“I’d . . . I’d sort of hoped it was,” said Lizzie. “I’d sort of hoped that you might want to see us all together.”

There was something weird about Lizzie’s voice. It was deeper than it had been a couple of minutes earlier, before Annie had left. It was as if she were trying out for one of those Shakespeare plays where a young woman disguises herself as a young man. She was speaking more quietly than she usually did, too. And on top of that, her tone was disconcertingly pacific. Tucker didn’t like it. It made him feel as though he were much sicker than he’d been told.

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re about to have a sex-change operation.”

“Fuck off, Tucker.”

“That’s better.”

“Why should everything be for your benefit, anyway? Can you really not imagine a small pocket of human activity that isn’t?”

“I just thought that you were all gathering because I was dangerously sick. And now that I’m not, we can forget all about it.”

“We don’t want to forget all about it.”

“You’re speaking for who, here? Everyone? The majority? The senior members? ’Cause I don’t think Jackson gives too much of a shit one way or the other.”

“Oh, Jackson. Jackson thinks what you tell him to think.”

“That often happens with six-year-olds. Maybe the withering contempt is inappropriate.”

“I’m sure I am speaking for the majority when I say that I wish we’d all had the protection that Jackson has been offered.”

“Oh, right. Because you’ve all had such fucking miserable lives, haven’t you?”

If this conversation were a prophet, it would be one of those scary Old Testament guys, rather than gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Mildness was clearly an elusive quality; you couldn’t just turn it on and off when you felt like it. But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature, and there was no thermostat.

“And that gets you off the hook?”

“I’d say that on the whole it does, yes. If I’d left you all in the shit then I’d feel worse than I do.”

“It was nothing to do with you, us surviving.”

“Not strictly true.”

“Oh, is that right?”

He knew it was, but he didn’t know how to explain it without causing more trouble. His paternal talent, before Jackson anyway, came down to this: he only impregnated charismatic and beautiful women. And after he had made a mess of them, they were pursued by successful men. They were pursued by unsuccessful men, too, of course, but by then they were all done with fuckups of any kind, so they sought out decent, solvent partners who could offer stability and material comfort. It was all pretty basic Darwin, really, although he wondered what Darwin would have to say about the coupling with Tucker that resulted in the women becoming mothers in the first place. There wasn’t much evidence of an instinct for survival there.

So that was it, his aftercare service; it was better than a trust fund, if you thought about it. Trust funds ruined kids; fond, well-heeled, but clear-eyed stepfathers didn’t. It wouldn’t work for everyone, he could see that, but it had worked for him. There was even a little blowback, too, seeing as how Lizzie’s stepfather was footing his hospital bill. He wouldn’t go so far as to say the guy—and he’d forgotten his name again—owed him. But it was quite the charming family he’d inherited, so long as he was prepared to overlook the charmlessness.

“Probably not.” It was too sophisticated an idea to explain from a prone position.

Lizzie took a deep breath.

“I was thinking,” she said. “This was the only way it was ever going to happen, wasn’t it?”

She was trying to sound like a boy again. He wished she’d just choose a voice and stick to it.

“What?”

“Your life gathering around you. You’ve always been so good at hiding from it. And running from it. And now you’re stuck in bed, and it’s heading toward you.”

“And you think that’s what a sick man needs?”

He could try, couldn’t he? It wasn’t as if a heart attack were a pretend illness. Even a mild coronary was serious, relatively speaking. He was entitled to a little R&R.

“It’s what a grieving woman needs. I’ve lost a child, Tucker.”

Her voice had changed key for the third or fourth time. He was glad he didn’t have to provide guitar accompaniment; he’d be retuning every couple of minutes.

“So like I said, it’s not really for my benefit.”

“Exactly. It’s for ours. But who knows? It might do you some good.”

Maybe she was right. Kill or cure. If Tucker had any money, he knew which of those outcomes he would bet on.

When Lizzie had gone, he picked up the books Annie had left him and read the blurbs on the covers. They looked pretty good. She was the only person he knew in this whole country, maybe in any country, who could have done that for him, and he suddenly felt the lack—both of her and of the sort of friends who might have provided the service. Annie was much prettier than he’d imagined her to be, although she was the sort of woman who’d be amazed to hear that she could hold her own against somebody like Natalie, who knew, still, the effect she had on men. And, of course, because she didn’t know she was pretty, she worked hard to be attractive in other ways. As far as Tucker was concerned, it was work that paid off. He really could imagine resting up in some bleak but beautiful seaside town, taking walks along the cliffs with Jackson and a dog they’d maybe have to rent for the occasion. What was that English period movie where Meryl Streep stared out to sea a lot? Maybe Gooleness would be like that.

“You look like you did well,” said Tucker.

“Yeah.”

“What did you choose?”

“A kite and a soccer ball.”

“Oh. Okay. I thought you were going to buy something that made it less boring for you in here.”

“Natalie said she’d take me outside to play with them. Maybe before we go to the zoo this afternoon.”

“Natalie’s taking you to the zoo?”

“Well, who else is there to go with?”

“Are you angry with me, Jack?”

“No.”

They hadn’t really had any kind of conversation since the unfortunate medical event. Tucker hadn’t known what to say, or how to say it, or even whether it was worth saying.

“So why don’t you want to talk to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry about what happened,” said Tucker.

“This soccer ball is what the pros use. In England, and other countries.”

“Cool. You can teach me some tricks when we’re out of here.”

“Will you be able to play soccer?”

“Even better than I could before.”

Jackson bounced the ball on the floor.

“Maybe not in here, Jack. Somebody somewhere will be trying to get some rest.”

Bounce.

“You are mad at me.”

“I’m just bouncing a ball.”

“I understand. I promised you I wouldn’t get sick.”

“You promised me you couldn’t die if you were well the day before.”

“Do I look dead to you?”

Bounce.

“Because I’m not. And the truth is, I didn’t feel well the day before.”

Bounce.

“Okay, Jack. Give me the ball.”

“No.”

Bounce, bounce, bounce.

“Okay, I’m coming to get it.”

Tucker made a show of pulling the sheets back from the bed.

Jackson let out a wail, threw the ball over to his father and collapsed onto the floor with his hands over his ears.

“Come on, Jack,” said Tucker. “It’s not such a big deal. I asked you to stop bouncing the ball and you wouldn’t. And now you have. I wasn’t going to give you a beating.”

“I’m not scared of that,” said Jackson. “Lizzie said that if you strain your heart, you’ll die. I don’t want you to get out of bed.”

Well, thank you, Lizzie.

“Okay,” Tucker said. “So don’t make me.”

Whatever works, he thought wearily. But it was going to be hard to pretend from now on that he was just your regular elementary-school dad.

“Hey, boys.”

Mumbled greetings were formed in his sons’ throats and emitted with not quite enough force to reach him; they dropped somewhere on the floor at the end of his bed, left for the cleaning staff to sweep up.

“Where’s your mother?”

“Huh?” said Jesse.

“Yeah, she’s okay,” said Cooper.

“Hey, fellas. You don’t want to turn those things off for a little while?”

“Huh?” said Jesse.

“No thanks,” said Cooper. He said it politely enough, so Tucker understood that he was turning down something else entirely—the offer of a drink, maybe, or an invitation to the ballet. Tucker performed a little mime restating his desire to converse without the hearing impediments. The boys looked at each other, shrugged and stuffed the iPods into their pockets. They had acceded to his request not because he was their father, but because he was older than them, and possibly because he was in a hospital bed; they’d have done the same if he were a paraplegic stranger on a bus. In other words, they were decent enough kids, but they weren’t his kids.

“I was asking where your mother was.”

“Oh. Okay. She’s outside in the hall.” Cooper did most of the talking, but always managed to give the impression that he was channeling his twin brother somehow. Maybe it was the way they stood side by side, staring straight ahead, arms dangling from their sockets.

“She doesn’t want to come in?”

“I guess.”

“You don’t want to get her?”

“No.”

“That was my way of saying ‘Would you get her?’ ”

“Oh. Okay.”

They both walked to the door, peered right and then left, and beckoned their mother toward them.

“He wants you to, though.” And then, after a pause long enough to accommodate dissent, “I don’t know why.”

“She doesn’t really want to come in,” said Cooper.

“But she’s coming in,” said Jesse.

“Okay.”

She didn’t come in.

“So where is she?”

They had readopted their previous positions, standing stiffly side by side, staring straight ahead. Maybe when they’d turned their iPods off they’d somehow turned themselves off, too. They were in standby mode.

“Maybe the restroom?” said Cooper.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Jesse. “The restroom. And maybe there was someone in there already?”

“Oh,” said Tucker. “Sure.”

Tucker suddenly became wearied by the pointlessness of the exercise that Lizzie had planned. These kids had flown thousands of miles to stand in a hospital room and stare at a man they no longer knew very well at all; this debate about whether their mother had gone to the bathroom or not was the most animated conversation the three of them had managed so far. (Tucker would miss it when it was over, but to extend it any further would probably entail scatological detail that he wouldn’t feel comfortable with, although the boys might enjoy it.) And then, in a moment, the ambient room temperature would become further chilled by the arrival of an ex-wife—not one he was particularly afraid of, nor one that bore him a great deal of ill will, as far as he knew, but not a person he’d had any real desire to see again during the time remaining to him on the planet. And then, sometime in the next hour or two, this ex-wife would bump into another one, when Nat came back with Jackson. And these two boys would stare at a half sister they’d never seen before and mumble at her, and . . . Jesus. There had been a part of him that was half joking when he’d asked English Annie to get him out of here, but that part was gone now. There was nothing funny about this.

The door opened, and Carrie peered around it cautiously.

“This is us,” said Tucker cheerily. “Come on in.”

Carrie took a few steps into the room, stopped and stared at him.

“Jesus,” she said.

“Thanks,” said Tucker.

“Sorry. I just meant . . .”

“It’s okay,” said Tucker. “I got a lot older, plus the light in here isn’t so flattering, plus I had a heart attack. I accept all of these things with equanimity.”

“No, no,” said Carrie. “I just meant, I guess, Jesus, it’s been a while since I saw you.”

“Okay,” said Tucker. “Let’s leave it at that.”

Carrie, of course, looked good, healthy and sleek. She’d put on weight, but she’d been too skinny when he’d left her anyway, due to the misery he’d inflicted on her, so the few extra pounds indicated only psychic health.

“How’ve you been?” she said.

“Today and yesterday, not so bad. The day before, not great. The last few years, mostly not so bad.”

“I heard you and Cat split.”

“Yeah. I managed to mess up another one.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll bet.”

“No, really. I don’t suppose we have a whole lot in common, but we all worry about you. It’s better for us if you’re in a relationship.”

“You’re all in some sort of recovery group together?”

“No, but . . . You’re the father of our children. We need you to be okay.”

Carrie’s choice of words allowed him to imagine that he was some kind of polygamist in an isolated religious community, that Carrie was here as the elected representative of the wives. It was certainly hard to think of himself as a single man. He tried, for a moment. Hey! I’m single! I have no ties to anyone! I can do what I want! Nope. Wasn’t working, for some reason. Maybe when he was off the drip attached to his arm he’d feel a little more footloose.

“Thank you. How have you been, anyway?”

“I’m fabulous, darling, thank you. Work’s good, Jesse and Cooper are good, as you can see . . .” Tucker felt obliged to look, although there wasn’t too much to look at, apart from a brief flicker of animation at the sound of their own names.

“My marriage is good.”

“Great.”

“I have a fantastic social life, Doug’s business is solid . . .”

“Excellent.” He was working on the basis that if he threw enough approving adjectives in her direction she’d stop, but this policy showed no signs of working.

“Last year I ran a half marathon.”

He was reduced to shaking his head in speechless admiration.

“My sex life is better than it’s ever been.”

Finally the boys came out of standby. Jesse’s face creased into a mask of distaste, and Cooper crumpled as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

“Gross,” he said. “Please. Mom. Stop.”

“I’m a healthy woman in her thirties. I’m not gonna hide.”

“Good for you,” said Tucker. “I’ll bet your bowels work better than mine, too.”

“You’d better believe it,” said Carrie.

Tucker was beginning to wonder whether she had actually gone crazy at some point in the last decade. The woman he was talking to bore no resemblance to the one he used to live with: the Carrie he knew was a shy young woman who had wanted to combine her interest in sculpting with her interest in disabled children. She loved Jeff Buckley and REM and the poetry of Billy Collins. The woman in front of him wouldn’t know who Billy Collins was.

“There’s a lot to be said for being a suburban soccer mom,” Carrie said. “No matter what people like you think.”

Oh, okay. Now he got it. They were fighting some kind of culture war. He was the cool rock ’n’ roll singer-songwriter who lived in the Village somewhere and took drugs, and she was the little woman he’d left behind in Nowhere County. The fact was that they lived remarkably similar lives, except Jackson played Little League, not soccer, and Carrie had almost certainly been to NYC more recently than he had. She’d probably even smoked a little pot at some time in the last five years, too. Maybe everyone was going to come in here swinging their insecurities like baseball bats. That would certainly spice things up a little.

They were saved by the return of Jackson, who ran the length of the room in order to punch both Jesse and Cooper in the stomach. They responded with smiles and whoops: finally, somebody was speaking their language. Natalie’s entrance was a little more stately. She waved a greeting to the boys, who ignored her, and introduced herself to Carrie. Or maybe she was reintroducing herself, Tucker couldn’t remember. Who knew who had already met before? They were definitely checking each other out now. He could tell that Natalie had absorbed Carrie completely and then somehow spat her out again, and that Carrie knew she’d been spat out. Tucker accepted completely that women were the fairer and wiser sex, but they were also irredeemably vicious when the occasion demanded.

The boys were still fighting. Tucker noted gloomily that Jackson was responding to the appearance of his half brothers with enormous relief and enthusiasm; their chief attraction was that they showed no signs of being about to die, unlike their father. Kids could smell these things. The rats who left sinking ships weren’t morally culpable. They were just wired that way.

“How was the zoo, Jackson?”

“It was cool. Natalie bought me this.” It was a pen with a monkey’s head precariously attached to its cap.

“Wow. Did you say thank you?”

“He was impeccably behaved,” said Natalie. “A pleasure to be with. And he knows more or less everything there is to know about snakes.”

“I don’t know how long all of them are,” said Jackson modestly.

The boys stopped wrestling, and a silence fell on the assembled company.

“So here we all are,” said Tucker. “Now what?”

“I suppose this is where you read your last will and testament,” said Natalie. “And we find out which of your kids you love the best.”

Jackson looked at her, and then at Tucker.

“It was Natalie’s idea of a joke, son,” said Tucker.

“Oh. Okay. But I suppose you’d tell us you loved us all the same,” said Jackson, and the tone of his voice implied that this state of affairs would be unsatisfactory and possibly mendacious.

He’d be right, too, thought Tucker. How could he love them all the same? Just seeing Jackson and his ill-concealed bundle of neuroses in the same room as those two solid and, let’s face it, dull and kind of dumb boys exposed the lie for what it was. He could see that fatherhood was important when you actually were a father—when you sat with kids in the middle of the night and convinced them that their nightmares were as insubstantial as smoke, when you chose their books and their schools, when you loved them however hard they made it for you to feel anything other than irritation and occasionally fury. And he had been around for the twins during the first few years, but ever since he’d left their mother, he’d cared for them less and less. How could it be any other way? He’d tried to pretend to himself that all five of them were equally important, but these two annoyed and bored him, Lizzie was poisonous, and he didn’t really know Gracie at all. Oh, sure, most of this was his fault, and he’d like to think that, if he and Carrie had survived, Jesse and Cooper wouldn’t be quite so fucking characterless. But the truth was that they were fine. They had a perfectly serviceable dad with his own car-rental company, and they were mystified by everybody’s insistence that their relationship with a man who lived far away was somehow important to their well-being. Meanwhile, Jackson tweaked some kind of nerve in his dad’s gut simply by turning the TV on when he was still half-asleep in the morning. You couldn’t love people you didn’t know, unless you were Christ. Tucker knew enough about himself to accept that he wasn’t Christ. So who did he love, apart from Jackson? He ran through a quick mental checklist. No, Jackson was pretty much it, nowadays. With five kids and all the women, he never thought for a moment that a shortage of numbers was going to be his particular problem. Weird how things turned out.

“I’m pretty tired,” he said. “How about you all go and visit Lizzie?”

“Will Lizzie want to be visited by us, though?” Carrie asked.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s part of the point of all this. That we get to know each other as a family.” And if it all happened in somebody else’s hospital room, then so much the better.

They came back a couple of hours later, giggly and apparently melded together into a coherent unit. They had picked up an extra member, too, a young man with a ridiculous bushy beard who was carrying a guitar.

“Have you met Zak?” said Natalie. “He’s your something or other. Your common-law son-in-law.”

“Big fan,” said Zak. “I mean, really big.”

“That’s nice,” said Tucker. “Thank you.”

“Juliet changed my life.”

“Great. I mean, great if your life needed changing, that is. Maybe it didn’t.”

“It did.”

“So, great. Happy to have helped.”

“Zak wants to play you a couple of his songs,” said Natalie. “But he was too shy to ask, himself.”

How bad could death be, really, Tucker wondered. A quick heart attack and out, and he would have avoided hearing songs by bearded common-law sons-in-law for his entire life.

“Be my guest,” said Tucker. “You got a captive audience.”

They were listening to Naked again. For a week they’d been living off bootleg performances of the Juliet songs: Duncan had made nine different playlists that followed the running order of the album, each taken from different nights of the ’86 tour. Gina eventually professed a preference for studio albums, though, on the grounds that drunk people didn’t shout all the way through her favorite tracks.

“Who’s my what?”

“Your . . . What does he call her? ‘Princess Impossible’?”

“I don’t know. Most of the women I’ve had relationships with were pretty reasonable, really.”

“That’s not what he’s on about, though, is it?”

Duncan stared at her. Nobody had ever attempted to argue with him about Tucker Crowe’s lyrics. Not that Gina was arguing with him, exactly. But she seemed to be on the verge of an interpretation that differed from his own, and it made him feel a little irritable.

“What’s he on about, then, Oh, great Crowologist?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I’m not setting myself up as an expert.”

“Good,” he said, and laughed. “It takes a while.”

“I’m sure.”

“But isn’t she Princess Impossible because she’s out of reach? Not because she’s an impossible person?”

“Well,” he said generously, “that’s the great thing about great art, isn’t it? It can mean all sorts of things. But by all accounts, she was very difficult.”

“In that first song, though . . .”

“ ‘And You Are?’ ”

“Yes, that one . . . There’s that line in there . . .”

“ ‘They told me that talking to you / Would be chewing barbed wire with a mouth ulcer / But you never once hurt me like that.’ ”

“How does that fit in with her being impossible? If she never once hurt him like that?”

“She became impossible later, I suppose.”

“I thought it was more, you know, her being out of his reach. ‘Your Royal Highness, way up there, and me on the floor below.’ Isn’t it that he thinks he’s out of her league?”

Duncan felt himself panicking a little: a lurch in the stomach, the sort of thing you get when you know you’ve left your keys on the kitchen table just after you’ve shut the front door. He’d invested quite a lot in Juliet’s impossibility. If he hadn’t got it right, then who was he?

“No,” he said, but he offered up nothing more.

“Well, you know more about it than me, as you say. Anyway, if that is what he meant . . .”

“Which he didn’t . . .”

“No, but forgetting about Tucker and Juliet, because I’m interested anyway: have you had one of those? When you knew you were out of your depth?”

“Oh, I expect so.” He flicked through the index file of his sexual relationships, much of which consisted of blank cards kept at the back. He looked under I for “Impossible” and D for “Depth, Out of,” but there was nothing. He could think of friends who’d had that sort of experience, but the truth was that Duncan had never so much as attempted to form an attachment to someone as glamorous as Juliet, or indeed to anyone who could be described as glamorous. He knew his place, and it was two floors below, not one, thus preventing any kind of contact at all. You couldn’t even see unattainable women from where he usually stood. If you imagined it all as a department store, he was in the basement, with the lamps and the dishes; the Juliets were all in Ladies’ Intimates, a couple of escalator rides away.

“Go on.”

“Oh, you know. The usual thing.”

“How did you meet her?”

It struck Duncan that, as they were already in the kingdom of the self-deprecating, he had to come up with something, otherwise it was all too grim. Nobody was so big a loser that he didn’t even have a story about losing. He tried to conjure up the kind of exoticism Gina would be expecting; he saw dramatic eye makeup, elaborate hairdos, glit tery clothes.

“Do you remember that band the Human League?”

“Yes! Of course! God!”

Duncan smiled enigmatically.

“You went out with one of the girls in the Human League?”

And immediately Duncan lost his nerve. There was probably a website which provided a helpful list of the names of all the men that the girls in the Human League had dated; she’d be able to check.

“Oh, no, no. My . . . ex wasn’t actually in the Human League. She was in a sort of second-rate version. At college.” This was more like it. “Same deal, synthesizers and funny haircuts. Anyway, we didn’t last very long. She went off with a bass player from, from some other eighties band. What about yours?”

“Oh, an actor. He slept with everyone at drama college. I was silly enough to think I was different.”

He’d negotiated that pretty well, he thought. They were well matched in their failures. He was, however, still feeling uneasy about whether he’d spent two decades misreading the tenor of the relationship between Tucker and Juliet.

“Does it make any difference, do you think? Whether Juliet was impossible as in difficult or impossible as in out of reach?”

“Any difference to what? Or who?”

“I don’t know. I just . . . I’d feel a bit daft if I’d been wrong all this time.”

“How can you be wrong? You know more about this album than anyone on the planet. Anyway. Like you say. There’s no such thing as wrong.”

Had he ever listened to Juliet in the way Gina heard it? He was beginning to wonder. He’d like to think that there wasn’t a single allusion he’d missed, in the lyrics or in the music: the steal from Curtis Mayfield here, the nod to Baudelaire there. But maybe he’d spent so long underneath the surface of the album that he’d never come up for air, never heard what a casual listener might hear. Maybe he’d spent too long translating something that had been written in English all along.

“Oh, let’s change the subject,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Gina. “It must be awfully annoying, me chirruping away without knowing the first thing about anything. I can see how this sort of thing gets addictive, though.”

“Okay,” said Tucker. “Here she is. Let’s go.”

The two of them walked past Annie and toward the door. Jackson’s showy determination, all jutting jaw and quick, even steps, led Annie to believe that the move had been rehearsed to within an inch of its life.

“Where are we going?” said Annie.

“Your place,” said Tucker. He was already halfway down the hall, so she could only catch his words by scurrying after him, and even then she nearly dropped them.

“My hotel? Or Gooleness?”

“Yeah. That one. The seaside-y one. Jackson needs some saltwater taffy. Don’t you, Jackson?”

“Yum.”

“Some what? I’ve never heard of it. You won’t be able to find it.”

The elevator had arrived, and she squeezed in just as the doors were shutting.

“What do you have that he’d like, then?”

“Probably rock candy. But it’s pretty bad for your teeth,” said Annie.

What, she wondered, was her immediate ambition here? Did she want to become the wanton lover of a rocker, or a home-care nurse? Because she suspected that the two careers were incompatible.

“Thanks,” said Tucker. “I’ll watch out for that.”

She looked at him, to see if there was anything in his expression other than impatience and sarcasm. There wasn’t.

The elevator pinged, and the door opened. Tucker and Jackson strode out onto the street, and immediately they started trying to hail cabs.

“How do you know when they’re busy? I can’t remember,” said Tucker.

“The yellow lights.”

“Which yellow lights?”

“You can’t see it because they’re all busy. Tucker, listen . . .”

“Yellow light, Dad!”

“Cool.”

The cab pulled over, and Tucker and Jackson got in.

“Which railway station do we need?”

“King’s Cross. But . . .”

Tucker gave the cabdriver complicated instructions involving a west London address, which Annie presumed was Lizzie’s place, and a long journey back across town to the station. She was pretty sure they’d need to stop at an ATM. He had no money and he’d be shocked by the fare.

“You coming with us?” said Tucker, as he tugged on the door handle of the cab. It was, of course, a rhetorical question, and she was tempted to decline the invitation, just to see what he said. She jumped in.

“We have to get our luggage from Lizzie’s place first. Do you know the train schedule?”

“We’ll miss the next one. But probably we’ll only have to wait half an hour or so for the one after.”

“Time for a comic book, a cup of coffee . . . I don’t know if I’ve ever been on an English train.”

“Tucker!” said Annie. The word came out shrill and unpleasant, and much louder than she had intended; Jackson looked at her in alarm. If she were him, she would be wondering how much fun this seaside holiday was going to be. But she had to interrupt the constant deflecting flow of chatter somehow.

“Yes,” said Tucker mildly. “Annie?”

“Are you okay?”

“I feel fine.”

“I mean, are you allowed to just walk out of hospital without telling anybody?”

“How do you know I haven’t told anybody?”

“I’m just guessing. From the speed at which we left the hospital.”

“I said good-bye to a couple people.”

“Who?”

“You know. Friends I’ve made in there. Hey, is that the Royal Albert Hall?”

She ignored him. He shrugged.

“Have you still got any balloons inside you? Because you won’t find anyone to take those out in Gooleness.”

This wasn’t turning out right. She was talking to him as if she were his mother—if, that is, he’d been born somewhere in Yorkshire or Lancashire in the 1950s, to parents who ran a boardinghouse. She could almost hear the bare linoleum and the boiled liver in her voice.

“No. I told you. I might have some little vent thing left in there. But it won’t bother you.”

“Well, it will bother me if you keel over and snuff it.”

“What does ‘keel over and snuff it’ mean, Dad?”

“Doesn’t mean anything. English crap. We don’t have to come and stay, okay? If you’re uncomfortable, just drop us off at a hotel somewhere.”

“Have you seen all your family?” If she could just get through her list of questions, she would turn herself into a host—a good one, welcoming and worldly and obliging.

“Yep,” said Tucker. “We had a jolly old tea party yesterday afternoon. Everyone’s fine, everyone got on, all good. My work there is done.”

Annie tried to catch Jackson’s eye, but the boy was staring out of the taxi window with a suspicious intensity. She didn’t know him, but it seemed to her that he was trying not to look at her.

She sighed. “Okay, then.” She had done her part. She had checked on his health, and she had checked on whether he had fulfilled his paternal responsibilities. She couldn’t refuse to believe him. And she didn’t want to do that anyway.

“So what is there to do in your town?”

“Do?” And then she laughed. “Sorry. The combination of Gooleness and an active verb took me by surprise.”

“We won’t be staying long, anyway.”

“Just until your children have given up on you and started traveling the thousands of miles back home.”

“Ouch.”

“I’m sorry.” And she was. Where was this disapproval coming from, all of a sudden? Wasn’t his checkered past half the attraction? What was the point of becoming attracted to a rock musician, if she wanted him to behave like a librarian?

“How was Grace, anyway?”

Jackson flashed his father a look, and Annie caught it, before examining it and lobbing it along to its intended recipient.

“Yeah, Gracie’s doing good. Living in Paris with some guy. Studying to, to be something.”

“I know you didn’t see her.” Shut up. God.

“I did. Didn’t I, Jacko?”

“You did, Dad, yeah. I saw you.”

“You saw him seeing her?”

“Yeah. I was watching all the time he was looking at her and talking to her.”

“You’re a little fibber, and you’re a big fibber.”

Neither of them said anything. Maybe they had no idea what a fibber was.

“Why that one?”

“Which one?”

“Why Grace?”

“Why Grace what?”

“How come you don’t mind seeing the others, but she scares you?”

“She doesn’t scare me. Why would she scare me?”

Maybe Duncan should be sitting on the train listening to this stuff. She knew already that Duncan would give an eye and several internal organs to be sitting on the train listening to this stuff; she meant that it would do him good to be here, that his obsession with this man would dwindle away, perhaps to nothing. Any relationship, it seemed to her, was reduced by proximity; you couldn’t be awestruck by someone sipping British Rail tea while he lied shamelessly about his relationship with his own daughter. In her case, it had taken about three minutes for passionate admiration and dreamy speculation to be replaced by a nervous, naggingly maternal disapproval. And that, it seemed to her, was a pretty good description of how some of her married female friends felt, some of the time. She had married Tucker somewhere between the hospital room and the taxi.

“I don’t know why she would scare you,” said Annie. “But she does.”

Tucker liked to think that he was reasonably honest with himself; it was only other people he lied to. And he’d ended up lying to people about Grace her whole life, pretty much. He’d lied to her quite a lot, too. The good news was that these lies were not constant, that there were long periods of time when he didn’t have to bullshit anybody; the bad news was that this was because Grace was way off his radar most of the time. He’d seen her two or three times since she was born (one of these times was when she made a disastrous trip out to stay with him and Cat and Jackson back in Pennsylvania, a visit that Jackson remembered with unfathomable fondness), and thought about her as little as possible, although this turned out to be much more than he was comfortable with. And here he was, on a train a long way from home with someone he hardly knew, lying about Grace again.

The lies weren’t so surprising, really. He couldn’t have a third-person existence—“Tucker Crowe, semilegendary recluse, creator of the greatest, most romantic breakup album ever recorded”—and tell the truth about his eldest daughter. And as he didn’t really have a first-person existence anymore, hadn’t had since that night in Minneapolis, it had been necessary to get rid of her. He’d gone into therapy when he’d given up drinking, but he’d lied to his therapist, too; or rather, he’d never helped guide his therapist toward Grace’s importance, and the therapist had never done the math. (Nobody ever did the math. Not Cat, not Natalie, not Lizzie . . . ) It had always seemed to Tucker that talking about Grace meant giving up Juliet, and he wasn’t prepared to do that. When he turned fifty, he began to think about what he’d done, like people do at that age, and Juliet was pretty much it. He didn’t like it, but other people did, and that was just about enough: surely a man could sacrifice a kid or two to preserve his artistic reputation, especially when there wasn’t much else to him? And it wasn’t like Grace had suffered, really. Oh, sure, she was probably fucked up about fathers, and men generally. And somebody, her mother or her stepfather, had had to shell out for her therapy sessions, just as Cat had paid for his. But she was a beautiful, smart girl, as far as he could tell, and she’d live, and she already had a boyfriend and a career path, although he couldn’t recall what the hell it was. It didn’t seem like she was paying such a big price for her old man’s vanity. That wouldn’t be how they saw it on Maury Povich’s show, if Grace ever forced him to go on the show to confront his inadequacies. But the world was more complicated than that. It wasn’t just good guys and bad guys, great dads and evil dads. And thank God for that.

Annie was frowning.

“What’s up?”

“I was just trying to work something out.”

“Can I help?”

“I would hope so. When was Grace born?”

Fuck, Tucker thought. Someone is doing the math. He felt nauseous and relieved, all at the same time.

“Later,” said Tucker.

“Later than who or what?”

“I think I might be ahead of you.”

“Really? I’d be surprised. Seeing as I don’t know why I want you to tell me how old Grace is.”

“You’re a smart woman, Annie. You’ll get there. And I don’t want to talk about it until later.”

He cocked his head toward Jackson, whose head was deep in a comic book.

“Ah.”

And when she looked at him, he could see that she was halfway there already.

They passed overlit kebab shops, and Indian restaurants offering all-you-can-eat specials for three pounds, and bars with one-word names—“Lucky’s,” “Blondie’s,” even one called “Boozers.”

“It looks better in the light,” Annie explained apologetically.

Tucker was finding his bearings now. If he translated some of the ethnic foods into Americans’ favorites and swapped a few of the bookies for casinos, he’d be at one of the trashier resorts in New Jersey. Every now and again, one of Jackson’s school friends got dragged off to a seaside town like this, either because the kid’s parents had misre membered a vacation from their youth, or because they had failed to spot the romanticism and poetic license in Bruce Springsteen’s early albums. They always came back appalled by the vulgarity, the malevolence and the drunkenness.

“Do you like fish and chips, Jackson? Shall we get some for supper?”

Jackson looked at his father: did he like fish and chips? Tucker nodded.

“There’s a good chippy down the road from us. From me. You’ll be okay if you just eat the fish, Tucker. Don’t touch the batter. Or the chips.”

“Sounds great,” said Tucker. “We might never leave.”

“We will, Dad, won’t we? Because I need to see Mom.”

“Just a joke, kiddo. You’ll see Mom.”

“I hate your jokes.”

Tucker was still distracted by the conversation they’d had on the train. He didn’t have a clue how he was going to talk to Annie; he didn’t know whether he was capable of it. If it were up to him, he’d write it all down, hand her a piece of paper and walk away. That was pretty much how he’d got to know her in the first place, now that he came to think about it, except he’d written everything down on cyberpaper.

“Have you got a computer at home?”

“Yes.”

“Can I write you an e-mail?”

He’d never put it all together like this before; even his ex-wives didn’t know as much as Annie would. They’d never done the math either, not that he’d helped them—he’d lied about Grace’s age more than once. And when he stared at the sum total of his crimes on the screen, it seemed to him that they didn’t amount to a whole lot. He hadn’t killed anyone. He looked again: there must be something missing. Nope. He’d done twenty years for crimes he hadn’t committed.

He called down the stairs to Annie.

“You want me to print it out? Or you going to read it on the screen?”

“I’ll read it on the screen. Do you want to put the kettle on?”

“Is that easy?”

“I think you’ll manage.”

They passed each other on the stairs.

“You can’t throw us out on the streets tonight.”

“Ah. So now I see why you wanted to wait until Jackson was asleep. You were playing on my good nature.”

He smiled, despite the churning in his stomach, went to the kitchen, found the electric kettle, pressed its switch. While he was waiting for the kettle to boil, he spotted the picture of him and Jackson, the one that Cat had taken outside Citizens Bank Park when they’d gone to see the Phillies. He was touched that she’d taken the trouble to print it out and stick it up there. He didn’t look like a bad man, not in that photo. He leaned against the kitchen counter and waited.