Twelve years after Calculus moved to Wilders, he invited Martha to come and stay for a holiday. She came almost immediately and ended up staying for good.

She wrote a letter, smuggled through e-customs, to her sister. (Calculus having called on the encrypting skills of Mickey’s father.)

Martha’s Letter

” The château is a sanctuary amid the wilderness; elemental with rampant winds in winter, a cold to smoke one’s breath, and summers that hammer blow heat into mountain rock. I know life here will be tough. That mountain liberty is the counter part of material poverty. But I will be able to hear myself think here and lose myself in my books. I wish to stay Mary, longer than planned. I really do. Calculus has grown very pompous but remains, at heart, a kindly man. Such a shame he’s falling out with his daughter & son in law. But having his grandson to raise brings him much consolation. My a-sexuality will be of no concern to him either. ‘All desire’, he too admits, ‘in that department,’ has been lost long ago. Mary he has this crazy idea of starting a commune! With genuine communitarian ideals and over which not one hangs a pall of solecism. And it turns out that history is on his side! I’ve been reading about Wilders’ background of Occitan culture; total brotherhood between friends was institutionalized in the ritual forms of fraternity in the 14th century. Will explain in more detail in next missive. Must go now. Time to put out the kerosene lantern. The light is hurting my eyes and Calculus says the whole region is on Asian hornet alert.

Love Martha

P.S. Tell me what you are reading.”

Their history

Calculus had met Martha many decades earlier when she worked as a librarian, a much ridiculed occupation even before Josef A’s campaigns got fully going to have the last of London’s libraries closed.

Martha was friendly, articulate and had no trace of ambition in her character. At least none that Calculus could detect. She was courageous, too, boldly displaying her love of books in public. Hers was a life utterly absorbed by words: carrying them about (as physical text), arranging, reading, savouring, recommending and reflecting upon them. Indeed, she treated words as deities. No small wonder she was utterly beholden to them.

Martha was the most able of librarians, efficiently locating the titles of books Calculus that tentatively presented on scraps of greeting cards. The cards coming from a friend of a friend… a wheeler dealer in retail’s shadier avenues.

Martha worked with a winning enthusiasm, and was never snooty about the ‘unserious science fiction,’ which Calculus read for light relief when not tackling mighty tomes on political philosophy and game theory. And not once did she object to tracking down all those books about football.

Calculus was undertaking a survey of the sport’s literature. Somewhat ingenuously, Martha offered to help, never believing Calculus would find a professor willing to supervise such a self-indulgent Ph. D. Yet somehow Calculus did, unearthing a football crazy academic from Naples University. Martha compiled a comprehensive list of footy-lit, Calculus profiting from her exaggerated sense of professionalism.

Their relationship as lovers was destined to founder. Not because of a discrepancy in their ages (he being much older). No, the problem lay elsewhere, in an inability to commit themselves to a passionately physical relationship, both feeling oddly detached from the body and its carnal gratifications. ‘We live in our heads,’ it was mutually observed. Martha deducing that ‘in prematurely ascending the Ladder of Love they had run out of the ‘base’ rungs!’ Calculus had laughed, having for once recognised the classical allusion.

A genuine fondness for each other meant they stayed in contact. Time passed and then, out of the blue, Martha received a letter from Calculus who lovingly described both the mountainous region and the château, emphasising its commodiousness. There would be space for her and all her books, including all those ex-library titles she had rescued from the dump. To assure their protection from the château’s leaky roof, Calculus promised Martha a huge and resplendent yurt.

She had wasted little time in responding.