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vessel who could carry things; tea trays, babies, a basket of apples for the poor.
    ‘What apples?’ he asked
    She had broken off reading and was talking about apples.
    ‘The ones you brought with you wrapped in newspaper. It is time they were eaten up. I will stew them, and take them to the poor.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What is the reason?’
    ‘They are from my father’s tree.’
    ‘The tree will fruit again.’
    ‘No. It never will.’
    His wife paused a moment. She could see his agitation, but she did not understand it. She began to speak, then left off, and took up her magnifying glass and began to read the story of Lazarus.
    Dark wondered what it must be like to lie in the tomb, airless and silent, without light, hearing voices far off.
    ‘Like this,’ he thought.
    How can a man become his own death, choose it, take it, have no one to blame but himself? He had refused life. Well then, he would have to make what he could of this death.
    The next day he began to write it all down. He kept two journals; the first, a mild and scholarly account of a clergyman’s life in Scotland. The second, a wild and torn folder of scattered pages, disordered, unnumbered, punctured where his nib had bitten the paper.
    He taught himself to wait until he had finished his sermon, and then he took out the leather folder andthe stained pages, and wrote his life. It was not a life that anyone around him would have recognised. As time passed, he no longer recognised himself.
    Free me, he wrote one night, but to whom?
    Then, hardly knowing what he did, he decided to take his wife to London for the Great Exhibition. She had no wish to go, but she thought it better not to cross him.

The moon shone the night white.
    Pew and I were sitting in The Razorbill, that is to say, The Rock and Pit.
    There was nobody else there. Pew had a key to The Rock and Pit, and he liked to go drinking on Saturday night, because, he said, that’s what Pews had always done. Until I came to live with him, he had let himself in, and drunk alone from a barrel of rum behind the bar so thick with dust that if you stood a glass on the top of it, the glass sank like a ghost ship in the fog.
    I was given a packet of crisps on Saturday nights, even though Miss Pinch had warned that it might lead to trouble, though she did not say what kind of trouble. The trouble seemed to be me.
    I had met her earlier in the day, as I was pushing oursack truck along the pot-holed road to the town. Her hand hung over me like one of those mechanical grabbers in scrapyards. She said she was Disappointed that I hadn’t been to school, and that this would Hinder my Progress. Immediately I thought of a bright blue boat beaten back by the waves. How could I be both the boat and the waves? This was very deep.
    ‘You are not listening to me,’ she said.
    ‘I am. It was the storm. We couldn’t leave the lighthouse.’
    ‘Captain Scott was not discouraged by the weather,’ said Miss Pinch. ‘He reached the South Pole in spite of the snow.’
    ‘But he died in his tent!’
    ‘Death, where is thy sting?’
    I had no idea.
    ‘Take this,’ she said. ‘I have borrowed it from the Mobile Library.’
    It was a copy of Captain Scott’s diaries.
    I began to read it while I was waiting for Pew. I do not regret this journey…We took risks…These rough notes must tell the tale.
    I looked at the pictures of them, lost in their white-coloured nowhere.
    ‘Why did they die, Pew?’
    ‘They lost heart, child. Amundsen had beaten them to it, and when it came to the return, they had no fightleft in them. You must never lose heart.’
    ‘No?’
    ‘No.’
    The moon was rising, full and clear and polar-white. The Introduction to the diaries told me that Scott had wanted to go to the Pole because there were so few adventures left. The world was nearly mapped in 1913. No one ever thought that in 1968 someone would go to the moon.
    ‘Do you see her?’ said Pew. ‘I can feel her the way the sea feels her.