Half Broken Things

April

Life acquired fluency. On good days, which came more frequently, there were long stretches of peace, even glimpses of grace. The weather improved and bulbs came up all over the grass and around the garden. Jean brought in tulips and daffodils by the armload and for the first time in her life was amazed by them. How had she missed them all these years, she wondered; their colours, the clinging, yearning scent, the slippery sap and the stamens, so unbearably naked and tuned to the air that it was impossible to believe they were not receiving some strain of music too fine for human ears. She discussed with the others what vases she should use and where they would like them put, and she was pleased when one day Michael said he didn’t much mind, just whatever she thought, anywhere was fine as far as he was concerned. His mildly distracted indifference struck her as affectionate; she felt promoted. His taking her somewhat for granted confirmed not just their familiarity but also his security in their relationship, and perhaps there really was something endearing about her, something elusive that only a son could see. She hummed as she trimmed stems and filled vases, to show that her prettifying efforts were for fun and she was not being fussy and anxious. Most of the flowers went in the drawing room for Steph, who said that she might get around to doing a painting of them sometime. On days when Miranda consented to sleep (which she did more and more, and even took on a slight listlessness when awake which they all agreed was a sign that she was nice and relaxed) Steph would settle on the drawing-room sofa in the afternoon while Jean and Michael flitted about on little tasks which seemed to please them, Jean most often around the kitchen, Michael ranging more widely about the garden and outbuildings as he searched out things that needed doing.

One morning early in the month the telephone rang while they were having breakfast. A man, who introduced himself as Stan, told Jean wearily that he could send one of the boys round later in the week to mow the lawns. As long as that was convenient to herself, he added, as per the arrangement.

‘Oh! Oh my goodness, arrangement? What arrangement? This week?…’ Jean turned to see Michael and Steph sitting upright and alarmed, and realised that her voice had sounded frightened.

‘Ma’am? The arrangement for the grass. I was told you’d know all about it. Shan’t inconvenience you at all, ma’am,’ Stan said, implying that the inconvenience would be his.

‘The grass? Well, I… I couldn’t say. How- I mean I’m not sure…’

‘The arrangement, ma’am, didn’t they tell you? They said there’d be somebody here that knew the score.’ When Jean said nothing he went on, even more wearily, ‘Ma’am, I farm the next land. Mr Standish-Cave lets me have his hay from the fields either side of his driveway, and for that I get one of my boys to cut his grass when he’s away. Suits us both, except I’m short of hands. So I’m not saying we’ll be round every week but I can spare Darren Thursday, most probably.’

There was a silence. There had been something on the owners’ list about the grass but Jean could not remember what. Until this moment she had not given the grass a thought beyond thinking it was getting rather long; it was silly of her, for of course it would need mowing. But not by an outsider. She said, ‘Well, actually, if you’re short of hands, there’s no need. I’m sure we can manage. It’s only a bit of grass cutting.’

‘There’s a lot of lawns, ma’am. You’re not planning driving the mower yourself, are you?’

‘Well, no, I don’t suppose so. But we, I…’ She looked at Michael. ‘I have someone here. I’m sure he’s perfectly willing. Then there would be no need to bother you, would there?’

Stan brightened. ‘That’s made my day, that has. I don’t mind doing it, mind, but it’s hard to fit in, come summer. If your visitor’s up to it, good on him, and you thank him from me. Only,’ he said, ‘I wonder, ma’am, if you’d mind not saying… you know, to Mr Standish-Cave. Thing is, you see, I’d still owe him then, wouldn’t I? You with me, ma’am? I mean I would do it, only if you’re telling me there’s no need… and it’s only a bit of hay at the end of the day, isn’t it?’ He laughed.

‘Quite right,’ Jean said. ‘You’re quite right, I shan’t bother to mention it. Goodbye.’

After she had put down the telephone they remained tense for a few moments. Then Steph said, trustingly, ‘No problem, is there?’

‘No. Oh no, it’s just-’ It was just what, Jean wondered. That matters such as grass-cutting, and a hundred others, were not for her to decide because the house was not hers and she had somehow not been able to bring herself to spell that out? That Michael and Steph had no right to be here because she herself was only temporary, transient, and belonged, in the end, nowhere? It was all too unsavoury. Jean looked slowly from one to the other and decided that they understood it all anyway, and more than that, they understood the need not to go into any of it.

‘It’s just- oh, arrangements,’ she said. ‘You know. If it’s not the grass it’s another thing. But I don’t think we want to be disturbed, do we? I should think we can manage by ourselves.’

‘Definitely,’ Michael said.

Steph shifted Miranda to the other breast and nodded. We don’t need nobody else.’

Jean reached for the coffee pot and refilled Steph’s cup. ‘You keep your fluids up now. Michael, I think the mower keys are in the jar on the window sill.’

Michael cut the grass that day, chugging pleasurably on the tractor mower, learning how to corner just at the right moment for the blade to snatch the edges of the grass without munching into the plants in the borders. The smell of the cut grass brought Jean and Steph outside, and Michael made a note that later he would scrub down the wooden table and chairs by the kitchen door so that they could sit there when it was warm enough.

Over the next couple of weeks he made it his business to discover the extent and nature of the grounds, the condition of window fastenings, door latches, furniture. He even inspected the roof, tutted over blocked guttering, and spent two days clearing out wet and wormy leaves, wearing huge industrial gloves. He cleaned and oiled garden tools. It was a house with more behind-the-scenes arrangements for comfort than he had ever seen; it felt like a theatre. He found out what appliances, machinery and systems made it all work and came to understand the boiler, the septic tank, the water softener, the plumbing, the Aga. Mentally he stored up projects for himself for the next day, the week after, next month. He bled the radiators, sawed up some felled logs on the edge of the woods. Thinking of Steph and Miranda, he planned that soon he would master the swimming pool.

Yet in all these things he was a little less than proprietorial, behaving more like a respectful and discreet householder-elect. It was with a sense of his filial duty, a grown-up obligation to help his capable but ageing mother with such a large house, that he took some of the weight on his younger shoulders. Jean observed him with increasing pride that she should inspire such quiet and solid devotion, and that he should express it in ways that she thought so apt and so manly.

But perversely, as the good days became more frequent, the bad days when they came grew worse. There were days on which Jean woke with her heart pounding so hard that she felt she had been thrown out of a dream about an impending collision, just a second before the moment of impact. Saying nothing, she began to dread her trips to the freezers, whose pickings were growing thin. She felt guilty about her early lavishness with the beef, salmon and game of which the supply had once seemed endless. Her generosity and the sense of celebration she attached to feeding everybody had been, she now saw, simple profligacy and poor husbandry. One morning she came back from the freezers with a packet of sausages to find Steph in the kitchen.

‘Oh hiya,’ Steph said, backing out of the fridge with a packet of bacon in one hand and a butter dish in the other. ‘I’m starving. Got to have a bacon sarnie.’ She set the things on the table and pulled a baking tray (the wrong one, Jean observed, not the one to use for bacon) from the pan drawer. Jean watched her as she peeled five slices from the bacon packet and laid them out on the tray.

‘But you’ve already had bacon for breakfast. About two hours ago,’ Jean said, in a rather ringing voice. ‘That’s all that’s left now.’

‘I know,’ Steph said, turning flat eyes to Jean’s. ‘Isn’t it awful. I’m that hungry. I’ll get huge. Must be the feeding, I’m just really hungry the whole time.’ She smiled lazily. Jean watched in silence as Steph slid the tray of bacon that was meant to be tomorrow’s breakfast into the top of the Aga. She tried to expel, in a long sigh, the resentment she felt at the commandeering of her oven. Her oven, her kitchen, her baking tray (the wrong one for bacon).

Steph was nosing in the bread bin now. ‘Bread’s finished as well, once I’ve had this,’ she said, taking out the end of a loaf. She sniffed it. ‘Needs using anyway.’

‘Steph-.’ There were no more than two or three loaves of bread left in the freezer now. Jean hesitated. She was in danger of saying something tight and mother-in-lawish. There was flour in the kitchen cupboards, after all, and dried yeast. They would be all right for a while.

‘Know what I was thinking?’ Steph was saying, as she went about sawing the bread into slabs. ‘I was thinking Miranda’s room could do with-’ She glanced at Jean apologetically. ‘I mean it’s lovely and everything- but it’s, like, kind of serious? A bit old-fashioned? What with the panelling, it’s kind of dark, you know?’ When Jean did not answer she went on, ‘I mean it’s lovely, as panelling. But I’ve always wanted to do a baby’s mural, you know, paint things on the wall. A cartoon character, maybe. Life size, and like in a kind of setting that you paint them in, maybe a castle or a forest or on a mountain or whatever.’ She waved her hands in the air. She did not seem to notice that Jean was not filling the silence with an enthusiastic response. ‘Saw an Aladdin one in a magazine once. I’d only need a bit of paint in maybe eight, ten colours, and the brushes. I could do a really nice job. I mean I’m not professional but I’m not rubbish, I could do it really nice. Is there any paint, sort of, around anywhere?’

She wandered along the row of wall cupboards, opening them until she found tomato ketchup, which Jean considered a ruination of good bacon. The plastic bottle wheezed two long red worms of the stuff onto the slices of bread. Then Steph set the bottle down so hard that a bead of ketchup still hanging from the top flew off and spattered on the worktop, which Jean had lately wiped clean.

‘Though it doesn’t matter if there isn’t because it doesn’t cost much, paint. I mean if I could get it myself I would, only I’m not exactly earning anything at the moment, am I? I mean soon as I was I’d pay you back and everything.’

Dear God. Paint in eight colours, brushes, nursery murals featuring cartoon characters? Jean opened her mouth but could not trust herself to speak. Was Steph blind? Could she not see that she, Jean, was standing in front of her holding six frozen sausages that were making her fingers numb, wondering if she could spin them out with rice or something and call it supper? Jean put the sausages in the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table. What could she say to Steph, round-eyed and trusting, no more aware than a child, who was calmly eating anything that wasn’t nailed down and asking her to find the money for paint? She would have to face up to a few things.

But what Jean actually heard herself saying was, ‘Oh yes, how lovely. I can just picture it. I wonder what Miranda would think- she’d be thrilled, wouldn’t she?’ She knew no way to point out that buying paint was out of the question, to tell her that there was hardly any money even to buy more food; to suggest that actually, they might all have to learn to manage with less to eat. Nor could she mention that even if they had the money, it would have to be Steph or Michael who would have to get up the courage to go shopping, because Jean herself could not.

But she could not point any of this out because to do so would amount to saying that life could not be lived in this way. And how could she suggest that when life together here was now, for them all, a simple necessity? Jean was protecting them all by saying nothing. Things would sort themselves out. In the meantime it was still true (in a way) that whether or not they could buy the paint Steph’s mural sounded lovely. And since it would never happen, Jean would not have to say anything heavy-handed about not touching the seventeenth century oak panelling. It could not matter, then, that she said again, ‘She’d be thrilled, wouldn’t she?’

Steph was now laying out flabby bacon slices over the bread, murmuring that she thought they’d be a bit crisper than that after this long in the top oven but she was too hungry to wait. Jean rested her elbows on the table and tried to think seriously about what else she might give them with the sausages that evening, knowing that by luxuriating in this immediate but comparatively small problem she was displacing temporarily the huge, intractable one. They could not live forever on the contents of the freezers, but in the meantime, until she absolutely had to decide what to do about it, there were a couple of onions and a tin of tomatoes. Jean brightened. And she would see if Michael could find anything more in the garden. He had already found some potatoes in the large walled garden that Jean had never explored properly. She would ask him to dig it over again, there were always a few more. Everything would be all right.

Steph was finishing her sandwich and Jean was sifting through a collection of jars of dried herbs when Michael came in, bringing a blast of outdoor air with him. He strode over to the Aga, crouched over the temperature gauge and groaned. ‘Thought as much,’ he said, straightening up and turning to them. ‘I’ve just been out and checked the tank and it’s practically empty. We’re out of oil.’

Just then there was a wail from over their heads. ‘That sounds like a hungry cry,’ Steph said informatively. Her desperation over her daughter’s feeding had vanished, and in its place was a kind of contented weariness which was easier on them all. But she was wrong, Jean was thinking, about the cry. Miranda cried very little and was never hungry. It was not a hungry cry, but a cry of bewilderment and despair, and it grew louder. It was then that Jean burst into tears, sank her head into her hands and sobbed almost hard enough to drown Miranda’s yells.

I had almost put my desire for a tree to one side, knowing that there simply was no money for such things, but when Steph announced that she was after paint for a mural, I found myself thinking that I did want my tree, and why shouldn’t I have it? I wanted a magnolia to plant in the spot where I’d buried the afterbirth, but I had contented myself with just the wanting of it and had not hankered much after the getting. Old habit. But why shouldn’t I get, too? I really wanted that tree. Still I didn’t say so, because on that very same day we had the business of the oil to deal with. It put other things out of my mind. Things rather came to a head, and I had to face the fact that even here, life can only go on with a certain amount of involvement from the outside. The oil was a shock to me, I admit.

Michael was wonderful. He sent Steph up to feed Miranda and then sat quietly with me until I was able to speak. He got it out of me at last that I wasn’t quite the owner of the house, a thing I had never really spelled out. I don’t think he was altogether surprised. But we both felt such distaste for this fact that, without having to say so, I think we both resolved to get the practical difficulties of the oil and the money situation dealt with without delay, and ever afterwards to refer to such things only when absolutely necessary. I told him what the owners’ notes had said, which was that the tank was full and wouldn’t need refilling. But Michael pointed out at once, being good at these things, that there would have been enough if I had been here alone because then I wouldn’t have been heating the whole house day in day out since January. It was obvious, of course, and not the sort of thing that I would ordinarily miss.

Of course I didn’t know how to get hold of more oil. Then he asked if there might be any papers kept anywhere, to do with the house, that would tell us. For example, what happened about the post? I explained that I had been picking the post up first thing before he or Steph could see it, and that I put it in the library desk, as instructed. But then I remembered the study upstairs, and I told Michael that there were lots of papers there, and filing cabinets. He took it out of my hands, told me not to worry about another thing, he would deal with all of it. He and Steph together, he added, and I could tell that he felt he needed her help. So I gave him the key to the study, and knew I trusted him to do as he said. And he did, of course. Steph too- she’s a clever girl, easy to underestimate a girl like that. They took care of all the money matters. In fact, until I started coming up here to use the typewriter to write all this down, I had no call to come in here at all. They have saved me from having to worry about that kind of detail.

I suppose I never have been very skilled with money; I mean look at me and Father’s clock for a start. I found myself wishing that somebody like Michael had been around all those years ago to help me with the business of Father’s clock. Not Michael, of course, how could it have been? I was only sixteen myself. I mean somebody older than me at the time, who would have known what to do. Mother was useless, not that I would have consulted her in any case; we had by then set out our positions about me and university and I knew she would have done nothing whatsoever to help me get there. She did not single out that one thing to be useless over, she was useless in everything from that point on, because when Father died Mother simply declined to be of any further use. She declined even to get up much any more. I think at first it was mainly to make sure that I didn’t go off to college or indeed anywhere else. Whether or not she was actually ill at that point I cannot say, but she kept to her bed. Not their bed, note. She couldn’t abide to be in the bed she had shared with him (I did think to myself, well, she probably couldn’t abide it while he was alive) so she took the room at the back of the house, beyond the kitchen, that the previous owners had built on for a lodger. There was some money from somewhere that Father left to her, and that went on putting in a bathroom alongside. No, I was on my own over the clock.

I went to Hapgood’s in the High Street. It sold jewellery and clocks and also mended them, so I thought they would know about my clock, even though mine was an antique and they sold mostly new things. Mr Hapgood was about thirty, I suppose. He had a wide face, not like a grown-up’s at all, but even so I thought of him as old. He had sandy hair and sharp little teeth, and very careful hands, and he was kind. He asked me how a young lady like me came to have an antique longcase clock in the first place. It was only two weeks since the funeral and the question made me cry, and Mr Hapgood took me behind the counter and into the back of the shop. It was quite dark except for the space over the two long benches that were lit by angled lamps, and very warm, with the smell of an oil stove. He sat me down on a torn leather sofa, surrounded by boxes of bits of metal and cogs and sharp-looking tools, and made me a cup of tea. And he said he would come and see the clock if I gave him my address. I was grateful.

Steph and Michael shut themselves in the study, leaving Miranda, newly fed, with Jean in the kitchen. Now alone, they assumed the authority of the young taking responsibility for the supposedly incapable old. Michael could hardly admit to enjoying the slight sense of crisis that Jean’s collapse had brought, but there was something uniting in the idea that he and Steph were now being relied upon.

In the filing cabinet under Suppliers Michael found receipts and details of the oil supplier’s quarterly debit scheme.

’It couldn’t be easier! Simply ring to order your oil whenever you need it. As a valued direct debit account customer your payments will not fluctuate, whatever the current oil price. Then once a year we will work out the credit or debit on your account and arrange with you for part or full settlement!’

It did sound easy, but would they take an order by telephone from Michael? Could just anyone ring up and order oil for any address?

‘Say you’re the handyman,’ Steph suggested, but frowned. It might work, and it might not. What if the oil supplier would deal only with the customer direct? There were receipts going back five years, so presumably the suppliers knew Mr Standish-Cave, even if only as a voice on the telephone. ‘No, better not. No, you’ll have to say you’re him, Mr What’s-his-name.’

‘Well, that’s not a problem, is it?’ Michael said. ‘I can do voices, remember.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Steph said witheringly, ‘but you’ve got to know what he sounds like first, haven’t you?’

‘He’ll be posh, that’s all. Won’t he?’

Steph looked even more withering and said, ‘That’s not the only problem anyway. What about a signature? They might want a signature, when they deliver.’

They fretted along these lines until she said firmly, ‘No, it’s too risky. We need to get hold of cash and just pay for the oil. What would it cost? We could sell some of the stuff here, couldn’t we?’

‘Jean wouldn’t like that. She likes to have all her things round her. Anyway, we need the oil now, today.’

‘Okay, but all this office stuff, she doesn’t need that. We could flog some of the stuff in here, for a start. The smaller bits, like them.’ She nodded towards the disconnected fax and answering machines and moved across to inspect them. Michael watched her dumbly, with nothing better to suggest.

‘Michael,’ she said, peering into the answering machine, ‘there’s a tape in here. Reckon it’s got what’s-his-name’s voice on it?’

Within half an hour Michael had produced a very passable impersonation of Oliver Standish-Cave, whose voice on the tape had sounded unsurprisingly public school, yet surprisingly pleasant. It was true that there was only his ’Hello. This is the office line at Walden Manor, 01249-588671. Please leave a message at the tone and we will return your call as soon as we can’ to go on, but with Steph’s encouragement Michael quickly found both the vowels and the correct pitch of assumed authority. Steph tried it too, until they both collapsed with laughter. Steph was finding that laughing hard could make her pee in her knickers, just a little, and when she told Michael this, he said, ‘Oh how absolutely frightful, for Heaven’s sake, woman, contain yourself’ in Oliver Standish-Cave’s voice, and they collapsed all over again.

‘But even if you phone up for the oil,’ Steph said, ‘we’ll need to sign something when it comes, won’t we? There’ll be stuff to sign some time.’ The thought sobered them again. Further rummaging in the filing cabinet produced any number of examples of the swirling, enormous signature on receipts and photocopies of letters.

‘Give it over here,’ Steph said, with determination. ‘I’m good at art, remember.’

And forgery, it emerged. The trick, she discovered, was not only to copy the shape of the signature but to work quickly. Oliver Standish-Cave had long ago given up signing his name in discernible letters; Steph had little trouble with the double hillocks of his first two initials and the huge, pretentious letter C that embraced them. Then all she needed to do was place, at just the right point, the long waving line of the rest of his name. It looked like a small rolling field, and one flick of the pen to dot the I of Standish became a bird tossed in the sky above it. She sat and practised at the desk, covering sheet after sheet of paper, while Michael carried on through the filing cabinet. Absorbed, they looked up at each other from time to time. Quiet elation at what they were doing hung in the air.

‘I think I’ve got it now,’ Steph said eventually, holding up a page for Michael to see. He shook his head in impressed disbelief and she turned pink with pleasure. ‘Go on, Michael, ring them. Say you won’t be in when they deliver and they should drop the receipt through the door. Then you can just send it back signed.’

Michael’s mouth had gone dry and his heart began to pound in his throat. For a moment he felt so dislocated that he was back in his old life, about to become some not-Michael or another from Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy, his entire body flooded with fear. He wondered about asking Steph to leave the room while he spoke, just in case he couldn’t do it. What if his Oliver voice gave way, or if he bottled out and slammed down the receiver? What if he burst into tears, or laughed? But he wanted her to stay and watch him, because he was doing it for her. It was for her, for all of them really, because now they were all- Steph, Jean, even Miranda, and he sensed it also in himself- growing blurred around the edges, more like one another. It was the resemblances he noticed, not the differences. They were becoming so alike in warmth, in little affectionate attentions to one another, that they were at times almost indistinguishable, fused into a trusting conglomerate of needs, all equally expressed and met. Even Miranda as she lay awake and motionless in her Moses basket reminded him of Jean’s smiled thanks when he brought in a load of logs, or tightened a washer on a tap, and he felt it, too, in Steph’s languid arms round his neck and it was there, too, when his mouth touched her skin. Perhaps that was what a family was, a sort of large healthy organism made up of smaller ones who did not have to survive everything on their own, or merely for their own selves’ sake. Nothing important that he now did or thought or felt could occur in the absence of these other people. Steph probably knew this already, as she somehow knew other things that he did not tell her, and so while he lifted the receiver and dialled, she stayed. She seemed also to understand that the joking part was over. She walked over to the window and looked out at the garden so that he could not see her face. She turned to him just once, to whisper, ‘Tell them we’ve run out and it’s urgent.’

As he stood waiting for the telephone to be answered he watched the halo of light that blazed round her head. Her hair was smoothed and pinned up today, and she had dipped her head forwards and was resting her forehead against the glass. How was it possible that such a little thing, daylight slipping through a window and falling on the simple curve of a neck, could inspire him to vow to himself that he would never, ever leave her? Michael stared at her head. He could see the back of her earring. He had no idea what the earring itself looked like from the front (he supposed he ought to) but now he set himself to memorising every tiny detail of the back of the metal clip, the private pinch and squeeze of gold on her earlobe. It was delicious to him in a half-forbidden, unofficial way, that he should know the back of her ear. It was like being admitted backstage, surreptitiously and discreetly, to discover that the guile and artifice behind some spectacle was even more thrilling than what the audience saw. He understood both the earring and the ear; he could almost feel the nip as if it were his flesh the little claw was clinging to, or his own teeth tugging at the lobe. He pictured the skin beneath her hair from which her hundreds and hundreds of thousands of fair strands sprouted and grew. How many? And why? Why did they grow like that, unless to hang like long threads that she could collect up and brush and fix in this almost-falling-down way, exposing her neck, whose beauty almost stopped his heart? It was only hair and skin and skull, after all, she was made of the same things as everyone else on the planet. He imagined the fine white shell beneath the scalp, round and hard, and under the helmet of bone, the warm coiled brain that made her think and talk and move and laugh. The ordinariness, the miracle of her. The telephone was suddenly answered.

‘Ah, hello?’

Steph did not turn from the window.

‘Hello. Yes. We need some oil. Urgently, I’m afraid, we’re out. Yes, bit of a cold snap, took us unawares! Yes, it’s Standish-Cave, Walden Manor. That’s right.’

Michael sailed through the negotiations; fill up the tank, about 3,000 litres please, put the receipt through the door, and then he confirmed breezily that they could manage to wait until six o’clock. He thanked the person at the other end for helping them out of a spot. Just before he rang off the woman said, ‘And how’s your wife doing?’

‘Oh, oh. My wife? Oh, she’s, er…’ Michael looked up desperately at Steph, who turned just then and smiled at him, lifting and twisting a loose lock of her hair. Michael said, ‘Oh, she’s absolutely fine, thank you. Very well indeed.’

‘Oh, glad to hear it. Do tell her I was asking.’

Men were deceivers, ever. Shakespeare, but I can’t remember where from. Father would know. And only half right, because women aren’t above a bit of deception either. I have come to believe that just about anyone will deceive to get what they need, if they have no other way open to them. In that strict sense there is no difference between me, Michael and Steph, and Mr Hapgood (in other, crucial respects there is all the difference in the world). And people who think oh no, they could never do the kind of thing we did, well, perhaps they are just people who have never had to, and who lack the imagination to see that if one day they found themselves in the same circumstances, they probably would. People who have landed in another category, who have somehow got what they needed by easier means, are no different from us. No, that’s wrong, they are different. They are luckier, that is all. Not better.

What Mr Hapgood did was this. He came to see the clock the next afternoon after I’d got back from school. I thought it only polite to offer him a cup of tea in return for his the day before, and while I was making it he had a good look at the clock. He came into the kitchen while the tea was brewing and leaned against the draining board. He would have to go and consult somebody, an ‘associate in the trade,’ he said, but it was without doubt a fine clock. I poured out a third cup of tea and took it to Mother, who was in bed, and when I came back he asked all about her, and I found myself crying again. He said he understood perfectly because his mother was much the same, not at all well. He said we should make ourselves comfy in the sitting room because life could be very difficult and what we both needed was a little cuddle. I think he might actually have been right about that.

The next day Michael and Steph returned to the study, bringing with them the pile of unopened post that had been accruing in the library desk. They opened the bank statements, which showed that whatever the Standish-Caves were living on while they were away, it was not being drawn from the Household No 1 account. Twelve hundred pounds a month were going in, and the account was in credit for a little over six thousand. Outgoings amounted to rather less. There were direct debits for electricity, water, telephone and oil, and to the local authority for council tax. Jean Wade’s monthly salary was the only other regular payment. They guessed that the statements for other accounts, that the owners must be using, were being sent by the bank directly to them.

They began to feel clever. Steph found reams of specially printed Walden Manor stationery. In the filing cabinet they found previous letters from Oliver Standish-Cave to his bank so that they could copy the style exactly. Michael fed a sheet into the typewriter and together they began to compose their letter. Steph lost all sense of proportion and wanted to clean out the account.

But it’s a fortune, six thousand quid,’ she said. ‘Once we transfer all that lot into Jean’s account we’ll be laughing, won’t we?’

‘And then what? Suppose the bank thinks it’s a bit funny and investigates? We got to do something quiet, something that’ll just slide past them without them noticing. Just a little rise that nobody’ll notice, so it can go on and on, see? Look, Jean gets four hundred a month. We just make it six, it’ll make a big difference.’

The clatter of the typewriter keys sounded cheeky and illegal, and it was hard not to laugh. The extra would make a difference, but not all the difference. And Jean’s next payment was not due for three weeks in any case, Michael thought, as he watched Steph sign the letter. She was laughing a little too triumphantly, not really taking in that the problem had been eased, not solved. They would have to do something more.

Michael sifted again through the post. Among the other unopened letters were credit card statements which proved the existence of a credit card that had not been used since shortly before Christmas. But the statements did not give the card’s expiry date, and that was essential, Steph declared, before they could order things by telephone. She had stopped laughing.

‘If only we had the card,’ Michael said.

‘Or a chequebook,’ Steph said, looking round as if one might be lying to hand somewhere. Then they heard Jean’s soft footsteps downstairs, crossing the hall from the drawing room to the kitchen. She would be putting the kettle on, and soon would come upstairs to fetch the sleeping Miranda. Then she would call them both down to tea, for which she might have made scones or a cake, although there had been less of those lately. It might be just toast, then. Since her outburst the day before she seemed again to move in her own unhurried way, perhaps even a little more slowly, Steph had remarked last night. Getting on, she and Michael had agreed.

He would not, could not fail Jean over the money. Because Michael thought that her slowing down was not entirely to do with ageing; the tread of her feet seemed to have something to do with a simple absence of strain. Perhaps Jean had ceased to strive. It was strange, he thought, remembering his desperation over paying his fines, that while there was now more point to everything, life for all three of them had grown less effortful. It was not that the struggle to find enough to live on had lessened, but rather that there was no longer any need to outrun a lurking sense of futility about everything. The question is it worth it? did not arise any more. There was peace in Jean’s footsteps, the work of her hands, her look of concentration as she peered at recipe books. She was sedate, but still busy most of the time. Her self-appointed duties in the house undoubtedly made demands upon her energy; towards seven o’clock she would sink into the big chair in the kitchen, tired, and Michael would give her the glass of sherry which she always said was just what she needed. But it seemed to Michael that her energy was freely and willingly expended. She had no need to hoard any, to hold a little in reserve against the day when it would be required in the struggle just to stay cheerful. He recognised in her a picture of himself in his freezing flat and remembered the tight battles fought between himself and the persistent nag in his head, telling him that nothing was ever going to get any better. It was an almost forgotten picture, now abandoned in the old attic of his life before Steph had come, but looking over at Steph now he could tell, now he thought about it, that the same voices had nagged in her head too. They must none of them ever again have to squander energy trying to hold off the conviction that nothing they did made any difference.

Steph and Michael resumed their search through the desk drawers and filing cabinets. Jean’s footsteps were crossing the hall again, and then they stopped. They listened to the silence. Jean must have paused in the hall, perhaps to consider the tall vase of daffodils on the carved chest opposite the stairs. She might have been drawing out the stems that were yellowing now and proffered flowers too crumpled and papery to deserve their places any longer, adjusting the fresher ones to fill the gaps they left. She would be humming to herself. Now came the faint creak and the sound of her climbing the stairs, another pause while she rested for a moment at the top. She might turn left to go to her room to change her shoes (sometimes she put on her slippers before tea) or, as they could hear her doing now, she might turn right along the broad landing. She did not, nor did they expect it, come into the study, but walked past the closed door towards the nursery. Michael and Steph smiled at each other. In a moment they would hear her talking softly to Miranda as she changed her, and then she would call them on her way past and they would all go down to tea. But the sound they next heard and which froze them where they stood was a rising, disbelieving scream.

It might have helped to be drunk. In a way I felt as if I were, in the sense that I still have no clear memory of the days following that one when I came upon Miranda dead. Glimpses, that’s all I have, and although I can’t be sure how many days it took, I know that Steph kept Miranda by her for too long, and that by the time Michael could persuade her to give her up so that we could bury her, some terrible things were happening.

I want it understood that the child was not neglected, whatever she might have died of. I hope that’s clear. Don’t think it hasn’t worried me, not getting a doctor. There must have been something wrong with her, perhaps her heart. I think now of the slight frown she sometimes wore when she was lying awake quietly; it seems to me now that she might have been listening to her little heart. I think it must have been her heart. It is hard to accept, but if that was the case then perhaps it was better to let her slip peacefully away, undisturbed by strangers. In the end, what do doctors know?

I prepared her with my own hands. There is no pain like it, the washing and dressing of the dead, because it is unbearable that one should be doing such things to a body that is so dear yet so changed, and equally unbearable that these necessities should be left undone or trusted to other hands. I used a strongly scented soap which I thought might do the trick at least for a while, but her skin began to wrinkle and slough, gentle though I was, and I feared that I was hurting her. I whispered that I was sorry, isn’t that silly? People sometimes say that dead people don’t look dead, they look as if they are sleeping. Miranda did not look asleep. Miranda was dead in my arms, gone. How else could I have contemplated placing her in the ground? I dusted her with talcum powder until I realised that it made me think of quicklime. I wrapped her in two white silk handkerchiefs. They covered her, tiny thing she was. She had hardly grown at all. I fancied that she looked even smaller than she had on the day she was born, though sometimes that happens when people die, they look emptied of something. I remember thinking that the silk would be soft against her skin, another silly thought, but it’s the kind of thing that comes to you in those circumstances.

Next I wrapped her white shawl round her tightly so that her mother would not feel the stick limbs. I had meant to dress her properly, in bonnet and bootees and everything, but I could not do it, not for the want of caring. Her hands and feet were too far gone. Then I slipped her into a pillowcase. Then I had a good idea; there were lots of lavender-filled pillows in the bedrooms, so I gathered them all up, ripped them open and poured all the dried lavender flowers in the pillowcase with her so that she would be buried with sweet flowers surrounding her. So that we might be distracted a little by the lavender scent and not have to notice the state she had got into. Then I bound her round and round with white ribbon, covering her completely.

Because by now Michael had managed to get through to Steph and almost bring her out of a kind of blindness that the death had plunged her into, and I did not want her to see (I do not think she really had seen it yet) the colour that her baby’s face had turned to.

So it wasn’t a tree, after all, that the space in the garden had been waiting for. We put Miranda there, in the same spot where her afterbirth lay buried. I hardly remember what was said. Michael had found volumes of poetry in the library, and he seemed to know what to say. I’m sure it was all beautiful, I remember parts of it, but of course it was not enough. A funeral is supposed to explain the whole thing, is it not? But not even my sweet Michael could find an acceptable way to say that this little one was dead and that she should be left in the dirty cold ground while we went back into the warm house without her. Steph could not be persuaded to come with us. So Michael buttoned her into her coat, and let her be. She stayed out until well after dark.

There followed several days when we could neither be together, nor bear not to know one another’s precise whereabouts. We could not rest in one spot, or seek out places of refuge. I roamed somewhat, trying to go about the jobs that needed doing, as did Michael, and even Steph. But we tired so easily, and would go to lie down and not manage to settle, and then we would come across one another wandering through the house again, or going about the garden. We could neither talk about Miranda, nor silence the clamour of her in our heads. I am speaking for myself, of course, and in truth there were times when I scarcely noticed what the other two were doing- but from what I did manage to take in, it was much the same for us all.

If there were any comfort to be had, it was in the knowledge that at least our child had not been taken away. She was dead, but nobody had been allowed to interfere. So we were all still together, all of us, including Miranda. Although she was dead and buried and gone from us, at least she lay not far away, and at home.

Steph’s days wasted one into the other, a cruel mirror of the time just after Miranda’s birth. Daylight lapped somewhere at the sides of the things she noticed, while Michael pushed and pulled her through the everyday and surely pointless practicalities of getting dressed, eating, bathing. In between times her brain swam, her empty arms stiffened and ached, her legs felt heavy and too weak to carry her far. She could not say whether it was through her body or her mind that she hurt more. It was as if loss jellified her. She felt boneless, a floating, absorbent thing that existed only to soak up pain. Then when her breasts began to ache with Miranda’s milk, she knew she had become some kind of efficiently functioning system for suffering. Night and day she processed raw material in the form of waves of perfect grief, which lapped and receded in her body, pricking, breaking, stabbing. Her breasts lifted, hardened and filled through countless incoming and ebbing tides of milk.

In the daytime she took long baths, as if she hoped to soak away her pain. She changed her clothes three and four times a day, swapping one anonymous, spotless shirt for another, yet her unhappiness clung; it lay beneath her pink skin and gleaming hair and beyond the reach of soap and water, or got itself caught up and buttoned in tight under her immaculate clothes. She walked about, ignoring the weight of her legs until she failed to notice the heaviness. Michael gave her little jobs to do, putting away a garden rake or carrying kindling, taking clothes to and from their bedroom to the laundry room; sometimes she would accomplish these tasks and sometimes stop them halfway through, forgetting. One day on the windowsill halfway down the stairs she came across two shirts, some socks and an empty tumbler that she had simply wandered away from, having paused at the window earlier on her way down. She spent a lot of time outside neither far from Michael nor yet with him, while he did what he could in the vegetable garden, but she was insensible to the sunshine which at times punched its way out through clouds and raised the smell of warm, dug soil into the air. She paced the paths and yards, the pool pavilion and outbuildings. She would stop and look at things for no apparent reason, and it was hard to know if she saw anything.

One day as she stood by the covered swimming pool, Jean, trudging back from the walled garden with a few sticks of rhubarb, stopped and watched her contemplating the turquoise rectangle. Had the pool been uncovered, would she try to drown herself, or was she imagining a summer day when Miranda might have been making her first splashes in the water? Steph roused herself, walked on towards the gate in the fence at the edge of the lawn, and stepped through it into the paddock. Jean turned towards the house, frowning at the bundle in her hand. Supper was going to have to be the last of the potatoes and an onion, and more rhubarb. It hardly seemed to matter; the walk to the garden and back had exhausted her so completely that she thought she might go back to bed anyway. Whilst thinking this Jean did not notice that Steph had already crossed the paddock and was now walking quite fast, making her way down the drive towards the road.

As she went further from the house, Steph wished she could stop thinking. It would have been a relief to be free of thought, free of the thousands of quarrelling and contradictory memories of the past few months: Jean’s house and how she had arrived that night, the birth of Miranda and before that, Michael and the flat, then Miranda, the awful first weeks. The miracle of waking up slowly, over several days, to the idea that her daughter would not be taken away, that she now lived in this amazing place with her, and with Michael and Michael’s mother. Even as she had been lulled by her new and gentle circumstances, there had still been space in her mind for Jace and at an unreal and distant point there had been Stacey, college, her pictures, her Nan. But as these thoughts tramped softly through her memory, now she wondered if, even as she had been learning to feel safe from that old life, she had been aware of a shade of disbelief. For how could she appear first in one life and then leave it for another, like the same small detail in two pictures- a jug, a scrap of lace, a tulip- that an artist might have arranged and painted twice on different canvases, for some sentimental reason or just through laziness or accident? In that sense she was, in a manner of speaking, simply the jug or flower or trinket that had come to someone’s hand. Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps this happened to her because she continually consented to be picked up and placed in surroundings which might turn out to please or displease her, but over which she had no power in either case. She could even, as she had this time, grow convinced of her happiness, but her inability to change anything did not alter. She had been determined that Miranda should not be taken away, and had been shown her powerlessness over that.

As she walked, this idea too got left behind, along with other thoughts of the past. They took their leave tightly, like tentative visitors who had come just to remind her that once they might have been important but would not be staying. She walked on in some expectation that now something else would have to happen to her. New things would have to come along; the things, whatever they were, that were to be important next, the things she was to be placed among, in whose canvas she was to occupy a space. She opened her mind, inviting new thoughts to come and fill it. She walked, but none came.

She was wearing trousers and boots and began to notice that both were too big, while the white shirt (whose, for God’s sake?) was a little tight over her chest. Her clothes had an indoor, bready smell, or was that the smell of her milk? And the clothes felt no more hers than any of the sensations they created, the trouser stitching chafing a little on her hipbones, the pressing of the shirt over her breasts, but suddenly nor did they, or she, seem to belong to anything she could remember of the past three months. She liked the feeling of neutrality. She carried on walking.

It may have been just the sound of passing traffic as she got nearer, but at some point it seemed to Steph that the long drive had, invisibly, begun to belong more to the road that ran past it than to Walden Manor, with its stone arms outstretched more than half a mile behind. Nothing as simple as curiosity turned her in the direction of the village, but when she took the turning that led to it after another twenty minutes’ walk along the edge of the noisy road, she found herself slowing down to look at it properly.

Most of the houses were old and the stone built ones along the curving main street were joined together. Many of them were double-fronted and had steps leading up to their doors. Some had window boxes, others had Bed & Breakfast signs in their windows. Trees were planted at intervals along the pavement. Most of the traffic ripped past along the top road that Steph had turned off, leaving the village quiet. In the middle, the street opened out round a small triangle of grass surrounded by railings and beds of flowering plants, where a stone monument stood, its steps and inscription worn away. On one side of the triangle was an empty bus shelter, across the road on another side was a peeling, semi-detached house with a sign saying ‘Vicarage’. The church sat behind, down a road that led off at the side. Next to the vicarage, well set back, stood a grander, older house, the only one with a drive and a front garden full of trees. The slate sign on the wall read ‘The Old Rectory’. Next to that stood two empty cottages, a shut-up garage, a modern, bright-green painted shop with orange star-shaped notices on its wide flat windows, a litter bin and a sign announcing that lottery tickets were On Sale Here. It was all very pretty, of course, Steph could see that, but empty and pointless unless you lived there. Perhaps even if you did, she thought, as a familiar feeling stirred in her. She wanted chocolate, suddenly, or crisps. Anything, and she had no money.

At the ting of the bell, Steph stepped into the shop and was surrounded by the smells of cheese, wrapped cake, newspapers and ageing vegetables. There was silence but for the dismal buzzing of strip lighting and refrigerators, and the almost audible expectation that she should buy something. From behind the counter a man with big yellow hands was stabbing at buttons on a calculator that sat on an open ledger. He nodded at her over his glasses without smiling. Steph raised one corner of her mouth and turned her back, browsing a rack of biscuits, fly sprays and birthday cards. The man looked down again, and Steph sidled along past shampoo and tins of soup. She couldn’t take crisps without making a noise, the biscuit packets were too big, and the sweets were on display right under the man’s nose. There was a tall, freestanding row of shelves that divided the shop in two, but there was also a round mirror high on one wall that gave the man a view of whoever was behind it. The stuff on the shelves round the back was only light bulbs, soap powder and tin foil, anyway. Unless somebody else came and distracted him, she had no chance. She turned and looked through the door on to the triangle of green grass, willing someone to come in with a long shopping list.

‘You looking for a tent or a lawnmower, you’re in luck,’ the man said, distantly. ‘Four new ones in yesterday.’ Steph turned and smiled cautiously, wondering what he meant.

‘Small ads, four new ones. Good price, the tent. Only got used once, bloke said. Selling it after one go, the wife didn’t like camping, apparently. He’s giving it away at that price, just wants rid of it.’ The man was motioning now towards the door, and Steph saw that he was pointing at a cluster of handwritten postcards pasted over the top half of it. She turned back and looked at them, pretending to be interested. She couldn’t have cared less about a tent or a lawnmower, but if she spent a minute or two reading the ads, something might happen. His phone might ring. He might even go through to the back or something.

‘Tent’s a fantastic price. He was going to put the card in for a fortnight, I said don’t. It’ll go within the week at that price, I said, take just the one to start with. At that price it’ll go in one. Tempted myself, if I’m honest.’

Steph smiled again and turned back. Clipped to the postcard was a blurry photograph of the quite resistible tent. Below it on another card Steph read:

WANTED: Childminder, hrs tbc, for Charlie, four months. Lively baby. Non-smoker. Kind personality req’d. Start IMMEDIATELY. Apply Bell Cottage Green Lane. Or tel (after 6 pm: 583622).

The man looked up again at the ting of the bell and noted that the pale young woman had left without buying anything. He sighed and returned to his ledger. She hadn’t looked the type to buy his tent, and he was beginning to lose hope that he’d ever shift it.

Bell Cottage was a small, double-fronted house down a narrower street that ran parallel to the main one where the shop stood. Steph found it by wandering. The signs on most of the lanes leading off the main street gave also the names of the streets they led to, and there seemed to be no more than a dozen or so at most in the old part of the village. The door was opened by a dark-haired woman in bare feet, who stared at her without speaking. Steph thought she looked too old to be the mother of a baby.

‘Hello… I was wondering if-’

‘I’m just about to go out.’

‘Oh. Oh, but I was just wondering,’ Steph said, sure now that she had got the wrong house, ‘if this is where the job is. The childminding?’

The woman hesitated for a moment without smiling. ‘Oh. Well, I have to go out when he wakes up. But you might as well come in,’ she said, turning back into the house and evidently expecting Steph to follow.

The narrow hallway had been painted some dull, pale colour that had been streaked and scraped black on both sides. The smell reminded Steph of something earthy, cold and none too clean, like mud or certain kinds of cheese. A long, dark bulge of hung-up coats and jackets padded most of one wall. Underneath lay a heap of boots and shoes, umbrellas, a crash helmet, walking sticks, a riding crop and one ice-skate. On the floor next to a low stool that was covered with newspapers sat a telephone directory, on which several milk bottles and a camera had been placed. Next to that stood a folded child’s pushchair whose detached plastic rain canopy leaned against the wall. On the floor nearby was the telephone, a bowl with a spoon and the brownish dregs of breakfast cereal in it, two or three listing carrier bags and an open briefcase with papers fanning out of it.

Steph followed the woman down the passage, past the staircase and into the kitchen at the back. She said, not asking, ‘Coffee’, pulled a kettle clear from a clutter of things on a worktop, filled it and switched it on. Steph wondered where she was supposed to put herself, and decided to stand still. There was nowhere not filled with other things. The worktops and table were laden with jars, utensils, little bottles, a tub of baby wipes and a pacifier, two radios, a toaster, a blender, the kettle, a feeding bottle steriliser, as well as assorted bowls which contained something or nothing: Steph took in papery-looking garlic, pens, bananas, cassette tapes, some pursed-up lemons, rubber bands, an assortment of hair ties, keys, scraps of paper, cut-out coupons, dried up garden bulbs. Only a fraction of space was clear for anything that might be expected to happen in a kitchen, such as cooking or eating. A notice board held curling fragments of cards, lists, takeaway menus, envelopes and postcards of beaches. On a blackboard alongside it were chalked the words Bags Coff Spread Milt tabs. O. Chips bleach. The cooker top was spattered with burnt spills which seemed to be dark orange, the grill above was covered with a rag of tin foil that smelled acrid and rubbery. Two of the wall cupboards had no doors. Any patches of floor that were not covered by cat bowls, litter tray, sheets of spread newspaper and squashed crumbs were more homogenously dirty. The windowsill behind the sink held a few jars of brown water with slimy forgotten herbs or attempts at cuttings of something or other, more milk bottles and a heap of pacifiers on a saucer.

‘I’m Sally,’ the woman said. ‘Charlie’s next door asleep, I’ll show you him in a minute but I’ll go mad if he wakes up again. He’s hell to put down.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose I should say that, I might put you off. I mean, he’s coming on. The thing is, he’s not such a good feeder. I’ve got to go back to work and he’s still getting used to the bottle.’

‘Oh,’ Steph said.

Sally turned, and as she poured water from the kettle, which had not yet boiled, into the mugs, she said breezily, ‘Still, at least I’ve got my tits back. Not that they’re much use to me now.’

Steph made a small noise that was half surprise, half laugh. That was the trouble with educated people. At some point in their lives they simply managed, somehow, to go beyond embarrassment. Or perhaps they were born incapable of it. Whichever it was they made you take on double the amount because you had your own and theirs on top. They told you things that you could never reply to. What was she meant to say?

‘So.’ Sally was putting milk into two mugs of instant coffee, another thing she hadn’t asked Steph about, shifting stuff- a baby’s jacket, a purse, some keys and half a croissant- off a chair so that Steph could sit down. She didn’t offer sugar, either, but she was watching Steph carefully. Steph, knowing she was being sized up, put on a bright face. ‘Charlie’s a lovely name,’ she said. ‘They’re coming back, aren’t they, the traditional names.’

Sally ignored her, but went on watching. ‘I did have somebody all lined up weeks ago but she rang to say she’s not coming now, less than a week before she’s meant to start. Got a better offer, I suppose. So I’m stuck. I’ve got to go back full-time next week.’ She leaned against the worktop and sipped her coffee. ‘If I don’t get somebody local I’ll have to take this girl an agency’s offering me and they charge a fortune. What’s your name anyway? You’re local, are you?’ She smiled in such a way that Steph could tell she had had to remind herself that smiling was a thing she was meant to do.

‘Yes, I’m staying here. I mean, yes. I do live here now. I’m Stephanie. Well, Steph, really. I’m twenty-three and I’ve had… a lot of experience with children.’

‘Yes, but what about babies. He’s only four months. Have you done babies?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Steph said, ‘I had sole charge of a newborn.’ She took a mouthful of coffee while she tried to assemble the words for the story she had worked out. ‘I took care of my sister’s baby. She couldn’t. She was depressed after it, the birth. You know, post-natal, she got it really bad? So I did everything, more or less, the lot, all the looking after. She couldn’t do a thing, hardly.’ Then, in case the woman might think she was complaining, ‘I really enjoyed it, I had a knack, everybody said. My sister’s husband, he was away at the time as well, so I had sole charge, I held the fort. Then they moved away.’ She paused. ‘To America. Her husband was American.’

That should put the question of references on ice for a bit. She began to feel slightly inspired.

‘And so now I’m staying here with… with my aunt, I live with my aunt.’

She had rehearsed on the walk to Sally’s house the phrase ‘my boyfriend and my boyfriend’s mother’, and decided that it sounded too flaky and impermanent and might make her sound like a hanger-on. And she wasn’t wearing a ring; suppose this woman advertising for the childminder was a religious nut or something, who disapproved of people living together? A niece helping her aunt sounded solid and respectable.

‘I’m staying with her and helping her with the house, she hasn’t been too well. At Walden Manor.’ Risky to give the name, perhaps, but she had guessed, correctly, precisely the effect it would have.

Sally raised her eyebrows and made an ‘oooh’ shape with her mouth. ‘Walden Manor? Oh. I know, yes, I think I know where it is. Off the Bath road, that no through road marked private? I’ve never seen the house.’

‘You can’t see it from the road. It’s more than half a mile up the drive.’

Sally sighed. ‘There are lots of beautiful places round here, actually. But I didn’t know Walden was owned by a… Actually,’ she looked mournfully round the kitchen, ‘I don’t really know many people. I haven’t been here that long, we only moved here after I got pregnant. I thought it’d be all playgroups and community stuff and all that. But everybody under seventy’s at work all day, in Bath or Chippenham.’

Steph made a sympathetic noise. ‘You’ve got a nice house, though,’ she lied bravely.

‘Oh yeah, thanks, well, it is nice, or it could be. Haven’t done much to it, been too tired.’ She waved with the hand holding the mug. ‘As you can see.’

Steph said, bracingly, ‘Anyway, she’s much better now, you know, my aunt, but she likes having me there so I’m staying on, but now there’s less for me to do I thought it’d be nice to find something.’ She smiled competently.

‘Your, er… aunt, I mean, it’s not, is she… You don’t seem… has she lived there long, I mean? Has it always been in the family, the house?’

Steph beamed with sudden understanding and said, with a slight lowering of her voice, ‘In the family? Oh no. Not at all. Look, if I tell you, will you promise not to say, not to anybody? Not to anybody at all, ever?’

Sally’s eyebrows shot up with interest. ‘Sure. Of course.’

‘Because she doesn’t want all sorts knocking on the door, you know?’ Steph paused. ‘Lottery win,’ she said. ‘Five week roll-over. Only she wants it kept quiet, because she’s not that sort of person, she’s just ordinary. She’s not, you know, flashy. I mean she’s always had this thing about a house in the country, so straight off she went and bought this big place and well, I think it’s a bit too much for her, but I can’t say. I mean she can do what she likes at the end of the day.’

Sally nodded respectfully. ‘I promise I won’t say a word. I didn’t even know the house was up for sale.’

‘Oh. Oh no, well, it wasn’t advertised.’

‘No, they aren’t always, the big places, it’s all word of mouth.’ She drank some of her coffee. ‘We don’t get much of the big stuff. Though we get farms from time to time, and then of course I don’t get a look in. Farmers have to deal with a man, apparently, can’t cope with a woman handling things. The firm goes along with it, doesn’t matter what I say. The senior partner says,’ she twisted the words sarcastically, ’ “in this outfit, political correctness comes second to complete client confidence.” ‘

Steph cleared her throat. She was not sure she had understood a single word. ‘Only with my aunt- you won’t spread it around, will you, because she doesn’t want the publicity, she’s a very private person. Not unfriendly or anything, but she likes to get to know people at her own pace, what with everything. You can understand. So you won’t tell anyone, will you? I mean I’m only telling you so you know the score. About me, for the job I mean.’

‘No, no, of course I won’t say anything,’ Sally said, in a way that made Steph wonder if she were interested enough even to remember the story, let alone divulge it. But she roused herself from her thoughts about the senior partner to ask, ‘But that is a point. You- I mean, what do you want a child-minding job for? I mean you can’t need the money, can you?’

Steph looked her in the eye. ‘My aunt, she’s dead generous, she’s doing a lot for me, but I’ve told her no way am I living off her for everything. So okay, no, in a way I don’t really need it, but I like earning a bit of my own money, you know what I mean?’

Sally had begun to peel off a splitting fingernail with her teeth, but Steph thought she might still be listening. ‘Like if I earn a bit I can surprise her, you know? Make a little contribution. Get her a bunch of flowers now and then, something like that. It’s the independence.’

‘Independence,’ Sally said distantly, dropping her fingernail on the floor. She snorted. She looked directly at Steph. ‘I’m independent. Not all it’s cracked up to be, let me tell you.’

She was doing it again. What was Steph supposed to say to a remark like that? She gave what she hoped was an interested murmur and hoped Sally was not taking them completely off the point.

‘I’m a solicitor,’ Sally said, wanly.

‘Oh, right. So, what I mean is, I don’t want you thinking I’d be unreliable, just ’cause I’m not, like, living on the money.’

‘Unreliable?’ Sally gave another uneasy smile. ‘Oh, no, I wasn’t thinking that. No, I can spot unreliable. I know all about unreliable. I might not even be going back full-time if Charlie’s father wasn’t world class unreliable.’ She turned to tip the last of her coffee down the sink. ‘He was training to qualify too. Was. As a solicitor, I mean.’

Steph knew that Sally was waiting for her to ask more.

‘So… do you mean… he isn’t any more?’

Sally sighed so dramatically that Steph felt in some way responsible for whatever might be coming next. ‘Oh, no, no,’ she said with slow sarcasm, ‘Oh no, he decided being a solicitor wasn’t enough for him.’ She sighed again. ‘He’s tried lots of things. He was going to be a priest, then he decided no, that would just be trying to live up to his dad. So he gave that up, tried other things, travelled a lot. Oh, he wants to save the world, basically. Law was just the latest thing, the thing he thought he should be doing while he went through his husband and father phase. But he’s given up on that, too, by the look of it.’

‘You mean he’s not here?’

‘Nope. No, he’s gone to Nepal. I don’t mean he walked out, oh no, my dear husband never does anything he could be blamed for. He only does things he feels he ought to do, never admits it’s what he wants. So then he can’t be criticised, can he, because he’s only doing what his conscience tells him is right.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t get talked into having kids, Stephanie, that’s what I did.’

‘Oh. Oh well. No, I won’t.’

‘He was the desperate one. Gets me to agree, gets me pregnant, and just when I thought this time he means it, he’s growing up finally, he gets another fit of conscience about privilege, east and west, all that. So practically the minute Charlie’s born he gives up law and wants us all to go off and live in Nepal and work for some leprosy charity. I said no.’

‘But he went?’

‘Yep. Now he’s out there working for this bloody charity, principles all intact and all for bloody nothing of course, so I’ve got no option. And oh, not only is he not providing a penny but I’m the one holding us back. He’s still waiting for us to join him, you see, thinks I’ll give in and go. And know what? I won’t. The main thing about it is, and you should listen to this, Stephanie, because it’s amazing how often this happens, the thing is he thinks because I’ve got the baby I shouldn’t mind where I go or what I do. Because I’m a mother now, aren’t I. He thinks I’m selfish, staying in a rich country and being a lawyer when I could be making a contribution. I’m perpetuating global inequality, apparently, going back to conveyancing and wills in Chippenham. Me. Me, selfish.’

Sally’s voice as she spoke had been getting louder to drown out bad-tempered wailing from another room. Practically shouting now, she said, ‘Well, global bollocks. But it’s amazing the number of other people that think I should have gone. His dad, for instance, he comes out with all the “for better for worse” stuff. Oh shit, he’s awake. Well, you might as well meet him.’

Charlie squirmed in a nest of covers on the padded floor of a playpen in the dining room. A carrycot stood on the table in the middle of the room. Sally pulled him out kicking. ‘He settles better in the playpen,’ she said wearily. ‘Dunno why. Doesn’t like the cot.’

Steph looked round. A smell of salt and pepper and old meat still rose from the dark green carpet, but in all other respects Charlie had taken over. Both the mantelpiece and a high, polished sideboard that was too large for the room were littered with baby paraphernalia. A baby changing mat, nappies and a heap of unironed baby clothes filled one end of the table. Dozens of baby books and plastic toys covered the sideboard and the four upright chairs, and a bank of soft toy animals formed a colony against the wall on one side of the cold, green-tiled fireplace. Steph caught sight of a teddy identical to one that had been in Miranda’s nursery, and felt something kick suddenly in her throat. She opened her mouth, but did not speak and managed not to gasp, and then the moment had gone, supplanted by a sense of safety. Because absolutely nothing else in this chaotic house- not Charlie’s bewildering mother with her aloof but embarrassing way of telling her too much, certainly not the streaked and bawling face of Charlie himself- sounded even the thinnest chord of memory, painful or otherwise. Steph simply did not recognise it, this bulging, crammed and messy place that so many things had been spilled into, as if the house were a repository for the thoughts, ideas, plans, all the stuff in Sally’s head. It was a place where myriad fragments and layers that made up her life had substantiated somehow into wave after wave of bits of beached rubbish, which Sally then used, abandoned, dropped, broke, lost or cherished, without explanation, apology or, it seemed, particular concern. Charlie was perhaps just another item in her collection. The very idea that one person’s life could so casually produce such rich and overwhelming disorder was unknown to Steph.

Sally had Charlie on the changing mat and had wrestled him out of his wet nappy. The sight of him insulated Steph further from any link with Miranda. Charlie had a standard pouting, apelike baby face, quite unlike Miranda’s ladylike and slightly worried one. And he never stopped moving. His flailing limbs creased into their own peculiar folds and bends like a badly stuffed toy, while Miranda had now and then waved her spindly arms and legs without conviction, and they had been what Jean called finely made. Steph darted forward and handed Sally a baby wipe from the carton, and deftly took the sodden clump from Sally. ‘Bin under the sink,’ Sally said flatly. When Steph came back Sally was walking round the room jiggling the angry bundle on one shoulder. For the first time since she had arrived Steph saw on Sally’s face not only impatience and distaste, but complete exhaustion.

‘I’m supposed to be going in for a meeting this afternoon. They keep doing it, I’m not due back till next week but oh, will I pop in to discuss this or that. I said okay but I’d have to bring him with me and they said oh really, well, with a bit of luck he’ll be asleep.’ She shifted him onto the other shoulder and blew gently in his ear, to no effect. ‘He probably would go back to sleep if I gave him his bottle now but he fights it and takes ages over it, so if I do that I’ll be incredibly late and that won’t go down very well.’

‘Tell you what, you go,’ Steph said, ‘why don’t you go to your meeting, and leave him with me? I’ll see to the bottle and everything. Just to help you out.’

‘What? Oh, no, I don’t think, I mean I’d like you to take the job, I mean for a trial period, but you’ve only just… I mean you, we- we don’t really know each other, do we?’

Steph smiled and nodded understandingly. ‘Oh, you’re quite right. I know, you haven’t got my references or anything- but look, I’d love to do the job, and you could do with a hand now, couldn’t you? Look, he’s got a wet patch on his bum, he needs a dry suit. Shall I take him a minute while you get a clean one, only I don’t know where you keep them.’ She held up her arms and Sally, a little taken aback, allowed Charlie to be taken from her. She rummaged in the pile of clothes while Steph rocked Charlie from side to side. In a lower voice, she said, ‘Tell you what, Sally, suppose I come with you, then I could look after him in the car or take him for a walk or something while you’re at the meeting. If you’re not sure about leaving him here with me, I quite understand.’ Charlie’s yells seemed to subside as she spoke. ‘Don’t I, Charlie?’ she said softly in his ear. ‘You don’t want to be left all alone with a stranger, do you? Do you, little Charlie?’ Charlie grew quiet. Steph smiled beatifically. ‘Hello, poppet. I’m Steph, all right? Aren’t you a lovely little man, aren’t you a good baby?’ she told him softly, rocking him with gentle confidence.

Sally straightened up and looked hard at Steph for several moments. ‘I suppose you have got references, haven’t you? Good ones?’

‘Oh yes, only not with me. I was just in the shop, you see. I was just out for a walk. I wasn’t expecting to see the perfect job there on a card in the window. But I just came straight along ’cause I didn’t want to miss the chance. I was scared I’d be too late and somebody else would get it.’

Sally said, ‘And how many years’ experience did you say you’d got?’

‘Oh, it was ten months with my sister’s,’ Steph said, ‘and loads of other little jobs childminding, babysitting and that. Babies and up to age five. But you need to see it all in writing, that’s okay. I understand. If you don’t feel comfortable.’

Sally looked at her watch and studied Steph’s face again. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I’ve decided. I can always tell, I’m good at reading people. And if you’re going to do the job I’ll have to leave him anyway, won’t I? I can tell I can trust you, Steph. I can feel it. And it’s very, very good of you to offer.’

Steph smiled up at Sally. ‘He’s a lovely baby,’ she breathed. ‘Now are you sure? Because I mean I could come with you, in the car.’

But the whole idea was suddenly cumbersome and silly. Sally shook her head. ‘No- decision’s made. As long as you’re sure…’

‘Go on, you go. We’ll be fine. I’ll give him his bottle.’

For the first time Sally gave a genuine smile. ‘Really? Oh God, you wouldn’t, would you? It’s all made up, just needs microwaving. I’ll be back in about an hour and a half,’ she said, with sudden energy, ‘if that’s not too late for you? I mean, you are taking the job? I didn’t expect… oh, brilliant!’

‘You go,’ Steph said serenely. ‘And you and I, young man, we’re going to get on just fine, aren’t we, while Mummy’s at her meeting?’

‘He’ll fight it. He hates the bottle, I’m warning you, you have to insist. It’s in the fridge. Twelve seconds on six,’ Sally said, on her way through the door. ‘And you mustn’t… do you know how a…’

‘And leave it for about another minute and give it a good shake, and test it on the back of my hand. I know,’ Steph said, more to Charlie than to Sally. ‘Don’t I, Charlie? I know.’

When the front door had closed behind Sally, Steph waited for a moment with the feeding bottle in her hand, then unscrewed the top and tipped the plastic-smelling formula milk down the sink. In the sitting room she removed a cat basket with a pair of sunglasses in it and a tilting stack of magazines from the sofa. Then she settled back with her feet up and placed Charlie on her stomach. Opening up her shirt, she lay back and gazed up at the cracked ceiling. Tears ran down her face as he gorged. She could feel the fingertips of his greedy little hand closing and unclosing over the skin of her breast, while his gums pulled milk from her bursting nipple almost faster than he could swallow it.

Michael listened to make sure that the house was quiet. Then he pulled a tartan rug from one of the library sofas, brought it into the utility room and spread it out on the floor. He thought that he would be safe from interruption here, even if Jean should wake up.

They had not had lunch until after half-past three. Neither of them had commented on Steph’s absence. They had chosen to assume that she must be resting and therefore did not remark on it- in this way they disallowed the possibility that there might be any significance in her failure to appear. Because as long as a thing remained unsaid, it could be deemed to be not happening. It would remain untrue, for as long as they did not draw attention to it, that dozens of little hairline cracks in their arrangements were about to open into fissures. They were afraid to refer even to how late it was to be eating lunch, lest it make them take a mere irregularity in mealtimes seriously. Since Miranda’s death everyone had been rising late and, in between daytime naps and lie-downs, scratching effortfully at things, in search of some sort of purpose in anything. To mention a lapse in the punctuality of lunch might be to suggest that they were failing to find it, or even that they might be falling apart. What did it matter, anyway, what time they had lunch? It was only time after all, told by a clock somewhere, and these days, except to notice that there seemed to be too much of it, they were hardly aware of it. Time did not seem to have any need of them nor they for it. Lunch itself, a sparse soup that had been getting weirder as well as sparser by the day, had not been worth waiting for anyway. This was its fourth manifestation, and since flavour had quite deserted the original stock, which had been made with the last cube, today Jean had added a shake of angostura bitters and a small tin of macaroni. Defeated by the effort of pretending it was edible, she had left hers unfinished and agreed to lie down for the rest of the afternoon.

Michael moved silently in bare feet through the house while he pictured her sleeping above, trusting but unaware. He was conscious of the first pleasurable sensation he had felt since before Miranda died, an agreeable certainty that what he was working quietly at now, without her knowledge, would please his mother. From the library he brought first a set of leather-bound volumes with the title The History of Scotland, during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI dated 1752, and placed them on the tartan rug. Then from the library desk he carried a brass inkstand, a pair of Sиvres inkpots, and two lace and ivory fans from a glass case that contained seven or eight others, and put them next to the books. That would do for the library. Jean would not notice. In the dining room he opened the corner cupboard that held some of the silver. He took a ladle, a sugar shaker and four salt cellars and spoons, and altered the spacing between the things that were left, dozens of them still, so that the losses were concealed. From inside the sideboard he took a porcelain tureen with a ladle and two or three lace cloths, but left the decorated blue and white pieces that stood on the top.

Back in the utility room he notched it all up. Even at Mr David’s prices there should be at least three hundred quids’ worth here. In fact, he might take the books to a proper dealer and do better. The thought of actually declining to sell to Mr David anything that Mr David was prepared to take was unfamiliar and delightful. He might make a point of doing it. He could afford to, he really only needed to make a couple of hundred to keep them all going. Michael felt a hot, excited bubble of pride rising inside him. He would take care of them; even if he had not been able to save Miranda he would take care of them now. He thought of coming back tomorrow with fresh milk, bread, meat, eggs, vegetables, fruit. Then he pictured Jean taking one of her cakes out of the oven, with happiness written all over her hot face, and told himself not to forget butter, sugar, flour, syrup, dried fruit. Chocolate for Steph. Her huge appetite had vanished since Miranda’s death, but she might be tempted by chocolate.

Using dusters and newspapers from a pile in one of the sheds he wrapped his haul carefully, arranged the pieces in the back of the van and covered them with the tartan rug. First thing tomorrow he would go over to Bath. If he got off first thing then he might even be back before Jean and Steph were up, and he would make breakfast for them and they would wake to the smell of bacon and toast and coffee. The little smile that had been on Michael’s face all afternoon widened. He closed the van doors and turned to look properly around him.

The afternoon was wearing to its end now but evening had not come; the earthy, growing smell of the spring day would not leave the air. He strolled out of the courtyard, drawn by the red gleam of the sun going down behind the hills miles away, far beyond the limits of the house. He followed the wide bend where the drive curved round to the front of the house before it straightened out to the half mile that ran down to the invisible road. Steph was walking towards him, though she did not appear to have seen him. Her arms were rigid against her sides, her hands apparently pushing the pockets of her jacket to the ground, and her head was down. Then she looked up and it seemed to Michael, from the angle of the lift of her head and the infinitesimal shake of her hair, that she had experienced pleasure at seeing him, perhaps for her, too, the first sensation of pleasure since before her baby had died. All at once the thought of tomorrow’s grand surprise breakfast seemed inadequate. He wanted Steph to be in on the secret too. How much better it would be if they did it together! He began to run towards her. She would be so delighted when he told her the plan; he would take her with him in the van tomorrow, and they would do the whole thing together. He would include her in everything, even show her off to Mr David.

‘Steph! Steph, listen! I’ve had this idea, it’s all set up, I’ve done it all, it’s ready to roll.’ He stopped, gasping. He felt sick and light-headed; it was such a long time since he had eaten properly.

Steph looked faintly interested. ‘Oh?’

‘I’ve took some stuff from the house, not much, nothing we’ll even miss, but worth a bit.’ He took her arm and steered her towards the house as he spoke, as if she had not been heading that way in any case. ‘Listen. It’s in the van, all ready, tomorrow we go and see my contact, you know, I’ve got this contact.’

‘Mr David. The one that rips you off.’

‘Yeah, well, this is better stuff, more saleable. It’s not the best in the house, so it’s not like it’ll get noticed, right, but it’s nice stuff, small stuff. He’ll take it. It’ll give us enough, anyway, and it’s cash, right? Enough to see us right till the next pay cheque’s due, and there’ll be an extra two hundred quid there, don’t forget. Six hundred instead of four. And if we need to, I can always do it again, there’s loads of stuff. I’ve only touched two rooms. Come with me- we’ll go early before Jean’s up, get the cash, go shopping, surprise her. You are coming, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, Michael. You and your small stuff. I can’t come with you.’

‘Why not? We won’t be out that long. If you’re worried about leaving Jean on her own… I mean we can always-’ He stopped, panting, his hands on his hips.

‘Aren’t you even going to ask me where I’ve been?’

Michael looked at her, stricken. Why had it not even occurred to him? She was leaving.

And she was smiling, actually smiling in a way Michael had not seen for weeks. She placed her hands on his shoulders and stood on tiptoe with excitement. ‘I can’t come. I can’t come with you tomorrow ’cause I’ll be at work. ’Cause I’ve got a job, haven’t I?’