I’m not explaining myself at all well, am I? she said. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that’s what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don’t want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. Like you’ve thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note.

It’s too small a word, don’t you think, Mr Evans? I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. And for a moment he was at the King of Cornwall with Amy in the room they thought of as theirs-with the sea and the sun and the shadows, with the white paint flaking off the French doors and with their rusty lock, with the breezes late of an afternoon and of a night the sound of the waves breaking-and he remembered how that too had once seemed the centre of the universe. And he could see this house, so remote and isolated, so far away, and he had a feeling that it once must have seemed to her and Jack, if only for a short time, like the universe with the two of them at its centre.

He could see them in their cities, in the heat and the light. Do you? Outside, he thought, beyond this mountain and its snow, there was a world of countless millions of people. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans? She rolled the cigarette end around in the ash tray. “She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work-an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not imaginary but the world as it truly was, a book without beginning or end.” It wasn't really the great poem of antiquity that Dorrigo Evans wanted though, but the aura he felt around such books-an aura that both radiated outwards and took him inwards to another world that said to him that he was not alone.Īnd this sense, this feeling of communion, would at moments overwhelm him. He found several shelves full of old editions of classical writers and began vaguely browsing, hoping to find a cheap edition of Virgil's Aeneid, which he had only ever read in a borrowed copy. All around him dust motes rose and fell, shimmering, quivering in those shafts of roiling light. “He pulled out a book here and there, but what kept catching his attention were the diagonal tunnels of sunlight rolling in through the dormer windows.

Flanagan the narrow road