Never Answer the Third Knock

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whom the world resolved itself into columns. Debits and credits, income and outlay, the careful arithmetic of small business and smaller margins — these were the languages in which he was fluent, and in which he expected, more or less, to spend his life. They were also the languages through which he had learned to navigate emotion, to translate the inchoate chaos of feeling into something orderly and manageable and above all comprehensible. A man in love was five pounds a month set aside for a modest house. A man in grief was a shortfall of capital. A man in fear was a line item in a ledger. His father’s merchant house dealt in imported cotton and printed calico, the sort of trade that required patience rather than flair, and Wren had always possessed patience in abundance. The business had been adequate for Wren’s father, adequate for the modest house in Bloomsbury, adequate for a quiet life of steady if unspectacular profit. It would have remained adequate for Wren — modest but sufficient, a life whose parameters were known, whose future could be mapped — had the American situation

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