Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Take usual precautions. Remit my lucre to the First Bank of Belgium, Head Branch, Bruges—Dhondt snapped his fingers and had the manager open me an account. Only one Robert Frobisher on their lists, I’m quite sure.
    Best news of all: started composing on my own account again.
    Sincerely,
R.F.

    ZEDELGHEM
16TH—VIII—1931
    Sixsmith,
    Summer has taken a sensuous turn: Ayrs’s wife and I are lovers. Don’t alarm yourself! Only in the carnal sense. One night last week she came to my room, locked the door behind her, and without a word passing between us, disrobed. Don’t wish to brag, but her visit didn’t take me by surprise. In fact, I’d left the door ajar for her. Really, Sixsmith, you should try to enjoy lovemaking in total silence. All that ballyhooing transmutes into bliss if you’ll only seal your lips.
    When one unlocks a woman’s body, her box of confidences also spills. (You should try ’em yourself one time, women I mean.) Might this be connected to their hopelessness at cards? After the Act, I am happier just lying still, but Jocasta talked, impulsively, as if to bury our big black secret under littler gray ones. Learnt Ayrs contracted his syphilis at a bordello in Copenhagen in 1915, during an extended separation, and has not pleasured his wife since that year; after Eva’s birth, the doctor told Jocasta she could never conceive another child. She is v. selective about her occasional affairs but unapologetic about her right to conduct same. She insisted that she still loves Ayrs. I grunted, dubiously. That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities.
    Talked about Eva too. She worries that she was so busy instilling a sense of propriety into her daughter, they never became friends, and now, it seems, that horse has bolted. Dozed through these trivial tragedies, but shall be more careful around Danes in future and Danish bordellos in particular.
    J. wanted a second bout, as if to glue herself to me. Did not object. She has an equestrienne’s body, more spring than you normally get in a mature woman, and more technique than many a ten-shilling mount I’ve ridden. One suspects there stretches back a long line of youthful stallions invited to forage in her manger. Indeed, just as I nodded off for the last time she said, “Debussy once spent a week at Zedelghem, before the war. He slept in this very bed, if I’m not mistaken.” A minor chord in her tone suggested she was with him. Not impossible. Anything in a skirt, that’s what I heard about Claude, and he was a Frenchman.
    When Lucille knocked in the morning with my shaving water, I was quite alone. J.’s performance over breakfast was as nonchalant as my own, happy to note. Was even slightly caustic with me when I spilt a blob of jam on the place mat, prompting V.A. to reprimand her, “Don’t be such a stickleback, Jocasta! Your pretty hands won’t have to scrub the stain out.” Adultery is a tricky duet to pull off, Sixsmith—as in contract bridge, eschew partners clumsier than oneself or one winds up in a ghastly mess.
    Guilt? None. A cuckolder’s triumph? Not specially, no. Still rather miffed at Ayrs, if anything. The other evening, the Dhondts came to dinner and Mrs. D. asked for some piano music to help the food go down, so I played that “Angel of Mons” piece I wrote on holiday with you in the Scilly Isles two summers ago, though disclaimed its authorship by saying “a friend” had composed it. I’ve been rewriting it. It’s better and more fluid and subtle than those sherbety Schubertian pastiches V.A. spewed out in his twenties. J. and the Dhondts loved it so much they insisted on an encore. Was only six bars in when V.A. exercised a hitherto unknown veto. “I’d advise your friend to master the Ancients before he frolics with the Moderns.” Sounds like innocuous enough advice? However, he pronounced friend in a precise semitone that told me he was quite aware of my friend’s true