He begins with a cough, and a shrug. ‘I’ve been gone a long time,’ he says. ‘I know… I know… I’m very – touched – that you have come to see me. My last letters – I must apologise for… well, let’s…’
He pauses and shakes his head quickly from side to side.
‘We’ll talk about that later, perhaps. Yes. I’m glad you came.’
Isla simply sits there with her face glowing. She tells him how much he is admired, how much she has longed to meet him. After several minutes of this he starts to respond more than monosyllabically.
‘Oh, it’s a long time since I did mathematics, really. A child’s game. A means to an end. My work now is very different.’ She can see the flattery working on him. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’
He is still reluctant to meet her eyes for more than a moment. But she keeps talking, tries to keep him talking. She picks up on points in their correspondence, passes on faculty gossip – to which he listens with what she suspects is feigned interest, apart from the odd light of recognition, sometimes hostile, when the name of a mathematician of his own generation is mentioned.
At one point during their conversation – this is when Isla thinks she has made a breakthrough – he sees her eyes drifting over to a netting bag of some green vegetables by the pallet where he sleeps.
‘Ah, yes,’ he says, and the twist of his mouth seems almost self-mocking. ‘Artichokes.’
Occasionally she feels something spiky in his mind pushing back at her. He’ll ask a question about a point of mathematics, as if testing her, checking she’s understood. Sometimes the look when he raises his eye is minutely sharper, more appraising – then the sentences will again trail off and the combing of the fingers through the beard will increase. He continues to sit cross-legged, without apparent discomfort.
As they talk, he hauls over a pottery container filled with pea pods, takes a handful and pushes the container over towards Isla. They shell and eat the peas, which taste woody, but less horrible than the sage tea – and to Isla, who is both hungry and nervous, they are a welcome opportunity to do something with her hands.
That first night, she keeps talking to him till the sun sinks. He lights the hurricane lamp and moths loop in crazy eights around the table. They pass a point where impoliteness has become moot. Only when he notices her start to shiver a little, and tries to give her his blanket, does she make a move. The blanket, she guesses, is the origin of the dusty smell.
‘I’m sorry. You are too kind. I must leave you…’ She dares his first name: ‘Nicolas. I have to go and pitch my tent.’ She asks if she can set up her tent down the slope from his house. ‘Perhaps we can talk some more in the morning; if I’m not intruding?’
‘No,’ he said, wanly. ‘You are intruding, but you are not an intruder. Perhaps a helper. A sharer.’
That night she sets up her tent, laboriously, in the pitch dark. She dreams of goats bleating, and the following morning she is woken by the sound of chickens pecking about at the entrance to her tent. It hasn’t rained. Shivering from the dawn, she pokes her head out and sees Banacharski, bent over in his corduroy trousers, scrubbing at something in the dirt up by the front of the shack.
That is how Isla Holderness’s week with Banacharski starts. She quietly slots into his life, and he lets her. That first morning, she offers to make him breakfast and he, affecting to be startled by the emergence of this woman from the dew-steaming tent at the foot of his garden, nods. ‘Come.’ She uses the eggs she saw – they are fresh enough, and finds a couple more in a dirt bath under the house, one still warm.
The gas canisters she saw outside heat a little tank of hot water Banacharski uses to wash. But he also has a single-ring burner on a bottle of gas and she finds a skillet.
‘I don’t usually cook,’ he says.
She makes omelettes, seasoned with chervil she finds growing at a short distance from the house, and they eat them. He, again, insists she take the chair while he sits on the floor.
For most of that morning she helps him potter around the garden, pulling weeds. He does this more than she, but he points, occasionally, and grunts. She doesn’t know anything about gardening; she has always lived in big cities. As it goes on, prompted gently, the older man starts to talk a little more – about himself, about the disappearance. He won’t say much about it, but when she says something about being overcome by ‘pressure’ he turns to her sharply.
‘I am not mad,’ he says, looking her very directly in the eyes. ‘I know that that is what they want everyone to think. And it suits me – for my own purposes, for different purposes. But I am not mad. I know exactly what they are doing. EXACTLY.’
He turns his head from her and roots at the foot of the hedge, turns back – looking cross, with a dandelion leaf tangled in his beard. ‘Exactly what they are doing. I am not mad.’
That is followed by another long silence and a furious bout of weed pulling.
It is early afternoon when he declares that he has to work. He does so in a sudden snap – a violence of gesture that takes her by surprise. She senses, suddenly, that he’s long past when he’d have started ordinarily, as if his gardening has been a distraction he has affected until it has become intolerable. The weeds he has been pulling are some way from his garden. They were there for a reason.
He walks briskly into the shack and shuts the door. Isla goes for a walk. The weather is pleasant enough. She walks a contour of the hill behind the shack, descends into a valley and marches up the other side until there is a pleasant ache in the tops of her legs, thinking all the way. She thinks how to approach him, how to coax him out. She has never done anything like this before.
Will he be finding her attractive? The thought has crossed her mind. He did have girlfriends when he was younger. He probably hasn’t had a woman since… unless… Why should she speculate? He’s an old man. She knows Mike would say: is it safe? She feels safe. He’s an old man. He’s reedy, pot-bellied. If he tried anything she could, with these strong thighs and these arms she goes swimming with… she feels safe.
But she wonders, just in the abstract, if he finds her attractive.
And so it goes. She returns later in the afternoon and knocks on the door. He lets her in. He has been in the chair at the table, writing on a yellow pad. He seems in a good mood.
‘My new work,’ he says, tilting the pad towards her. It’s in prose, very densely written, studded with what look like algebraic notations. She makes to peer more closely at it, but he snatches the pad away and puts it face down on the desk.
‘Tell me, Isla Holderness… what do you think happens to us when we think? When we want something?’
Isla raises both her eyebrows, opens her face, looks deferentially blank. Banacharski snorts. They don’t talk about his work again that night. But, as last night, she asks whether she can stay in her tent, and perhaps help him tomorrow and he assents with a courteous gesture.
And so they establish a routine. Isla helps him to cook, makes a few efforts to clean up the shack – though she knows better than to touch his mouse-nests of paper, let alone order them or be seen trying to read them. And, gently reasserting her interest, she piece by piece steers him into talking about his work. It is a slow and elliptical process.
‘I put it another way,’ he says one evening, apropos of nothing, and in the middle of what has so far seemed to be a conversation about the virtues of eating raw vegetables (he says he lived happily through one summer eating cow parsley and soaked nettles). ‘If everything is perfect – if our measurements add up, if we can measure that, and that, and that -’ he points with sudden violence to the verticals on the wall of the shack, just in the shadow of the hissing hurricane lamp – ‘and that angle is so, and that line is so, and that force is so… we can build a house. Yes? So when the winds blow, when the hurricane comes, we will be safe. You see?’