The first day I went to see my mother I remember a mottled hand. It was in the sunlight beneath the fanlights, and it was holding a glass of water. Something about the woman's dress, something about her skin - the places that the dress touched it, and the places that it came away from it; something about the shadows formed by folds of it, and the shadows cast by her own dark hair; - something about all of these things meant that I knew, even before I took it, that the glass would be very, very cold and the water within it very, very pure.

It was the very form of strangeness, on that day, and as I drank the water, and as the woman smiled patiently at me, as though she would have to disappoint me in some way, I knew that I had no right to be here. I was here, but I was not intended; I had not realised it was my mother that I should find today; I had not anticipated the side track which had brought me here, and I felt exhilerated to have been capable of becoming, to have originated something in this way, as though freedom were within my grasp. In the moment before I saw the hand, there was a large, humming transformer behind a chainlink fence, and the heavy blue and grey ribs of its bindings - the dust, the smell of oil, the durability, the agelessness of the thing - that was the domain to which I truly belonged. As static and resilient as that bulk, whose clumsy contours could close only about the most workaday and functional of ideas. I could not be there and here; this person could never have come from there; yet here he stood. The air in the hallway had a delicate, wistful scent, reminding me that today in particular it was breathed within an age whose days were numbered, and none of which could be regained.

As if in response, the hand went back. Withdrawn to the side of its body, first it seemed to beckon; then it gave up on the idea, and both of us were just drawn along, like ducks across a lake. I followed it upstairs to various rooms, all of them clean and well lit, and, though it never led me to any bedroom, I knew already that that room too would be cool and measured, with easy shadows, firm and unashamed, that sweep gracefully along the walls like their own reflections in the boughs of the trees beyond the window; I knew everything would be pure and kind, with an overwhelming sense of whiteness from the plumped pillows and sheets, everything naked and everything revealed without either scrutiny or shame, everything natural and continuous, with an even-tempered self-assurance continuing to infinity.

I opened the back door, and the skeleton of my father walked toward me from the conservatory, slightly too tall for his age. As he passed me he took off his hat by putting it in his hand, as if at a loss where it should go now, and I realised that I had never understood my father, and never would. Within the gesture, the ambiguity of his desire to acknowledge his son struggled with the absurdity of explicitly saluting him, while the hat itself – a forgotten means to an end – seemed to epitomise the struggle between volition and action, between the means of a performance and the performance itself.

Outside, the garden stretched impossibly far, with urns and brick paths broken by herb beds over a succession of elevated swards, and I suddenly felt I wanted to take off my shoes and walk in it, as if I had never walked in any garden until I had walked in this one. The grass made me feel dizzy; I could listen forever to the sound my feet made as they moved through it. Then it grew wild, in the places where people could not see, and I looked up at the great building opposite, with its decaying, greenish, beautiful, warped roofing, which descended to slantwise windows from which every trace of paint had fallen away, and I felt that I was not living completely. Even now, this very instant, true life was taking place beyond those windows, the other side of here. It was not the hardship of it - it was the lack of knowledge, the lack of certainty. Those windows, simultaneously decrepit and unashamed, might open anywhere, for they had no pride to guide them nor false friends to tell them tales. Now I saw the hand again in a different guise. I saw the past that had been heaped upon it, the history through which it had fought to become itself, the waste and loss that made it mortal, together with the purpose and resolve it carried beyond them both. I saw that it was right that it was a hand, rather than any other limb, for it grasped, consoled, concealed and protected, as well as cleared a path to the place that it would go, leading others after it.

We returned to the house in siIence. I had made my decision; I asked when I could move in, but already she was gazing down the empty road at the front of the house. There were other, prospective tenants coming to view the place, she said softly - to view the place and her; and, as she did so, something in her expression made it clear to me she wished the men and women in question were rounding the street corner even now, perhaps dragging their own destinies like babies along beside them.

"You won't, then, bear me upon the stage of this world?" I asked softly.

She was staring ahead, proudly and sadly; I admired her for not looking away, for not being ashamed either of her decision or her feelings, which seemed to run in entirely contrary directions.

"No," she said.

"And there is nothing I can do, to change things?"

She shook her head: "You are free," she added, as if she were releasing me of any obligation to understand her.

"Free to do what?"

"Just that."

“I would rather be tied to you, than free and alone, for all the world that I might miss.”

“Would you? Then fetter yourself.”

I remember her running across the garden in the sunlight, running across the garden and across the field, and I remember that the field was of full of straw, and some of the short blades about her legs were golden, and some of them were brown, in the same way that I remember the sweet smell of the field, which carried along with the scent of hay the freshness of dew from the garden, as she and the world were carried along a second time by the feet and the smooth legs and the grey-haired blessing of everything which has been overlooked or misunderstood. In the palm of her hand she was holding my life, the real life that had been mislaid, the life I always knew was really mine. It was the hand that opened the door, but it was still a hand at the bottom of a pool, as well, where the weed and fish swim together in the clear water of the glass. It was the hallowed hand she held before her; may it rule kingdoms, for it carries my destiny within it.