I managed to get the cork out with a screwdriver. It seemed to take me forever. My mother accepted a glass of wine without comment and we resumed talking about the plants she would put in that would provide food and shade for the tortoise. I wondered what she would do when everything was complete and it was very close to being complete. Grief is dangerous work, I thought again, but when you have overcome it and it passes away, are you not left more bewildered and defenceless than ever?

Instead, it turned out that my mother had not built the home for the as-yet-unrealized tortoise on her land. A real estate agent came out to see if the adjacent area would appraise out to make it worthwhile to subdivide and noted the error. The enclosure was well within her client’s property line and had to be removed.

Appraised out, my mother said. Who comes up with these dreadful phrases . . . I agreed that language was becoming uglier the more it was becoming irrelevant to our needs.

My mother took on the task of dismantling everything she had accomplished. She broke up the walls and trucked away the rubble. She even dug out the filled trench. Then she rough-raked the ground and rolled some of the large stones back into place. She left the few flowering shrubs and grasses she had so recently planted but without protection the birds and animals that are so seldom seen quickly consumed them. Such is their need.

[...] His wife fed me a treasured Czech recipe which was so garlicky that the next day Marie-Claude wordlessly gave me chlorophyll gum and at the movies the couple in the row in front of us got up and took different seats when she and I sat down behind them.

‘Is it possible to make a work of art that is not embodied in an object?’

A ponderous silence.

‘Well?’ said Delia.

‘Is it the artist’s job to answer questions, or to ask them?’

In a classroom in Manhattan on a rainy day, my perception of art was changed forever. Vito Acconci’s pedagogy was a mixture of persistent enquiry, faith in the invisible and nudges toward the unknown. It struck me for the first time that art might exist beyond the realms of painting and sculpture. This was a mind-boggling revelation, like opening a door in your own house and discovering an entirely new room. My jaw went lax, my breathing deepened. The spirit of conceptualism had entered me, and I became a convert then and there.