THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 57
make me feel special somehow. Stupid
that I should care.
William bought me a whisky chaser.
I was starting to feel the loosening of
the drink. I leaned in and explained to
him my attraction to forests, how, when
I was a boy, a stand of Douglas firs had
seemed as otherworldly as the rings of
Saturn. There are no trees on my island.
There have not been any for hundreds
of years, not since they were all chopped
down for boats or fuel. The land offers
no protection. Whatever soil has scabbed
over the Lewisian gneiss is too intrac-
table to grow anything other than the
hardiest of vegetables, and even those
have to be cultivated in raised beds.
Occasionally, holidaymakers who
were romanced by the isolation of the
isle would buy an old croft and set about
planting an apple tree or a peony rose.
The islanders would cover their smiles
and wait. They knew that trees are like
men. They need one another, and with-
out the support of a cluster they will be
ripped up, knocked over; they will wither.
The wind that roars off the Atlantic can
sweep you from your feet. My island
does not nurture things that stand alone.
As I talked to William my lips were
near his ear, and he smelled pleasantly
of his Penhaligon’s and gin. Yet when
I drew back I saw that his eyes had
glazed over. I was certain he was bored.
“I must be the dullest man that you’ve
hired,” I mumbled.
“Well. You compensate for it in other
ways.” He offered no comfort for my
feelings. William removed his cashmere
jumper and tied it around his shoulders.
It was an unflattering look—he resem-
bled Billie Jean King in a den of neo-Na-
zis. “Casper, have you never been in love?”
“Once.”
“Oh, what happened?”
“He married my sister.” I downed
the whisky. “And you?”
He didn’t reply at first. Then he started
talking. Simon was a recording engineer
for the BBC, fourteen years his junior.
They were happy, for differing periods
of time: only a short while for Simon, a
much longer, more blissfully ignorant
time for William. Neither of the men
had any siblings, so after they bought
the house in Chiswick together they
filled it with antiques left to them by
dying grandparents, dowager aunts, and
then, finally, their own parents.
William started dancing again as he
said, “Simon cheated on me.”
I tried not to look at him in case he
stopped talking. “Could you no forgive
him, like?”
William shook his head. He said it
wasn’t just something that happened,
it wasn’t opportunistic. Simon had
cheated with a young man he worked
with. They’d met up two or three times a
week for a year and a half. “I worked so
much they felt safe spending whole af-
ternoons together. Fucking
in the same bed you sleep
in now. He would have left
me eventually if he hadn’t
grown so accustomed to the
comfort of our lives. Or,
perhaps, I would never have
known.” William raked his
fingers through his hair.
“Perhaps he would never
have needed to say any-
thing if he hadn’t got sick.”
It will be to my eternal shame that
I frowned and then asked William what
he meant by “sick.”M
onday arrived and we fell back
into our strange domestic rou-
tine. He brought me tea in the morn-
ing and watched me pretend to sleep
as he drank his own.
After he left for work, I searched for,
but could not find, the photo album of
his summer boys. Feeling sulky, I wanked
with one arm thrown over my face. Then
I showered and went into the city. I
made the mistake of wandering around
Leicester Square as if there were some-
thing to see. All the touristy things were
spoiled by panhandlers, and every time
I stopped a young crusty approached
me for money and I didn’t know how
to say no. I was home in time to see the
Portuguese cleaning lady drag the bin
bags to the curb. I showered again and
prepared a gin-and-tonic for him as he
came in the door.
It was a bad day at the office, he said.
It was the first time I had seen him truly
agitated, the first time he hadn’t main-
tained a façade. We ate a dinner of Dover
sole that he fried in the pan. To see him
sear it so easily made me feel useless.
As we ate, he went through some legal
paperwork, his Montblanc scraping the
tabletop as he pressed hard enough to
carry through the carbon copies. I amusually comfortable around sullen men
but his silence bothered me.
We went to bed early, each of us re-
treating to his separate floor. I was lying
in the guest room when I heard him
call for me. I went upstairs but William
had a sour, impatient look on his face.
“You rang, Milord?” I tried to be
the clown.
His master bedroom was at the top
of the house. He had knocked many
small rooms into one, to create an airy
space that he’d then under-
mined with heavy Geor-
gian antiques. There were
large skylights set into the
slanted roof. I could count
the blinking planes as they
formed an orderly queue
and began their descent
into Heathrow.
William was dwarfed by
a carved oak bed. He was
propped up on pillows and
wearing striped pajamas. The bedside
lamp cast a focussed beam for reading.
I could see his hands folded on top of
the sheets, but his eyes were obscured
behind his crooked glasses.
He tossed a Dunhill bag toward me.
It contained a sky-blue jumper that
was made up of little twisting cables.
It was impossibly soft. He said that
he’d noticed me staring at his own cash-
mere, as I pulled it on over my T-shirt
and stood before him in my sagging
underwear.
“Casper. I’m tired of this,” he said
flatly.
“Would ye like some tea?”
He took off his glasses and there, again,
were his gray eyes. He tidied the papers
he had been reading and patted the bed.
“It’s obvious that you don’t like me.”
“I do.”
He cleared his throat and began again.
“It’s obvious that you don’t like me in
the way I hoped you would like me.”
I clasped my hands and bowed my
head, a pose I’d learned from being
hauled in front of my father.
“Have I not been generous enough?”
“Aye, you have. Plenty.”
William didn’t move for a long time.
I was about to excuse myself when he
reached into his bedside drawer. There
again was the claret photo album. “Then
let me be blunt. I’ve been very patient.
You embarrass me when I have to ask