Arthur & George

no such guilt, and cheerfully asks if he may carry the doctor’s bag upstairs.
    When Maud is four, it is decided that she is too frail to be left on her own all night, and that neither George nor Horace, nor even the combination of the two, can be trusted with her nocturnal care. From now on she will sleep in their mother’s room. At the same time, it is decided that George will sleep with his father, and Horace will have the nursery to himself. George is now ten, and Horace seven; perhaps it is thought that the age of sinfulness is approaching, and the two boys should not be left alone together. No explanation is given, and none is sought. George does not ask whether being put to sleep in his father’s room is a punishment or a reward. It is how things are, which is all there is to be said.
    George and his father pray together, kneeling side by side on the scrubbed boards. Then George climbs into bed while his father locks the door and turns out the light. As he falls asleep, George sometimes thinks of the floor, and how his soul must be scrubbed just as the boards are scrubbed.
    Father is not an easy sleeper, and has a tendency to groan and wheeze. Sometimes, in the early morning, when dawn is beginning to show at the edges of the curtains, Father will catechize him.
    ‘George, where do you live?’
    ‘The Vicarage, Great Wyrley.’
    ‘And where is that?’
    ‘Staffordshire, Father.’
    ‘And where is that?’
    ‘The centre of England.’
    ‘And what is England, George?’
    ‘England is the beating heart of the Empire, Father.’
    ‘Good. And what is the blood that flows through the arteries and veins of the Empire to reach even its farthest shore?’
    ‘The Church of England.’
    ‘Good, George.’
    And after a while Father begins to groan and wheeze again. George watches the outline of the curtain harden. He lies there thinking of arteries and veins making red lines on the map of the world, linking Britain to all the places coloured pink: Australia and India and Canada and islands dotted everywhere. He thinks of tubes being laid along the bed of the ocean like telegraph cables. He thinks of blood bubbling through these tubes and emerging in Sydney, Bombay, Cape Town. Bloodlines, that is a word he has heard somewhere. With the pulse of blood in his ears, he begins to fall asleep again.

Arthur
    Arthur passed his Matriculation with Honours; but being still only sixteen, he was sent for a further year among the Jesuits in Austria. At Feldkirch he discovered a kindlier regime, which allowed beer drinking and heated dormitories. There were long walks, on which English pupils were deliberately flanked by German-speaking boys, thus obliging them to speak the language. Arthur appointed himself editor and sole contributor of
The Feldkirchian Gazette
, a hand-written literary and scientific magazine. He also played football on stilts, and was taught the Bombardon tuba, an instrument which wrapped twice around the chest and made a sound like Judgement Day.
    On his return to Edinburgh, he discovered that his father was in a nursing home, officially suffering from epilepsy. There would be no more income, not even occasional coppers from watercolours of fairies. So Annette, the eldest sister, was already in Portugal, working as a governess; Lottie would soon join her, and they would send money home. The Mam’s other recourse was to take in lodgers. Arthur felt embarrassed and affronted by this. His mother, of all people, should not be reduced to the status of a landlady.
    ‘But Arthur, if people did not take in lodgers, your father would never have come to live with Grandma Pack, and I should never have met him.’
    This struck Arthur as an even stronger argument against lodgers. He knew he was not allowed to criticize his father in any way, so he remained silent. But it was a nonsense to pretend that the Mam could not have made a better match.
    ‘And if that had not happened,’ she went on, smiling at him with those grey eyes which he could never disobey, ‘not only would there have been no Arthur, there would have been no Annette, no Lottie, no Connie, no Innes and no Ida.’
    This was indisputably true, and also one of those insoluble metaphysical conundrums. He wished Partridge were there to help him debate the question: could you remain yourself, or at least enough of yourself, if you had a different father? If not, it also followed that his sisters would not have remained themselves either, especially