a crack where two pipes butted unevenly. Mercury glowed as if alive beneath the filmed water. It gave off a warm, smudged glitter, a thin trapped snake worth a hundred guineas.
“A find! A find!” Johnny chanted. They sucked the metal into pressure bottles. Finding the luminous metal lifted their spirits; Renfrew laughed with gusty good humor. They walked on, discovering unexplored caves and dark secrets in the warrens, fanning the curving walls with yellow beams. Johnny discovered a high niche, scooped out and furnished with a moldy mattress. “Home of some layabout, I expect,” Renfrew murmured. They found candle stubs and frayed paperbacks. “Hey, this one’s from 1968, Dad,” Johnny said. It looked pornographic to Renfrew; he tossed it face down on the mattress. “Should be getting back,” he said.
They found an iron ladder, using the map provided. Johnny wriggled out, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight. They queued up to turn in their pint of the silvery stuff to the Hunt Facilitator. In line with current theory, Renfrew noted, social groupings were now facilitated, not led. Renfrew stood and watched Johnny talk and scuffle and go through the tentative approaching rituals with two other boys nearby in line. Already Johnny was getting beyond the age when parents deeply influenced him. From now on it was peer pressure and the universals: swacking the ball about in the approved manner; showing proper disdain for girls; establishing one’s buffer state role between the natural bullies and the naturally bullied; faking a certain coarse but necessarily vague familiarity with sex and the workings of those mysterious gummy organs, seldom seen but deeply sensed. Soon he would face the consuming problem of adolescence—how to have it off with some girl and thus pass through the flame into manhood, and yet avoid the traps that society laid in the way. Or perhaps this rather cynical view was outdated now. Maybe the wave of sexual freedom that had washed over earlier generations had made things easier. Somehow, though, Renfrew suspected otherwise. What was worse, he could think of nothing very straightforward he himself could hope to do about the matter. Perhaps relying on the intuition of the boy himself was the best path. So what guidance could he give Johnny? “See here, son, remember one thing—don’t take any advice.” He could see Johnny’s eyes widen and the boy reply, “But that’s silly, Daddy. If I take your advice, I’m doing the opposite of what you say.” Renfrew smiled. Paradoxes sprouted everywhere.
A small student band made a great noisy thing of the announced total, several kilograms in all. Boys cheered. A man nearby muttered, “Livin’ off a yes’day,” and Renfrew said drily, “Frapping right.” There was a feeling here of salvaging the lore and ore of the past, not making anything new. Like the country itself, he thought.
Bicycling home, Johnny wanted to stop and see the Bluebell Country Club, an unbearably cute name for an eighteenth-century stone cottage near the Cam. In it a Miss Bell kept a cat hotel, for owners who were away. Once Marjorie had adopted a disagreeable cat which Renfrew had finally lodged there permanently, not having the heart to simply throw the bugger in the Cam. Miss Bell’s rooms stank of cat piss and perpetual tubercular-class dampness. “No time,” Renfrew shouted to Johnny’s question and they pedaled on past the cat citadel. Afterward, Johnny was a bit slower than before, his face blank. Renfrew was at once sorry he had been gruff. He was having such moments more often lately, he realized. Perhaps in part his absence from home, working at the lab, made him acutely sensitive to lapsed closeness with Marjorie and the kids. Or perhaps there was a time in life when you realized dimly that you had become rather like your own parents, and that your reactions were not wholly original. The genes and environment had their own momentum.
Renfrew caught sight of an odd yellow cloud squatting on the horizon and remembered the summer afternoons he and Johnny had spent watching the cloud sculptors work above London. “Look there!” he called, pointing. Johnny dutifully gave the yellow cloud a glance. “Angels getting ready to piss,” Renfrew explained, “as m’old man used to say.” Bucked up by this bit of family history, they both smiled.
They stopped at a bakery in King’s Parade, Fitzbillies. Johnny became a starving English schoolboy bravely carrying on. Renfrew allowed as how he could have two, no more. The news-agent’s a door down proclaimed on a