The boy said, "How do you start a novel? I'm sorry, that must seem a foolish question, naïve. But I would really like to know."

It wasn't stupid.

"There's no one answer," he said. "Sometimes a phrase, sometimes an image or a character, sometimes a what if? Old Pritchett used to watch two people in a bar and ask himself, what does she see in him? You never know if you can go on of course, not till you've done so."

"So you don't know where you're going?"

"I once asked Saul Bellow about that, when I was young. He said it was helpful to have some signposts. Maybe it is. In his own novels he missed a lot of them or they were pointing the wrong way. But then he was really an essayist."

"What was that sentence you found on your typewriter?"

The boy was gaining confidence and the old man hesitated.

"Pass the bottle, Katie. ‘Across the river and into the trees', Stonewall Jackson's last words. I've often wondered what he meant. We cross the river and into the dark woods..."

"And Hemingway," the boy said.

"Great writer, lousy man. Like a lot of us."

"You're too hard on yourself, Sir."

"Not your grandmother's opinion, Katie."

The whisky was mellowing him. He felt it. A mistake to have deprived himself of it.

"When I was young, your age," he said, unprompted, "I believed that if I wrote one really good book, with sentences that rang true, I would have justified myself. You  think that way when you're young. Maybe you should think that way then. I don't know."

It was true. He had believed that and made a wasteland of his life in consequence.

"It's like a marriage, starting a novel," he said, "you don't know how it's going to turn out."

Of course he shouldn't have married her. She shouldn't have married him. But that's how it had been...across the river and into the trees. Without her he would have been less. Without him she would have been more. He knew that now. Too late.

Their quarrels had been icy. She used to say, your imaginary characters matter more to you than I do, there was that girl who never existed you fell in love with in that Jerusalem novel. Did I? he wondered. He had brought her, the Jerusalem girl, to a bad end, sad end, too.

"I'm tired," he said. "Bedtime. You'll stay the night, not drive after whisky. Nobody's slept in the spare room for years. You'd better find hot-water bottles, Katie."

He staggered, just a moment, as he got to his feet.  The whisky, nothing else. "There's the owl again," he said, "deep in the woods."

In bed himself, he thought of them making love. When had he last done that, except in books? He turned over to let his weight lie on his heart.