Half Broken Things

August

When the telephone rang it was just after one o’clock in the morning. Jean woke at the sound of it, her heart pounding.

‘Hello?’ She could hear a rushing noise, and piped music. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s me.’ It was Michael, fractured and afraid.

‘Oh, my goodness! Michael! Michael, are you all right? Where are you?’

‘I’m in one of those service stations. I want to come home. Is it all right? Is it all right to come home? Is everything all right?’

‘Yes! Yes, come at once! Come home, come straightaway. Where are you?’

‘In a service area, I’m not sure, on the M6, no, the M5, I’m near Birmingham.’

Jean said, ‘Oh! Oh, that’s miles, I thought you meant you’d be- Oh, you’ll be hours still. Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t stay up, I just wanted to check it was okay- it is okay, is it? There hasn’t been any trouble with- you know, anything?’

‘No! No, everything’s fine. We just want you home. Oh, hurry, won’t you- I mean, no- don’t, don’t hurry, drive safely. Be very careful. Oh, Michael!’

He arrived at three o’clock. Jean had got dressed again and was lying awake listening for the car, and as soon as she heard it she got up. Steph was downstairs before her and was already leading Michael into the kitchen. He was crying with tiredness, and was visibly thinner. They put him in a chair by the Aga. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe; he sucked in air and held it in the top of his chest and swallowed, as if fearful of letting it go. When he did breathe out, he sank physically as the air left his body and waited, it seemed for long minutes, before gulping in another chestful. It was painful to watch. Jean made tea and fussed, to conceal the fear she felt for him. Had he been eating? He was so thin, he must be starving! Michael shook his head.

‘No appetite,’ he said. His voice was rusty from lack of use. ‘I had no appetite. I was too scared. But now I’m here I am quite hungry. In fact, I really am hungry. I’m starving.’

Jean smiled. ‘Oh well, I can fix that. What would you like? A bacon sandwich? Scrambled eggs?’

Michael looked at her as if he were struggling to understand what she was saying. But the tea was already beginning to calm him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not bacon. I really couldn’t eat anything salty.’

‘Something sweet, then? What about something sweet?’

‘Maybe. I- I think first I want a bath, if that’s all right.’

Steph went ahead to run the water. When he came down again he looked even more tired. Jean had made a mound of toast and another pot of tea, at which Michael managed a smile, a little like one of his old ones. He sat down. But when he lifted the lid of the pot next to the butter, peered in and smelled the strawberry jam, he had to get up quickly, unbolt the back door and dash outside to be sick.

You read about such things in the papers, don’t you? Head in suitcase, torso in canal, that kind of thing, you think, how on earth has that come about? And you picture some monster getting up to all sorts, enjoying himself, and phrases like pure evil pop into your head. I know better, now. I know that the blackest deeds are not necessarily done by those with the blackest hearts. I know that in the first place we did not want to kill Mr Brookes; we had to. Second, we most certainly did not want to deny him a proper burial. Even less did we want to plant bits of him all over the country. But it was the only way to deal with the situation we found ourselves in, and he was dead anyway after all, it’s not as if we were doing any worse to him than had already happened.

But I fretted and cried after him. I tried to think, if there is a God, He knows all about it already. If He is there and serving any purpose, doesn’t He know everything anyway? So He’ll take care of poor, blameless Mr Brookes’s soul without the need for the coffin and prayers, surely. It would be a little trite of God, I thought, to insist on the coffin and the prayers in the circumstances. I prayed, yes, literally I prayed as if God might still be listening to me, that He would be above all that and see His way to dispensing with the niceties in Mr Brookes’s case. It worried me. Actually, it began to lose meaning, this connection we cling to, between the person lost and the stuff in the coffin. They’re not the same. Let’s be grateful they’re not the same. Let’s not burden ourselves with talk of souls, but let’s just separate the man from the meat; regret the passing of the man, even if only to shield ourselves from the fact that the meat has been jointed, carved, and distributed all over the place. We wish it could have been otherwise.

And if there is no God, well, what then? Then we’re all in it together, we’re all the same, there’s no escaping it. If there’s no God, then no one of us can be closer to him than the next person, so that dispenses with the religious haves and have-nots, and what a relief that is. When it comes to our deeds, I am not without conscience, but I think we all do what we have to, according to who we are and where we find ourselves. We cannot preserve the delusion that we are not mere creatures of clay, or that some of us are at heart any better or any worse than anyone else. Unless you believe in monsters, which on the whole, I do not. The point is, the whole Mr Brookes episode is as horrifying to us as if we had read it in the paper ourselves and shaken our heads in pity and disbelief. We are not monsters.

The night Michael returned he would not go to bed. Steph kissed him so tenderly when she went up, saying that Charlie would be awake and needing her in three hours’ time. I saw the tears start in his eyes when she said that, but he let her go, telling her he could not sleep just yet and would be up soon. We sat until the silence that followed Steph’s leaving us was absolute. I was waiting for him to talk, and he knew it. We sat downstairs until dawn. Still he would not go to bed because he did not think he could sleep just yet. And then, as I almost feared he would, he told me all about it.

I shall not, could not give you all of it here. But Michael had gone east and then north, disposing of those thirty-one bags, in thirty-one different places, between here and Scotland. He brought the road atlas and showed me, as much as he could remember. He had tried to work by night when he could, and in the daytime he would park up somewhere to sleep. The car parks of those large supermarkets on the edges of towns were often suitable, if he used one of the spaces furthest from the store entrances. But he never dared stay for more than two or three hours. He was afraid it might attract attention to be in one place too long, so several times a day he would move and find somewhere else, keeping his eyes open all the time for places to bury the bags that he could return to after dark. He used the washrooms in motorway service areas when he could. He wanted, he said, to keep looking slept and clean and shaved, like somebody who might own a Mercedes, not some ragbag. When a person is described as ‘suspicious-looking’, apparently, it usually means they look tired and poor and not very clean. But he couldn’t eat, and he knew he was beginning to look half-starved and haunted.

By night he would park in as concealed a place as he could find, and then take the spade, a few of the bags, the torch, and go off. After the first night or two he decided the spade was not such a good idea. He bought a trowel and handfork, and another backpack that he lined with plastic sheeting. Each night, with two or three bags from the boot in the backpack, and the tools in his pockets, he would set off looking for burial places. It looked less suspicious, he said, as if he were just setting out on a night hike.

It is amazing when you start to look, he said, how many places there are that never get walked over or noticed, even though nearby people are coming and going all day. He dug holes on those patchy and desolate stretches of ground where people do not go, not even to walk dogs, the soft ditches at field corners where no footpaths cross and where no ploughs go. He even buried two bags deep in the middle of a huge roundabout, planted with thick shrubs and trees.

As he went further north he began to seek out remoter places, though it was hard to judge how suitable the ground would be. He walked long distances in the dark, managing whenever he could by moonlight. On some nights he would hit rock not far below the ground’s surface, and then he would have to give up, the night wasted, and take the bags back to the boot. And the boot was beginning to smell. But he never gave in to the temptation just to drop bags in a litter bin and get away, or to scratch shallow holes for the bags and cover them over quickly. He always dug deep, emptied the contents of the bag in with the remains of the salt, filled the hole and trod over and around it carefully, replacing any turf. The thought of an excited dog with a wagging tail dropping some freshly dug-up part of Gordon Brookes at its owner’s feet filled him with horror. Not one of those bags must ever be found.

But just in case any should be, he avoided leaving them in any discernible trail. He branched off the M1 and wound through the High Peak District of Derbyshire, then continued due west into Cheshire and turned north again on the other side of the country, on the M6. From there he made detours into the Forest of Bowland and Swaledale. He crossed the country again south of the border, and drove east to Newcastle and then set off northwest through the Cheviots, entering Scotland at Hawick. But he could only get rid of three or four bags a night, at the very most. The boot seemed almost as full as when he had begun. So he pressed on, beyond Glasgow, across the Forth Road Bridge into Fife, burying bags where he could. The last two went into the North Sea at a place called Garron Point, north of Stonehaven. The next day he bought a large container of disinfectant, emptied it over the boot of the car, and headed south.

As he told me all this I asked questions: but how did you manage it, were you not frightened, how could you drive so far, on next to no sleep and little food? To my ears it was heroic. It hadn’t occurred to Michael to see it that way, but I was overwhelmed with admiration. Bit by bit as he talked and the day grew bright, some of the flint that was in him began to melt out. It came gradually, his understanding that it was all over. I sent him up to bed just as Steph was coming down. He went willingly. Now he could rest. The massive effort was over and we were back together again, and safe.

Jean was kept busy with the plums. There were six or seven trees, some bearing red fruit and some purple, and a golden one that she told the others were greengages. She decided against jam. But she read up about stewing, purйeing and freezing plums; she made them plum tart and plum charlotte, working in the kitchen with the radio on. She paid special attention to the news, dreading to hear anything about the discovery of human remains. No news came. She was now even more grateful for every day that passed. Each morning she would wake with the thought that another twenty-four hours had gone by which, even as she slept, had been doing their degrading, natural work. With every moment that passed Gordon Brookes was being returned to earth, dissolving hourly into the elements in which he lay.

She watched Michael, willing him to mend. After several days during which he did not get out of bed, he re-emerged with a white face and unsteady eyes. He blinked too often and glanced away to the side every two or three seconds, as if he had suddenly heard a soft but unwelcome noise over his shoulder. He had also developed a habit of giving tight little sniffs which would momentarily convulse the muscles in his throat. But the days of August stretched on, the time between the present and the past grew longer, and the events which had threatened his near-collapse seemed to fade in his mind. He did not get any worse. Jean trusted to the passing of more time and to the house itself to heal him, as she knew they would.

The summer continued hot. Some of the trees all but dried up and began to drop their leaves ahead of time, before their colours changed. They lay like torn paper strips painted dark green on one side and pale grey on the other and set out on the ground to curl under the sun. Jean pointed out to Michael the jobs in the garden that she considered mellow, soothing, and in keeping with the season, sending him out to be among the fallen leaves, not because she wanted them tidied up (she very much liked the dry swirl of them under the trees) but because she thought it would please him to feel their papery weightlessness in his arms.

It was not a particularly theatrical August. These days a mist lay on the garden until late morning. Amber blisters broke out over the remaining plums. They oozed and then rotted on the trees and on the ground; wasps feasted. In the flower beds it was the turn of the geraniums and carnations to eclipse the waning early flowers, the roses and monkshood, but everywhere the colours looked a little exhausted.

Charlie was less content to be carried round the garden on Steph’s hip having the names of colours told him; he wriggled now to be put down on the grass, where he would sit for a moment, pointing, and then lunge forward trying to reach the flowers, desperate to get among them. He could bounce along quite fast, and needed constant watching. Steph fretted pleasurably about his increased independence and mobility. She was worn out, she said. What with Charlie being here all the time, she was being run ragged. And he would put anything in his mouth. One day Jean came out to the garden to find her entire wooden spoon collection in a circle around him on his mat and Charlie sitting with his arms stretched up towards her, two bright red circles on his cheeks. He was teething.

There followed some disturbed nights and days of frantic gnawing, bad temper and a burning temperature. It was Steph and Michael together who saw him through it. They took it in turns to rise as soon as they heard him cry and dose him with Baby Calpol. For four nights in a row they walked the hot little bundle up and down with a cold flannel against his face. Then there were two twin white stumps in the centre of his lower jaw. It seemed to bring Michael round. His smile, which had been tight, filled out again. He laughed. Sally, who rang Steph once a week or so, sounded sorry in a remote kind of way to have missed her baby’s first tooth. Steph promised to take a photograph. In the meantime Simon, Sally said, was no worse, but neither was he much better. She could not come home yet. Steph told her not to worry.

Not only the colours in the garden faded, but the skies changed too, and in the afternoons the light shining on the walls of the house was gold. Inside the house Jean noticed the scent of roses and from the windows, looking up from what she was doing, she liked to watch Michael and Steph in the garden with Charlie, whose good humour was quite restored. Now once again there would be singing, and shrieking and laughing, and Michael and Steph swinging Charlie up high between them, then quiet spells. That was when Jean liked to walk slowly outside to join them. Charlie would be either asleep, or amusing himself on a rug in the shade, Steph would be lying or strolling about nearby. Michael most often would be reading. A pretty picture they made, or perhaps they created something more like a line in a poem than a picture, because the faint reluctance Jean sometimes felt to walk in and become part of it was not a fear of sullying the thing visually. It was an appreciation of the scene’s completeness, and her utter contentment in standing there beholding it, that sometimes made her wonder if adding herself to it would be clumsy. For she was beginning to feel the slight separation that comes with being the first to realise something important, ahead of other people. The date was beginning to weigh on her mind, and, with her face as calm as ever, she now, as she went about her work, would be wondering about it, thinking what to do. She would not discuss it with the others, not yet; she liked to be thinking it over for herself as she watched them out in the garden, oblivious. She did not want to burden them with it yet. Then they would look round and see her, and call out, and she would go towards them, smiling. So they would lie about talking and playing until it was time to go in. They were impossibly happy.

I did say earlier that it is amazing to me the way this house seems to provide what we need. It amazes me further that it provides it just when it is needed. For it is only now, in August, that I have remembered about monkshood although I have been tending the flowers, picking them, learning about them from the gardening books, arranging them, all this time. And I have known for years that monkshood is a poisonous plant, but it was only when Steph was talking about Charlie, who is now crawling and putting all sorts in his mouth, that I wondered how safe he would be in the garden, and then, as if I had only just seen it for the first time, I became aware of the monkshood. Aconitum, to give it its proper name.

And I also see, but only now, that the things I have been remembering and writing down here about Mother- things which I have not thought about for years- are part of all this. Not just rambling digressions on my part, but stopping places on the way to where I am now. All this time I have been becoming the person I am. I have always been heading this way.

This is the point. On the day of that row with Mother, eighteen years ago, with the buddleia swinging in the wind outside, it wasn’t the news about the clock that did it. Mother and I had stopped screaming at each other. The row was over, really, and we had reverted to our usual calm hostility. But in the silence, when I was going about all the things I had to do to her- the washing, the wiping, the hair, the tablets, the breakfast, the cleaning up, the rubbing of her elbows and heels with meths to stop her getting bedsores, tidying the bed- we were both thinking up things to hurt the other with.

Who can say what might have happened if she had not got in first? But worse than the actual information she gave me was the offhand pleasure she took in it.

‘Oh, yes, moan moan. You can moan,’ she said. ‘Go on, I’m used to it. But if you didn’t have me you wouldn’t have anybody, would you? I’m all you’ve got. It’s not as if you’ve got any friends, is it?’

‘May I remind you,’ I said, ‘may I just remind you that in actual fact I do have a mother?’ I was plumping up her pillows, bashing them with my fist. ‘Not you. I don’t mean you. I’m talking about a mother, a real one. I at least have a blood relation.’

‘Oh,’ she said, looking past me, ‘you still think that, do you? Well, allow me to inform you that you are sadly mistaken.’

I was confused to begin with. But hadn’t she said, just after Father died, that my real mother had not died when I was four, she had given me up? Wasn’t that what Mother had said? (Wasn’t that what I had been holding on to, the hope that I would find her some day?) Mother said, still breezy, oh, yes, but she died later. She had not bothered to remember quite when.

I wanted to die myself then, for shame perhaps. For shame that some ordinary day, any dull old day when I got on and off buses, filed carbon copies, ate biscuits, bought stockings, God knows what banal things, was the day on which my real mother died. On that day I had been oblivious. I spoke no word, took no farewell, did not grieve. I did not know the day or even the year she died. Oh, well, Mother said, relishing it, it was maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. Then I thought, she’s lying, the whole thing is a lie. But no, she knew this because my real mother had kept in touch with the adoption bureau, keeping them up to date with her address, in case one day I ever wanted to contact her. Mother had never told me that, either. The bureau had been informed when she died and had passed the news on to Mother but, as she pointed out, what was the use in telling me? It wasn’t as if I knew her.

Until that precise moment I had considered the Mr Hapgood episode as the worst thing that had ever been done to me. In a way it was- as a deed actively done, I mean, or a set of deeds performed but then over and finished with- but now I suddenly saw that Mother’s treatment of me so outclassed Mr Hapgood’s in malice that it amazed me that I had not seen it before. For Mother, without actually doing very much, had been busy. Over the years, forty-one of them by that time, she had been so constantly and perniciously denying me her care and approval that my state of permanent want had become a strand, no, the very substance of my character. I suppose I had grown to think of it as an inability on her part, something she couldn’t help, but suddenly I saw that she had withheld things from me so conscientiously, in so meticulous and thorough a manner, that it must have been deliberate, worked at. It had not occurred to me before then that I had a right to be angry. But now I thought, what sort of person would do that?

Mother’s bedroom was on the ground floor, behind the kitchen. I opened the top pane of her window, because the room really did need freshening up, though she complained that it was too windy. I left her door open a crack. Perhaps I was in shock and perhaps I wasn’t, but I must have omitted to turn off the burner of the cooker when I had made her usual breakfast of porridge. Then I fetched my coat, bag, purse, keys and shopping bag. And before I left, I must have dropped a tea towel carelessly, because one edge was touching the burner and the other fell over the worktop where there were three or four cotton wool pads soaked with methylated spirit (left from when I had been rubbing her elbows and heels to keep the skin strong). The bottle stood alongside the roll of cotton wool, and evidently I had omitted to replace the cap. The wind must have blown it over. I left the door from the kitchen into the front hall open, too. I didn’t go to the office that day or, in fact, ever again. I did some unnecessary shopping, slowly. Then I sat for half an hour over a cup of coffee. Then, as it was a fine, blustery day, I took a long walk along the towpath, and I thought about my mother, my real one. I must have been out for over four hours, but what with the through draught and our old-fashioned kitchen cupboards of painted wood (I had been on at Mother for years to change them) the ground floor had gone up in less than two hours.

Everyone was so kind. Mother had been found in the kitchen, they said, obviously trying to make herself a cup of tea or something. I kept quiet about the fact that Mother would rather lie for a week with a mouth like a desert than get up to make her own tea. They said she could not have noticed what she was doing with the tea towel, and she must have panicked when the meths caught alight. Anyway, although she might also have suffered a mild heart attack, it was smoke inhalation that killed her.

The fire almost destroyed the house, which turned out to be under-insured. The sale of the house was just enough to pay off the builders for the rebuilding work. I have been a house sitter since, joining Town and Country with a reference from nice Roger Palmer of Oakfield Avenue, who agreed with me that there was no need to mention the house fire business. All this time I have been becoming the person I am today.

So, as you see, I am capable of such an act. I admit it, but because I am still not sure what I intended, I cannot say exactly just what the act was. I do know that it was the opposite of coldblooded. My blood that day was close to boiling, but I certainly was not out of control. I am not sure whether or not that makes what I did deliberate.

Nor am I cold-blooded now, in considering the monkshood. If I can contemplate the next step calmly, it is only because I know that that is the state of mind necessary. Besides, I am doing it for all of us. And I feel responsible, and that always has a calming effect, I think.

I looked it up in the garden book, just to be sure. It says, ‘Monkshood is a useful plant, bearing graceful, small bell-like blooms of an intense blue up and down its stem. Its leaves are attractively pinked in appearance, and it makes an effective filler for the back of the mixed border. No attention is necessary. All parts of the plant are very poisonous, especially the roots.’

Because there is nothing I can do to stop the Standish-Caves coming here. They are expected soon. I have the date. In fact I have always had the date, though I have been unable until now to connect it with something that might actually happen. But Shelley rang to check up on me again and to confirm the date. She has informed me that they will be taking a taxi from Heathrow and will be here by half past four on that day. They want me to be here to hand over the keys, and expect me to be ready to go by six o’clock.

That being so, I thought, I shall have tea ready for them. They shall be received with such ceremony and circumstance, by this humble, fawning, slightly embarrassing house sitter, that they will not refuse. I shall make such an obsequious fuss and show of this cake I have made for them that they will indulge me. I shall bake them a cake to welcome them back, made with apples, honey, fruit and spice, which will mask any foreign taste, assuming that monkshood has any. I think it more likely that it imparts a bitterness, that is all. And with the spices to distract the tastebuds, any slight bitterness on the tongue will not be noticed until after enough has been swallowed.

Jean began to glow with her idea. As she worked in the house, she planned it in detail. On the day when she believed that she had it perfect in her mind, she went to the walled garden. Michael stretched up from picking beans and together they strolled down towards the paddock. It was after five o’clock, and Steph had taken Charlie indoors for his bath.

It was, of course, unthinkable. But it was less unthinkable than all of them having to leave Walden and have all the other things catch up with them. Only that would be truly unallowable. Michael saw that at once.

‘A cake? Are you sure it’ll work?’

‘I’m going to use the roots. They’re the most poisonous part. I’ll grate it up small, it’ll look like ginger. All the books say it’s deadly.’

‘But even if it works… even if it does, somebody will know, won’t they? People will know they’re coming back. They’ll be missed.’

‘Listen. I’ll tell Town and Country that the Standish-Caves came back as planned but then they decided not to stay here after all, and went off back to the States. But even though the contract with Town and Country has expired they’re keeping me on themselves, privately, because I know the house so well by now. And it’s for an indefinite period, because Mr Standish-Cave’s been developing some business interests over there. All right?’

‘But what about money? There won’t be any more coming in. How will we manage?’

We can write to their bank again, can’t we? We can instruct them to carry on paying me, double my salary even. And they’ll have credit cards on them. Chequebooks for their other accounts, passports. We’ll be able to get at all their accounts.’

‘I’ve already got stuff on all their investments. It’s all in the study. I could set up an e-mail address. I’ll say I’m him, I’ll e-mail the whole lot of them, the bank, the advisor, everybody, tell them to use e-mail now, because I’m living abroad. Oh God, it’d work.’

‘And you could say that all statements and all the correspondence are to be sent to Walden Manor from now on, because you might be moving about and there would be arrangements there for forwarding things.’

They had walked round the paddock and returned to the garden. Now they were sitting side by side on a bench green with mould, looking down the path towards the gate in the far wall. Beyond, across the back lawn, stood the dark wall of the house. Jean waited for Michael, who looked excited but still fearful, to speak again.

‘We could just go on as before,’ he said softly. ‘We won’t be greedy, will we? When we get the statements for the other accounts we’ll see what comes in from the investments and what they spend. We’ll just make sure we don’t get through any more than that. There’ll be enough for everything. Repairs when we need them, everything.’

‘Yes, and I was thinking… Charlie’s going to need a swing soon. You could fix one up in one of the trees. And we could get him a slide.’

‘And Steph quite fancies getting a cat. Somebody’s selling kittens, she says, there’s an ad in the village shop. We could get a cat.’

‘Well, yes, we could. We should get two, though, I believe they’re happier in pairs. Oh, we could do all sorts of things.’

‘It’d work. Nobody would ever know.’

‘We just need to get through the… the necessary part, the awful bit. Without making mistakes, or getting frightened and giving up.’

‘It’ll be easier this time. We weren’t expecting it last time, it was crazy, horrible, it just came at us out of the blue. This time we can plan it. We’ve got time to get everything right.’

‘And when we- you know- when we have to get rid of them, you won’t have to do all that again. You needn’t go off with them, in a hurry, like last time. We’ll think of something else. There must be easier ways, more gradual. Burning, maybe.’

‘We’ve got to manage it somehow,’ Michael said, looking straight ahead. ‘Otherwise we won’t ever be safe.’

‘We will. Because we’ve got to,’ Jean said. ‘And when we do, we’ll be safe forever.’

It was twilight when they walked back down the path to the house. Steph had come back downstairs with Charlie and had switched on lights as she went. Their yellow glow shone from every window into the surrounding dark.

Michael got down to some serious planning the next day. What, he said, if they decided to do a tour of the house and garden the moment they arrived? Jean shook her head.

‘I suppose they might. But I’ll be at the door when they arrive, I’ll tell them tea’s already poured in the kitchen. Even if they do look round quickly, it won’t look so different, will it? Even if they notice one or two things, suppose they see there are no photographs on the tables for instance, I’ll say I put them away for safe keeping.’

‘What if they go upstairs?’

‘They won’t. And just in case they do, I’ll move my things back into the tiny little room they gave me. Move your things up to the attic. And I’ll lock the nursery and not be able to find the key.’

Over the next few days, together they made lists of what had to be done. Michael bought Jean a cotton skirt and top from the supermarket to wear on the day, since Mrs Standish-Cave might well recognise even the blandest of her own clothes on Jean. They planned that on the day they were due back, Michael’s van, and Michael and Steph and Charlie, would be nowhere in sight. But Michael, having left Steph and Charlie somewhere with the van, would walk back and stay out of the way but close at hand, ready to come the moment Jean called out for him.

Jean found the pieces of broken porcelain at the back of the cupboard where she had put them in January, and made a passable attempt at reassembling the teapot. Back in one piece, though crazed now with a frenzy of fine golden glue lines, it sat once again in its place on the sideboard in the dining room. Nearer the time Jean would replace the keys in it, in case the Standish-Caves wanted to get their hands on them even before tea. Jean also decided that if she set a large bowl of flowers on the dining table, it would prevent their noticing the black rings that had appeared on it since they had seen it last. Michael said that the day before they came back he would clean the pool, replace the winter cover and close up the pavilion. But all these were precautions. Jean could not imagine that the Standish-Caves would do anything other than come to the kitchen and sink their grateful teeth into her cake. She would have slices of it cut and ready for them on plates, waiting.

Shocking, isn’t it? It shocks me. And I do truly hate violence. I do not say this with any pride, but if I am a killer, I am a gentle one. After all, I saw to Mother with a tea towel, and this time I’m doing it with cake. Hardly offensive weapons. But I hope the necessity for it is understood, and I shall make it a very strong dose that works quickly. I intend to do all I can to avoid unnecessary suffering.

There has been, however, a change of plan.

It was Mr Standish-Cave’s telephone call. He sounded nice. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but not such a concerned and pleasant person. He said he was ringing just to ask me to be very, very sure that there was nothing in the house that would remind his wife of babies. He was certain, really, that he had put all the baby things into the nursery and locked it, but just in case, would I go round and check before they arrived. I must have sounded surprised because he went on to explain. They had not been able to bring their baby home. He had died in hospital when he was five months old, after a number of operations. His wife had had a breakdown over it; that was why they had been abroad for so long. She was much better now, but frail, and he wanted her to be eased gradually back into things, not be reminded too suddenly of the previous terrible year. And, he was delighted to say, she was pregnant again. So I said oh, how lovely, now you have everything to look forward to. And he said yes, we feel so lucky. His voice grew slightly hoarse when he said that.

You see? It changes everything. It’s one perfect chance. One perfect chance to get the important things right. A curled, waiting, perfect chance, and it’s theirs. When I think of all the messes and inadequacies we have been caught up in and have, no doubt, contributed to- there’s me and Mother and my real mother, Steph and her hopeless parents and her first baby, and Miranda, and then there’s Michael’s poor child-mother and kind, puzzled Beth and Barry and then there’s Sally treating Charlie like an encumbrance, and that husband who’s waltzed off to put other people’s lives right- I think, we got it spectacularly wrong, didn’t we? Somehow we got it all spectacularly wrong, and for the most part it wasn’t even our fault. And here in this house, we’ve been able to put so much right. It fills me with happiness that we have been able to do that. It redresses a balance.

And that, surely, should be enough. I’m still tempted to think that we really could arrange matters so that everything goes on just as it is, and forever, but in the end, we are not greedy. We are not monsters. We made our own and our only perfect chance here in this house, and we took it, with whole hearts and together, and we lived it out, every moment. And with our hearts still full, and still together, we should leave others now to their perfect chance. The Standish-Caves might make wonderful parents, and they might not, but I think they should be allowed their perfect chance, too. The truth of it is that even before we came here, time was pretty much up for us all. There can be nothing good waiting for any of us beyond this. We seized our perfect chance at the last possible moment.

Besides, how long would we have? How long before our lovely lives unravelled again? It would not take much; do the Standish-Caves not have parents, or other family, or friends? For how long would they be content to communicate by e-mail, even supposing we made no disastrous mistakes? How long before someone discovered that the Standish-Caves were not ‘abroad’, and came knocking on our door to find out where they really were? I’ve come to the conclusion that the world just will not go away. That’s all we want it to do, just go away and leave us in peace. But it won’t. It never does. It keeps at you, prodding and pricking till you’re demented, slicing at all your defences till you’d do anything just for a place to lie and gasp, and even if you’re lucky enough to find one, it’s just when you’re beginning to breathe normally that it comes after you again. The whole idea that we could keep the world away indefinitely was, of course, desperate. You can go ahead and call it mad if you like, I wouldn’t.

So the change of plan came into my mind, and my mind, I assure you, is as clear as could be. And when I changed the plan, I began to come up here to the study to write my report in the afternoons, feeling that I should like everything to be understood, even though I am not sure who I am writing to, exactly. I have been coming up for a few hours each day for about twelve days now. The Standish-Caves are due back on the 3rd of September. It is the 31st of August. Tomorrow morning I shall put all these pages I have written into an envelope and send Michael to post it, first class, to Shelley. That’s the obvious destination, I can rely on Shelley to get things moving. But I do not know who will be here first (the post is so unreliable these days), whether it will be Shelley herself, or the police, whom Shelley is sure to contact at once, or the Standish-Caves. I do apologise to whoever it is for what is sure to be an unpleasant discovery. I should like to leave things somewhat tidier, but I don’t believe that’s possible.

You see, I have told Steph and Michael that it is my birthday tomorrow. I think that right this minute down there in the garden they are discussing what they might give me as a birthday present, but of course they have given me everything already. Thanks to them I am not just an agoraphobic old woman with wild hair, I am Michael’s mother, a devoted mother-in-law and grandmother, a homemaker. They gave me that. Steph is not just a sleepy, tongue-tied girl in strange baggy clothes, nor is Michael to be dismissed as a depressive with nervous eyes and an occasional facial tic. We are a family. And for that reason, I’m afraid it is necessary to include Charlie in this. He would be lost without us. You may say he would still have Sally, but that would be to overlook an important point. I have met Sally, of course, and spoken to her on the telephone and heard enough about her from Steph, to know that as Charlie grows up Sally might take on the world for him. She’ll be shrill on his behalf, abuse his teachers, insist on his rights. He’ll get the best in car seats, bicycle crash helmets, orthodontics and for all I know hot air ballooning lessons, but will he know a moment’s peace? What will she do when he is frightened, lonely and unsure? Do you think she will wrap him round quietly, with wisdom and warmth, make him feel strong, and secure, and wanted? No, it has to be this way, to save him knowing what it is to grow up with a mother who does not really want him, not enough. He must be spared that.

The sun is leaving the garden now. From about now until sunset the edge of the house will cast a shadow like a sundial across the grass, between the willow tree whose leaves Michael swept up the other day and Miranda’s grave, where Steph’s marigolds are finishing now. There is a coolness in the air already; I shall ask Michael to light a fire this evening. I wish every remaining hour of today and tomorrow to be gracious and pleasant.

I have made a cake for my birthday, of course. It is in the oven now, a honey cake with the necessary amount of spice added. I shall give it a layer of icing for extra sweetness. I expect they will find some candles for it. And at teatime tomorrow I shall blow out my candles and cut the cake into slices. I shall mash up a little bit with ice cream and feed it to Charlie myself, and when I have seen Steph and Michael bite into theirs, I shall eat my own. I shall spare them from knowing, beyond a little bitterness on the tongue, that the end has come.

Now I realise that it is the house that has brought us to this. For this house is itself a kind of deep and slow-ticking clock, in which our days have spent themselves as imperceptibly as a perfect mechanism winds down or a living heart beats towards its own end; the days have ticked out so quietly that it seems that our hearts have beaten with more mellow calibrations than before. Our passing lives have slipped by us here in the way that a song cheats time. When I hear Steph singing her song to Charlie,

I want every note to float to the next, not caring that in the very singing of the song, time is being depleted. The house has shaken out time itself upon us like a garment that we have gathered around ourselves, Steph, Michael and me. So we shall spend a last day here. Steph will sing her songs to Charlie and I shall listen, smiling. Michael will watch over us all with his careful eyes as the last of our finite, peaceful days passes, wrapping us at the end in time’s warmth and in our great and reciprocal gift of love.