brain.
‘What’s the project?’ It must be something big to have brought him back. Something to ‘get his teeth into’. That’s how he’d put it. He could never resist challenges.
‘It’s hush-hush. But he asked after you and hinted at a contract for us. Wanted to know if you’re still Venning. So I said what’s Venning. And he said get Hesketh to educate you.’
‘He was referring to Venn diagrams. They’re a very effective device for analysing patterns of unity and differentiation. Named after the mathematician John Venn, who incorporated them into set theory in the 1880s. If you’re looking for a speedy categorisation tool that’s highly visual and comprehensible at a glance, and flexible enough to accommodate an infinite number of new factors, you can’t do much better. They consist of overlapping or interlocking circles. You can incorporate U-shapes too. And the S-form. Depending on complexity.’
‘Get out of there! So when I see you doodling a bunch of amoeba fucking, that’s what you’re up to?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there was I thinking, ask not the reason why. Hesketh is Hesketh.’
‘Who else would I be?’
‘No one. And they only made one of you. Which is why you’re packing for Sweden.’
‘I want to go by train.’ I like trains.
‘I anticipated that, bud. Belinda says it’s do-able if you can get to Edinburgh tonight. Svensson should be out of his coma by the time you arrive. Find me the pattern. Love you, my friend. Bye.’
He gives his signature dismissal – head down, a fist-clench high in the air, like a sportsman – and then he’s gone.
When Ashok says ‘love you, my friend’, he doesn’t mean it. It’s a florid form of expression, of the type Kaitlin once classified for me as ‘the vernacular of dick-swinging’. When I say to someone that I love them, however, I mean it. For someone aged thirty-six I have not said it very often. Three times in two years, to the same woman. And when I stop loving them, I say: ‘Kaitlin, I don’t love you any more and I can never love you again.’
She confessed to her affair on Saturday 5th May. By tacit agreement, my workroom was my territory and she and Freddy never came in. I don’t know how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me work.
She said, ‘Hesketh. I made a mistake. You and I can go back to normal. It’s over.’
I was doing a tricky blintz fold at the time, on a moth. It demanded all my concentration.
‘What’s over?’
But she didn’t reply. When I finished the next fold to my satisfaction and looked up, I saw her staring at me urgently, as if expecting a response. As if I were telepathic: as if I, of all people, should have guessed that she had been leading another secret life, in parallel to the one that was on show. I have no radar for lies. Why would I suspect that her yoga lessons were not real yoga lessons, or that her ‘late conference meetings’ masked another type of rendezvous?
I said, ‘Whatever it is, you’re going to have to explain.’
And so she did explain. And then I understood.
She’d had an affair. It had lasted eight weeks. And now it was over. That’s what she meant when she said we could ‘go back to normal’.
But we couldn’t.
Two species of bird feature in the glossary of cuckoldry. First, the cuckoo, which lays its solo egg in another bird’s nest, leaving others to do the nurturing. In this reading, the ‘cuckold’ is the cuckoo’s victim: the non-biological father of another man’s offspring. The second bird is the cockerel, which echoes ‘cuckold’ linguistically. Some accounts claim that the origin of the ‘horned cuckold’ dates back to a time when cockerels were castrated, and their spurs sliced off and stuck through their combs where they were said to implant themselves and grow, giving the impression of horns. As the cockerel had been castrated, the ‘horns’ became an obvious symbol of the bird’s impotence. From a
‘What’s the project?’ It must be something big to have brought him back. Something to ‘get his teeth into’. That’s how he’d put it. He could never resist challenges.
‘It’s hush-hush. But he asked after you and hinted at a contract for us. Wanted to know if you’re still Venning. So I said what’s Venning. And he said get Hesketh to educate you.’
‘He was referring to Venn diagrams. They’re a very effective device for analysing patterns of unity and differentiation. Named after the mathematician John Venn, who incorporated them into set theory in the 1880s. If you’re looking for a speedy categorisation tool that’s highly visual and comprehensible at a glance, and flexible enough to accommodate an infinite number of new factors, you can’t do much better. They consist of overlapping or interlocking circles. You can incorporate U-shapes too. And the S-form. Depending on complexity.’
‘Get out of there! So when I see you doodling a bunch of amoeba fucking, that’s what you’re up to?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there was I thinking, ask not the reason why. Hesketh is Hesketh.’
‘Who else would I be?’
‘No one. And they only made one of you. Which is why you’re packing for Sweden.’
‘I want to go by train.’ I like trains.
‘I anticipated that, bud. Belinda says it’s do-able if you can get to Edinburgh tonight. Svensson should be out of his coma by the time you arrive. Find me the pattern. Love you, my friend. Bye.’
He gives his signature dismissal – head down, a fist-clench high in the air, like a sportsman – and then he’s gone.
When Ashok says ‘love you, my friend’, he doesn’t mean it. It’s a florid form of expression, of the type Kaitlin once classified for me as ‘the vernacular of dick-swinging’. When I say to someone that I love them, however, I mean it. For someone aged thirty-six I have not said it very often. Three times in two years, to the same woman. And when I stop loving them, I say: ‘Kaitlin, I don’t love you any more and I can never love you again.’
She confessed to her affair on Saturday 5th May. By tacit agreement, my workroom was my territory and she and Freddy never came in. I don’t know how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me work.
She said, ‘Hesketh. I made a mistake. You and I can go back to normal. It’s over.’
I was doing a tricky blintz fold at the time, on a moth. It demanded all my concentration.
‘What’s over?’
But she didn’t reply. When I finished the next fold to my satisfaction and looked up, I saw her staring at me urgently, as if expecting a response. As if I were telepathic: as if I, of all people, should have guessed that she had been leading another secret life, in parallel to the one that was on show. I have no radar for lies. Why would I suspect that her yoga lessons were not real yoga lessons, or that her ‘late conference meetings’ masked another type of rendezvous?
I said, ‘Whatever it is, you’re going to have to explain.’
And so she did explain. And then I understood.
She’d had an affair. It had lasted eight weeks. And now it was over. That’s what she meant when she said we could ‘go back to normal’.
But we couldn’t.
Two species of bird feature in the glossary of cuckoldry. First, the cuckoo, which lays its solo egg in another bird’s nest, leaving others to do the nurturing. In this reading, the ‘cuckold’ is the cuckoo’s victim: the non-biological father of another man’s offspring. The second bird is the cockerel, which echoes ‘cuckold’ linguistically. Some accounts claim that the origin of the ‘horned cuckold’ dates back to a time when cockerels were castrated, and their spurs sliced off and stuck through their combs where they were said to implant themselves and grow, giving the impression of horns. As the cockerel had been castrated, the ‘horns’ became an obvious symbol of the bird’s impotence. From a
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