The Peacock Cloak

like you are. I’m just a human being.”
    “I know that,” he told her urgently. “I really do know that. In fact that’s the whole point, that’s what’s so…”
    He broke off, realising that he was doing the very thing that irritated her. He offered a humorous little gesture of apology in an attempt to lighten things. But though Elena laughed, the laugh had the same strain in it as it had done before. She had not been reassured. They ate in silence for a little while, Clancy desperately wanting to say more, but knowing that if he did speak he would only compound his offence.
    Finally Elena laid her fork down on her plate and looked straight at him.
    “Can you really live without drama, Clancy?” she asked. “Can you still feel love when it becomes ordinary and everyday and is no longer as exciting as landing on some lost planet where they greet you like a god?”
    My uncle also put down his fork. He rubbed his hands over his weary face. He opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it again.
    And he realised that it was over. Probably Elena herself didn’t quite know it yet but she’d made up her mind and wouldn’t change it.
    “Do you know what,” Clancy said, “I am utterly exhausted. It was a hard trip, and there were some difficult problems on the way back. I don’t mean to be rude but I think it would be best if I went back to my own place and just got some sleep for twenty-four hours or so.”
    She didn’t protest, he noticed. She didn’t point out that she had a spare room and that if he wanted to sleep alone he could do it just as easily here.

    “I clung too tightly,” he told Com as he sat at his own window looking out over the lights of the city. “I clung too tightly and didn’t let her breathe. She’s got tired of it – who can blame her? – and now I’ve lost her. It’s too late to get her back.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” Com said.
    “What do you mean you’re sorry, you plastic rattle? You have no feelings, you’ve admitted as much yourself.”
    Uncharacteristically Com paused for fully a second, long enough for it to have surveyed the whole of human knowledge.
    “I know about human beings,” it then said. “I know human history and human biology. I know you want safety and you want danger. I know you want desire and freedom from desire. I know you want to grow up and to remain children. I know you want to be connected to others and to be alone. I know you want to be free and to be contained. I know you want all those things and many other things too. I know you are pulled in different directions all at the same time. I know this is why you are so complex and so impossible to predict. I know that this is why you are so mysterious even to yourselves. I know this is why you think you are free. And I know I am different. I have only one drive, in human terms only one want, and that is why in human terms I am not free, have no personality and am not really even alive. I have only one want and that is to serve you.”
    Clancy was floored by this for a few seconds.
    “But in the end you are only a toy, Com,” he finally said. “You really do have no personality, you really aren’t alive, you really aren’t free. When it comes down to it, Com, you really are just a very fancy toy.”
    And he thought of Elena who he loved so much: funny, gentle, tough, pragmatic, kind, firm, self-reliant Elena. He thought of her lying awake in her own bed across the city, wondering what had gone wrong, noticing how much she’d outgrown him. And he imagined her wondering what would be the kindest and fairest way to bring it all to an end.
    My uncle turned back into the room. My poor lonely Uncle Clancy. Listening and re-listening to the recording of his voice when he next spoke, the image that comes into my mind is of some sort of weary beast of burden, once again shouldering a load which for one foolish moment it had thought it could set aside.
    “Come on, Com,” he said, “let’s get down to work. Let’s find somewhere really remote that I can go to. Somewhere that will take me away for a really long, long time.”
    He gave a small wry laugh.
    “Yes, and somewhere where people don’t live underground and paint scary things on the walls of caves.”

Rat Island

    Snap.
    I took this picture when I was eleven. This tall man is my dad, his face in a kind of frozen wince, wishing he was back in his Whitehall office on his own, going through a draft report with his gold