PART ONE

1

WHO ASKED YOU?

Difficult question. Nobody and everybody. What Francine meant was why did he think he had some obligation or right to rummage about collecting - not a very systematic collection -ideas? She said he was like a shoplifter in a supermarket. What she meant too was that he lived in a chaotic state, constantly picking up ideas rightfully belonging to other people — and other contexts - and trying to take them home. There was a certain portion of truth in her charges. She also implied — in fact she actually said it that night — that he had no ideas of his own.

'That's nonsense, of course,' he said, foolishly imagining he was being asked to contribute to an entertaining theoretical discussion. 'To understand ideas, to be interested in ideas, you have to have ideas.'

'Here's an idea: why don't you get a job?'

'I'm working on Mendel's papers.'

'Are you?'

'Yes, I am.'

'And what does that work consist of?'

'Research, reading.'

'Oh, I see. And who is paying for this research?'

'You know the answer. But remember, we very nearly had a TV deal. And there are still people interested.'

'Your life so far has been a series of nearlies. I've got some hot news for you: no one is interested in E.A. Mendel. He had an idea in 1953 but nobody can remember what it was. That's why the publishers aren't giving you any more money and that's why the TV deal got nowhere and why nobody wants your film version of his story. Of course I am not in the creative world, but even I know what goes on at the cinema: morons eat popcorn while watching cars exploding and aliens turning into spinach. They don't want some bollocks about the history of ideas.'

When Francine was angry she developed a kind of torrential force that could not be stopped. He watched her with admiration as she gathered herself. He had the feeling that he had written the script for her, but he had no hand in the delivery. Sometimes she started quietly, inviting him to say something provocative. At other times she wanted to deliver a peroration without contradiction, as though she had already run through the early charges and was now simply summing up for the benefit of the jury. A not very intelligent jury. He knew that she had a desire for certainty, for the incorrigible proposition. And this made it very hard for her to live with someone as unformed as he was. For a while she had called him the questing vole, but that was while she still found him amusing. Now she thought his curiosity was an excuse, a form of evasion.

Her face, with its seeping medical tiredness, had a high, feverish colour now, siphoned from the depths by resentment. Her eyes were cloudy, the way they used to be during sex, as if her anger had produced a flash of blindness, like looking at the sun, and her throat was becoming pink and russet, and slightly mottled — mushroom colours and textures. The violence of her feelings towards him was causing this discoloration. Mushrooms have a strange and mysterious life cycle, much of it underground. And on the surface Francine appeared calm, although the fungal colour was becoming more intense.

'Conrad, I go out every morning at seven, I return home at seven - if I'm lucky - I've been peering at samples and slides, I have even seen a few patients, I have grabbed ten minutes to eat a piece of microwaved pizza in the canteen, and you have been reading the letters and ramblings of a long-forgotten — rightly in my opinion — Oxford don, who knew just how to flatter you by talking of your human qualities. And, guess what, the marmalade is exactly where you left it at breakfast.'

The charges were true. But his alleged human qualities seemed to Conrad to be important, if still unclear.

Francine continued: 'I have decided to leave you. I can't live like this. I need some support.'

At the time she surprised him with her resolve. A few months later she said that she had been seeing another man, the consultant who was her boss, a man very highly regarded in obstetrics. He had recruited her to his team. He was fifty-one years old, sixteen years older than her. That word 'seeing' troubled him. He found it hard to believe that it meant fucking. It was too brutal. He had hung around outside the hospital for a few days and once had seen them leaving together. (He had plenty of time to observe the disordered comings and goings of the patients while he was waiting.) What had surprised him was that he was not present in their lives. Somehow he had imagined that Francine and John would be crippled by the knowledge of him, that his spectral form would be visible between them, that they would be slipping away nervously, alarmed by the foolishness of their actions; but no, they walked happily down the front steps of the hospital in Whitechapel and linked hands as they turned down a side street. What hurt him most was that she appeared happy, carefree, girlish. Even her hair seemed to have acquired new vivacity.

In another context, John might have looked to him like any other decent, utterly unremarkable English professional man, but here, leaving the hospital with Conrad's wife, he had princely qualities. Here, he was a man known and admired for his pioneering work on the incontinence in women caused by childbirth. Francine was a suitable tribute for his achievements.

She tried to dress up her defection as a gift from her to Conrad:

'I have a career, my career path is more or less fixed now, but you, you still have some growing up to do. I realised you didn't want to be tied in this way. I am sure you will see it for the best in time.'

She always needed to tidy things up mentally, as if by naming them they were settled. It was — he thought - a scientific habit: taxonomy applied to the emotional life.

'With my human qualities still unexplored.'

'What?'

'What you said about me and Mendel.'

'Yes,' she said impatiently. 'You and your human qualities.'

It was clear that she had come to this meeting determined to be brief and final. Her neck coloured again anxiously at the delay.

'In medicine, we don't have enough time to investigate human qualities. We are too busy with human beings, in person.'

'And is John leaving his wife?'

'That's our business.'

'Is he too old to have more children?'

'Jesus, you can be offensive.'

'We were going to have a child, remember?'

'We were. But I had to delay, remember, when I got the research job and you found - what a surprise - that you weren't earning as much as you expected when you went freelance.'

'Well, you're fine now as long as wifey doesn't take all his money.'

'I'm glad you said that, because you've reminded me that underneath all that airy-fairy charm you are just a vicious little prick. People like you who sneer at honest endeavour and science and actually doing something for people, while reading the fucking Guardian and having an opinion on everything, from politics to football, to, I don't know, immigration and the Iraq War, without really having any in-depth knowledge of any sort, are the real worry for this country. Anyway, now you can go and explore your human qualities in depth and at leisure.'

Francine asked him to leave as soon as the flat was sold - as she said, a free spirit can operate anywhere.

Mendel and von Gottberg had gone to Palestine for three weeks in the winter of 1933; he decided to follow in their footsteps. He took a loan on his credit card. He was encouraged by the fact that the surrealists advocated depaysement, the policy of uprooting yourself from your home country, to increase your sensitivity and understanding, qualities he was clearly in need of. Although he could only afford a week of depaysement, it seemed to him a good moment to go. The seventeen boxes of papers, which he had arranged and re-arranged and tried to catalogue, reproached him with his lack of progress. The problem was that he was looking at the letters for a kind of meaning, some hints from Mendel to him, perhaps some clues to his own destiny.

Actually he found that it wasn't that easy to go to Israel without friends or letters of introduction. The Israeli agents at the airport questioned him closely about his motives and his intentions. He explained that he was going on holiday but that made them suspicious. He stood for half an hour with his baggage, which earlier an excitable dog had okayed, while they made phone calls. With reluctance they allowed him to proceed. At Tel Aviv the plane landed to some rousing folk music; there they questioned him again and asked him to list the people he was seeing. There was only one, a film-location manager whose name he had been given. The agents particularly wanted to know if he had friends on the West Bank. They wore sunglasses on the tops of their closely shaved heads, giving the impression that office work bored them, that they would prefer to be vigorously employed outside. And this, he thought, is what has happened out here in the Levant, as Mendel described it: Jews have become outdoorsy people.

The Mediterranean, lapping the town, was unexpectedly glamorous, but Tel Aviv had a rackety, half-planted feel and he remembered what Mendel had written:

I have realised — it was a true revelation — that I have a kinship with these strange Levantines, who are like relatives one hasn't seen for twenty years. They make me uneasy, even afraid. German Jews, who are arriving by the thousand, are going mad at the disorder, seeking bus timetables. They cannot believe that the buses do not depart on time, if they arrive at all. Axel finds the food oily. It is oily, but I have convinced myself that it is my ancestral cuisine. I eat on bravely.

Conrad took a shared taxi to Jerusalem and he found himself looking closely at the other passengers, remembering Mendel's description of the people as odd and fascinating. Some were backpackers from New York's suburbs, he guessed, the girls wearing little squares of cloth on their heads to indicate a willingness to muck in with the harvest and an eagerness to embrace the spiritual challenges ahead. There were English Hasids, the men strangely abstracted as though this earth, this taxi bus, these numerous children, these wives with the chestnut wigs and full fecundity, were in a way not fully present, unavoidably inhabiting the same space, but ephemeral, shadows cast by their husbands' radiance.

By the time the taxi van had reached a mountain pass, he wondered how the soft pale people from North London and the eager backpackers saw the landscape outside, now turning from the coastal plain to a tumultuous upland littered with the painted shells of armoured cars, left — he discovered — as a reminder of the war of 1948. What did they see in these tortured, pumice rocks and grudging trees and steep, parched valleys? Did they see a land of milk and honey, a landscape that had been deep in the race memory all through the diaspora, or did they see, as Mendel did, an unfamiliar and unnerving otherness?

Conrad himself knows that you can hold at the same time different landscapes in your head - or in your fibres - for instance, the broad openness of Africa and the distilled beauty of Oxford. He also finds himself seeing John and Francine conversing about bladders and urine samples in the lab and then, back in the little flat John has taken, he sees the warm strawberry rash rising up her throat as John, with the scientific and practical qualities, so different from his own which are essentially meaningless, removes his scrubs and reveals his highly meaningful self to his research student, who has now forgotten for ever that she is married to Conrad. He feels a sharp pain, as though he has in some way been erased, his very existence questioned. And he wonders how the lovers can reconcile the madness of sex with the scientific life. The answer - the Orthodox children with their insane side-locks seem to have been put here to illustrate his train of thought — is that we are not wholly rational, and never will be.

To prepare himself for this trip and to think about something other than Francine and John in Whitechapel, he has read Amos Oz's autobiography. Oz's mother was never able to adapt to the landscape; goose-girls and deep resinous forests were more real to her than Arab shepherds and olive trees. In Jerusalem with the blinding white rocks and the thin soil, she felt lost: eventually she killed herself, leaving the eleven-year-old Amos. And maybe this is what Mendel meant when he described the country as strange and his kinship with the people who had been Levantised as unsettling, even frightening.

And Conrad sees Mendel, small and plump, with the tall, thin von Gottberg, approaching Jerusalem and he wonders exactly what thoughts assaulted them, because Jerusalem is a city like no other, a city that attracts the irrational and the mystic and the fanatic, as if there are certain loci on this earth that exhale some of the vapours of human longing that have been breathed on them over the millennia. Once Conrad heard wild bees in a cleft in a rock in Africa, and the fanning of the wings and the diligent murmuring suggested some message, like the intimations of music, which came from beyond the rational. Jerusalem is the world capital of the irrational, with longing and loss and despairing hope to boot.

And into this place - they arrive on donkeys from Transjordan — come Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg. Even on a donkey it is clear that von Gottberg is born to ride. Whereas Mendel has only once ridden - coincidentally on a donkey - on the beach in Bournemouth. In the photograph of the event, the donkey wears a straw hat and the infant Mendel is holding an ice cream. He wears a sailor top and small black spectacles, so that he looks like a bee, a Jewish bee. Mendel tells friends gleefully that on the outskirts of Jerusalem they were stoned by Orthodox Jews. Von Gottberg's feet, in calfskin boots, are almost trailing in the powdery dust.

Outside the King David Hotel where they are staying, a photographer captures them. Mendel is smiling, a smile that Conrad recognises across sixty years. It's as though a smile is ageless, or perhaps eternal, independent of the decay and collapse of the surrounding features. Von Gottberg has his arm around Mendel's shoulder: some way behind them is the stone fagade of the hotel, and behind that a glimpse of the Old City. In this photograph they look as though they have been posed for Nazi propaganda, the tall, athletic, aristocratic Count Axel von Gottberg, of Pleskow, and the smaller, softer Elya Mendel, of Hampstead, who could be thought by the ill-disposed, from his complicit smile, to have cabalistic knowledge. Conrad knows that look, intensely curious, half-amused, expecting something entertaining to happen, as happy to hear gossip as a new idea. Conrad is staying in the old Petra Hotel, not far away, but he ventures into the King David to get the fabled view of the Old City from the terrace.

The Old City glows in the late-afternoon light. It is not obviously a Jewish city: he can see churches and the Dome of the Rock and beyond that the cemeteries rising above the Garden of Gethsemane and up the Mount of Olives. The walls are mainly Ottoman with some Crusader sections, but the stones were quarried near by and re-used after every conquest, so that this city -viewed from above the swimming pool from which the voices of children are rising - is as no other city he has ever seen, semaphoring significance. And this is the pattern: ideas and creeds are now represented by unheeding stones as the ends of human longing. For two thousand years - longer if you count the Mesopotamian diaspora - the Jews have held this landscape in their minds. But over there, pulsing, is the golden Dome of the Rock, where the Prophet Mohammed ascended on a horse for his Night Ride to Mecca, and beyond that on a hill is the spot where Jesus ascended into heaven, and then beyond that the hills of the Judaean Desert, which seem to have a separate illumination, so that they are pale and bleached, with the dark shapes of clouds - the clouds themselves are not visible - moving swiftly like airships over the landscape.

And Conrad thinks that here in the Holy Land Mendel and von Gottberg may already have been aware of some sort of historical juncture in the relationship between Germans and Jews. On the one hand the aggrieved and resentful Germans were being offered a Faustian deal by Hitler and on the other the rawly human but vulnerable Jews were arriving here in their confused thousands, on the move again. But they could not have had more than an inkling of the nightmare that was to come.

Von Gottberg's letters show that he was always keen for Mendel's approval: Mendel was the same age as von Gottberg, but seems to have arrived, like an egg, fully formed into the world and, strangely for a young man, to have come equipped with a serenity and wisdom. Conrad wonders if von Gottberg resented, at a deep Germanic level, Mendel's urbanity and his protean - Jewish - qualities. Von Gottberg's family had lived in the same pile for six hundred years, while Mendel's had arrived in England via Riga and St Petersburg only nineteen years earlier.

As Conrad walks down to the Jaffa Gate and into the Old City, he finds himself under siege. He is entering a city out of an orientalist's sketchbook, with spice stalls and pushcarts and shops selling nuts and feral vegetables and parched herbs and chunks of meat; Bedouin women sit gloomily with isolated tomatoes spread on cloths, and then a group of Orthodox priests passes, plump from the devotion of crones, and young boys rush about with beaten-copper trays of tea and Palestinians are sitting at a table attached to a hookah, and now some Jews in fedoras with threads of the tallith underneath their overcoats come sightlessly by, and Arab children are buying candyfloss in colours that do not exist in nature, and then Conrad enters a long tunnel of tiny cave-shops selling jewellery and souvenirs and he stops for a mint tea in a courtyard that leads off the teeming street. He sees Mendel and von Gottberg here, Mendel eagerly listening out for traces of Aramaic and Russian and von Gottberg trying to estimate what point in history this overwhelmingly aromatic and exotic place has reached and Mendel fascinated by the sense he has -or is acquiring - that human objectives can easily be in conflict. As if to prove the point, German Jews are sniffing vegetables fastidiously, resisting Levantisation from inside their Bavarian jackets and loden coats. Conrad sips his mint tea - a large bunch of mint thrust into the pot - and wonders what it was like to be here without the knowledge of what was to come. The knowledge that has made us.

Mendel and von Gottberg stop at the Lutheran Erloserkirche. Although von Gottberg has given up active Christianity, he is a believer in Christian values. Mendel, although a non-believer, is a Zionist and believes in the preservation of Jewish cultural values. It's strange, Conrad thinks sitting here, near the church, now accepting some pistachios and some more tea, that belief in the existence or non-existence of God is no impediment to friendship and understanding.

The young Palestinians wear cheap trainers; their hair is geometrically cut. He wonders if they ever have distinctly secular thoughts. And he wonders if on this trip the two friends talked about Jews in Europe, because already in Germany Jews are under notice. On a personal level, as he knows, human beings - for example, he and Francine - can have irreconcilable differences. He thinks about having Francine back, if she asks, but he knows it would be impossible because he cannot imagine forgiving her, not so much for kicking him out, but for allowing her body to be a receptacle for someone else's semen. How can he explain that in rational terms? He can't. And he can't even explain to himself, as an atheist, why this idea of the transfer of human substance, this sacrament, should be so painful to him.

He feels cold now as the sun goes down. The Old City seems to be closing down too: as the shopkeepers pack up, the bare electric light bulbs strung out along walls are beginning to shine bright. The sky above the courtyard is the colour of dark crustaceans, a pigment with a mineral content, elemental specks of colour not fully ground in. Tomorrow he will follow von Gottberg and Mendel along the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha to see where Christ died and the madness began.

The Arab owner of the Café tells him that his brother lives in London. These days everyone in the whole world has a brother living in London. And Conrad has had this kind of conversation many times. It always leads to misapprehensions and pointless exchanges of information, which become increasingly stilted.

'You know Hackney?'

'Yes.'

'My brother say is very bad.'

'It is a poor part.'

'Many Jews.'

The protocols of Zion will be next, or the theory that Mossad bombed the Twin Towers.

'Thank you for the tea.'

'Wilcome to Jerusalem. I born here.'

'Thank you. I was born in Cape Town.'

'Israelis take my home.'

'I am very sorry.'

'You wilcome. No pay.'

In his hurry, he turns the wrong way and is lost. Where, a few alleys away, all was movement and bustle, he is now in almost empty lanes stalked by cats. An Arab child stares at him. From a dim doorway a woman calls the child; he hopes this is not a response to seeing him. He wonders how he appears in his khakis and T-shirt. Perhaps he looks sinister. These jumbled alleys and turnings and stairways have no obvious plan. He passes a small Café, half of it below street-level, where a group of young men is watching a football game on television. The field is so green he thinks the football must be taking place in Germany or Scandinavia. The verdure in this chalky, bone-coloured place looks lurid and unreal. A goose-girl would happily lead her gaggle of geese across it. He comes out of an alley into a square, and there ahead of him is an Armenian church. From the church he hears someone chanting, perhaps a priest. He puts his head inside the heavily brocaded doorway, into the scented and lamplit vestibule. A man, perhaps a verger, directs him towards the Jaffa Gate. God bless you, he says, as Conrad walks out past the church under an arch, the stone strung with electric wires which also drape doorways and blind balconies.

Can we know anybody else? Other minds? Can I know von Gottberg and Mendel, or even Francine? Does John already know her better than I do? Or maybe we find what we want in other people, and so we never know them.

Who asked you? she said. He could have quoted Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Although he has a talent for quotation, he didn't quote Eliot in reply because he doesn't believe its implied meaning, which Eliot probably picked up from Buddhism, that life has patterns according to which we must try to harmonise ourselves. Life has no purpose: that is its stark beauty. That's one lesson he learned from Mendel. Here, as he walks, he hears all sorts of prayers and imprecations rising, those who are dispatching them evidently unaware that nobody is listening.

Sitting high in the Ottoman crenellations above the Jaffa Gate he sees the casual outline of two Israeli soldiers against the crustacean sky. If life has no meaning then this city, with its tumultuous longing and bitterness, is a monument to the power of delusion. And this delusion also has a kind of beauty; and he remembers what George Grosz wrote, that the commanders in the field paint in blood.

The imams are calling as he walks back, and from a mezzanine room, somehow awkwardly stranded by ancient architectural upheavals - these old buildings and stones are jumbled and reordered after thousands of years of recycling - he hears wild, muscular-Jewish music, and then he sees the shadows on the wall of men dancing. The shadows at least are hurling themselves about in a madcap way, as though the harvest had been good or they were moonstruck or - more likely - expecting the Messiah at any minute.

His room is small and sparsely furnished, with a view of a courtyard. Actually it's less of a view than a meniscus, a little sliver of wall and some stone paving down below, glazed by the passage of feet. He likes strange, unknown rooms. They give him a low charge of excitement.

Mendel wrote to a friend that von Gottberg was a great dancer. He had known the inside of every nightclub on Kurfürstendamm: I am, as you know, a very poor dancer. Axel was dancing with the wives of the British officials. What a flutter in the dovecotes. And it was this flutter in the dovecotes that was to change both of their lives for ever. Unlike Conrad, Mendel and von Gottberg had come with introductions; they had met with everyone from Zionists to Orthodox prelates and British officers. Mendel writes that he would have been glad to meet the Grand Mufti, if he were prepared to speak to Jews.

Conrad cannot sleep. He lies pleasurably in the mean bed and thinks, tries to think, more measured thoughts about Francine. He understands her contempt for him. His grandmother's house in Cape Town had flypaper in the kitchen; many of the little shops in the Old City have it, hanging down over the strange cuts of meat or the sticky pastries. He remembers as a child waiting to see a fly landing on the paper: and this is how Francine sees him, waiting idly for some minor sensation, while she goes out on the world's business. And it is true that helping women deliver their babies as she does, sometimes having to slice them open just above the pubis, is activity of an entirely different order. Once upon a time they had discussed films and books and ideas; she had been charmed by his inchoate eagerness. What charmed her then now seems infantile to her. The scientific life has got to her, as though all those chemicals and miserable people and - let's face it - death, have somehow driven her into the arms of the superior class who deal with the real world, who have the power of life and death and who know folly and self-indulgence when they see it. Francine cannot bear to see people chomping their way to the grave, slurping sweet drinks or puffing on cigarettes or dipping into buckets of popcorn: in her estimation he is really just a high-minded version of these slobs who exculpate themselves from the consequences of their own folly in torrents of banality. And this is one of the reasons he loved Mendel, because Mendel never ceased from exploration. And Conrad sees now, in this cell just outside the resonant walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, that what happened to von Gottberg and Mendel must be explored even though he cannot justify it to Francine — God knows he has tried - and it may be that the only reason is that he owes a debt of love to Mendel, who recognised his human qualities, and gave him a surprising legacy.

He sees more clearly now. In the morning I will begin to put this story in order, as Mendel wanted. He sees Mendel's creased smile, and he sees von Gottberg standing before Freisler, his hands crossed in front of him, ready to be sacrificed.

And von Gottberg was almost exactly the age I am now.

2

MENDEL AND VON Gottberg are standing outside the boundary of the Dome of the Rock, which they know as the Mosque of Omar. The dome is gleaming. It is too bright for this climate, a great gold cupola high above Jerusalem winking and conducting heat and radiating it out over the Old City, like the RKO Radio Pictures trademark.

The faithful are gathering for prayer and the muezzin are calling. It's a sound that stitches together the Muslim world, a defiant, plaintive, poetic call. They stand under the shade of a cypress as the worshippers arrive and wash themselves at the tiled basins into which water gushes from giant bronze spigots. Water and paradise are closely associated. The faithful drift into the mosque, its magnificence and space and colour the simulacrum of paradise. Down below, in an alleyway, Jews are praying in front of the Western Wall; their heads nod and dip and nod again. They are not worshipping the giant blocks of stone in front of them as it appears, but they are inspired to piety by the remains of Herod's temple. It is their direct line to their real and imagined past.

'Down below,' says Mendel, 'they are plotting how to get up here into the pound seats. You believe in destiny, Axel, don't you? That is their destiny.'

They often discuss the purposes of history. To Mendel's amusement, von Gottberg sees patterns in history.

As they leave the haram, von Gottberg stops and holds Mendel's arm.

'Elya, I am going back to Germany.'

'Don't leave us.'

'I have to go.'

'Why?'

'My country is sick.'

'Can I ask why you, especially, have to go?'

'It's my country. Somebody has to take care of it.'

Mendel thinks that his friend sets too much store by his own destiny.

They walk out of the Old City down towards the Kidron Valley. Mendel walks surprisingly quickly, efficiently but not gracefully. He and von Gottberg have often talked on Addison's Walk in the spring, deep in fritillaries, scilla and windflowers, and in the autumn brushing through leaves and the spiralling, helicoptering seed pods from the limes. Perhaps it reminds von Gottberg of Unter den Linden.

Von Gottberg has cherished his talks with Mendel, more than anything at Oxford. They have argued about the nature of ideas; Mendel has begun to tire of philosophy, but loves the history of ideas. He doesn't see - he is wilfully blind - the forces behind history and philosophy. Sometimes in Oxford von Gottberg has detected a certain loneliness in his friend. He loves the company of women, but he is a virgin. Von Gottberg knows that Mendel observes his easy successes with women and so he plays them down and sometimes he withholds information from him.

As they walk down the dusty track into the Kidron Valley, they are, in their Oxford fashion, discussing philosophy. Under their feet are flints and stones the colour of bones; some of them may be bones. There are tombs here cut into the rock. The biggest, Absalom's tomb, has a hole high up on its face, as though a mortar shell has gone right through the rock.

Mendel says that Jerusalem is a place of irrationality. Von Gottberg thinks that Jerusalem is just a stage in man's journey to self-consciousness.

'Ah, the Geist. Hegel always pops up when you are at a loss to explain.'

'You should remember what Hegel said: "The actual is rational."

'Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. Sonorous nonsense.'

They love high-minded walking.

At Absalom's tomb, in fact the tomb of a member of one of the Hasmonean priestly families at the time of Christ, they buy some bread from a Bedouin, who heats it on a brazier (it is very cold, although there is some sun on the high ground) and the Bedouin gives them a twist of paper with coarse salt in it. The bread is sprinkled with a dried herb, perhaps oregano. Mendel says that this bread has been baked since the time of David, and the herbs come from the mountainsides. He takes pleasure in this continuity.

'Count von Gottberg and Mr Mendel.'

Two young women are coming down a track towards them. One is Elizabeth Partridge, the wife of a second secretary at the High Commission. It seems to Mendel that she is not here by chance. She introduces the second woman who is wearing a silk scarf wound around her neck and over her head.

'This is my cousin, Rosamund Bower, Mr Mendel.'

'Elya, please. This is the land of the muscular Jew. In fact a wholly new breed of informal Jew, who likes outdoor activity. Absolutely delighted to see you in daylight.'

'You were deep in discussion,' says Elizabeth. 'Interesting, I hope?'

'Yes, Axel was trying to tell me that I misunderstand the nature of human ends.'

'And do you?'

'Not always.'

'Does he, Axel?'

'It's hard to say, because nobody can agree on human ends.'

'Too clever for me, I'm afraid. I'm rather simple,' she says, laughing girlishly in the direction of von Gottberg.

Mendel notices her small, childish teeth, which are strangely lascivious. He has never before thought of teeth as part of the sexual weaponry. The second woman who he has at first decided is the less attractive, the alibi type, he sees now has a dark, rather serious look, which suggests a rich inner life. Her lips appear to be naturally outlined in some mineral substance. She leads Mendel towards some caves.

'I think it is amazing that these tombs are carved out of solid rock.'

'Yes,' she says, 'the tomb with the hole in the top, Absalom's tomb, has that hole because it was completely buried over the centuries and grave robbers got in from the top.'

'I wonder how long it took to carve out. But of course time, and any idea of its short supply, probably hadn't occurred to the Hasmoneans.'

'Do you always talk so profoundly?'

'Believe me, I'm far more superficial than I appear. It's just a habit you cultivate in my line of work. What's yours?'

'I was at Oxford for a year, in fact I used to see you always surrounded by acolytes. Now I am trying to write a novel.'

'What sort of novel are you writing?'

'I'm a great admirer of Virginia Woolf.'

'Marvellous writer. I've met her.'

'Did you like her?'

'She frightened me. She sent me a postcard afterwards, saying any time I was in London I should knock on her little grey front door and she would let me enter.'

'Rather risque.'

'Yes, I thought so.'

'And did you knock on her front door?'

'No, I was too nervous. Far too nervous. We met last night briefly, but I didn't catch your name a few minutes ago, I'm afraid. Rosalind?'

'Rosamund.'

'Why were you following us?'

'Well, we're not actually following you. It's just that your friend Axel arranged last night to meet Elizabeth here and she thought I should come to protect her. Is he very voracious?'

'I think he is. Surrounded by servants all his life and milkmaids, of course.'

'Is he a Nazi?'

'Good God, I hope not. No, he's far too intelligent for that.'

'Oh look, they're wandering off.'

They follow the other two at a distance in the direction of the small village that stands above the valley. All around are graves, slabs of stone, some neglected, one or two with small piles of rocks on them.

'What are you doing here?' he asks.

'Oh, Elizabeth and I are cousins, as she said. She is a little bored here, I think, so she invited me to stay. She and Roddy have an old Turkish house, very solid. I was in Italy trying to write my novel, so I came by steamer to Haifa. Do you know I heard about you all the time in Oxford, but we never met.'

'More's the pity.'

'You're supposed to be brilliant. Dazzle me.'

'Am I supposed to be brilliant? To tell you the truth I talk far too much, but only the credulous are taken in. Will you tell me about your novel?'

'Are you interested or being polite?'

'I'm deeply interested.'

And she sees that he is. He smiles but it is not patronising or cynical. His eyes, behind his glasses, are very dark, the irises abnormally large. As they walk up through the olive trees where goats are foraging in their irrepressible, intelligent way, she tells him that it is the story of one young woman watching as her lover is taken from her by a friend.

'Has this happened to you, or is that too direct a question?'

'They always say write what you know.'

She is no older than him, but he has seen that life can quickly produce wariness; the blitheness of extreme youth has gone, but still she has a kind of directness he finds attractive. At Oxford he soon discovered that he was drawn to these intelligent, upper-class girls. She stares down the dry wadi, in the direction of the Dead Sea.

'I am over it now, I think. The book is my therapy.'

'I met Dr Freud once, a very strange man.'

'Gosh, you have met everybody. Why is he strange?'

'Sorry, I tend to blurt things out when I am excited. After five minutes he proclaimed, "I see you are not a snob."

'Why?'

'I don't know. Perhaps he has psychic powers. Please tell me more about your book.'

'I'm finding it very hard to write because I am not sure if the life that interests me will interest other people.'

'May I read it? Do you have it here?'

'I've only got a few chapters typed. In my bag. I carry them everywhere. It comforts me.'

'Will you let me read them?'

'I would be honoured, actually, if you would.'

The village, Silwan, is very simple. These Arab villages appear to be slowly falling down, roughly at the same speed as other parts of them are being built. A mosque, with a pencil-slim minaret, stands in the middle of the dusty, crumbling houses with cool dark interiors. They have tea and coffee in a courtyard served under a cypress tree out of the cold wind. Elizabeth is wearing a straw hat, tied around the crown with a huge floppy pink bow: the brim spreads extravagantly on one side and hangs over her eyes, so that when she talks to von Gottberg she has to raise her face slightly, which, Mendel sees, is done in a consciously provocative way. Both the women have shining waved hair, and their eyes are made up to look wide and expectant.

'Shall we leave them?' Mendel asks.

'All right. Elizabeth, let's meet up again at the King David for a cocktail. We'll meet you at six or so. Elya is going to teach me how to speak everyday Hasmonean.'

'Toodle-oo,' Elizabeth says, and turns back to von Gottberg. They hear his extraordinary laugh suddenly breaking to the surface.

'In Russia there is a saying that you sometimes feel like the fifth wheel on the wagon,' says Mendel when they are at a distance.

'Yes, I am afraid my cousin is not happy with Roddy. He is rather earnest and works all the time.'

'And Axel is providing a little diversion?'

'Yes. She hopes so anyway. Where shall we go?'

'Let's walk up through the Jewish cemetery. And then to the Garden of Gethsemane,' he adds.

'No need to be ecumenical. I'm half Jewish, although I was never brought up with any Jewish faith. Or indeed any faith. When you are here, do you long to see where Jesus walked or where Solomon's temple stood, or to climb King David's tower?

'Nothing to do with King David, of course.'

'Do you see a Jewish homeland?'

'Yes, I think Jews must have a homeland. We Jews.'

She rests her hand on his forearm.

'Elya, can we go back to the hotel now? I have the manuscript and I want you to read it. I won't be able to rest until I hear your opinion.'

In the bar of the hotel she orders a Tom Collins.

'Would you like one?'

'I've never had one.'

'You don't know what you are missing.'

She removes her small hat, which is clinging to the side of her head, and shakes her dark, waved hair, as if expecting clouds of dust to emerge, as from a beaten carpet. Her hair is centre-parted, the waves tumbling in an orderly fashion to just above her collar. Mendel feels quite drunk after his first deep draught.

'Can you read the manuscript in your room?' she asks.

'Of course.'

He feels suddenly bereft, and stands up.

'Shall I meet you down here?' he asks.

'Don't be silly. I'm coming too.'

The lift, one of the earliest in Jerusalem, is piloted by a robed servant, perhaps a Sudanese. A Nubian. Rosamund and he stand some way apart; lifts sometimes produce this awkwardness about proximity. His room is on the sixth floor. The operator uses a brass handle to bring the lift to rest.

'It's a little cluttered, I'm afraid.'

In the short time he has been here he has collected pamphlets and maps and books and a Roman head and a small carpet, rolled up. After clearing a space they sit in the two padded and studded chairs, which have fanciful Ottoman legs, splayed outwards. She pulls the manuscript from her bag.

'Here we are.'

She stands and goes to the window.

Outside, the Old City is glowing. The light in Jerusalem has a desert quality, adamantine in the day, but softening and golden in the evening.

'God it's a marvellous sight. I'll order from the bar. What would you like? I'm going to have another Tom Collins.'

'So am I,' says Mendel, giggling. 'When in Rome . . .'

Once he has started to read, he looks up only to smile until a waiter in a white uniform with a red sash over his shoulder appears.

'Wonderful,' says Mendel, but she doesn't know if he is talking about his second Tom Collins, which he drains excitedly, or her novel.

'Do you mind if I have a shower? I'm dusty.'

'No please, go right ahead. This is very, very good, moving, this opening scene of the break-up. You are a marvellous writer.'

He can hear the shower — the showerhead is enormous, as big as a French sunflower drooping at sunset. The sound of the water on the marble, by way of her body, distracts him. She is in his bathroom, just through there, naked.

She comes out in a bathrobe with a white towel around her head.

'Elya, I wonder, are you the sort of man who needs a woman to ask him a direct question? I think you are, so let me ask it: would you like to make love to me?'

At twenty-four, he is finally naked with a woman. Their lovemaking is not awkward, as he had feared his first sexual experience would be. She anticipates his uncertainties.

'Oh Elya, you are so beautiful.'

He knows he is not beautiful, but he finds her tone and the way she speaks to him intoxicatingly strange, as though she is from another place, one where he has never been, one which has its own language. He finds as they make love that he has passed through into a world that was always there, but behind a screen, indicated to him only by rodent scratching or the calls of small, unseen nocturnal animals.

When he comes, far too quickly of course, he weeps with joy as she breathes Tom Collins into his ear.

'You probably thought I was providing cover for Elizabeth.'

And the idea that she has set out to seduce him makes him feel doubly esteemed. They lie in bed and eat green-and-mother-of-pearl pistachios as the softening sun leaves the ancient walls in shadow, but lingeringly embraces the Dome of the Rock, the Mosque of Omar, like a favourite child before sleep.

He wonders if she feels the same sense of being blessed as he has next to her. She can't, but still he feels that he has never been happier and that this moment has somehow resolved — perhaps as Axel's thesis and antithesis is resolved — many of the contradictions in his life.

'Now read on, Elya.'

He reads aloud now and she is thrilled by his understanding and his extraordinary, liquid, exotic cadences, which make her book seem more human, richer, than she could have hoped. He reads, thrilled by the feel of her thigh against his. He worries that he is too plump or too hairy, but he soon loses himself in the book. She has an extraordinary, comic grasp of social relations and tensions, as well as a sardonic wit. The heroine, Claudia, has a bold approach to life: It's not only our fate, but our duty to lose our innocence.

'Do you believe that?' Mendel asks her.

'I don't think I'm talking about sexual innocence. More that we should not be under any illusions.'

'As Joseph Butler said, things are what they are. Why should we wish to be deceived?'

'Exactly. Whoever Joseph Butler is, or was.'

He knows that they will make love again soon and he feels that he is living in a moment that can never return. He reads:

'Do you have feelings Claudia?' Esmond asked.

'Of course I have feelings. Do you?'

'Yes I do. Of course I do, but they are not important to me. I try to be more decent, more civil than I feel. That is how I get by.' 

'Do you have feelings, Elya?'

'I do.'

'Do you have feelings for me?'

'That's a strange question under the circumstances.'

'You wept, but perhaps you wept because you had lost your innocence. We hanker after innocence.'

He puts the book down and turns to look at her. He is still wearing his glasses, which he fears loom rather large now that he is naked.

'I have the most extraordinary feelings for you. Quite astonishing, even frightening. I feel blessed.'

He can't get over the fact that he is lying next to this young woman, that her breasts are now touching his chest, that he met her only yesterday, that she says he is beautiful.

'Were you very hurt?' he asks.

'I was terribly hurt. Rationally I knew he was highly unsuitable, but that didn't stop me loving him. Do you think women sometimes embrace hurt?'

'I don't know enough about women, to tell the truth. So far I've always been considered rather safe in a taxi.'

'No longer, Elya. Those days are behind you.'

She slides on top of him: it is almost unbearably sensual to feel her body on his. She sits up, astride him. She utters tiny shrieks and her eyes seem to cloud over. He feels exalted although he has a nagging sense that his life and his emotions have been too quickly and easily subverted.

Down in the bar they meet Elizabeth and Axel, both a little tight.

'Elya was reading my book. Sorry we're late.'

Axel is leaning back on his seat, in a lordly way, at his ease.

'They are cousins, you know,' he says.

Elya wonders if he imagines that this is drawing them closer. He sees that Elizabeth and Axel and Rosamund are complicit. Perhaps they think it is amusing that he should be drawn into this menage. All the things he had never experienced, until an hour ago - Rosamund wiping herself with a hotel towel, dressing again with such insouciance, dabbing scent behind her ears and hooking up her brassiere deftly and re-attaching her stockings — these things to them are routine. He feels hurt, as if he is being patronised, but as he has never been able to strike an attitude for long he soon gives in to this warm, physical well-being, while still going over the precious details, both the magical and the practical, of their love-making. At the end of the lounge an Egyptian band starts to play 'Happy Feet', and Rosamund immediately jumps up and leads Axel on to the dance floor.

'Are your feet happy?' Elizabeth asks him. She looks at him in that over-the-shoulder fashion; her lips are deep red and shiny.

'Cheering up.'

'Shall we give it a whirl?'

'I don't really dance, I must warn you.'

'Just hop about enthusiastically. That's the secret.'

The band gives the song a certain Middle Eastern plangency; he doesn't care how foolish he looks as he tries to follow Elizabeth. She holds him quite firmly; of course he has danced before, but now he too is in on the secret: dancing is a sort of surrender to the sensual, to the clear message that music is life, and life is love and sex and longing, strangely and incomprehensibly distilled. And he sees that there are various forms of understanding that are not susceptible to strict logic, but which still have very real effects.

Rosamund and Axel appear next to them suddenly, and she blows him a kiss. Axel leans over to him, affecting a heavy German accent. 'Zeitgeist. Good, nein.

An army officer cuts in and he finds himself dancing with the officer's wife. She is bright and cheerful, like the small birds in cages attached to the walls in the Old City, incessantly flitting and chirping dutifully.

'Lovely girl, Elizabeth. And what do you do?'

'I teach at Oxford.'

'Oh gosh, you must be jolly clever.'

'Not really. I am like a monkey, I learn tricks easily. Are you enjoying living here?'

'Nobody likes us, not the Arabs and certainly not the Jews, which makes life a little trying.'

'Yes, I have relatives here who seem to think it's all my fault.'

Jolly argumentative, aren't they, don't you find? They argue like billy-oh about almost anything.'

'It's an old Jewish tradition. It's the Midrash: life must be constantly examined.'

'Gosh, jolly interesting. Actually, I try to keep out of politics. Richard says it's best.'

'I'm sure he's right.'

'I know that Hitler is being beastly to the Jews, but Richard thinks that Hitler is right about the communists. They're the real problem, he says.'

Later the four of them leave the hotel and go off to a house in the Old City and smoke hashish. It's almost dawn when Elizabeth and Rosamund leave to go home. Roddy will be waiting. Axel hugs Mendel briefly and says, 'Lovely, lovely girls.'

When Elya lies on his bed again, he can smell Rosamund's perfume faintly and, he imagines, the more mysterious scents of her body. He thinks of his mother at home in Hampstead sewing intently as his father reads the newspaper.

Dear Mama. Tonight I lost my virginity and smoked hashish for the first time.

She would be happy: she thinks her own life is too ordered.

And he thinks about what Axel said to him as they inhaled the hashish: I must go back, Elya, dear friend. Please understand.

3

WHEN CONRAD GOT back from Jerusalem, he found that the struggle for the ownership of the Holy Places had a parallel in his own life. In six years of marriage, he and Francine had accumulated quite a lot of stuff. Now he was being asked to go through an inventory to decide who had what. In Jerusalem the contest between the religions was a bitter struggle for the possession of places, many of them of doubtful historicity. What he wanted to discuss - or contend - with Francine was the human issue. How, for example, was she able to accommodate herself physically and emotionally to someone so different from him? What was it like to live with someone else, to breathe their air and experience their little night noises and foibles? Was it easy to feel a different skin against yours after nine years? And, if it was easy, what was it that he lacked that this other person had? It was a mystery, an existential mystery, and he would have liked to get to the bottom of it. But when he tried to get on to these topics, Francine saw not some interesting ontological issues but jealousy. Jealousy, tout court.

'Don't give me the philosophical stuff. I know it's painful for you, but I love John. You have to accept that. You and I are not suited. You think running off to Jerusalem — how did you put it? - to get closer to Mendel and his German pal is somehow important. It is so damned airy-fairy. For nearly ten years you have been telling me your ideas. None of them, not one single one, has come to anything.'

'That is not totally accurate.'

But before she could develop the aggrieved lobster-thermidor colouring, he added, 'At least from where I am standing — admittedly the non-scientific vantage point — I would have to say that there has been some bad luck and some near misses. But yes, in material terms you are right, although you seem to conveniently ignore the fact that ideas have value in their own right. And - no, wait a second — also I accept that you believe you love John. Love is, after all, even for the people who understand the ins and outs of biology - no innuendo intended - an irrational, even subjective matter.'

'Conrad, in case you have forgotten, we are here to discuss which of our possessions you are going to have and which I am going to have. I have made a list and I have checked the things that are unmistakably yours or unmistakably mine. After that I propose that we have a choice each, one after the other until we get to the end of the list.'

When he looked at the list, there were items on her side that seemed far from indisputably hers. For example, any wedding presents that originated on her side of the family were treated as hers alone.

'I don't remember your mother saying that the Boda Glass was yours. The tag read, as far as I can remember, "For Franny and Conrad, from Mummy". I remember distinctly feeling a little queasy about the "Mummy"!'

'Look, she gave them to me. She is my mother and she never liked you. You've had six years of use and broken about one in three of them anyway.'

'Now I would like to break the rest of them at my leisure.'

'Oh Jesus. I'm on call tonight. I can't spend the whole afternoon discussing every item.'

From the bakery below, the smell of yeast fermenting was strong and pleasant. The bakery smells, the hints of artisanal life, are what he likes most about the flat.

'I tell you what, I'll have the bed. Presumably you have one that works well for you?'

'Oh my. I see the way this is going. You can have the bed. I'll have the desk my father gave us.'

Her choices had a basis in economics or utility; his were provocative or whimsical. For instance, his fourth choice (how demeaning he found the system, in fact how demeaning he found all forms of practical organisation), was a small Roman head he had bought in Bristol. It was probably worthless, maybe even a fake, but he had grown fond of this modest bust of some late-Roman Bristolian in his best toga - three diagonal folds were visible under his chin - with the sightless seer's eyes suggesting some desirable and ancient ease of mind. What Ovid called otium.

'Are you interested in what I did in Jerusalem?'

'Not especially. I find your aimless journeys and impulses depressing. Also I know that you have no money.'

'Not exactly aimless. But still, OK, let's keep within the world of objects. Things. As you so rightly say, we are not here to divide up our ideas, our loyalties or our finer feelings. Just the fucking bits and pieces. And talking of money, when are we selling the flat?'

'Which I mostly paid for.'

'I think you will find it is in our joint names. Anyway, you and John between you already have enough for a little hidey-hole in Whitechapel, it seems.'

'You are such a bastard. I don't want to talk about John. I don't want to cause unnecessary distress.'

'Only necessary distress. You know what I found in Jerusalem? I found that you were never meant to allow possessions to take the place of ideals.'

'Luckily for you, that's never likely to be your problem.'

'You looked beautiful on our wedding day.'

'Why did you say that? Why now?'

'I said it because you had serenity then. Now all you think about is your work and - what you said, your words - your career path. Before we go back to looking at the crockery and debating ownership of the Dyson, what is a career path? To me it seems like planning your own funeral fifty years in advance. All the way to the grave. No thanks, I don't want a career path, I want to follow, in my aimless and depressing way, the life that interests me. How do I know what will interest me in ten years' time? In ten years' time I might want to farm coconuts in Mozambique or learn Sanskrit, or fuck pigs, I don't know. But I just don't want a career path.'

She wasn't listening. She was opening up a flat box that contained a collections of schnapps glasses, unused, unseen, for six years. He could have gone on to tell her about the benefits of depaysement, the opening of your mind to wonder, but he knew that she was in no mood for this kind of thing.

Is he trying to get close to Mendel? Did he really say that? One of Mendel's favourite themes was the impossibility of knowing another mind. Take Francine's mind. He finds it astonishing that for all these years he believed he knew her mind quite well. He thought he understood her tastes, her determination to understand how things worked, her anxieties about disorder, and still he thought that deep down she loved him, but somehow it seems her face, with its almost-too-strong nose and her widely spaced eyes and distinctly ribbed lips — the top lip protrudes slightly — has fooled him all this time. It suggested a kind of softness; he could never have guessed that she would dispose of him so decisively. He imagined that they had exchanged enough of their human essences to become in some way one person. He had often lain in bed — the bed he had just been granted - and thought about the minute sloughing-off of skin, the exchange of air as they lay close. He had adapted himself happily to her night habits. (She sometimes appears to be awake, with her eyes wide open and her teeth grinding lightly.) And not to forget in this round-up the semen rushing eagerly on its short, Darwinian sprint, the bed-sheets made not grubby by the spillage, but intimate, even numinous; how she would eat breakfast standing up, unaware that he saw her absolute belief that she was going to be late as endearingly irrational. And all this she has ignored, because John's claims to intimacy are stronger than his.

If he doesn't know her mind, how can he know Mendel's? We see through a glass darkly, von Gottberg's wife, Liselotte, had written to Conrad of her experiences. But this idea of darkness, he thinks, is romantic, a mistake, because it suggests that we are moving towards light, that we must look closely for the truth, that there is some end in view - religious or personal or historical or philosophical. He remembers so well that the last time he saw Mendel, breathing air and oxygen through a plastic tube, he said with his faintly ironic smile, 'Life has no meaning. I rejoice in that. Things are what they are. There is no more.'

Mendel had written that to him the history of ideas was often more interesting than the ideas themselves: what he meant -Conrad believes — is that the search for meaning is more revealing than the nostrums, the prescriptions, the ideologies, concocted in the name of this search. But still he is far from clear about what Mendel had in mind for him. Maybe all he had in mind — surely plenty — was an extended tutorial in how to live your life. Francine intended something similar, if a little more practical.

'Conrad,' she said, 'I know you don't really care, but can we get this sorted? Once and for all? And fairly? You have a talent for putting off very simple matters. In fact you find them almost intolerable.'

'I do.'

'It's a kind of resistance to reality.'

'Oh thanks for that. And I thought I was just lazy. That's the scientific mind for you.'

'I was being polite.'

'I was thinking about how you could possibly have sex with John.'

'Shall we stick to the programme?'

'That's another thing I find difficult.'

For no good reason he debated her every choice, the wedding photographs, the used chequebooks, the Dualit toaster, the curtains he had never liked. He made a stand over the books and his demands were mostly met, because he had, somehow, a moral lien over them, although not of course over the medical textbooks. In idle moments — plenty of those in the last nine years — he has looked through them. It is amazing to him what these doctors know. She thinks it is a matter of pride with him to decline all opportunities of practical knowledge, but the truth is that when he looks at these textbooks he sees mountains of facts - even protein molecules require pages of explanations and tricky little diagrams - mountains that he could never have scaled.

Before his rapid decline, his father had often talked about Everest. Mountaineering represented not man's ability to conquer some turbulent geology, but his ability to make life in his image. Later when he discovered that even the best intentioned can be disappointed, his father lost his faith in the human enterprise. But back in the fifties it was a young man's task to subdue chaos wherever it was found; in personal relations or in the garden or in the colonies, the imperative was much the same. And Conrad sees that ideas have their time: von Gottberg, with his spirit and destiny, belonged to a different time. Mendel, back then, was already interested in the effect of ideas, often deleterious. He hated particularly the lie at the heart of Marxism, that ordinary people are suffering from false consciousness. And when, soon after his trip to Jerusalem with Mendel, von Gottberg went back to Germany and wrote his infamous letter to the Manchester Guardian, things were never the same between them. Von Gottberg wrote that the Guardian was wrong to say that there was discrimination against Jews in the courts in Hamburg. He had never seen it, and he was working there as a prosecutor. He had even spoken to some active storm troopers who, though they supported their leader's race policies, said they would never have countenanced violence against Jews.

And now, in this wrangle, Conrad saw what he already knew, that there was no hope of recovering what he and Francine had lost.

'Fran, take whatever you want. And we'll sell the flat whenever you are ready. Or you can buy me out. You decide how much it's worth. I don't care.'

This insouciance upset her more than the wrangling. Maybe she thought it was a ploy. Her throat was colouring and her tired, tired eyes, flecked with late-night blood spots, looked at him for the first time today.

'What's the matter with you? Why are you doing this to me? You know we were going nowhere.'

'Going nowhere. It's a common but untrue belief that life is a journey.'

'Please, Conrad. Please, please, spare me, spare us, this hell.'

'You take whatever you want. And pay me out when you can. I mean it.'

She started to cry, but resisted his attempt to put an arm around her.

'No, Conrad. I've made up my mind. Conrad, you are an extraordinary person, wonderful really and I loved you. But you have, I don't know, a kind of contempt for me and the world I live in which has hurt me terribly.'

'I don't have a contempt for you. Not at all, I admire you. It's almost unbelievable to me what you do and what you know.'

'Yes, unbelievable is the word. But you are engaged, in your estimation anyway, in the higher pursuits.'

'That's just not true. But you know, you are what you are. You once said to me, "Who asked you?" and the answer is nobody. Nobody asked me. But it's in my nature. And, by the way, the contempt is largely from your side, from the practical side of life, towards the airy-fairy, represented by me. I never wanted to hurt you. Never.'

'You see where we've got to? It's hopeless.'

'Do you love John?'

'Yes. I love John.'

'Do you know what Axel von Gottberg's brother called him on the day he was hanged by Hitler? He called him an outcast dog.'

'Am I supposed to see a connection?'

'No. But to me it suggests that desperate people will do or say anything. Are you desperate?'

Zur selben Stunde starb Axel in Berlin-Plotzensee. That was what von Gottberg's wife wrote in her memoir: one brother called the other an outcast dog in the same hour as Axel died in Berlin-Plotzensee. This is where all his talk with Mendel led von Gottberg, to a blank wall in a prison, a wall decorated with meat-hooks to which thin cords were attached to form nooses. How could you call your own brother an outcast dog? What is it about us, we presumptuous human creatures, that makes us on the one hand desperate for order and certainty, and on the other craven, vicious murderers? I don't know and, for all her knowledge, Francine doesn't either.

When he looked at Francine she was ticking the list frantically and he saw with an upwelling of sympathy that rose like a tidal bore from within him, starting somewhere at the bottom of his torso, that her face was blotched now: the colour had escaped from the neck. All her composure was in that moment gone. She was a frightened woman, young but not very young, and she was exhausted by her work, by his intransigence, by her childlessness, by the realisation that life is full of disappointments. He put his arm around her now, brushing away her muted protest. He kissed her and she was trembling and he was shaking too, because there was something exciting about taking back, even for a short time, his sexual property, that another man had used.

Afterwards they lay together silently, their skins damp. For both of them what had happened was shocking, although of course they had made love thousands of times before. How strange then, he thought, how perverse, that this love-making should seem illicit.

His father loved a singer called Tim Hardin. He had a vinyl recording of his songs which he played endlessly and would sing in the bath. Now the words come to Conrad unbidden, and he sings:

If I listened long enough to you, I would find a way to believe It's all true, knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried. Still I'd find a reason to believe.

'Tim Hardin?'

'Tim Hardin.'

'Conrad, I'm glad we did this. But it'll never happen again.'

If I listened long enough to you, I would find a way to believe It's all true, knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried. If I gave you time to change my mind, I'd find a way to leave the past behind.

'Do you still love me, Conrad?'

The bakery smells that rose up from below were strong now, coming in gusts. Their possessions, arranged as if in a charity shop, seemed to him utterly worthless, without purpose or substance. He could hear his father, singing quite tunefully in the bath. Two thirty-five-year-olds were lying semi-naked in the Camden afternoon, which intruded weakly through the dirty panes.

'Fran, even gannets mate for life.'

'Oh shit. I'll sort out all our things and make sure it's fair. I owe you that.'

She seemed to be eager to go. Perhaps John was waiting somewhere to hear how her encounter with the erratic one had gone. He watched her get dressed again. She usually goes into the hospital in jeans and changes into her blue scrubs there. In future John will be sharing this intimate knowledge of her, how she pulls on her jeans and leans slightly forward to do up the top button and how she passes both her hands through her hair, and then leans forward again to shake it for a moment, before raking it back. What do these little things mean? He couldn't believe this would never happen again.

His intimacy with Francine, whose buttocks, he noticed, were beginning, ever so slightly, to droop, would be relegated, like his father's singing, to a different and more treacherous intimacy, the realm of memory where almost anything goes.

When she had gone, he felt strangely exalted. He lay on the bed and then fell asleep for a while, and he heard his father singing I would find a way to believe. Sometimes in his memory his father shuffles, small steps, like a dutiful Japanese woman's, as he sings It will never happen again.

4

MENDEL WAS ELECTED a fellow of All Souls in the autumn after he returned from Jerusalem. In those days Englishness had a sort of radiance and Mendel's parents could not help basking in it, explaining to their relatives and friends that a fellowship of All Souls was the highest honour in the English academic world. Their son Elya's triumph had allowed them to feel that they were sitting in the box-seat, as the saying went. Actually their son was also an immigrant, six years old when his family arrived in Britain by steamer, but the children shake off the whiff of the old country very quickly even as it clings to the parents like some faintly noxious gas, for ever.

By the time Conrad met him, Mendel was that necessary figure, the publicly acknowledged wise man, known not just in Oxford but in the wider world. A few of these people spring up in every generation. So, reading the letters, Conrad was surprised and touched by Mendel's pride in his election to All Souls. We tend to think that well-known people were always celebrated.

Conrad visited Mendel once in All Souls, for lunch. It was 1991. He remembers the elderly college servant — a dying breed, said Mendel, and this one was clearly moribund - serving the oxtail soup with his thumb dangerously close to the brown Plim-soll line.

'Often he doesn't notice when his thumb goes in,' said Mendel. 'That's probably why the soup is served cool, for health-and-safety reasons.'

They sat in a small panelled room, the Common Room, which the Fellows used when there were not many of them dining. Mendel told him that dessert was always served here after dining in hall, a custom whose origins had been forgotten. The eggheads of all shapes and sizes, boyish, awkward — some, he fondly imagined, idiots savants - greeted Mendel before they moved to their tables. Mendel was like a saint in an obscure church, whose effigy or relics have to be touched or kissed or stroked when entering.

'They're always surprised, I hope pleasantly, to find I am still alive.'

These brainy folks seemed to be physically tortured by their intelligence, stooped, contorted, with out-of-control hair and clothes that ranged blithely between the resolutely tweedy and the hopelessly ill-assorted, as though great minds were unable to take in the merely cosmetic.

And now Conrad sees that those early days in All Souls, when Mendel was in love with Rosamund, had been wonderfully happy, the freedom to read and write and the encouragement to live the life of the mind unreservedly. In his own way, Conrad has been trying to do this for ten or more years, without much to show for it. And it is this aspect of the life of the mind, the snub to the free market and its bogus laws, which Francine resents most: where's the vaccine, where's the best-seller, where's the academic tenure? What's the product of this free-range thinking?

Yes, it must have been bliss, with Rosamund coming up from London for the weekends, and Mendel going often to London to see her and reading her new chapters with that wonderful enthusiasm and humour, and the love-making which was still new and utterly entrancing to Mendel; love and sex dissolved the protective deposits of cynicism and selfishness. And, Conrad guesses, caused Mendel to understand that there are many human actions that are animal or irrational in essence. Conrad himself knows this all too well. Dumped by Francine he feels jealousy and rejection, but still more strongly, the loss of innocence. He wants to believe in love and its redemptive power; in fact he loves the idea of love perhaps more than he loves Francine, although he remembers The Leopard: Love. Flames for one year, ashes for thirty. It's the nature of love that you enter the lists knowing you will both lose.

Rosamund and her cousin Elizabeth, who had become even more bored in Jerusalem, were making a visit to Germany and were proposing to see von Gottberg. Rosamund wanted Mendel to patch up his relations with Axel.

'He's very hurt, Elizabeth says. Please write to him, Elya.'

'I will write him. But what he wrote to the Guardian was unforgivable, although it is possible he had his reasons.'

'Elizabeth says he is trying to avoid joining the Party.'

'The only way to avoid that is to emigrate.'

'You are a hard man. And I thought you were soft.'

'I have surprised myself. Perhaps I was reacting as a Jew. But Axel must have known exactly what laws were passed. When we were in Jerusalem we met German Jews arriving in their thousands. What were they fleeing? A few cartoons showing them heavily bearded? No, loss of property, loss of jobs, loss of life. What he wrote was that the only hardship the Jews were suffering was because of "aid" for German Jews from abroad. And he cited the storm troopers as witnesses of their excellent good treatment at the hands of the authorities. Do you know what angered me most? It was the idea that Jews should be grateful under the circumstances. Only the wilfully blind cannot see. Anyway, now you and Elizabeth can see for yourselves. But in my mind Axel has passed from the grey world to the black-and-white. Books have been burned. Jewish shops have been expropriated. Axel knows these things. His idiotic letter is not in keeping with his beliefs and character, or if it is, he has deceived me and all of us.'

There is reference to a letter from von Gottberg, trying to explain himself, but Mendel dismisses it: 'He always takes refuge in generalities: "Europe must see that the true spirit of the German people is being subverted." Et cetera, et cetera.'

'Still, Elya, write to him. He loves you.'

'I will write to him, for your sake.'

He writes a conciliatory letter to von Gottberg, saying that he hopes and believes that they will always be friends, and that he was probably unaware of all the circumstances surrounding the writing of the letter to the Guardian. But, Axel, you must know that what you wrote was foolish and — ifnot strictly interpreted — untrue, dangerous. It was not worthy of you. Please come and visit me in All Souls whenever you can.

Conrad wonders if it is possible to read this letter as von Gottberg read it. They could both see that Europe's dark prejudices were surfacing in Germany, but neither of them could have any idea of the horrors to come, because, given the stock of available human experience, they were unimaginable.

When Elizabeth and Rosamund return from Germany, Rosamund writes to Mendel to break off their relationship. Mendel is heartbroken, but grateful, so he tells friends, for the happiness she has given him. He is, of course, primarily grateful for the sexual experience, previously a mystery to him. He cherishes it and husbands it.

Conrad wonders what happened in Germany. There is no sign in Mendel's papers that Rosamund met anybody else and her novel, when it was published early the following year, was apparently a minor success, thought by The Times to display 'an amusing, if rather shallow understanding of the surface aspect of our times'. Mendel kept the cutting alongside her letters. He wrote: Nothing has changed. In my present mood I am happy with this situation. I see ahead of me a long, enclosed tunnel of work.

Later there is a letter from Elizabeth saying that Rosamund has decided to return to Germany to oppose the rise of Nazism. She will be sending reports back to the newspapers; her uncle is a proprietor. But there is no mention of Rosamund's feelings for Mendel. He writes that he consoles himself with the knowledge that he was made for the contemplative life.

Conrad is sitting in the flat, now on the market. Without Francine's presence, he has noticed, it is deteriorating. He is unable to control the remains of meals and dirty plates and crumpled bedclothes. He seems to cause seismic upheavals with simple acts like opening a jar of coffee or looking for a book. Mendel's papers, which he is trying to put in some order, are resisting, faithful to their progenitor's spirit; he was famously disorganised. The collected letters of E.A. Mendel are far from collected. In fact they may be more dispersed than when he took delivery of them two and a half years ago. Many times he has been warned - Francine has warned him - that they should be kept in safe storage. For the moment they are still in hundreds of books and loose files of papers and seventeen cardboard boxes in what used to be his study but which has now become an all-purpose room containing items of clothing, plates, books, newspapers and socks. He hadn't realised until Francine moved out just how much stuff came through the letterbox every day. With her fear of chaos, she must have been up at dawn clearing up. Or clearing up when she came in from a hard day in the hospital. He feels retrospective guilt. New pizza-delivery services are multiplying, and working drivers with their own vans offer to move his possessions. Sometimes he looks at these flyers and marvels at the grammar and spelling. Utility companies and phone suppliers and holiday companies are offering deals. Often they come with mission statements. He understands that they are for mom and apple pie of course, but why are they issuing these quasi-philosophical statements which can't possibly mean anything? If it is true that language corresponds to some fundamental order in the brain, these folk are in serious trouble. A company that is offering to deliver salt for his water-softener (he doesn't have one, as far as he knows) describes itself as 'caring'. Caring salt. Or perhaps the proprietors are generally caring people and they want it to be known. He spends far too much time reading these bits of paper.

Am I heartbroken, like Mendel, he asks himself?

He hasn't spoken to Francine for ten days or so. She last rang to say that the agent was a little concerned about the state of the flat. It wasn't presenting well. Could he tidy up? He promised to give it a bash, but so far the moment has not presented itself. Although he is not actually discouraging interest in the flat, he likes the status quo. The bakery smells soothe him and he is able to apply himself to Mendel's papers, trying to understand what happened all those years ago.

Sometimes he goes out to meet friends. They appear to feel sorry for him, as though he has lost something. Nobody takes account of what Francine may have lost. He sees clearly his diminished status through his friends' eyes. The truth is, he is not heartbroken. He is beginning to feel liberated, freed of the awareness of Francine's disapproval. Although he must get someone to clean up, so that she won't have fresh grievances: in this way he is not yet entirely liberated. He remembers his friend Osric saying at first that his divorce was wonderful: he was able to eat scrambled egg in bed at three in the morning while watching women's tennis if he wanted to. Later he admitted to being lonely.

He imagines Mendel in his rooms at All Souls, properly heartbroken, first love turned to ashes, and, jumping forward, he sees von Gottberg in front of Roland Freisler at the People's Court, as though, somehow, there is a connection. This scene of von Gottberg being accused by Freisler of the perfect preparation for a traitor, loitering in Cafés in the Kurfürstendamm after going to Oxford, an English university, on an English scholarship, haunts him. He thinks about it every day. He replays it, as if the film is inside his brain, right in his being. If Freisler had known his history a little better he would have realised that Cecil Rhodes's tendencies were closer to Nietzsche's than anything currently popular at Oxford. Rhodes truly believed in the Ubermensch and the world spirit. But Oxford, to some people, is even now a provocation.

It occurs to him, in this flat above Baiocchi's Bakery, The True Taste of Italy, that he is living more fully in Mendel's life — All Souls and Oxford are very real to him — and more fully in von Gottberg's life - sometimes when he wakes in the night he believes that he was present at the People's Court - than in his own. It is a strange but comforting feeling that the outside world is becoming less substantial to him. Perhaps I am beginning to understand what it is to live someone else's life. And possibly, he thinks, this is what Mendel had in mind for me, that I should apply this understanding to his life and give it its final shape. And this is perhaps what novelists do. The reality they create is just as valid as any other. Or more so. This is the sort of talk -although of course he is talking only to himself — that drives Francine mad. If she were here he would not have been able to resist trying it out on her. His mind is moving very lightly so that he thinks that appearance and reality and false consciousness and dualism are just fancy terms for the idea that the world is imaginatively constructed.

And now Conrad decides to clean the place up. He has the idea that if he cleans up he will possibly be better able to order Mendel's papers and so to determine their meaning, which needs panning out. When this meaning is discovered, he thinks, it will be nothing more than a few gleaming specks. His mind, moving a little too fast, like a man running down a mountain, skips to the Klondike and men in shabby clothes standing in icy streams staring hopefully at sieves.

He has no plastic bags, but the bakers below give him some used flour bags and offer him the use of their dumpster. He buys a freshly baked ciabatta, lightly dusted with flour, and takes it upstairs with the bags. As he cleans he leaves a light talc everywhere. He wonders how he could have used so many toilet rolls in so short a time. He carries the stuff downstairs; Tony Baiocchi and one of his sons, who wears a diamond ear stud, help him throw the flour bags into the dumpster.

'Where's your lovely missus the doctor, then? We ain't seen her for a little while.'

'We've split up, Tony.'

'That's a crying shame. She's a lovely gel. I thought you was perfect together.'

Upstairs he takes a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. He wonders if he is looking haggard and eccentric, but actually he quite likes the way he looks, a little dishevelled, but interesting; small pouches have formed under his eyes. He has not taken much note recently of the time; he feels no need to go to bed at any particular hour, or to get up if he doesn't feel like it. This irregularity has led to these eye-pouches. Perfect together. They were never perfect together. But he sees again the sense that other people have that Francine is something special, a lovely gel, who lent him some lustre. The world doesn't give much value to high-minded thinking.

Successfully completing manual tasks always leaves him invigorated and he sits down among the cardboard boxes with renewed purpose. Just then the phone rings and he hears a woman's voice, clear but delivered at elderly registers.

'I would like to speak to Mr Senior.'

'Yes, that's me.'

'You won't know who I am, but I am Elizabeth Partridge. The novelist, Rosamund Bower, was my cousin.'

'Good God. Sorry. Apologies.'

'You probably imagined I was dead.'

'No, no, not at all, I just had no idea what had happened to you. Although of course I knew that Miss Bower died in 1984. And I have some of your letters.'

'Yes, I know that Elya Mendel gave you many of his papers. I have some of his letters as well as some letters from Axel von Gottberg, and I wondered if you would like to have them. Elya suggested it before he died.'

'Jesus Christ. Sorry again. Yes, please, I would love to see them.'

'I'm in Ireland, but I will be in London next week for an operation.'

She speaks, as clearly and as harshly as a bell, with the authority of someone who has been around servants and dogs and horses all her life.

'Did Mr Mendel write to you often?'

'Oh yes. He certainly did. We were terribly close, particularly after Rosamund chucked him. Axel wrote to me often. I also have some of Rosamund's letters from Axel. Are you married?'

'I am, but it's not going well. She's gone.'

'It's a mistake to think of marriage as the final solution. Your voice is slightly odd. I hear that's how the young speak today. Is that what's called Estuary English?'

'Probably. I hope your operation is not serious.'

'At my age everything is serious. But this is just plumbing. Do you know, I never took it seriously when people said growing old is awful. But the truth is that it is awful. Things conk out.'

'I've got a lot of questions for you.'

'I'll do my best. Fortunately, my brain seems to be holding up surprisingly well.'

'How many letters do you have?'

'At least a hundred.'

'Good God.'

'You seem to have a rather limited vocabulary. In those days one wrote. Goodbye.'

'When are we going to meet?'

'I will telephone you when I arrive at Basil Street.'

He thinks when she has gone that she probably slept with von Gottberg. He finds it quite shocking, even thrilling, that someone who knew them both so well is still alive. From her letters, he has come to know her, but it never occurred to him that she would still be alive. She must be ninety-two or -three at least. He tears at the ciabatta with his hands and eats it excitedly. The room is pleasantly farinaceous. He has spoken to someone who slept with von Gottberg. He is stuffing the bread into his mouth. He is easily excited. His mother used to say that he was highly strung. Von Gottberg was highly strung; his hands would grasp and furl and unfurl when he was excited by ideas. In the face of enormous danger, mortal danger, he would become calm and detached. At his trial, after being tortured for days by the Gestapo in Albrechtstrasse, with only the sure prospect of death, he was calm. A few months later, when Helmuth James von Moltke was sentenced to death, he welcomed Freisler's remark that the Church and the Nazis demanded the same thing, the whole man. He would be hanged — von Moltke rejoiced — for his thoughts.

And this is something Mendel must have understood, that a deep belief, however irrational its origin, can be the source of strength and unimaginable courage. Perhaps the only source of strength.

5

WHEN ELIZABETH PARTRIDGE calls him a few days later she asks him to come at tea-time, which he takes to mean four o'clock. He emerges from the underground at Knightsbridge and walks down Basil Street to her club. It is a place that accommodates members, mostly women, up from the country, women who don't want to be startled in any way by the new realities of London. So he imagines; he always, constantly, unstoppably, makes these judgements. The brass doorplate has been polished for so many years that the inscription, 'London and Counties Club', is as indistinct as the epitaph on an ancient tomb. He rings the bell and a porter in a faded dark-maroon uniform -the colour of an old apple variety - trimmed at the cuffs and lapels with gold thread that has lost its lustre, opens the door and, limping, leads him to the reception desk where he presses his hand down on the burnished brass bell which produces one exhausted ping.

'She won't be long,' says the porter, who opens a small panelled door and passes through it. He appears, when the door shuts, to have vanished behind a large vase of delphiniums.

Everything in the place is faded. Even the delphiniums are of a washed-out blue. It's an effect decorators often strive for, the gentle deterioration of fabric and carpet and paint, the suggestion that here at least there will be no absurd — vulgar — newness. Even the lift with its concertina doors and brass buttons and mahogany interior is perfect. Conrad likes it. He likes strange things: there is no pattern to his tastes, another aspect of his life that upsets Francine, who finds whimsy self-indulgent. But what he likes is the confidence demonstrated by the committee, or whoever the presiding genius of the place is, that in this corner of Knightsbridge at least there is only one possible style appropriate for its members. It's akin to the belief that God took time out to endorse the Anglican church - its rituals, its tasteful hymns, its worn-out kneelers, its flowers, its surplices, its holy innocence - with his special approval. We are all God's children of course, but Anglicans are his favourites, because of their demeanour.

He is inspecting a thickly varnished oil painting of a horse in a landscape, when he is called.

'Are you here to meet someone, sir?'

He turns to see a cheerful young woman in a heavily threaded violet suit. The threads are on the outside, in a fine arachnid web, as if hovering above the material itself.

'Yes, I am here to see Elizabeth Partridge.'

'Ah, Lady Dungannon. She is expecting you. Please go through to the lounge and I will tell her ladyship that you have arrived. Would you like tea?'

'Oh, yes, please.'

'Ordinary tea, or herbal?'

'No, no, not herbal. Ordinary tea. Builders' tea, please.'

He imagines that 'builders' tea' is the sort of phrase that plays well here. He waits in the lounge, where the brass clock on the wall ticks loudly. The lounge looks on to a small courtyard. Elizabeth Partridge, he has discovered, was married to an Irish peer who died nearly thirty years ago. He tries in the loud silence to imagine what it is like to be as old as she is, to have witnessed so much, the parade of ideas, absurd fashions, hopeful politicians, corrupt regimes, dictators, murderers, sexual encounters, musical styles, marriages, bereavement and above all the restless, insatiable appetite for happiness, for explanations, for fulfilment and also for art and beauty and music. Every generation uses and transforms what has gone before. As Eliot said - approximately — every generation takes what it needs from art. If you live for ninety years, you must lose faith in human judgement, so fickle, so self-regarding, so dangerous.

He hears the lift lurching and coughing upwards. The doors open somewhere above and close clumsily and noisily. There is a moment of indecisive whirring as if it is gathering its elderly senses, and then it jolts into action again. The doors open and he can hear the porter making polite encouraging noises to someone. The young woman's voice now joins in.

Into the lounge comes Elizabeth Partridge in a wheelchair, pushed by the porter. She sits in the chair with dignity, although age has cramped her so that she is curled, rolled, almost into a cochlear posture. The porter wheels her into place and helps her into a florally abundant armchair. Her face, heavily made up, has a mummified look, the porcelain appearance of time stopped, a broken clock, so that she can never get older and, with her carefully arranged woman-aviator's hair, will go to her grave in exactly this state. He thinks of her in the Kidron Valley, when she and von Gottberg were certainly having an affair, and he tries to imagine her tilting her head to look at him over her shoulder from under a large hat, her hair in shiny waves partly obscuring the view.

'Ah, hello,' she says. 'You must be young Master Senior. Pass me the bag, Miss Trentham. Is the tea coming?'

'Tea is on its way, Lady Dungannon.'

'Sit down, my boy. Sit down. It's not a cocktail party, more's the pity.'

She laughs and her laugh is so high and girlish that he is instantly charmed. As a small boy he liked older people, although his Aunt Dorothy with the bristly moles on her cheek repelled him when she kissed him.

'Why, Conrad, did Elya choose you to be his biographer?'

'He doesn't actually say biographer anywhere. I think he just wanted me to have his papers and look after them.'

'Thank you,' she says to the young woman. 'We will be talking for a while. Did you say tea is on its way?'

'Yes, it is, Lady Dungannon.'

'Jolly good. In this folder I have all the letters from Elya and from Axel, as well as some other bits and pieces. But before I give them to you, I want to ask you to do one thing. I feel I can ask at my age.'

She reaches across and places her hand on his wrist. It rests there with an avian lightness for a moment.

'Yes.'

'I want you to remember that Elya trusted you. He told me just before he died that you have some sensitivity.'

Conrad feels that dangerous surge of childish gratification rising up in him.

'To be honest, I don't know why he said that.'

'He was an excellent judge of character.'

The porter brings the tea. There is a long pause, some sighs, some clattering of bone china as he unloads his tray. Here, it is still a mark of civilisation to cut sandwiches very thin and to stack them in neat triangles. In the outside world people fill sandwiches and baguettes and bagels to bursting, but that is not the way here: watercress, cucumber and Cheddar are strictly confined. The tea comes in a pot with a matching jug of hot water and a strainer.

'Would you pour, Conrad? My hands are a little shaky.'

The ritual - perhaps it's the point of all rituals — draws them into a complicity. On her forehead he sees the thin indelible pencil mark of a blue vein, threatening to emerge from under her pale skin, which is only lightly coated on to the bones of her face.

'Yes, so you mustn't use his papers or the letters I am going to give you to make a fast buck.'

'No, no, of course not.'

Actually he is stunned both by the — justified — suspicion and by the phrase.

'No. You must not. The point about Elya is that his life's work was the understanding of human aims. As a matter of fact I think human longings is a better phrase. He believed that we make the best of the life we are given. All those years ago in Jerusalem, I asked him what he did — I had no idea he was an Oxford don - and he said he believed that human beings spent a lot of time deceiving themselves. He was thinking about why this should be the case, d'you follow me? What he couldn't decide then was whether this is a necessary human characteristic. Axel, of course, believed in Hegel, who Elya thought wrote absolute balls.'

'You were very close to Axel, weren't you?'

'I was. I loved him. But so did my cousin, Rosamund. She left Elya and followed him to Germany, but it didn't work. No, she slept with Elya because she wanted to prove to Axel that she would do anything for him. It was his idea that she help Elya lose his virginity. She never really loved Elya, unfortunately. However much you admire someone, you can't force the body to fall in love, don't you agree? Rosamund loved Axel, and she took up with a friend of his, just to stay in Germany. You're probably shocked. People of your age think sex was invented in 1963, as Larkin said. It wasn't, believe me.'

She laughs again quite suddenly, improbably loudly considering the diminished sounding box from which the laughter emerges.

'Did he know about Rosamund and Axel?'

'Elya? Yes. You must read the letters.'

'And Axel von Gottberg? Elya Mendel always writes about his charm, but deep down he never trusted him after his letter to the Manchester Guardian!

'No, that is true. Elya never trusted him after that letter, but also he never trusted him after Rosamund. What's odd, of course, is that people like us - Axel, Rosamund, Elya and me - were just young people in strange times. I'm not saying we were ordinary, far from it, but the times were extraordinary. And knowing Axel changed us all in different ways. The only advantage of growing old is that you see things from differing perspectives. Young people think they have made the world.'

Axel von Gottberg has reached out from the grave to change Conrad's life too, although he is not yet sure exactly how.

'Let's have a cocktail now. Will you order? I would ring the bell, but life is too short to wait for Alf.'

'I'll go and order. What would you like?'

'I'll have a Tom Collins. I gave Alf Lionel's recipe years ago. Lionel Wray, Elya's friend, notorious sodomite. Or so he pretended.'

He finds the young woman and gives her the order for two Tom Collins.

When he comes back Elizabeth is powdering her nose, looking into a small compact and moistening her lips.

'He was very good-looking, you know.'

'Who?'

'Axel. He had enormous charm and sex appeal. Elya had charm, but it didn't really have a sexual content. Women liked him and confided in him but he was often treated, I think it's fair to say, as what people these days call a walker. Although some of his students fell for him utterly. One young woman, he brought her to stay when we came back to England, to Sussex, was desperate to marry him. He asked me in the kitchen what I thought. She was talking to my husband, my first husband Roddy, who was killed in 1942, and I said, "Don't touch her with a bargepole." "Bit late for that," he said. "I mean don't marry her, she's away with the fairies, daft as a brush." "Yes, but she's very good in bed," he said. "Honestly, Elya, what kind of talk is that from a fellow of All Souls?" And he laughed. He had a wonderful liquid laugh, like a big warbling bird. But you know how he laughed, I am sure. Actually we all laughed like hyenas. I think it was a fashion.'

Conrad has an image of those dogs, Boston terriers, that barked at the circus to produce music. He remembers Mendel's laugh: it rose, it bubbled from a cleft in the rocks, from the Kidron Valley, distilled in Jewish time, from a biblical age of innocence.

The porter is cast specifically to lend verisimilitude to this scene. He appears with two tall cocktail glasses, each topped with a maraschino cherry and a slice of orange. He places the glasses beside them on little round paper mats and then attempts a sort of respectful, unobtrusive exit, which stops the conversation.

'Don't mind me, your ladyship, I shall be returning shortly with some mixed nuts.'

Nobody has spoken like this since 1953.

'Jolly good, Alf,' says Elizabeth.

Conrad wonders if it is possible to order your life so that you are surrounded and attended only by people called Alf who have been sealed from the world as it is. If you have money, it may be possible. He wonders, too, if there comes a time when you wish for stasis and are unwilling to take on board any new information. That seemed to have happened to his father; he wasn't prepared to take on a new world, because he believed it would be just as deluded as the one it was replacing.

'Chin, chin,' Elizabeth says, raising her glass. 'Do you know, Axel, as a good Prussian, always bowed his head slightly when he said cheers or prosit. Elya noticed it. He said it was a sort of submission to higher powers. You couldn't say prosit without, as Elya put it, an acknowledgement of higher meaning if you were Prussian. Higher meaning was exactly what Elya spent his life trying to debunk.'

'How long did Rosamund stay in Germany?'

'After Axel called off their engagement, she went back to Germany and lived with a German for a year, and even wore the Herrenhut mit Schmuckband, that funny little trilby hat with a ribbon, for a while, but she came back here just before the war started. Her man joined the Party - he was called Strelitz - and remained a true believer to the end. He was killed in 1945. What she really wanted was Axel. Axel visited her, and me, on his trips to London to try to stop the war. That was in April and May 1939. A year later Ros married an Englishman. Five years later Axel was dead, hanged. It was too awful. We were so young.'

'I've seen the film of the trial.'

'Is it terrible?'

'He is oddly serene. Ready to die.'

'He was horribly tortured. Fingernails torn out, and God knows what else.'

'Did Elya ever talk about that?'

'No. He couldn't bear to hear about torture or pain. He was a coward himself, by his own admission.'

'Did he ever say he felt guilty about undermining Axel's reputation with the authorities, here and in America?'

'He was accused of it. But he said any criticism he had of Axel was of his fondness for putting himself in the middle of any intrigue that was going. And of course his patriotism. Patriotism was a very dirty word in Oxford. What's the phrase, the last refuge of the scoundrel? He felt that Axel's attitude was my country, right or wrong. What Elya realised very early on was that Hitler was not like anybody who had gone before. He had read Mein Kampf. But no, I don't think he ever believed that he had been responsible for Axel's death in any way. Axel put himself in danger from the beginning, by joining the German Foreign Office and playing a double game. He went all over the place telling people about the resistance. It was surprising he wasn't arrested long before July 1944.'

Conrad sees that Elizabeth is becoming tired and agitated.

'I must go now and rest,' she says.

'Can I see you again?'

'If I live through tomorrow's op, I would love to see you. Come and stay with us in Ireland.'

'I would love to.'

'How old are you, Conrad?'

I 'm thirty-five.'

'Just the age Axel was when he died. My son is sixty-one. Astonishing. Now take the letters and remember what I said about your obligation to Elya.'

As he walks along Basil Street towards the underground with his precious parcel in his tennis bag, he marvels that out here on the street life is so different, as though he has stepped through the scenery, like the evanescent porter. And this too, he thinks, is English life, a series of cameos or farces played out in separate rooms. Elizabeth conducts herself as someone who is on a stage, surrounded by bit-part players like the porter, the Dogberry of this scene. That self-assurance of the English upper-classes, the belief, as Cecil Rhodes put it, that if you asked any man what nationality he would prefer to be, ninety-nine out of a hundred would tell you they would prefer to be born an Englishman -that assurance lives on long beyond any possible verification. And it was this confidence that the benefits of an exposure to Englishness - an inoculation of Englishness, as a Master of Balliol once described it - would benefit everybody, that led Rhodes to include Germans among his candidates. And it is by this strange philosophical route that Axel von Gottberg came to Oxford.

When he gets home Conrad delays opening the folder and spends some time examining the cover on which Elizabeth has written in bold, lost, copperplate: My correspondence with Elya Mendel and Count Axel von Gottberg and my cousin, Rosamund Bower, and other papers. Dungannon House, Ireland.

When he eventually opens the folder after making coffee, and checking his emails twice, the sight of the letters, the paper alone, with the intimate and confessional quality of handwriting, has a powerful effect on Conrad. As he starts to read the letters, he discovers that they are full of promises and new starts and partings. As he knows, the pain of parting can itself be a pleasure. It should be no surprise that sixty years ago people had the same feelings as he does, but it is. The effect is unexpected: Elizabeth Partridge has brought him closer to them all, as though he has been introduced to friends of a close friend. And in a way he has been. But still he finds himself unsettled: Elizabeth is ninety-three, but her lover - who was also her cousin's lover -is for ever thirty-five. There are pictures of people at a certain age that freeze them in time — he thinks of movie stars and sportsmen and revolutionaries — and this has happened to von Gottberg: he remains for ever young. Early death also confers certain mythological qualities, and he wonders whether Mendel resented this as the years went by.

All three of the others are very aware of Mendel, as if his example, his deep-mined wisdom, reproaches them explicitly. It is a burden to them, it seems, trying to live up to the standards of their friend. Von Gottberg suggests that it will be difficult to write frankly after he returns to Germany. Conrad has seen this clear suggestion in other letters; Mendel has perhaps underestimated his friend's difficulties in Nazi Germany, because he sees basic principles so starkly. One of von Gottberg's letters asks if he has friends left in England and in almost every letter he tries to envisage a new European understanding; he is alarmed by the gulf that he thinks is opening up between Germany and England. He is longing to see Rosamund again, as though he has great faith in his ability to explain to her how it can all be fixed. He arranges to meet her at Tempelhof, from where they will drive to the family home. His mother is dying to meet her. Absurdly, Conrad feels nervous about her reception.

6

PRAGUE

I OCTOBER 1938

Darling Lizzie

He looks different in Germany. Of course he is at home. At first we found it difficult to speak. I don't know why. Six months have gone by and in that time so much has changed, not just for us, but for our countries. An awkwardness had sprung up. I can see that what Axel fears most is that we will all be separated. He believes, however, that Hitler and his awful supporters are the product of history. What he means is that we created the problem at Versailles, and Hitler has simply used the situation. The German people — according to Axel - don't want Hitler or war. I must say to the visitor like me they seem to be longing for war and they appear to adore Hitler. But I am getting ahead of my story, dear cousin.

We stayed the first night in Charlottenburg, which is enchanting. Axel is well known in every Café and bar, suspiciously so in my opinion; his favourite is the Romanisches Café, where the avant-garde meet. Anyway, by the time we had a few cocktails and fried calfs liver - essential Berlin food, said Axel - we were quite relaxed. In the morning we visited the Schloss, of course, the usual over-egged gilt and rococo. From Berlin we drove north to the countryside. This is Axel's Heimat. His father was one of the Kaiser's trusted ministers and the family have lived here for six hundred years. Axel feels very deeply for his Land, and I can see now why he felt he could not abandon his home and his family for a life in Oxford, although Elya thinks if he hadn't got a second he would have stayed on. We stopped a few times in small villages, sleepy villages. Some of the names of towns and villages sound Polish to me, and in fact we were not far from East Prussia. Axel is very good-looking, as we know, but at home he has something princely about him. The peasants who served us (emancipated 1807) seemed thrilled by his voice and his looks. It helps that he's a least a foot taller than anyone else, of course. You know how intensely Axel can engage you with those hazel eyes? We novelists often prattle about eyes, probably because it's so easy, but Axel's eyes have more depth than anyone's I have ever met. We stopped by a cornfield streaked and splashed with blue cornflowers and red poppies and he kissed me there, as though it had special meaning. He said he loved me and that not a day has gone by without his thinking about me. What's a girl to do? Strange, considering it was he who encouraged me with Elya. Dear Elya. I hope he has forgiven me.

Soon we were approaching the family pile, via the Gottbergerwald, a huge forest which has been in the family since the fourteenth century, or thereabouts. The house emerges as you approach and then disappears again. Axel was so pleased to be showing me his demesne. It's a Palladian house, built in about 1850 in reality, on the site of the original manor house. We approached it down an avenue lined with oaks and enormous medieval barns. He stopped the car on the last hill so that we could gaze down the avenue at the house and the lake behind. The servants were lined up to greet us and I wished I had more luggage to occupy them. Inside, Axel's mother, the Grafin, sat in a drawing room overlooking the lake. She speaks almost perfect English, as good as Axel's, and she welcomed me warmly. She's a very grand lady. Axel's father is unwell and he has been recuperating somewhere, I think in their other house over the Elbe, so I did not meet him. Axel admires him very much, although he thinks he belongs not to the previous generation but to the one before that. Later Axel's older sister arrived; the coachman had gone to get her at another house — I am not sure if it is one of theirs — where she had been painting. She was married and lived in London for a while. She is a wonderful painter and wears elaborately printed dresses in a bohemian style that only a very few can carry off. She was wearing a hat with ostrich feathers. That night we ate in the grand dining room and Axel and his sister were delightful. Her name is Adelheid, although they call her Adi, and she is about to marry the richest man in the whole of Mecklenburg. It will be possible to walk from the Baltic to Berlin without leaving their joint Heimat. (I may be exaggerating just a little.) In the morning we went riding in the forest where Axel and his sisters had run half-wild most summers. He took me to a lake hidden deep in the trees, which he said was their secret place as children. When we came back his mother was very grave: she said that the Brownshirts had destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues in the night. The police and the army did not intervene. The realisation that a gang of thugs is in charge of the country is terrifying. Axel, in his usual way, spoke soothingly of historical forces and the coming of the new order of labour, which is disguised by these upheavals. I wonder. But anyway, he has not joined the Party, a fact which is making life very difficult for him, his sister told me, although he denies it.

That night we argued as we used to, but now there was something desperate about it: Jews have been murdered, scores settled as if the days of the Teutonic Order are coming back. And yet here we were in the grand house, with Axel saying that the English are suffering for their dried-up rationalism, which fails entirely to understand that we are on earth in a context. As Elya says, Hegel is never far from his thoughts. Not, of course, that I have read Hegel, but the general idea seems to be that everything has a purpose and that all conflicts lead inevitably to a resolution. Axel says that Hitler must be given some rope so that he can hang himself. He says, when his mother is not present, that there are plans in the High Command to stop him if he invades Czechoslovakia. As we sat and talked it all seemed very remote, yet Berlin is only a few hours' drive away. You know in your bones that terrible dark days lie ahead, but Axel retreats into metaphor: Germany will find her rightful place in the new Europe that is emerging; these upheavals are a sign of the emergence of new forces, benign forces. (I'm repeating myself, but then so does he.) I have the impression that Axel has had affairs with many women in Germany as well as the ones we know about in England. It's as though he feels he needs to help women in the only way he can. You know when I wrote in Shadows at Dusk, 'He can't get on with women, so he gets off with them' — well, there is something of Axel in that. The next day we went back to Berlin. He is keen to introduce me to all his friends, even the women who I just know he has been to bed with. He seeks out Jews too, and seems fascinated by the fact that Mummy is Jewish. He said to me at the home of one of his friends, 'I am not a womaniser.' What he meant, I think, is that he has some sort of higher capacity for understanding: in life, as in women. I love him, although I can see that this cannot end well. Already we have to talk in code in public. In Berlin he is worried about his landlady and about neighbours. One night at three in the morning he sent me away to a hotel. I was shocked, but he said that it had to be done, no more explanations. We drove out to visit one of his clients in a Jewish area and the house was daubed with a huge five-pointed star and Juden heraus. It was so shocking, so nearly unbelievable, that I couldn't see how Axel could stay one more day. I waited for him in the car, but again he told me it was a phase, an historical phase. I'm shocked, I am as much shocked by the fact as by his blindness. But he is very sensitive to feelings and the next day we drove to an old inn deep in the countryside, a lovely place which is adorned by a huge gilded bunch of grapes over the ancient doors, and we dined by candlelight on Sauerbraten and a plum tart. I think he was keen to show me a more tranquil Germany.

Oh, Elizabeth, I can't tell you how torn I feel. I love him, I am obsessed by him, yet I have a horrible, uneasy feeling. Particularly in relation to what's going on in Germany. Somehow he wants to put it right himself, or die trying. It's madness - he is only a newly qualified lawyer doing rather routine work, but he has this burning sense of duty to Germany, not this Germany, of course, but to a higher Germany, a Platonic Germany. He talked to me seriously of the 'valuations' of feudal Germany. I completely lost my temper, and he said, 'How beautiful you are when you are cross,' and I told him, weeping, that he is the most beautiful man I have ever known. Oh, Lizzie, he is unfaithful, he's mesmerising and he's also a little mad, but I love him. He's asked me to marry him. I'm sorry, darling, I am rambling. Let's meet in Cornwall, in the physical world, when I get back from here. A dunking in cold seawater will set me to rights. I'm crying as I write. I must stop.

R x

Conrad looks for the signs of tears on the paper, the watermarks of misery, but he can't see them.

He reads on, letter after letter. It's dark outside but he has no idea of the time. The letters are unbearable in their accumulation of hope and ideals and of love and disillusionment. He sees in a speeded-up version a sort of historical conveyor belt that never stops producing this craziness from a deep unplumbable human well. But it's when he thinks of von Gottberg standing in front of Roland Freisler, dignified, resigned, his eyes molten from the sight of evil, that Conrad finds himself weeping softly, because this is the end of all these false hopes and ideals. It's as if it is a medieval morality play that mocks the naive traveller. He knows that he is moved on his own account, because he is just as much an item in this parade of human folly, he and Francine with their false hopes, the child they failed to produce, the success he never achieved, the warm urgent longing to live a higher life — details unspecified, of course — that they once shared, the expectation that somehow they were due fulfilment - equally unspecified -and then the loss of love, the tiredness in her skin, the bitterness in her heart. He quoted Malraux to her when she was still listening: Art is an attempt to give man a consciousness of his own hidden greatness. But she has come to regard his ability to remember quotes as a monkey trick.

While Rosamund was suffering her agonies of doubt, over in Oxford Elya Mendel was discussing with other Oxford philosophers the meaning of theory: What do we mean when we make a theory? Are all philosophical questions purely linguistic? Is philosophy grammar? Do ethics have any rational content? No, they don't.

Rosamund retreated to England and she and Elizabeth and some other friends, including the poet Emily Brittain, went down to Cornwall to the family house overlooking Padstow Bay, near Trevose. Back in England Rosamund felt, as she put it prosaically, that a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. They walked on the cliffs and swam where the water was deepest and most turbulent; they knew secret channels between the rocks. And Conrad sees them in those one-piece suits, sleek young women, on whom disillusion is falling like rain. Von Gottberg writes to her: the dangers to her in Germany would be great. She must know that he can never leave Germany.

'He believes in his destiny, Lizzie. He thinks that is going to be increasingly difficult for his English friends to understand.'

The beach under foot is pebbly. This roughness of the shingle, the eroded honeycombed rocks, the cold impersonal sea, the lighthouse at Trevose, the headlands that crouch down against the wind, the narrow paths between the stone walls are Rosamund's Heimat, she decides. And Conrad sees the myth of Englishness, which believes itself practical and down-to-earth and unshowy, can even be seen in landscape: This part of the country with its small woods and simple houses and pounding sea is more part of me than any philosophy in the world, she writes to von Gottberg.

Mendel tells Elizabeth that von Gottberg has written to him saying that he is in love with Rosamund and that he is going to marry her and that he hopes that he, Elya, will forgive him: I wrote to him telling him that I have long since got over Rosamund but I think it is only natural to say that it makes me uneasy. Of course you must not mention this to Axel or to Rosamund. I do hope, however, that she is not going to try to make a life in Germany. This is no time for anyone, let alone someone Jewish, to be going there. As usual Axel has his head in some very thick cloud.

Conrad wonders if Mendel was gradually, as people do, building up an intellectual case against von Gottberg, which was really a cover for sexual jealousy. It is easy to imagine the highly voluble, relentlessly cheerful and intellectual Mendel feeling that von Gottberg was a charlatan, attractive to young women - for instance, Rosamund — with his phoney-baloney spiritual and mythological tendencies, and his deep-forested Teutonic destiny. And of course his five thousand hectares, mit Schloss. Perhaps unconsciously in his gossip and in his letters, he was forming von Gottberg to his prejudices. Many people do this. Francine, for example, has made Conrad's lack of money into a moral principle: she thinks he has selfishly avoided the pursuit of money because (a) she, Francine, has a proper job and (b) because he wants to avoid responsibility. It suits her thesis to emphasise those aspects of their relationship, forgetting conveniently that he supported her - emotionally anyway - all through medical school and the hell of finding hospital jobs in the Health Service. He coached her too:

Why do you want to work at St Thomas's Hospital, Dr Swinburne? I hope I don't sound too pretentious when I say that St Thomas's represents to me something about medicine that my late father, Professor Swinburne, was always very keen on, the idea that hospital medicine is both the latest technology and a passing-on of wisdom down the generations. I love the fact that Tommy's contains both expertise and a long and inspiring tradition. And most particularly I really want to get the best possible training. Obviously I have limited practical experience, but I do believe that St Thomas's offers this, as well as a wonderful team spirit.

She was reluctant to learn his little speech, but he explained to her, although he was himself already out of the loop, that interviewers are not interviewing a candidate to discover her worth, but rather to see if the candidate can bring allure to their own lives and careers. What they are looking for, Francine, he proclaimed, is a stooge, a true believer. He doesn't proclaim any longer.

Sitting in that interview, ten years ago, was his wife's lover, then a newly appointed consultant of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. If Francine's ghost-written spiel hadn't been so appealing, she might not have got the job. But he can't expect any retrospective gratitude now.

Mendel's way of tackling the growing tensions in Europe was to look more closely at ideas and their effects. Idealists, he wrote, have produced some of the most terrible cruelties in history. Although he saw that the philosophers around him were undoubtedly right to believe that ethics had no rational basis in logic, he came to see that we must act ethically according to common sense. He also saw, as he once told Conrad, that Oxford philosophers were going down a blind alley if they believed that there was some incorrigible proposition waiting to be discovered. In the thirties, he told Conrad, academics were in the grip of this fallacy. Most philosophers in Oxford, he said, believed in a version of determinism, although of course none of them had ever met a determinist. His reading of the history of ideas offered an entirely different perspective, namely that ideas and beliefs are often in conflict, so the important question, it seemed to him, was not the truth of the ideas themselves, so much as the resolution of them, and that could only be realised by understanding human longings. Conrad remembers not only the conversation in Mendel's rooms, but also the rooms themselves, with the mullioned windows looking out towards Christopher Wren's clock, and the panelling that the years had infiltrated so richly, and the Roman head on the mantelpiece, acquired in Jerusalem, and the books and papers stacked and scattered so profligately. In his journalistic fashion, Conrad's father had loved books, but in Mendel's world books were not objects of self-congratulation - upmarket interior decoration - but living things, as alive as the souls that produced them. In books you could find the whole history of mankind (he didn't exclude novels and poetry) a history that includes folly and heroism and idealism and cruelty; he said more than once, quoting an American poet, that books are the bees that carry the quickening pollen from one mind to another. And Conrad in his own fashion has always felt happiest surrounded by these living dead.

Francine demanded a regular cull of books as though there was a limit to the number of books you needed at any one time. Anything over that limit, for example, books you were never likely to read again, was an indulgence. But Conrad kept them, all except for best-selling novels. Now he's sitting in his own All Souls, in a crowded room above Baiocchi's Bakery, The True Taste of Italy, in Camden Town, surrounded, his feet actually lapped by, the souls of the departed in book form, reading the letters of Elya Mendel and his friends. Each time he sees von Gottberg's beautiful handwriting he feels a jolt. Von Gottberg may have proposed marriage to her cousin, but he continues to write deeply romantic letters to Elizabeth, remembering their walks in London and Oxford, visits to her mother's house in Kent and dancing at the Café Royal; they both loved dancing. She was married at twenty-one, her husband was a friend of von Gottberg's, but he was now in Athens on a posting. It seem certain to Conrad they had been lovers once and that this continued after her marriage. He was one of those people who insisted on maintaining his friendships with lovers.

He finds a letter from von Gottberg, mailed in Switzerland just after Kristallnacht:

My darling Elizabeth

I understand that you were hurt that I proposed marriage to Rosamund. But let us be practical. You are married already. Please don't think I have lost my reason in the general madness of my country, but if I can persuade Ros to come and live with me, I feel we will all three be close. On your way to Athens, please come and visit me in Berlin and I will show you Pleskow. It's so beautiful in the winter. I am going to be there for three weeks. It's becoming increasingly difficult for me to speak clearly. You know what has happened now, as Elya understood it would, and I didn't. In reality I did understand, but I was not prepared to accept it. I feel very foolish, and even humiliated. I have written to Elya from here — it is easier from here — to say how sorry I am about that letter. I still believe, perhaps I am deluded, that I can help Europe to find its true nature. (As I write this, I hear Elya laughing that amiable but deadly laugh!) Don't mention this letter to Rosamund; I know how close you are, my darling, but please respect my wish that what we have should remain intact, and sacred. Love A

The visit to Pleskow was not a success. Whatever happened angered Elizabeth, who kept copies of her letters:

Darling A

As you had told me, Pleskow was utterly beautiful in the winter and your sister could not have been more friendly, although I found myself wondering if she was comparing me to anyone.

But I can't accept your views at all, darling! You have the attitude that you are for God and Ros and I must be for God in you. Of course I shall not discuss this with R, but you seem to me to be living a double life or worse. What I said, I stand by. Obviously I understand in the broader sense that you are deeply involved, as we discussed that night in the little house by the lake. You know my feelings about that, but, darling, it's not possible for you to share this life with anyone. I assure you, I do believe our love and friendship will survive whatever happens next.

Athens is noisy and mindless. Roddy is gloomy. I wish I were at home, in my own little house. The glory has passed from the earth. Love E

Dawn comes. It takes Conrad some time to locate himself. It's as if he finds himself in an unfamiliar room in a foreign country, without knowing how he got there, although he has been awake all night. Beneath him the bakery is coming to life: the ovens hum and whirr and the smell of the yeast as the proven bread is taken for baking is comforting. It tells him, more clearly than the murky view from the smeared windows, where he is.

7

VON GOTTBERG STILL does not believe that war is inevitable. He is working in Hamburg as a prosecutor, the only job he can find as a non-member of the Party. Still he is resisting joining. He wants, nevertheless, to play a part in his country's life and has applied for a post at the Auswartiges Amt, the Foreign Office. He believes that the Nazi Party will leave the stage of history soon enough; it is just a symptom of the changes to come. Why join? One day the president of the lawyer's association calls him and explains to him that he wants to talk to him in person.

Two days later he presents himself. The president knows his father. They walk the length of the garden of the president's office, and out along the inner ring of the Alster. Von Gottberg knows that this is not because the president wants some fresh air, as he tells his secretary, although there is plenty of that blowing in up the Elbe from the North Sea.

'My boy, I can't endorse you for the Foreign Office, despite your father's good name. Your request was sent to me by Berlin for a reference, but my hands are tied. You are not a member of this association and that would be seen as a rejection of National Socialism.'

'I don't reject National Socialism if that's what it is. In fact I am all in favour of both socialism and nationalism. But I can't join the Party. It's not possible for me. I have friends in other countries who would misunderstand. My aim in joining the Foreign Office is to work for our country. I don't want a war, but if I join the Party I will appear to be in the war party. I would have no credibility at all.'

'Just join the association. Not the Party. Then I can write you a glowing reference.'

'Mr President, you are a member of the Party, I assume?'

'I am.'

'Do you want a war?'

'Of course I don't want a war. Nobody in Hamburg wants a war. But the problem we all have in every professional association, as you know, is that we have been required to swear an oath. Germany is going in one direction and you either jump on the train or you are an outcast. Can I tell you in confidence that none of us is happy? We tell ourselves we can work from the inside, we can make things better. Now, let me speak quite frankly, if you don't join the Party or our association, you will end up in a concentration camp or in exile.'

'I will give you my answer tomorrow. And I thank you.'

That night von Gottberg is dining with a friend from Gottingen, Dietlof Goetz. Goetz is very strong, darkly good-looking, and he loves all sports. Von Gottberg finds him wonderfully uncomplicated and honest. As they leave the restaurant -they have been eating green-eel soup — they see a commotion on the Lombardsbrücke. A man is running, pursued by three Brownshirts. Dietlof steps forward without hesitation and punches one of the Brownshirts in the face, and they block the way of the other two, who turn away reluctantly and morosely with their companion, whose nose is bleeding freely. The man who was being pursued, a Jew obviously, comes back. He removes his hat. He is a man of about fifty. He says nothing beyond thank you to Axel, but grasps his hand in his two hands briefly, and then Dietlof s, before hurrying away. He is wheezing.

Dietlof is exhilarated as they stop at a bar for a beer.

'We can't beat up every Brownshirt in Germany,' says Axel.

'We must try. It is our sacred duty.'

'What have we become, Dietlof?'

'I am leaving. I am going to America. There is no future here.'

'Look. Let's walk a little, I want to talk to you.'

'One more beer. It's thirsty work beating up these animals.'

They leave the bar. Dietlof is unconcerned that the Brownshirts might be looking for them. But Axel is nervous until they break free of the close alleyways and walk along the lake where the rigging of moored yachts is slapping and chiming against masts and spars. Goetz is in his uncle's shipping business in Hamburg, but his family home is also in Mecklenburg.

'Dietlof, can I speak honestly to you? I know I can trust you. I have been talking to my friends in England and there is a chance we can stop the war. If everybody like you leaves, there will be no future — as you say — for our country. Another war will be a complete disaster, again. The Nazis apparently are unable to see that the whole world will eventually be against us, including America.'

Von Gottberg explains that there is resistance to Hitler in the Army Council and that General Beck, the supreme commander, is absolutely against any foreign adventures. There is a plan to deal with Hitler when the time is right. His friends in England are absolutely against a war too. It only requires all sides to hold their nerve.

'Dietlof, it is our destiny, our duty, to stay in Germany and fight for the country we love. My dear friend, when I saw you punch that bastard, I felt strangely exalted. It doesn't need many of us to stand up for Germany, for what you and I would call the true Germany. But first, and this is what my work is, we must persuade our friends in England and America to allow Germany some return of pride and dignity. It they don't do that, Hitler will flourish on the people's resentment. Believe me, Dietlof, we need you. You must stay.'

Dietlof Goetz was to say years later that Axel von Gottberg's passion, his eyes brimming, his voice quivering with emotion, made him ashamed of his plan to join his brother in New Jersey. Von Gottberg convinced him by the Alster that it was only by demonstrating to the world that there was another Germany, not seized by madness, that they could live honourably. The life of exile, he said, is a half-life.

Later that month von Gottberg writes to Elizabeth Partridge saying that he has met a girl from Mecklenburg, who is the sister of his old university friend Dietlof Goetz, and that he is planning to marry her. He has written to Rosamund too, explaining that he hoped they would always be friends, and wishing her well. But, Elizabeth, you know that I will always love you. If you hadn't been married I believe ours would have been a match made in the heavens.

Down below the bakery is making its first deliveries of the day. The bread is stacked on wooden trays to be loaded into the vans. Conrad sees the tortoise shapes, the brown carapaces, from above and he is reassured. Human life depends on small rituals and the daily bread is surely one of the most basic. No wonder the Church appropriated it. He sits among these papers, anxious that they should not miscegenate with the earlier papers that lie in disarray around the flat. I am losing my hold on order, he thinks. I am more engaged with Mendel and von Gottberg than I am here, in my own home. I must see my friends. Although they have become strangely silent. Perhaps Francine has been briefing against me. I must re-enter the physical world, as Rosamund put it.

What happened at Pleskow, he wonders? Letters are only the outcroppings of an underwater reef. Elizabeth Partridge will tell him what Axel von Gottberg said to her that evening in the little house by the lake. But he knows already that von Gottberg joined the lawyers' association and soon after that, the Party, because he was appointed a counsellor in the Foreign Office, Information Department. With the new job he moved back to Berlin, and into a small apartment. Every morning he walked to the Information Department in Kurfürstendamm. Sometimes he was summoned to the ministry at Wilhelmstrasse. And at the same time he began to attend meetings of the Kreisau Circle, a quasi-religious opposition group which met on Helmuth James von Moltke's estate, Kreisau.

How much of this double life did Mendel understand? Mendel, tucked up in All Souls, was fearful of what might happen to him if Hitler invaded, and was considering an escape to America. He saw clearly what Hitler was, and it frightened him. Oxford became unbearable to him: quoting Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he wrote: I feel like someone locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues.

8

A NURSE FROM a private hospital in Marylebone summons Conrad: Elizabeth Partridge, Lady Dungannon, wants to see him. He takes some time finding suitable clothes. He has neglected his wardrobe and he is conscious that his shaving has become irregular, so that he never quite completes the job. He shaves carefully although the blade is blunt - it is one of the razors in cheerful pink plastic — all women's things must be cheerful — that Francine has left behind. And he brushes his hair, trying to spread it around. Like Axel von Gottberg's, his hair is thinning alarmingly. John, his wife's lover, has thick, wiry school-prefect's hair, even though he is sixteen years older. Perhaps his wife prefers this kind of growth. What else has she been keeping from him?

He has the impression as he hurries to the underground that Elizabeth must be dying. The nurse, to be fair, gave no indication of imminent death. He is supposed to be showing a potential buyer - WITH READY CASH - around, but he has left a note on the door saying that the key is with Tony, the baker. He asked Tony to be as quiet as he could — the machinery they use to wash the bakery is noisy — while the prospective buyer is upstairs.

'You don't really want to sell, I'll turn 'em up full blast. I'll bang all the trays together. It'll sound like a fucking mad house.'

'That's the idea, Tony. Good man.'

Tony is always dusted with flour at this time of day, so that he has a ghostly appearance, not necessarily the ideal person to let in a cash buyer. Francine has implored him to tidy up, but it hasn't been possible at such short notice, although he has managed to organise the papers into drifts and has hidden the dirty dishes under the sink.

What he wants to ask Elizabeth is exactly what happened on her visit to Germany. What had Axel said that upset her? And also, he wanted to know when she saw him last. After years of reflection, old people reorder their lives. We all do it in our way. We construct our self-image as if we are hoping for some retrospective distinction, a vision of the person we believe we are supposed to be; without being able to see a template, we carry on relentlessly, like bees obeying an order they don't understand, until death makes it all irrelevant. Why is it important to practise wilful amnesia and invent myths? Francine's mother, the professor's widow, describes their life together in implausible terms, an improbable idyll of happiness and contentment and domestic bliss. In truth he was a philanderer and caused her much pain. These old women - Liselotte, Grafin von Gottberg, and Elizabeth Partridge - are living with the memory of the man who meant most to them or gave their lives retrospective significance. And this is what Francine is accusing him of, of trying to give himself some phoney significance by attaching himself to Elya Mendel. Except, as he has told Francine — more than once — he was chosen by Mendel.

'So you are the chosen one?'

'I didn't say that. I simply said he chose me to edit his papers.'

'To do what with exactly? So far, all I can see is a neurotic muddle. You're like a dog running for a stick. You have no plan.'

'No career path. You're big on career paths, aren't you?'

He could have said to her, Look, Francine, these papers contain some deep significance, some big issues, the man of ideas versus the man of action, the contemplative life against the active life, false ideologies, the curse of the twentieth century, or you could see them as just one thing, one human thing, a plea from an old man to me to recount fairly what happened between him and von Gottberg. Who cares, she would have said.

For scientists what happened in the past is filed away. They don't see ideas in the same fashion. Instead they see them as building blocks, pointers to how things work. They, unlike us, live in a world of certainty, or at least in the conviction that certainty can be achieved. Although she told him once that sixty per cent of all theories posited in science magazines prove to be absolutely untrue in time.

Now, a little floury himself - he can feel the flour when he rubs his eyes — he is on the train with the people who aren't really rushing anywhere at this time of day. Some of them seem to have only a tenuous grip on life. Every time he emerges from the flat he finds himself marvelling at people: every one with his or her own mind, own worries, own ambitions. What's the point? Why did evolution find that it was more effective to have an individual mind? Perhaps we would have been better off like tadpoles, all obeying simple rules. Perhaps we are, as the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal once wrote, on the same plane of reality as tadpoles or even plants and minerals: In these moments an insignificant creature - a dog, a rat, a beetle, a crippled apple tree, a lane winding over a hill, a moss-covered stone - mean more to me than the most beautiful, abandoned mistress of the night.

Although, Conrad thinks, a beautiful mistress of the night could be just what he needs. He often looks at women on the underground and wonders what they would be like in bed. Would they be eager or timid or loud or quiet? Would they be concerned with their own pleasure or with their partner's? This is an important divide, he has found, and not easily judged on appearance. Elizabeth Partridge suggested to him she has had a full sex life. It's as though your life, on some measures, is validated by the amount of fucking and heartbreaking you have been involved in and also by the number of breasts and clitorises and cocks and inner thighs and mouths you have travelled intimately. The body is a terra incognita which must be explored in order for you to achieve the desired self-esteem, to complete the dots, pointillist style, of your self-image. Sex has become a sort of religious career. These old ladies, he sees - his mind always tends to speed up with the humming, rushing, whining, rattling trains - set a great deal of store by their memories, because memories are a form of immortality.

Elizabeth Partridge has chosen her hospital on the same basis as her hotel, as a reminder of the old order. The nurses wear tasteful blue uniforms and little coronets, like napkins elaborately folded in seaside hotels. What these details signify is that the secret England is still there, unaffected by the coarsening of life outside. The receptionist is wearing a tailcoat, apparently without embarrassment.

In her room, overhung by flowers of exquisite breeding in tall cut-glass vases, Elizabeth appears very small and mortal: the jungle is advancing to reclaim her. Her face under the cheekbones is a pale lilac, something like the colour of a budgerigar's breast.

He places his half a dozen tulips apologetically beside the bed.

'Ah Conrad. Lovely flowers, thank you. Sit down, my boy.'

'How are you?'

'As you can see, I am alive. Or at least I think I am.'

Her voice, however, is weaker, as though the body's decline draws on the essential substances impartially, even on something so precious as the means of speaking. Conrad's treacherous eyes fill as he remembers his father in mute agony, twisting and turning and his mouth opening and closing convulsively, as though he had something important to say before he went, but could not. He hung on for eight days in this appalling state.

'You look wonderful,' he says.

'My boy, the important thing to know about Axel is that he was a patriot. Germany was everything to him. When I visited Pleskow he asked me to marry him. Can you believe it? He was engaged to Fraulein Goetz, he had rejected Rosamund, and now he was asking me to marry him. I reminded him that I was married. I reminded him that he had broken Ros's heart: I told him that she was devastated by his letter, but he said that he and Ros had an enduring relationship. You must never abandon someone you once loved, he said. I was shocked, because he seemed to me to be so troubled. I didn't think his behaviour was rational. I told him it was impossible for us to marry. He would have liked me to say that I loved him.'

'Did you love him?'

'I did. But I couldn't throw up everything for him. I couldn't wound my cousin, and I certainly couldn't live in Germany.'

'Were you lovers?'

'You're a very direct young man.'

'I'm sorry, but I feel that I have to know what happened.'

'We were lovers. In Pleskow, even there, after what had happened. So I was a louse too. People often are in these cases, don't you find?'

She reaches slowly for some water. Her arms are fragile, and speckled like the hen's eggs in children's books. He helps her. She drinks, a small, birdlike sip.

'Where was I?'

'You were saying that you loved Axel von Gottberg.'

'He said something to me which, in fairness to Elya, I think I should tell you. He said that as soon as he wrote the infamous letter to the Manchester Guardian, he knew that he had lost Elya for good. Since then, he said he had been working to prove that he was worthy of Elya. I found it immensely touching. That night in the little house by the lake he told me at least some of what he was engaged in. It was highly dangerous. The concentration camps were filling up already. He also said to me that all he could offer me as a wife was Germanness. Strange word. But what he meant was that this was a German problem, to be solved by Germans. The Jews were not the main point, at that time. Hitler must be removed by Germans. He was sure of that. He wanted me to tell Elya, and to tell him also that he was engaged in secret opposition. We didn't know the extent of it until later, but of course Elya just thought it was his usual self-dramatisation when I told him. I think it was difficult from Oxford to understand — in fact it was hard to understand from wherever you were — what the atmosphere was like in Germany. It was terrifying. Kafkaesque. But Axel chose the heroic life, whatever his friends believed.'

She lies still for a moment, her lips possibly forming some more words, but in the end no words emerge for a while.

'You said you saw him again?'

'Just before the war started, he came to England. He wanted to explain to people how to deal with Hitler: the German mentality, Versailles and all that. We met in Kent. He had seen Elya in Oxford and the Rhodes people had fixed him up with various meetings and private talks. But also his friends, the Astors and so on, had influence. He met Halifax and Chamberlain at their house in St James's Square.'

'Why did his Oxford friends distrust him?'

'They thought, to put it bluntly, that he was working for the Nazis. He seemed to be able to go anywhere and do whatever he liked. They found this suspicious. They also thought that he said different things to different people.'

'Did he?'

'I think he did. He was naive in some ways. It's clear that when it comes to us gels, he said all sorts of things. The problem, as I said, is that he wasn't able to speak freely by this stage. He had to be careful, because he was in the resistance and working for the Foreign Office at the same time. When he saw me at my little house in Kent he was distraught because he felt nobody at Oxford was taking him seriously and that none of them trusted him. It was humiliating for him. Deeply, deeply humiliating. Oxford meant so much to him. And yet they thought he was a Nazi or, at best, deluded.'

She appears to fall asleep. For a moment he thinks she may have died, but the rose patterns on her satin dressing gown are rising and falling gently.

'He took me to Sachsenhausen, you know. We stopped outside in his little car. The guards came out to see what we were doing, we sat for so long.'

The room is richly scented. The heat — hospitals are always overheated — is causing these flowers to signal to summer insects. Life, even at the plant level, is a slave to attraction. The women in this story - the gels - were drawn to Axel von Gottberg, but others were deeply affected by him too. Even Roland Freisler, the prosecutor, seems drawn to him as he stands there, his hands clasped - Conrad suddenly remembers that the hands were not shackled in court - Freisler shouting at him, but at the same time impressed by his dignity, perhaps aware for a moment that his grotesque screaming and acting are shameful, coarse, so that he speaks more quietly, even conspiratorially. Axel, doomed, has a certain resignation, perhaps even a serenity, that Freisler acknowledges. And the attraction is in the fact that von Gottberg looks like a German hero. Freisler does not. Hitler does not. And this may be one of the reasons that Hitler and his friends, having killed millions without a qualm, are unhinged by these aristocrats who, if there were anything in race-science, Rassenkunde, would be on his side. Hitler is reported as saying that the aristocrats had betrayed him and he should have acted against them from the beginning. Others who knew him said Hitler was never the same again.

'You look like him.'

She is smiling, slightly crumpled after her absence.

'Like Axel?'

'Yes. You are thirty-five?'

'Yes.'

'Axel was thirty-five when they hanged him.'

'I know.'

'He was an astonishing person. Women saw it immediately. He was fervent. Are you fervent?'

'I don't think so. Sadly.'

'Are you successful with women? I imagine you are.'

'I am not successful with my wife.'

'Yes, now I remember. You said you were separated.'

'Yes.'

'Is it because of this, the papers Elya left you, and so on?'

'Not really. We are very different. She's a doctor.'

'And you?'

'That's the problem. I can't honestly say.'

'I may not be the person to give advice, but keep at this task. In their own way, both Elya and Axel were great men. Elya was a wonderful judge of people. The fact that he asked you to do this is an enormous compliment.'

'Thank you.'

'I am so glad we have met. Elya asked me before he died to speak to you. He wanted you to have my side of the story. He spoke about you.'

'What did he say?'

'I told you that he thought you had special qualities.'

'Do you remember what they were?'

'I can't. Not exactly. I don't think he said.'

'Did he say what he wanted me to do?'

'Nothing specific. He thought you would know.'

He doesn't know. They are interrupted by a nurse in blue, who comes to take Elizabeth's temperature and blood pressure.

'Lady Dungannon, you have some other visitors in the waiting room. Shall I tell them to wait a little longer?'

'I had better go,' says Conrad. 'Goodbye, Elizabeth.'

He kisses her lightly, his lips just brushing her budgie cheek — he feels anything more vigorous might injure her — and tears start in his eyes. I am becoming unhinged, he thinks.

'Goodbye, my boy. Come again tomorrow. There's more for us to discuss.'

As he goes out he sees Elizabeth's visitors, a man in a loden overcoat and two women in country clothes, one in a green padded coat and the other in a tweed skirt, holding her Barbour over her arm. They have a weathered look as though they spend a lot of time outdoors.

'I'm sorry if I kept you,' he says.

'Not at all. I hope we didn't rush you.'

'No of course not. She's just having her blood pressure done.'

'I'm Nancy Cutforth, this is my sister Bunty Miller, and this is Esmond O'Driscoll.'

'I'm Conrad Senior.'

They shake hands and he feels their fragility relayed down their arms like telegraph messages.

'Too damned hot in here,' says the man.

'You could take your coat orf, Esmond.'

'Jolly good idea.'

'We're all gaga, as you can see.'

They laugh, and he remembers what Elizabeth had said about laughter.

'I'm on my way.'

He walks up from Marylebone and into Regent's Park. She is going to die tonight. He feels sure of it, although he doesn't believe in any kind of presentiments. He wonders who the three elderly visitors are. They have a kind of patina, like old paintings, which people of his generation will never have. Their world may have contracted, but their values are immune from further change, although they are beleaguered. The shrinking of their circle as the years pass must be frightening. His father had no friends by the time the dementia set in; everyone had abandoned him. His father ended by the sea, raging, a sort of provincial Lear.

He crosses the bridge into that part of the park he likes best where there are a few buildings, a college, a park-keeper's neat house, and then he goes out again through the circular rose garden. Across the football prairie he see the zoo's mountains. Once he heard a lion roaring in broad daylight, hoarse, reverberating, a challenge thrown down into nothingness. No response came back of course. It's late afternoon now. A few people are playing football. There's an all-Asian game over there: he can see small figures, perhaps Filipino or Malay. There are dogs, going about their optimistic lives, accompanied by their owners, who look less optimistic, some of them even depressed. One of Rosamund Bower's books has a scene set here in wartime, by the boating lake.

When he gets home he finds messages from Francine. She is angry: the agent said that the flat was a mess. The client - the cash buyer - spent exactly one minute looking at the place. The chaos appalled her. And the noise from below was terrible. She's sending in industrial cleaners in the morning, and whatever they find lying about will be thrown out.

He feels at a great distance from Francine. Her complaints don't touch him at all. After nine years, he's free. Is he attractive to women, as Elizabeth Partridge put it? He hopes he is. Francine is on duty. He leaves a message apologising, explaining the urgency, and starts to pack his papers as neatly as he can. His loyalties are now directed entirely towards Mendel and von Gottberg. He has no more duties here. He is completely free to explore his human potential, to tell this story.

In the night Elizabeth Partridge dies and the circle closes.

What Elya Mendel wanted, he sees, was that he should collect all these conversations and letters and memories, and turn them into something coherent, a narrative.

9

5 MARCH 1939, OXFORD

OXFORD THE ENCHANTED: Axel, Count von Gottberg walks down the cobbles of Magpie Lane. He walks around the familiar and beloved place as though he is trying to feel its topography under his shoes. He passes through the gate on to Christ Church Meadow. Small boys in bright scarlet from Magdalen College School are playing rugby, tiny figures on the vast green sea. As he gets closer he sees how white their legs are, and how fragile, barely able to carry them into a run. They have curious blue patterns on them, as though their pale white skin is showing the veins beneath. A whistle blows and they stop and gather around the master in charge, who is wearing a cricket sweater and baggy trousers. Across the meadow, where dun cows are grazing or lying down, he can see the river and on it, between the burgeoning trees, boats passing, some in a leisurely Ratty-and-Mole way, others with sculls flashing in the weak sunlight. The English have a special relationship with water. He walks right down to the river and then along past the pouter-pigeon college barges. Looking back to the colleges he sees a Renaissance city - spirit and history in local stone. This stone is a pale russet, the colour of the old apple varieties his grandfather had collected at Pleskow, Gravenstein and Cox's Pippin and Egremont. He feels a kind of ache, which in reality is for his youth, and the girls he has known and the carefree years, but also a heaviness about what is to come. Even now he could choose to stay here and pick up the easy friendships. He could leave his homeland for the life of an emigre, to be treated with politeness and condescension.

He loves the landscape because he was happy here. There are places he has been, Hamburg is one of them, which he knows to be beautiful, but which have no pull on his heart. Other places quicken the spirit because of what they evoke: they for ever speak of blitheness, a state of happiness he can't hope to feel again. Elizabeth said Pleskow is the only place in Germany where the madness has not yet struck. And Pleskow is the landscape to which his heart is given, and Pleskow is in Germany. His family has lived there for six hundred years, which is longer than most of these colleges have been standing. His English friends don't understand this deep allegiance. It's spiritual and they reject the notion of spirit, but spirit is after all only the word that describes what is inalienably human.

He walks in a large arc towards the Botanical Gardens and Magdalen. The punts are drawn up beside the bank, forming a wooden platform extending right into the current, like a Roman military bridge. He strides along Addison's Walk. The fritillaries are not yet out and the water behind is like ale. He and Elya walked here. Their differences were all in the pleasurable inconsequential world of philosophy then. And now? He remembers Elya in Jerusalem, so happy after his first sexual experience with Rosamund. Transfigured. Elya on the one hand ancient in his understanding, on the other a plump eager boy in love. A Jewish boy. Unmistakably. Now we Germans have created a cordon sanitaire around the word Jew. As if Jew is something like bacillus. Just as he, Axel, cannot use the word Jew any longer without shame, Elya cannot speak of Germany or Germans without contempt. But there is a secret Germany. One lunatic cannot destroy that in a few years. This Germany that Holderlin and George describe as Geheimes Deutschland is a Germany of the mind.

The fable of blood and desire, a fable of fire and radiance: The pageantry of our emperors, the roaring of our warriors.

It is the longing for something nobler, which nobody here can understand. He swings back down through the Parks where the narcissi and daffodils are taking over from the crocuses. When he first came to Oxford eight years ago, he remembers his astonishment that spring at the thousands of bright, undaunted flowers breaking out of the damp, cold soil. Gardening is perhaps the art in which the English have most excelled. It suits their temperament, something to be quietly proud of, and something very private. Every college has a garden. Even now as he passes Rhodes House he sees the border, piled with compost, the rhubarb-coloured stalks of peonies already shining between the pale-yellow and white narcissi. On the other side of the road through the gates that will never open until there is a Stuart on the throne again - one of those much-loved Oxford whimsies, like the fact that the time at Christ Church is always set five minutes later than Greenwich Mean Time — he sees one of the most beautiful borders in Oxford, which extends a hundred yards or so to a bust of Cardinal Newman. He walks past Blackwell's to Balliol. The porter, Jimmy Tibbs, greets him as if he has never been away: 'Good morning Mr von Gottberg. Keeping well, sir?' He leaves a note for the Master, confirming that he has arrived safely and has arranged for his bags to be picked up at the station.

He wonders if Tibbs sees him as an enemy yet. He walks back — it is nearly time - past the Easter Island Roman heads, through the courtyard of the Bodleian Library out to Radcliffe Square beyond. The Square, grouped around the Radcliffe Camera, the most extravagant building in Oxford, and contained by St Mary's Church and Brasenose College to the west and south and the Library and All Souls on the other two sides, seems to him to be the heart and the soul of Oxford. As cyclists come by in the thickening light, he hears snatches of laughter and conversation. He looks for girls who might be the girls he knew, as if by wishing it he could cause them to appear as they were. Yes, we are for ever tied to the place where we were young and happy.

He enters the lodge and asks for Mr Mendel. 'You're expected. Mr Mendel's rooms are in the great quad, staircase four, sir.'

He emerges facing Wren's sundial on the Codrington Library. He finds the staircase. It is one floor up; his feet ring on the stone. He knocks. 'Come in.' There is Elya, standing by the fireplace in which a coal fire is burning. He has a book in one hand.

'Axel. Welcome to my little house in the woods.'

Elya is wearing a grey three-piece suit, which is bulging in the middle slightly. His face, however, has lost something of its boyish roundness. Axel seizes him by the shoulders and kisses him twice. Three years have passed since they were together in the same room.

'Lovely rooms, Elya. God, I envy you.'

The main room is panelled, a sitting room full of books and broken-backed armchairs and a table covered in periodicals and papers and on the mantelpiece, among other mementos, is the Roman head Elya bought in Jerusalem. Through a door he sees a bedroom with a candlewick bedcover and lopsided wooden light stands.

'Axel, it's marvellous to see you. A miracle. Oxford has been a mausoleum without you. I've got a bottle up from the cellar. Would you like a glass? It's the college's special reserve. Claret.'

Even as he says claret, he gives it a little ironic emphasis, to suggest that Jews don't really drink claret.

They sink into the swayed armchairs, their feet upturned towards the fire. They lie back. Elya is less elegant, being shorter and plumper, but right at home, ready to talk. He's always ready to talk. He tells Axel what has happened in Oxford: who has been elected to the post of Professor of History, what has happened in the parliamentary elections, who put up as a Mosleyite and the strange mood in Oxford, knowing that war is coming.

'Is it coming, Axel?'

'I hope not. I'm trying to stop it.'

'All by yourself?'

He asks the question without malice, but with a certain amusement.

'No, obviously not all by myself. Can I clear up one thing with you first? It's been on my mind. Are you still angry with me about Ros?'

'Axel, I am deeply grateful that I knew Ros, but that was years ago now. And as I wrote to you after you took my advice, I am very pleased that you are not going to marry her. I didn't think it would have been fair. Can we leave it at that, my dear friend?'

'Thank you, Elya. Elizabeth accused me of being a womaniser, but I hate to see it in that way. Ros will always be dear to me and to you, I am sure. And your letter was fair and true: I should never have asked her to marry me. As you said, it was selfish and dangerous. How's my English, by the way? It's been worrying me that I haven't been speaking it much. As you can imagine.'

'Your accent has always been better than that of almost anybody we know. Mine is ridiculous, a sort of emigre Wurlitzer. I sometimes think, Axel, that speaking such echt English has caused people to misunderstand you. They can't believe that you are really, deep down, where it matters, German. But you are.'

'For better or for worse. When we were in Jerusalem you told me that deep down - au fond - you were Jewish. Although an atheist. I think it's the same thing. When you say I am obsessed with spirit and such other woolly notions, what is one's identity? What's the difference? You have in your cultural memory, from your family, from your religion, an instinctive Jewishness. I have an instinctive German-ness.'

They are off.

'Axel, one thing has changed. The German instinct is now to obliterate those they see as lesser people. Do you know what one of my colleagues said to one of your chaps who was advocating more colonies for Germany at a meeting the other night? "We Jews and the other coloured people beg to differ." Wirjuden und die anderen Farbigen denken anders. You must be careful Axel, how you make your case. The mood has changed. People here are saying the Nazis are bastards and we want to crush them to dust, and that is how they think now. Don't rely on the old college scarf. Your people have changed everything. They are trying to take over the world in the name of Geman-ness as you call it. German-ness has some prior claim to life.'

'There's another Germany, Elya.'

'This isn't the Geheimes Deutschland, I hope?'

'It is in part. Yes, but, Elya, there are people of influence even in the Army Council who plan to get rid of Hitler.'

He is conscious of whispering now. Mendel pours the claret. The bottle is dusty.

'Elya, I want to tell you something: I will not be able to talk to you freely again. Even in the meetings I am having in London, it will be difficult. I am not sure if people here realise the sheer madness of life in Germany. But, Elya, I can only go on if you tell me that whatever happens you trust me, however it looks. If you can, I particularly want you to put in a word for me with Michael Hamburger. I'm going to New York in two weeks' time to address a conference, and I want to go down to Washington to tell Michael the details of the opposition in Germany, and to ask him to give us some help. Can you do that?'

'I will write to Michael and ask him to see you, of course.'

'Thank you.'

'But you must understand, Axel, that things have changed. It's no longer about some high-minded chaps getting together to sort things out. You in Berlin, you the opposition, chatting about how awful Hitler is while thousands of Jews must emigrate and others are imprisoned and Germany grabs the lost lands, how does that look? It's not easy for us to understand, dear friend. What you see is the task of saving Germany. What I see is somewhat different. I see the end of mankind. There is no halfway with this creature.'

'Elya, the only way to stop him is to allow the German people their dignity. He's offering them that, but his way will lead to destruction, utter destruction.'

'What are we supposed to offer? A few more Jews, a few Slavs, a few small countries? There may be some people in Whitehall who still want to deal, but these are the people who haven't read Mein Kampf. You don't seem to understand: the Sudetenland was the end. You will risk your reputation by talking to these people.'

'Germans are not a flock of sheep. Everything has a cause. Germany felt trapped, humiliated until this lunatic offered them a way out. But there is another Germany, Elya, which only needs encouragement. You are going to sneer, but there is a decent, a noble Germany.'

Outside clocks strike all over Oxford. Axel jumps up and runs to the window.

'I wanted to marry Rosamund, but you were right: it was not possible to bring her to Germany. I am getting married in September and I would love you to come to the wedding. It will be in the parish church at Pleskow. Her name is Liselotte Goetz.'

'I don't think I will be able to come. I'm congenitally timid. But please, let me offer you my warmest congratulations.'

Axel stares out of the window where the gas lights are soft, blurred by the damp mist that has come in.

'I will never see Oxford again.'

'Stay the night. You can sleep on the sofa.'

'I've left my stuff at Balliol, but I'll bring my pyjamas. We can continue to talk, I hope.'

'Of course. You look tired, tired to the marrow, Axel. Are you in danger?'

'We all are.'

He wonders if Elya really understands what is at stake. Dear Elya, who, for all his intelligence, loves gossip and friendship and comfort. Now, above all, he wants Elya to trust him.

'When I come back from my Balliol dinner will you tell me, absolutely frankly, where we stand?'

'What do you mean, Axel?'

'I mean can our friendship survive? Do I have reserves of trust to draw on, whatever happens?'

'When you come back from dinner we shall talk. Axel, I'm concerned. Why do you say you won't see Oxford again?'

'I have that feeling. In reality, it's more than a feeling, it's a certainty. As I walked here, round the Meadow and so further, I knew it. I don't think the world as we know it will survive what's coming unless we can stop it. Never mind Hitler for the moment, the East is gathering itself. A new barbarism is coming. If we can't persuade the German people that they can get what they need without Hitler, he will lead them into the jaws of the Russians. We have to keep peace in the West. But I must go. Nobody keeps the Master of Balliol waiting.'

'Not even God.'

Elya swings his plump leg over the side of his armchair, so that he is facing Axel.

'My dear friend, I beg you to bring your eyes down from the heavens to the ground. The most important job at the moment is to stop this madman with his racial policies and his desire to conquer the word. Forget about the Russians. I know the Russians. Whatever they are, they are not the main threat to the world. We can't offer Hitler concessions so that the Russians don't come and take your country. Hitler must be stopped, tout court. Next thing Hitler will be killing thousands of Jews, not just the ones he thinks are particularly dangerous, but just because they are Jews. Kristallnacht was just the supporting programme. Things are what they are, Axel, here and now. Don't try to pretend they are something else. You can't allow Hitler to murder Jews or to take Czechoslovakia so that the Russians don't come. And by the way, you are going to be late.'

Of course Elya doesn't understand. Western Europe is a bulwark against savagery, a repository of civilised values. Germany and England must never be set against each other and weakened.

'To be continued, dear Elya,' he shouts as he leaves the room and jumps two at a time down the stone stairs, across the quad and out of the porter's lodge. The duty porter is startled: perhaps he has never seen anyone running in All Souls before.

'Late, I'm late,' Axel shouts.

Alone in his rooms Mendel plays a gramophone record. A yellow Deutsche Gramophon record: Furtwangler conducts Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Certainly if music is the touchstone Germany is the most civilised country on earth. In what sense, philosophers ask, can a piece of music be said to have meaning? Music evokes great emotion, but does it contain meaning? And how does it evoke emotion? This recording always causes him to feel deeply personal thoughts, linked to ideas about places and memories of Rosamund. Nietzsche believed that music revealed the pain and suffering at the root of human existence. And what Axel would say is that mystic experience, for example, the concept of a sacred Germany, which is a state of mind, are just as real in their effect as this Furtwangler recording on me. I am listening to this record and my emotions are stirred, and Furtwangler is, apparently, a Nazi. And Axel's man, Hegel, says that art contributes to the synthesis we require between the personal and the external worlds. But the Nazis see art as particularly subversive. Art has no morality, yet art can cause people to think about the abstract and the mystic.

The third movement is so beautiful; with the evening charged already, Elya feels himself and the world at a juncture. Beethoven was almost deaf but gloriously defiant when he wrote this; his pain and suffering are very evident. It's not simple: Axel is unable to distinguish this secret Germany from the actual Germany that is spinning into the abyss. And I, he thinks, cannot separate Axel the saviour of Germany from the Axel who has had sex - how many times? — and shared intimacy of thought and body with Rosamund, my first love. Rosamund is Jewish yet she is hopelessly in love with him still. Elizabeth, thank God, hasn't told her that Axel proposed to her at Pleskow. There is something deeply dishonest about Axel, for all his charm and his warmth and easy friendships. He claims to love women, but women to him are part of his domain, which is granted him of right. Perhaps it is just the basic aristocratic instinct, unknown to Jews from Riga.

He goes down to the Common Room to eat something. The food is usually very bad. He takes a collection of Turgenev's short stories. Reading at table is supposed to indicate that you don't want to talk, but everyone knows he is unable to stay silent. John Plamenatz, a Montenegrin, who was elected at the same time as him, comes over.

'I just have to sit with you, Elya, in case some Englishman wants to talk to me. Englishmen make me feel very alone.'

'I am an Englishman.'

'A sort of Englishman.'

'You think I am trying, like all Jews, to make a good impression? An amateur gentile?'

'No, you've done that long ago. You've become a necessary figure . . .'

'A licensed fool.'

'No, you are a public figure, but you haven't lost your insecurity. I hear Axel von Gottberg is in town?'

'Yes, he's on an important mission.'

'Do you believe him?'

'I believe he believes he is on an important mission. This is a wonderful time for the world-historical figures to emerge.'

'Is he a Nazi?'

'I don't think he thinks he is a Nazi.'

Axel returns at eleven. He is exhilarated. The Master of Balliol and the Warden of Rhodes House have been very helpful. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have both agreed to see him. He finds Elya in his rooms reading and listening to Beethoven. Elya lifts the spindle off the record and close the box.

'Saved the world?'

'I'm trying.'

'Did you have a good dinner?'

'Master's lodgings. Very good. The best wine, of course. And you?'

'Brown Windsor soup, a cool lamb cutlet and spotted dick. It's the price you pay for the honour of a fellowship, you eat absolute muck. Sometimes I take the train up to London just to eat my mother's pirogi.'

'Elya, after my meetings in London I am going to Washington.'

'So you said. Are you doing it for the Auswartiges Amt or for your friends?'

'Please trust me. There are certain compromises I have been obliged to make. For the greater good.'

Elya looks at him through the round glasses. Axel knows that he is not so much thinking of what to say, as deciding what not to say.

'Is Wilhelm Furtwangler a Nazi by conviction or out of expediency?'

'That is a strange question. I think he is confused.'

'Are you confused?'

'No. I have had to make compromises, as I said, but I am not confused.'

'What were you going to ask me?'

'When you write to Michael, whatever your doubts, please remember what I asked, that you trust me. That's all I want. Nothing is as it seems to be.'

'Of course not. Lionel's coming over to see you. Do you mind?'

'No, not at all. I'm delighted. But don't tell him about Hamburger, please, or Balliol.'

'No. But cloak and dagger is not really our crowd, as Lionel calls it.'

'Our crowd. It's very strange how one short period in one place like this can have so much influence, don't you think? Our crowd. In three years here I felt we were at the centre of the world. More so than I do in Berlin. Berlin, the town, seems to be floating somewhere on the fringes of the world in a sea of unreality. Do you know the Nazis took over the department store where we have all shopped for more than a hundred years? They just told the Israel family to go. It brought home to my mother exactly how ruthless they are. You will say it's taken her a long time, but it's the crudeness of their thinking, their absolutely unnecessary cruelty, that has affected her so badly.'

Axel is still buoyed up after his dinner; they talk excitedly in front of the fire, which Elya prods vigorously from time to time, as though it is a reluctant farm animal. Elya ranges from the recent elections, to Munich, to the Jewish refugees flooding to Hampstead. His voice is as seductive as ever, as liquid as the calling of doves in Jerusalem, and then dissolves unexpectedly into giggles. He recites one of Lionel's scabrous poems, which concerns Penelope Betjeman's love of horses. He quotes Turgenev saying that, though he is fascinated by radicals, he is quite unable to be one himself.

'That's me, I'm afraid,' he says. 'I have no capacity for action. All I can do is talk.'

Axel knows that behind his back people say that Elya lacks courage and is too eager to please, but Axel sees that Elya is a product of his history: he has been uprooted and is only shallowly planted in this soil.

They hear Lionel's booming voice some time before he appears.

'I want to see my Junker friend,' he shouts. 'I want to see the duelling scars on his bottom. Let me in.'

Lionel comes crashing in. He is large and roughly carved. Axel, who is himself quite tight, can smell alcohol on him as they embrace.

'How is life in the Third Reich?' he asks, as Elya pours him a drink.

'It's difficult.'

'I hear you have a plan. Are we allowed to know what it is?'

Axel knows that any talk of the real Germany will get him nowhere.

'No plan. Just trying to help. Elya recited to me one of your latest poems.'

'Filthy, I trust.'

'Absolutely.'

Lionel slumps in a chair. These chairs have been so battered over the years that they can be sat in from any direction. Lionel places his large head on the worn carpet.

'Axel says, I believe, that the thing about Hitler is that he is playing on something real and that is the sense that most Germans have that they have been treated badly. The ordinary person remembers unemployment and chaos only too well. We - you and I - have to start from that position.'

'Elya, can you start from that position?'

'No, I've told Axel that it's not possible. I start from 1933.'

'But let's accept, Axel, as a theory, that the German people are keen to have their amour-propre restored. Then what must we do?'

Lionel is gazing at the roof as he speaks and now he raises his head to the horizontal in order to sip his drink.

'Western Europe must acknowledge Germany's right to regain the lost lands. Then they will see that Hitler is not the only way.'

Lionel stands up surprisingly nimbly and his drink falls to the floor.

'Goodbye, Axel. You were once my friend. Did you miss Kristallnacht? Were you out duelling? Yes, you were my friend. I even imagined I could spend my life with you. Now it is my greatest wish that I never see you again. You may not be aware of it, but you are a Nazi.'

He lurches towards the door and can be heard stumbling down the stairs. Elya and Axel are silent.

'He's drunk,' says Elya finally.

'But he meant it.'

'I'm afraid he did.'

They talk until about 3 a.m., when Axel, turning from the window, finds Elya asleep. At six, when Mendel wakes on the sofa, he sees that Axel has gone. At eight he returns, haggard, his skin pale, his eye sockets deep and dark.

'Where have you been?'

'I've been walking around Oxford.'

'Are you all right? Lionel was drunk. He's often drunk and outrageous these days.'

'I've tried to explain. But I see I have no reserves of trust left after all.'

'You do.'

'Goodbye, Elya. I am sure I will never see you again.'

Later that morning Mendel writes to Michael Hamburger in Washington:

Dear Michael

Axel von Gottberg came to see me in Oxford. He is having meetings in London. He has asked me to put in a word for him. When he travels to America to address the Huntingford Institute he is hoping that you will be able to effect some high-level meetings for him. You can imagine particularly to whom I refer.

His friends at Oxford, and I am one, believe that he is at heart — I mean ideologically — a Nazi, although he is far too intelligent and complex a person to accept that as a simple fact. For a start it would be beneath him socially. He has been obliged to join the Party, as of course he could not be in the Foreign Office without membership. But he seems to be licensed to travel and talk to whomsoever he likes. At best he is a German patriot of the old school, a fact that makes him antipathetic to Hitler, if not to all of the ideas behind Hitler. You will no doubt receive him with all the cordiality our friendship indicates, but I feel I must warn you that both Lionel and I - and others — believe that, for all his undeniable charm, he should be treated with caution. He has a great taste for high-level intrigue.

Life in Oxford at the moment is nervous as if - as Somerset Maugham might say — a tropical storm can be felt in the air.

Yours affectionately

Elya

Nine days later, Hitler invades Czechoslovakia and Elya Mendel's nagging guilt in writing to Michael Hamburger, the President's counsel and Supreme Court judge, warning against his friend Axel von Gottberg, is soon forgotten.

10

ELIZABETH PARTRIDGE'S FUNERAL is to take place at Booby Bay, Cornwall, in a little church on the edge of the water near the house that she and her cousin, Rosamund, loved. She will lie next to Rosamund and their grandparents. The train down is whipped by rain as it crosses into Cornwall. Conrad can't imagine living down here. The landscape is grudging and windswept. He takes a taxi from Bodmin Parkway and is driven by some rural bore who thinks London - Lunnin - is Gomorrah.

'I couldn't live in Lunnin with all them Pakistanis and such, what they call Muslims and mullahs. I don't know how you can do it. If they don't like it, they can always go back where they came from.'

'I like them,' says Conrad.

This is not strictly true. He only knows three, one who sells him his newspaper and two who run the local tandoori takeaway, a hatch in the wall, which he has used a lot recently.

This shuts the driver up for a while.

'Do you come down here often?'

'First time.'

'Boo-iful place, Cornwall.'

'Compared to what?'

'Well, you can just see.'

He can see very little from the back seat as they head down a deep tree-shrouded valley where the new leaves are being thrashed by the wind. He is wearing a dark suit borrowed from Tony at the bakery, who goes to a lot of funerals. Tony says they are dropping like flies. Conrad is not sure who he means. Tony is sorry Conrad will be moving out. He sees Conrad as something of an exhibit, the man holed up with a thousand books and some fancy ideas, who doesn't know his arse from his elbow, despite all the books. The books are now mostly in storage, and the flat, newly sanitised, is comparatively austere.

Francine has written him a curious letter. Her style is usually more direct, a phone call or a terse email. Now she is demanding a face-to-face meeting. He wonders what she wants.

The other night he went out with his journalist friend Osric, who has just returned from Baghdad. Something has happened to him after three months there. Instead of coming back with his sympathies and human understanding deepened, he appears in the face of suffering to have decided that Western life has become over-analytical. Life, apparently, is a struggle for survival and we had better realise in the West that it always has been. We are in danger of disappearing up our own fundaments, he says. We think the soldiers, the grunts, the jarheads, the squaddies are morons, but actually they have seen life at the sharp end. He has left his girlfriend who also works for the Herald. 'You see what I mean? I come back from hell where nobody reads the fucking Herald, and I have been reporting on people so crazy, so fucked up, so deluded by religious manias of all sorts, that they want to kill all of us. I was at a protest with our boys one day and some kid there threw a bottle at the Land Rover. "Shoot the little cunt," I shouted. "Shoot him." You know what they said? They said, "Calm down, mate, you sound like the bloke we had in from the Sun." And they laughed. When I tell Sarah what happened, she is shocked and suggests I get counselling. She wants me to go to some therapist in Hammersmith. I have seen a man's legs blown fifty yards in different directions and I have seen a woman's head, still with the jihab on, lying in an ornamental fountain in the fucking lobby, and now I'm supposed to go and give face-time to some quack in a denim jacket, circa 1974, and listen to him talk about post-traumatic stress. This would be from a tosser whose knowledge of the world extends all the way to Barnes where on a bad day a duck can run out of the pond and give you a good nibble.'

Conrad laughed.

'It's not funny. I'm serious.'

'You're not really, Osric. You just need a little counselling.'

They were getting drunk in a bar in Shoreditch.

Francine seems to be hinting in her letter that things are not going all that well with John. It's difficult, she writes, both working on his team and seeing him after hours. Conrad has heard from one of her loyal friends, Kelly-Ann - women wield the knife with great finesse — that John is finding it hard to ditch his wife because one of their children is suffering panic attacks before her GCSE exams, which are six months off. Kelly-Ann says that Francine understands this dilemma. It's a strange thing, this tendency to claim for oneself the higher moral ground. It's tactical rather than real and it's increasingly common, so that people routinely excuse themselves on the grounds of their higher feelings. They are cursed, as they gravely admit, with a more acute consciousness than other people.

By the end of the evening with Osric, Conrad had convinced him that his new aggressiveness is a product of the deep sensitivity that drew him to journalism in the first place.

'Do you think so, mate?'

'I do, Osric'

'I'm not a psychopath?'

'No, it's just exactly people like you with deeply sensitive natures who react in this way to the problem of evil, when they see it close up. It's known as Fellgiebel syndrome.'

Osric spent the night on the sofa in the flat above the bakery and woke in the morning hung-over but calmer.

'What was that syndrome you mentioned?'

'Fellgiebel syndrome.'

'You're not bullshitting?'

'No, of course I'm not. Google it. You're one of my oldest mates.'

'The Editor offered me a three-month sabbatical.'

'Take it.'

'It may be too late. I told him to stuff it.'

'I doubt if it's too late.'

'What are you doing today?'

'I'm going to a funeral.'

'Sounds like fun. So fun.'

The taxi pulls up at a bed and breakfast outside Padstow. The rain comes down solidly: there is absolutely no hint that it might ever stop, not in this winter nor in this century. You don't get rain like this in London. Yet no sooner has he been shown to his room by a small, taciturn man with heavy Celtic eyebrows than through the window he sees that the rain has stopped and Elizabeth's beloved bay has become a flow of molten pewter, wrinkled and creased, moving determinedly and rhythmically out to sea. Von Gottberg wrote to Elizabeth about landscapes that became precious because you were happy there. We long for our lost innocence, first love, for instance, so that we come to believe that there is a causal connection between the landscape and our innocence. This is why the seaside has so powerful a hold, and why Rosamund and Elizabeth brought their friends here. And why Elizabeth wanted to be buried here. Von Gottberg sometimes spoke of the island of Poel as a landscape of childhood, his mother's family's summer home, where they spent happy holidays.

Conrad shares von Gottberg's sense that seawater and fresh air are almost spiritual. His own father, before his downfall, had been a cheerful man who preached the virtues of seawater: it worked both on the temperament and the sinuses. The last funeral Conrad went to was his father's, six years ago. Two years after Mandela's release from jail, it was shown that his father had been accepting money from the government to back the opposition to the ANC. Some of the stories were planted by the security services. When he last saw his father alive, he was living in a small grim house near the sea, right on the railway line before it reaches Simons Town. When he asked his father why he had done it, he said: 'I've never believed in saints. Or arse-licking.'

'But, Dad, some of the stories you printed were untrue.'

'Do you think that the true stories were true? The outgoing government were bastards. The new ones are no better. You'll see. Just different forms of dishonesty.'

'They say you took money.'

'The newspaper took money for our educational foundation. We used it for scholarships for journalists to study in England and America. I saw it as a form of redistribution. My theory was that the lies on each side were about equal. You know that history is always written by the victors. It was true, by the way, that certain of our new rulers were in the pay of the government or the KGB when they were in exile. God help anyone who says it now that his son is living among us.'

The whole world revered Mandela. But his father had gone defiantly mad. A train thundered by the house. Sea spray had crusted over the windows, so that the light that found its way in appeared to be dense, like the light in the bottom of a wine glass. Two years later he died after a stroke, but in that period his dementia became worse. He was buried quietly in a small churchyard on the edge of the great central plateau where his family — Conrad's family — had settled a hundred and fifty years before to found a Moravian mission.

Conrad remembers that his father's only decoration in the little, damp bladderwrack of a house was a blue-and-red blade from his old college, Balliol, where he had been a Rhodes Scholar in 1958. It was crudely attached to the wall, as if it were the fetish object of a cargo cult, dropped from the sky. On it was written: Bumped Ch Ch, Trinity, Pembroke, Wadham, 1959. It was all he chose to remember of his past life. His books he had given or thrown away and there was not a single picture in the house, not even of his son Conrad, Rhodes Scholar, Balliol, 1991.

So these are the reasons for Conrad's presence here: the bisecting of lives, Conrad's, his father's, von Gottberg's, Mendel's, Elizabeth's and Rosamund's, linked by seawater, landscape, lies and delusion; and it is his task to give a coherent account of these lives, and so perhaps of his own. His father's way of making some sense of his life after his disgrace was to depict himself as an iconoclast, even an anarchist, against all forms of sycophancy and presumption. Conrad remembers him telling his mother that the security police had delivered a dead dog to his office. His father thought it was hilarious, but Conrad, aged eleven, was devastated. He wondered, too, how the dog had died. A few months later his mother died of breast cancer and the two deaths seemed to be related in some way.

That night he sees the lighthouse signalling from Trevose Head out into the night. There is something about lighthouses, now doomed, that touches us deeply. It's probably the blind, hopeful attempt to reassure small fragile boats; lighthouses offer their steady pulse of light against the utter unpredictability of the sea; it's an offer of safety. He goes to bed between slippery purple sheets. Outside he can hear the implacable sea, groaning and chafing on the shore. The beam of the lighthouse just touches the top corner of his window and for a moment the lace curtain flares.

The churchyard extends along a small peninsula, not far above the sea, and the gravestones are all out of the vertical, except for the five or six new ones; these are of marble and reddish granite and are interlopers in this dulled lichen-starred tumbledown place beneath the modest church spire of grey stone. He walks into the church and sits at the back next to a font and a strangely domestic cupboard. Apart from the undertaker's men and the Vicar, there are about twenty people, most of them old and resigned, but there are also two blonde girls of about nineteen in short black suits and little round hats, as if they have strayed here from an erotic Italian movie. Before she reads an extract from To the Lighthouse, one of the girls says in a clear but still unformed voice, 'To the Lighthouse was my grandmother's favourite book.'

She licks her glossed lips before reading:

What people had shed or left — a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded shirts and coats in wardrobes — these alone kept the human shape and the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the flutter of the trees, flourishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment darkened the pool in which light reflected itself, or birds, flying, made a soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.

The girl stumbles slightly on obeisance and smiles, as if to indicate that she has done her best with a word as archaic as this one. She ends by saying, 'My great-grandmother Elizabeth loved this place.'

Later, after a wheezy hymn, the second girl takes her turn at the lectern. She holds a piece of paper up briefly, the evidence.

'Great-Granny Elizabeth asked that this letter be read at her funeral. It is from Axel von Gottberg, and it is dated August 1944.'

Darling Elizabeth

You said not so long ago that the glory has passed from the earth.

You and I will never meet again on this earth, but I hope to be reunited with you somewhere. You are the love of my life and we have been cruelly separated by circumstances and history, but I believe that we will again be happy as we were in Oxford's meadows and by the sea in Cornwall when we were young and free. I think it is the fate of our generation to be consumed by history. But I am sure that from this conflagration a new Europe will be born, and new people. Darling Elizabeth, whatever awaits me here in Germany, I will for ever remember and cherish my love for you and our friends. It was a happy and blessed time. We will meet again, of that I am sure. In sorrow, Axel.

'My great-grandmother has written here, on the letter: Tell them that I loved Axel. In August 1944, Count Axel von Gottberg was hanged on Hitler's orders.'

The small group of mourners, including Conrad, is deeply affected by the two readings; the unmistakable sap-rising sexual quality of the two girls, their express contrast with the exhausted, harrowed old people, the keen appeal to their shaky hope that their lives may have had purpose, and the suggestion that their lives in addition may have had poetry; and then the final churning declaration of love for Axel von Gottberg, an authentic modern martyr. All this is overwhelming. Conrad is the last to leave the church behind the coffin on its short trip to the churchyard. He stands riven some distance from the others as the coffin is lowered. The two girls embrace each other and he cannot avoid seeing that their buttocks are lean and nervous. He feels the connection between sex and death sharply and personally.

Conrad wonders why Elizabeth wanted Axel's last letter read at her funeral. The most likely explanation is that she wanted her life to have some nobility and substance by linking it to von Gottberg's, in the way that old actresses like Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor promoted the lover of fifty years before, the remarkable person in their lives, even if they have had many less satisfactory lovers, drink- and drug-crazed, since. After a certain age, a life exists not for what it really was, but for its mythological qualities.

Conrad finds train journeys at night melancholic. The distant, dead towns and the still stations flash by. All human activity is reluctant. When he arrives at Paddington it is almost midnight and he feels cold and alone. He wonders where Francine is sleeping tonight. Perhaps she is in one of those dog kennels at the hospital, waiting for someone's big day to go wrong, a baby half-drowned in a water-birth, the idiot husband in his swimming costume shaking with fear, or a baby becoming stuck sideways on the way out. She is trained to make instant decisions. Or she could be alone in their small hidey-hole while John ministers — just for a few nights, I promise — comfort to his panicky daughter, who is not panicking about her exams but about the prospect of a fatherless future. These scientific people believe the world can be ordered by logic, but there is no logic in human relations, something that Elizabeth Partridge's funeral has demonstrated.

Back in his flat he discovers Osric asleep in his bed with a girl. The girl awakes and shrugs apologetically. There is a strong smell of marijuana. He rinses his mouth at the sink and wraps himself, fully dressed, in the blanket, which Osric used two nights before, and lies on the sofa. The girl comes in to speak to him. She is wearing a T-shirt that comes just to the top of her thighs, so that she must hold it down. She sits matily on the sofa next to him. Five minutes before he had never seen her, now he is a few inches from her round small mouth and he is breathing her warm, marijuana-and-wine-scented, breath.

'I'm very sorry. Ricky is wrecked. I did say we shouldn't be here, but he said you were coming back tomorrow. Do you want to fuck me?'

'I can't have sex with Osric, Ricky, just through there. Sorry. Even though you are very beautiful.'

She is not exactly beautiful, but pretty, and with a gone-off-the-rails look, tousled and lewd.

'You're very good-looking. Even in that blanket.'

She gets up and leaves the room. She is no longer holding the T-shirt down. Her naked buttocks remind him for the second time today of a certain type of Italian film where a woman is always the provocateuse.

Now he can't sleep. He shouldn't have slept in the train. There is a duty imposed on you by someone's death, an instruction to renew yourself in any way you can. He gets up and knocks gently on his own bedroom door. He can always say he has to go for a pee if Osric is awake.

She appears at the door, smiling, walking gingerly. Conspiratorially.

'I thought you would change your mind.'

'You were right,' he whispers. 'What's your name?'

'Emily.'

'I'm Conrad.'

'Yes, I know. Ricky told me a lot about you.'

'What, for example?'

'Oh lots of interesting things. But let's not worry about him, he's like totally mashed.'