A Distant Shore

III

For a woman of her age she remains in pretty good shape. She was never a beauty, but in her day she was able to turn the odd head. A few men even whistled after her in the street. Not that they were really interested, but they noticed her, and then they stopped noticing her, and by the time she and Brian had entered their thirties she was walking down the street to silence. Brian seldom walked anywhere, for he preferred to drive his company car: to work, to the golf club, to his business dinners; Brian seldom bothered to put the car away in the garage. He justified his laziness by banging on about how dangerous the streets were these days, and how you only had to travel a mile or two in any direction to find yourself in the British equivalent of Beirut. He didn’t like it when she reminded him of the Chadwicks, who were driving along the avenue at the end of the road and minding their own business when suddenly they were blocked in by two vans. Four men jumped out of the vans and bashed in their windscreen with monkey wrenches and took all their jewellery and money, and so to her way of thinking it didn’t seem to matter much where you were these days, for people seemed to feel that they could pretty much do whatever they liked to you. There had even been a story in the local paper about a woman who was badly beaten up by a gang of kids in the park across the way when she tried to stop the young hooligans from mugging her six-year-old daughter for her bike. But because Brian never listened to her when she said that he ought to walk but just be vigilant, and because he used the preponderance of street crime to justify his laziness, Brian began to grow tubby. Their infrequent love-making became, for her, deeply connected with the problem of shifting one’s weight. Brian hated her to mention his little potbelly, so she stayed quiet on this subject. Which was generally how they passed through their thirties and forties with each other. By staying quiet.

And then he left her, and the quietness intensified and threatened to overwhelm her until she noticed Mahmood. All things considered, she planned her assault quite well. Nice perfume, translucent nail polish, grey hair unbunned, and the neckline just daring enough to suggest that what lay beneath the horizon might still be worth exploring. And much to her surprise it worked. These days he arrives every Thursday evening at 7 p.m. precisely. Before he comes round she lights a dozen scented candles, and then she turns off the lights. She plumps the cushions, and places a white china bowl of mixed nuts on the glass-topped coffee table. She once tried savouries, but he did not take very well to them. Another time she tried music, but he listened for a while and then told her to turn it off. He did not ask her to turn it off, he ordered her with one hand busily pulling his lobe, as though her choice of Chopin had somehow damaged his oriental ear. These days she does not bother with either savouries or music. At 7 p.m. he knocks twice, and then he rattles the letterbox so that the flap clatters noisily. She has lost count of the number of times she has suggested to him that knocking at the door is sufficient, but he seems to be helplessly addicted to the letterbox. However, as she quickly draws the curtains and then pads her way to the door, she reminds herself that this annoying little habit of his is just another part of their ritual.

Mahmood is tall and striking. To begin with he used to step through the door and bend and kiss her on the forehead before stooping to unlace his shoes. He would place them side by side, like soldiers, in the hallway and then follow her into the candlelit living room. Back then he was slightly apprehensive, and she liked the way his eyes danced nervously around the room without ever alighting on anything. She loved his smell, which was strangely sweet and cloying, but she knew that it did not mask anything unpleasant. Mahmood was scrupulously clean, and she understood that whatever oils or lotions he rubbed into his skin were in all likelihood related to his culture, and she did not mind. In fact, back then she did not mind anything about him. Since Brian had left she had only entertained one other man, a recently widowed partner of Brian’s from the bank. However, this man had come to visit wearing a parka, some grubby slacks and trainers, not the suit and tie and the smartly polished shoes that she had been expecting. It was a Sunday afternoon, but there was still no excuse for such ill manners. He demanded a piece of lemon wedge with his tea, and he seemed disappointed that she was only able to offer milk and a tablespoon of honey that she managed to scrape from the bottom of an old jar. He then proceeded to praise his former wife’s abilities at knitting tea cosies and bed socks, and he lectured her on the excessive calories in date and walnut cake. She offered him a digestive biscuit instead, but he refused, and then when he went to leave she was forced to momentarily endure the rough wood of his tongue in her mouth.

It was after this visit that she planned her campaign with Mahmood who, at least initially, managed to exude both coyness and interest. These days Mahmood has dispensed with this performance. Mahmood manages to meet her eyes before stepping first on the heel of one foot, then on the heel of the other, and wriggling his way out of his shoes. He still lines them up next to each other, but after such a dismal approach to their removal, this gesture seems almost insulting in its affected formality. She is relieved that he still seems amenable to eating first, for to dispense with the etiquette of the shared meal would be to abandon dignity. However, “dignity” is a word that Mahmood seems to be increasingly unfamiliar with. These days he eats quickly, often with one hand (always his right hand), and he makes noises that alarm her. Today is no exception. Having finished, he stares at her as she clumsily moves a piece of chicken breast up and onto the back of her fork. He watches closely as she dips the fork into the rice and then dabs the whole construction in a shallow pool of curry sauce before levering it towards her mouth. It is painful, for she understands that he is suppressing laughter.

In bed she knows that she satisfies. He always shudders, but he does so quickly now and only once. These days their bodies separate with indifference and Mahmood is quick to give her his back. Sadly, her lover seems to have bolted down the short slope from attentive to perfunctory without any intervening stages of incremental boredom. One week he took the time to speak with her before, during and, most importantly, after their relations. The following week he was racing through the motions as though he was late for an appointment. Gone were the revealing half-sentences. “They call us Asians, but that doesn’t mean anything, does it?” Or personal titbits that she could take as signs of intimacy. “When I see my reflection in a mirror I know that I can never go back home.” He used to listen to her when she explained what an electric blanket was, or when she told him what the difference was between a bishop and a priest. When she suggested that he read “improving” books, he took the trouble to ask her what she meant, and her use of the phrase “birthday suits” actually made him laugh out loud. They were, of course, in their “birthday suits” at the time. He kept laughing and repeating the phrase as though unable to comprehend the absurd precision of the imagery, and she laughed along with him. Today she bore his weight and coquettishly wrapped one leg around him as though she wished to pull him deeper. But she did not; it was all show. A gesture to prevent her from feeling as though she was merely an object speared.

She does not blame Mahmood for her present degradation, for she understands the real culprit to be Brian. She silently endured too many years of his conversation in the form of monologues about the virtues of architecturally designed patios and breakfast bars, and the superiority of South African whites over French Chardonnay, conversations in which her opinions were never sought. On other days he would simply seize a seemingly random topic and start to complain. Did she realise that you used to be able to see a specific doctor, but now everywhere’s a group practice and you never know who the hell you will be getting? Was she aware of the fact that because of the bloody unions, his bank employees were now only allowed to “interface” with the public from behind “anger-proof” glass? She quickly learned that Brian had absolutely no interest in her opinions, but by not answering back she allowed him to look through and beyond her, until he finally convinced himself that she did not exist. When Brian walked away, she too was convinced that he was walking away from nothing, and it hurt. However, at least to begin with, Mahmood did not treat her as though she were invisible.

She stares at his back. To be desired is not unpleasant, and to be mounted and entered suggests desire. In the beginning she toyed with the idea of asking him to find a way to stay over. She wanted him to tell Feroza that he had to visit his brother in Leicester, but somehow she never found the courage to put this proposal before him, and he never suggested it to her of his own accord. One night she did ask Mahmood if the next day they might go to the town museum to see a visiting exhibition of priceless Eastern miniatures, but he looked at her with disbelief writ large across his brown face. With some effort she was able to imagine that his curdled face was rejecting the art and not her company. She smiled. But inwardly she decided that she would never again suggest anything beyond the boundaries of their arrangement. She was not a woman who coped well with rejection. But, if truth be told, Mahmood had not rejected her. He had simply arrived at a place where he no longer felt it necessary to either woo or enchant his fifty-five-year-old mistress.

Strangely enough, she still trusts this lithe man who briefly visits her table on the way to her bed. When he first spoke to her outside the confines of the newsagent’s shop, he did so with a candour that she was sure Feroza had never been privileged to hear. He sat in her living room loudly sipping strong tea, and nervously rubbing one blue-socked foot on top of the other. She told him that last week she had been furious at the ill manners of the woman ahead of her in the queue at the shop. The woman had complained that she could smell curry on her copy of Hello! magazine, and when poor Mahmood had offered to refund her money, the rude so-and-so had simply stormed out. But they both knew that by itself this incident did not explain her asking him over for tea. She had framed the invitation as an opportunity for social intercourse and cultural exchange in an English home, but as he continued to sip loudly at his tea, her conversation stumbled and she heard herself comment that they had not had much weather of late, and then she fell silent and waited for him to talk. Which, in due course, he seemed eager to do. He told her about his first marriage at the age of twelve in his Punjabi village, and how his family had arranged everything without any concern for his feelings. Mahmood told her that he was traded as though he were a mule, and used as the bargaining tool in a dispute between two families. He told her about his childish attempts at sex with his fourteen-year-old bride, who quickly developed an appetite that a twelve-year-old boy could not satisfy. He admitted that, in an attempt to master his “woman,” he beat her, and he recalled the many times she ran away, and how her own father had once been forced to drag her back by her long black hair, screaming and kicking. The father slapped her face and then, suddenly remembering himself, he begged forgiveness from her husband, a twelve-year-old boy, for this act of transgression. Mahmood rose to his full height and thanked his father-in-law for returning his wife. In his heart Mahmood felt no anger towards his father-in-law; he felt only an embarrassment that his wife had humiliated him for all the village to see. She had made it plain that he could not control her, which by extension suggested that he could not control any woman. His fellow villagers not only sympathised with Mahmood, they despised his wife for her refusal to play the part that had been assigned to her.

Eventually, when he was sixteen, a delegation of men visited Mahmood, and while they were careful to pay him all the respect that his position demanded, they suggested to him that unless he was prepared to beat his wife as though she were a carpet, he should return the woman and shame her. Despite the indignities that he had suffered, Mahmood could not find it within himself to habitually raise his hand to his wife, and he knew that it would be impossible to jettison this woman and keep his honour intact. Therefore, after the departure of the delegation, he made a decision. He had seen the many photographs that the men in England sent back to the village, photographs in which they posed holding a radio, or standing beside a television set, or sometimes just clutching a fistful of five-pound notes. Mahmood made up his mind that he would leave for England and join his older brother in Leicester, where he owned three restaurants. He imagined that there would be no problem finding a well-paid job of some description in Mrs. Thatcher’s country, and after he had saved some money his ambition was to go to university, hopefully to study law or medicine. Mahmood dreamed of one day returning to his village in triumph as the most important man in the region, and he intended to spit in the face of the woman who had publicly humiliated him.

But she knows that Mahmood runs a modest newsagent’s in a small town in the north of England that boasts neither a cathedral nor a university. Mahmood lives in a place where if, on a Saturday afternoon, one happens to turn on the television set as the football results are being read out, towns of unquestionable insignificance will be freely mentioned, but Mahmood’s small English town will simply not exist. After ten years working in the kitchens of all three of his brother’s restaurants, and rising to a position where he ultimately had sole charge of The Khyber Pass, Mahmood had managed to save enough money so that he could consider starting up a business of his own with his new wife, Feroza. However, Feroza was aware that her husband could no longer stomach the disrespectful confusion of running a restaurant. The sight of fat-bellied Englishmen and their slatterns rolling into The Khyber Pass after the pubs had closed, calling him Ranjit or Baboo or Swamp Boy, and using poppadoms as Frisbees, and demanding lager, and vomiting in his sinks, and threatening him with his own knives and their beery breath, and bellowing for mini-cabs and food that they were too drunk to see had already arrived on the table in front of them, was causing Mahmood to turn prematurely grey. Feroza persuaded Mahmood that the newsagent’s business would be better for them both and, having been born and brought up in Leicester, Feroza knew all the intricacies of how to sell the day’s news to the English in either tabloid or broadsheet form. She persuaded her husband that they should leave the Midlands and raise their family in a small English town with decent schools and among people who still had some manners. And so Mahmood had fled Leicester, thus incurring his brother’s wrath, and only a year ago he had arrived with chubby Feroza to be greeted by the hospitable gloating of those who lived in this town.

Dorothy says very little about her own life, being concerned to make sure that the dominant narrative is male. After all, his story involves passion, betrayal, migration, sacrifice and ultimately triumph. Mahmood is a success. Her story contains the single word, abandonment. Curiously enough, she realises that both stories seem unconcerned with the word “love,” but she keeps this thought to herself. And then one evening, during the second month of their understanding, Mahmood asked her about her life, and specifically about her husband. She blushed which, given the fact that she was lying in bed with Mahmood at the time, suggested that she still carried within her the painful residue of a relationship whose memory she had been trying to shed for the past five years. “He left me and ran off with a younger woman.” She paused. “And then I left Birmingham and came back to live here.” She slowly inclined her head away from him, and wondered if a trip to the bathroom, or excusing herself to go and make a cup of tea, might be considered impolite. He said nothing. She imagined Brian parking his car in a succession of country lay-bys and spending the late afternoons wondering just what on earth had happened to his life. And why not, for she was probably at their home with a glass of sherry asking herself the same question. Her teaching career no longer interested her, and although she still derived pleasure from music, it no longer gave her joy. Joy was an emotion which soared on wings, which suggested transcendence, but her life with Brian was firmly anchored. No joy. And then there were Brian’s women who, like Brian, she imagined to be overweight. She smirked at the thought of the dreadful collisions that she presumed must pass for sex, with portly Brian no doubt casting himself as a star performer. But it was pathetic really, for she could always tell when he was at it because he stopped wearing a vest. Mahmood said nothing about Brian having run off with a younger woman. She turned to face him and pulled herself up and onto one elbow. “Are you really interested in my life? I mean there’s not much to it, you know.” Mahmood continued to stare at her with his dark eyes.

She began by explaining that, as the eldest, she was expected to set an example. And this she did, much to the annoyance of her younger sister. She worked hard, but she did not regard university to be a viable proposition. However, when she was accepted to read music at Manchester, her shell-shocked parents took her and Sheila out to a restaurant for the first time. Her father was uncomfortable handling the menu, and both girls noticed, but their mother simply laughed nervously and kept looking about herself in the hope that she might see somebody she knew. When the bill came, her father added and re-added it three times, all the while muttering under his breath about forking out money for something that his wife could have whipped up with one hand tied behind her back. He had spent his working life as a draughtsman, reluctantly hovering on the fringes of middle-class respectability, but this close proximity to what he perceived to be “white-collar smugness” served only to increase the fervour with which he preached “the value of brass.” Sadly, the celebration dinner at the restaurant merely reminded the girls of the restrictions which had long blighted their young lives, and the evening propelled Sheila one step further along a path that would finally lead her clear away from home.

Dorothy met Brian during her first year at university. A public schoolboy, he had a posh accent and confidence, two things that she knew she could never acquire, no matter how long she searched for them. For three years he protected her as she struggled with her degree in music, while he seemed to breeze through his course in mathematics, which he regarded as an unwelcome distraction from his passion for beer and rugby. As the time drew near for them to be unleashed upon the world, it was clear to their small group of friends that Brian would propose and they would be married, which, within a few weeks of graduation, they were. Brian’s parents tried to hide their disappointment, but her mother was delighted, for her ambition had never included a daughter at university, let alone a son-in-law whose family lived in a detached house. Her father, on the other hand, took his kneeling-pad down to the allotment and busied himself there. His youngest daughter had run off and was no longer in touch with home, and his eldest daughter was marrying into a world whose values he despised. Her father saw no reason to pretend, and she saw no reason to beg, and so they kept out of each other’s way. The night before the wedding her sister telephoned and wished her good luck, but said that Brian sounded as though he lacked a bit of spark. They had argued, but they did so without passion. She reminded Sheila that the wedding would not be the same without her, and her sister reminded her of the facts that she had recently shared with Dorothy during the university visit. They both fell silent. She decided to conclude the conversation by telling Sheila that after the wedding they would be moving to Birmingham, where Brian was brought up. Sheila laughed.

Long before she went to live there, she had already imagined Birmingham to be a city whose heart was a cold arterial clot of motorways, and whose suburbs were full of windows that displayed washable flowers. Brian was happy, for he had secured a job in a city-centre merchant bank, but soon after their marriage they discovered that they could not have children. They had every test possible, but the doctors claimed that they still did not know what was wrong, which of course meant that they probably did. After years of being prodded and probed they finally did discover the reason for their failure, and their GP was left with the sad task of persuading Brian to accept that the problem was his. However, her compassion quickly soured into anger as she began to hear about his petty affairs at the bank with backroom girls. Straight out of school, these were graceless, slightly dumpy girls still too naïve to be placed in front of the clientele, but who went positively weak at the knees at the thought of being pinned beneath a man who wore a suit and tie to work. She threw herself into her life as a teacher of music at the local secondary-modern school, and having proved her ability to tease tuneful sounds from their discordant souls, she was quickly transferred to the grammar school. This was a place where the parents expected, and where the headmaster expected, although she soon discovered that the pupils were as unfocused as the pupils at the supposedly inferior school. And then Brian’s affairs seemed to stop, and she realised that there must be somebody special. She herself had not been totally ignored. There had been staffroom flirtations; the head of physics idly pushing an arm through hers and looking at her in a particular way; and the cricket master forever offering his services as a driver to run her to a concert, or to the supermarket, or to anywhere that took her fancy. Once or twice a month a man would sit next to her on the bus and attempt conversation, but she knew that her days as an object of desire were firmly rooted in the past. She imagined that either pity or curiosity motivated these men, and it never occurred to her that there might be any possibility of her seriously pursuing a liaison beyond the one she endured with Brian.

He left the note on the kitchen table. It simply said, “Sorry.” At first she did not know what to make of it. She tried to remember the threads of their last argument. There was always an argument in the air, like an unresolved plot line from one of the television soaps whose omnibus editions he liked to watch at the weekends in his socks and sandals. But she could not remember any argument. She put down her bag and went upstairs to get out of her school clothes. Then she taught her private student, and after the hopeless boy had left, she began to prepare dinner. It was only when the light began to fade at 8:30 p.m. that she realised that her inability to locate the source of any argument was far more significant than she was acknowledging. In fact, there was a problem. She called his office, but there was no answer, just the office machine and his dry-toned voice. After a sleepless night in their oversized raft of a bed, everything was clarified. The letter arrived with the morning post. She recognised his handwriting and tore it open. He had gone to Spain with Barbara, whoever Barbara was. He was sorry, but he could not live this life, and it was killing him to pretend. He had to go, but he knew that she would be better off on her own without him. How did he know? she wondered. The selfish pig had walked out on nearly thirty years of marriage and was writing to her as though the only thing that he was guilty of was exchanging the wretched uncertainty of English weather for the calming predictability of blue sky and bright sunshine. She did not dress, nor did she leave the house. She telephoned the school and told them that she needed to take a week’s leave of absence because of a family crisis, and the headmaster’s secretary answered her in a voice which seemed to be taunting her with secret knowledge of the failure of her marriage. And then, sometime later the same day, having drunk a dozen cups of coffee, a decision was made to sell up and, at fifty years of age, start over again in the nondescript town that she had grown up in. She would leave Brian’s Birmingham and go home and find a position among her own.

Mahmood had listened attentively and occasionally raised an eyebrow, but she knew that hers was not a very interesting story. For the past five years she has lived in a neat semi-detached house and earned her daily bread as the music mistress at the grammar school that, soon after her return, abandoned all standards and became the local comprehensive. In the evenings she has become something of a television addict, watching programmes that she acknowledges have no value beyond the killing of dull time. Reality shows and court-room dramas are her speciality, but once in a while she can enjoy a documentary, particularly if it concerns animals. Meanwhile, in Spain, her former bank-manager husband runs a bed and breakfast (which he insists on calling a “pension’) on the Costa del Sol for “upmarket” British tourists. Football shirts are not encouraged, and fried breakfasts, not just continental cold plates, are offered. In fact, according to the promotional material that Brian so generously sent to her, fried breakfasts are the speciality of Barbara’s house. Apparently, even some of the bigger hotels don’t do “the works,” but at Brian and Barbara’s “Casa BeeBee” you can always get a fried breakfast. Having read the brochures, she immediately burned them. For five years she has lived alone, and each passing year she has watched herself age, the increased wrinkling of the skin between her breasts being her secret barometer of decrepitude. Last month the man on the bus asked to see her bus pass and she slapped the two-pound coin down so hard that she hurt her hand. Not turning heads is one thing, not being taken seriously is another thing altogether. And then one morning, as she felt herself finally coming to terms with the futility of years spent mourning a man whom she had never truly loved, she walked into the corner shop for her newspaper and the new owner, a doe-eyed Indian man, handed her a copy of the Daily Mail and took her money.

She continues to teach because there is nothing else for her to do. It is too late for a change of career, and there is no other profession that she can imagine herself pursuing. The truth is she lost the passion for teaching music at about the same rate that English schoolchildren appeared to lose the passion for learning. And the piano is not a popular instrument. Was it ever? In the remote hope that she might unearth a singular talent she takes private pupils, but she understands that she is little more than an unwelcome distraction for middle-class children whose parents are determined to provide them with socially acceptable skills. To most pupils she is no different from their ballet teacher or their tennis professional. But, mercifully, she has not lost her love for the music itself. After Brian left she thought about trying to compose. Her few university compositions were praised, and her senior lecturer had written her a note asking her to perhaps consider applying for a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. But little did he know that her sail was already hoisted in the direction of Birmingham. These days she practises again, and she tries to tease notes into tuneful shapes. Sometimes she writes down her patterns, but she does not tell this to Mahmood. Occasionally she sees him in his shop wearing a personal stereo, a discordant, tinny whine leaking out from the badly padded headset. She is used to offering herself up to his boredom, but after her disastrous attempt to interest him in Chopin, she now refuses to expose her beloved music to his stone ears.

In the bathroom of the house she lays out towels, a robe, fresh soap and a toothbrush. To start with Mahmood would shuffle heavily into the bathroom and use her “gifts.” She tried not to allow uncharitable thoughts to enter her head, but she knew that Feroza could not care for him in this way. And back in his native country he could only have dreamed of such luxury. But he no longer bathes. He goes to the bathroom, but he sometimes forgets to shut the door properly and she hears the undignified thunder of urine cascading directly into the water and not against the side of the bowl. And then he flushes and blows his nose at the same time, so that it sounds as though a storm has broken loose in her house. Mahmood comes back and he has another go at her, but it is as though he is trying to knock her through the bed. In the beginning it gave her pleasure to spoil him a little, but these days, Mahmood no longer has time to be spoiled. The presents she buys, the silver pendant, the leather wallet, the address book, are no longer fingered and weighed and then finally held. He simply nods and sometimes he even forgets to take them with him. And so there are no more presents. When he finishes, Mahmood rolls out of bed and steps quickly into his clothes. For some reason he scrunches his white cotton underpants into a ball and pushes them into his trouser pocket. She looks at his smooth, unmarked back as he bends over to pull on his socks.

“Would you like a drink before you go? A cup of tea, or something stronger?”

He turns and looks at her. He smiles with his black eyes, but he says nothing. He is dressed now, and he stands and turns fully to face her. She lies entangled in the sheets and stares up at him, a fish trapped.

“No, thank you,” he says. “I have to go.”

She notices a slight shrug of his shoulders, and then she watches as he treads silently from the room. He steps into his shoes in the hallway, then she hears the door open and bang to and the letterbox clatter, for he always shuts the door with too much force. After a short period of reflection she struggles clear of the bed linen and pulls on a cotton robe. Then she goes into the sitting room and draws the curtains a little to admit some moonlight, before opening the piano lid as far as it will go.

The following morning she goes into the shop. This is part of her daily routine. A copy of the Daily Mail on the way to work. It is his habit to sell it to her in a brusque manner that she knows he has appropriated in order to disguise their affair. However, of late his manner seems to have corroded into indifference. She is trying to learn not to take everything so personally, but she imagines that such anxieties are an integral part of deceit. Today Feroza is sitting on the counter top and in her arms she holds a child. A new-born baby with a head of oily black hair that is already curling wildly into cowlicks and bushy tufts. Mahmood is playing with this child and he does not see her as she walks into the shop. He is showering love and affection upon this child. Her eyes meet those of Feroza, who stares at her with a cold, unblinking gaze. She notices a mocking sneer beginning to buckle Feroza’s lips, and then Mahmood turns and sees her. There is no warmth on his face, no glimmer of communal deceit in his eyes, nothing. He simply looks at her and then returns his gaze to the child. “Give her the paper,” he says without looking up. Feroza picks up the Daily Mail. She holds out her hand, and Feroza drops the paper on top of the counter for her to pick up. Feroza is no longer smiling, and the child is revelling in the attention of its father.

During the second period of sixth-form music the pupils stare at her as she stumbles over her words. There are long pauses. She gazes out of the window. Then she turns to face them and laughs. She is conscious of the fact that she is making a fool of herself in front of these children. She tries to convince them of the relative merits of Mozart over his contemporaries. In fact, over all artists of the period. Sacrifice. She rolls the word around on her tongue. Sacrifice. And arrogance. Here she stops. She is brought up quickly against this word. She feels faint and wonders whether she should stop talking and play a few notes on the piano. Demonstrate something for them. Sacrifice is not the problem. Her life with Brian involved surrendering her dignity. Sacrifice. She has known sacrifice all her life. Making chicken curry is sacrifice. Asking him if he has ever been in an English home is sacrifice. Listening to him talking about his years of misery in the restaurant trade in Leicester. Buying a Sunday paper and nattering idly about the weather while others come in and out and cast her baleful glances, now that is sacrifice. They can stare at her if it makes them happy, but she knows about sacrifice. But arrogance is something new. Mozart. Mahmood. Arrogant eyes. Nobody says anything. They simply stare at her. But she is not saying anything. And then she hears the bell and she knows that today she will not have to talk any more about Mozart or about sacrifice. She watches as the pupils scrape back their chairs and stand. They gather up their books and papers, and they look at her as they walk out. They look at her and she looks back at them and grins. They continue to look at her.

She waits, but there is no knocking at the door and no rattling of the letterbox. The lights are dimmed, the candles lit, and the faint odour of Rhogan Josh lingers in the air. She has bought an especially expensive bottle of wine in order to make an effort, even though she knows that Mahmood is not a wine person. The subtleties of the bottle will be lost on him, but nevertheless she has bought the wine. However, there is no knocking at the door. There is no rattling of the letterbox. For the past few days she has gone into the shop and collected her newspaper and he has looked in her direction, but done so without encouraging conversation. But why should he? The shop is generally full and it is not their way to draw attention to themselves. This morning she sat on the top deck of the number forty-two bus and looked down into the back gardens. A woman was throwing a dripping carpet over a thin line that was stretched between two sycamore trees. Behind the woman a wooden shed leaned shoulder to shoulder against an equally unstable garage, and the whole sorry picture was illuminated by a weak pale light which gave the impression that at any moment a storm might break. As the bus passed the park she saw the stone war memorial, and beneath the plaque somebody had spray-painted “Eat Shit” on the plinth. Again she reprimands herself for her behaviour. She had let herself down in front of her sixth-formers. It was shameful to display such a lack of control, but she knew that they would soon forget her slip-up. It was only one class, and next week she will put everything back on track. And then she smells burning. She hurries to the kitchen and turns down the light under the Rhogan Josh, and then she decides to uncork the wine.

This afternoon she went into the new “one-stop” shop by the school. There was a new person behind the counter. A young girl, who had that sunken-cheeked, gypsy-like Romanian look about her. It was difficult to tell, but she was not English. That much was clear. She wondered where the girl’s parents were, and if they intended to come and help out. In her nose the girl wore a polished silver stud like a small ball bearing, and her black hair was flecked with outgrowths of purple. The child was making a statement, but it was one that was badly in need of interpretation. She chose an expensive bottle of wine and then she pointed to a doll on the top shelf. The foreign girl reached skywards and handed it to her in order that she might inspect it. “You like?” She ignored the girl and then turned the doll first one way and then the next. She knew that she was going to take it, but she was simply going through the motions. She opened her purse and handed the girl a twenty-pound note, and the girl opened the till and reckoned the change with surprising ease. Then, ignoring her customer’s outstretched palm, the girl placed the money on the counter and began to put the doll and the bottle of wine into the same paper bag. She gathered up her change and took the paper bag from the immigrant girl without glancing in her direction or offering any thanks. Once she reached home she took the expensive bottle of wine from the bag and put it in the fridge to chill. The doll she left in the bag and she placed it beside her briefcase. She dimmed the lights and lit the candles. She made Rhogan Josh. And then she readied herself. And waited. But there is no knocking at the door. There is no rattling of the letterbox.

In the morning she stops by the shop for her Daily Mail. She closes the door behind her. Feroza is serving a man who seems to be paying a bill. He is squinting at a printout, his glasses pushed up onto his crumpled forehead. She knows that he is questioning Mahmood’s arithmetic. Or worse, his honesty. Feroza looks at the man with contempt, and then she glances up at her new customer. The child is asleep in a basket on the counter, which makes her look like a gift that has been delivered and unwrapped. Feroza tosses the Daily Mail onto the counter top. She taps the counter with her knuckles and asks, “Anything else?” The man is absorbed by his puzzled squinting and so she steps around him and approaches the counter where the Daily Mail sits between these two women like an unsigned contract.

“I’ve brought this.” She plunges a hand into the paper bag and produces the blonde-haired doll. “For your child.”

She offers it as a gift to the wife, who looks first at the doll, and then at her. Feroza’s eyes ignite with indignation. The man looks up from the arithmetic, and then the wife spits at the Englishwoman and catches her in the face with her spittle. Feroza moves to spit again, but what spit she has left gets caught on her lower lip and hangs as a stringy testament to her loss of control. She leaves the doll and her Daily Mail on the counter top. She turns and exits the shop with the fierce eyes of the wife, and the puzzled eyes of the man, boring into her back. The doorbell tinkles as she opens the door, and the glass rattles as she closes it behind her. Only when she is safely outside does she take the sleeve of her coat and wipe the spittle from her face.

She ought to have known better. She sits in the dusk clutching a mug of cocoa with both hands as though she needs to keep them warm. She can barely remember her day at school, but she is sure that she gave the outward appearance that everything was fine. She can feel her feet perspiring lightly, which they always do when she is racked with any kind of anxiety. At her age she ought to have known better than to patronise a thirty-year-old woman and her child. She had been arrogant enough to presume that she could deceive this woman, who said precious little but whose hooded gaze spoke volumes. Perhaps an apology would make things right, and enable her to close this chapter with some dignity. At present this is all that she desires. Closure with dignity. Nothing more. She telephones him when she imagines that Feroza will have gone to sleep. “Mahmood,” she whispers, “it’s me. I’m sorry for calling, but I think I need to see you.” There is silence. “I need to explain about this morning, that’s all.” There is a silence that is clearly informed by his exasperation. And then he speaks.

“You must buy your newspaper somewhere else. I do not wish to know you.” He puts down the phone. He does not wish. He does not wish. She replaces the telephone on the cradle and holds on to the receiver as though readying herself to make a follow-up call. But there will be no follow-up call. She will draw a hot bath, and then there will be another mug of hot cocoa, and then she will go to her bed, which has unfortunately begun to feel light without a double load. In the morning she will remedy this situation. She will purge her house of all signs of Mahmood, and then she will discover another route to school. One which will neither stir her memory nor trouble her conscience.

It is Monday morning. She sits in the staffroom during a double-free period. Time to do some marking and make a cup of coffee, if she can find a clean cup. The staff have long ago given up the idea of their having individual cups, for invariably somebody would use somebody else’s cup and this would lead to a falling out and general bad feeling. This morning she finds a cup that, with a quick rinse, is tolerable. She is also lucky enough to find biscuits that are not stale. And then, as she stirs the UHT milk into the coffee, she looks up and sees him idling by the door.

“Well, come on in. Nobody’s going to bite.” He is dressed in the uniform of a relief teacher. His suit is smart, the shoes are well polished, the tie neatly knotted, and the strangely creased shirt is clearly package-fresh. The biggest give-away is the briefcase, which is emaciated and concave as though eager to be nourished with badly written papers. He looks around himself, checking that it really is him that this woman is speaking to. Now he steps into the staffroom and gingerly closes the door behind him.

“Coffee?” she asks. “I don’t recommend the tea.” He nods, then remembering his manners he speaks.

“Yes, please. Just black. No sugar.”

“Just black, no sugar,” she repeats. He sits down and places his briefcase on the floor. She hands him his cup of coffee, then she picks up her own and sits opposite him. “This is my favourite part of the week. My Monday morning double-free period. I can catch up and get a bit of peace and quiet.” He seems rather alarmed by this confession and puts down his coffee.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.” She looks at him, this timid man with greying temples and rather awkwardly knitted hands.

“Perhaps I should introduce myself. Geoff. Geoff Waverley.” He holds out his hand, which she shakes.

“I’m Dorothy Jones.”

“Pleased to meet you, Dorothy.”

He sounds well mannered enough, but she doesn’t remember giving him permission to call her Dorothy.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she says. “But would you like to go for a drink after school?” He pauses as though unsure how to respond to this overture, and then he laughs nervously.

“Well, why not?”

“It’s all right, I’m quite harmless. And there’s a nice pub that nobody goes into, neither sixth-formers nor teachers. That’s why it’s nice. Your reputation will be safe with me.” He laughs again, the tension flooding out of him in a great volley of high-pitched laughter. She looks at him and smiles. And then, to his evident confusion, she takes a sip of coffee, stands up, and then crosses the staffroom floor and returns to her marking.

Why not? she thinks. It has been a fortnight now since Mahmood put the phone down on her. Apart from the twice-weekly games of tennis with the boring woman who is the head of English, her life has returned to a familiar routine of time spent at the keyboard, assiduous reading, undemanding television programmes and fitful bouts of sleeping. She misses the idea of Mahmood, almost as much as she misses the man himself. Even when he went at her without any intimacy, she felt connected to something that existed beyond the narrow scope of her own predictable world. There was a stimulating confusion in her life which, with the slamming of a phone, has once more become as unsatisfactory as an unopened suitcase on a single bed. These days she finishes her meals, having often done little more than pick idly at the food, and then she stands her knife and fork to attention next to each other and gazes at the floral pattern of the wallpaper. Sometimes she stares out of the window at the people in the streets walking their dogs, stopping at hedges and lamp-posts for their pets to do their business, then quickly yanking at the dog leash and scurrying away from the little parcels that have been deposited. The one bright note in her life is her rediscovery of the joys of walking, although she is always careful to avoid the dog mess. Three miles to school, and three miles back again, all the while positively sucking in great buckets of fresh air. If, as will occasionally transpire, she feels too fatigued to walk back from school, then there is no guilt attached to hopping on a bus and paying the fare. She now notices the frequent stopping, and the tedious waiting at some stops as large numbers of passengers get on and off, but she tries not to let these things annoy her. These days, once they reach her street, she is careful to disembark one stop beyond the corner shop and walk back to her semi.

She watches him as he stands by the bar ordering the drinks. He tries to attract the barman’s attention, but he does not realise that the barman has already seen him and will come over after he has finished serving the lady in the wheelchair. Her new friend is too keen to prove himself masterful. She stands and goes to look at the jukebox, which is full of music with which she is unfamiliar. A drink in the pub. Jukebox. She remembers this ritual from the early days with Brian in Manchester. She looks around the dark, oak-panelled pub, and notices that all the mirrors are filthy and covered in a thick film of dust. The carpet is worn through in places and badly stained, and for some reason the door to the “Gents” is propped open so that, although she cannot see the actual urinals, she can see a succession of men slowly turning around and zipping themselves up, then wiping their hands on their trousers before ambling back into the gloom of the pub. The place is populated with after-work couples, the men with slightly loosened ties, and the women pulling nervously on cigarettes and speaking with an animation that no doubt eludes them when they are in the office. And then there are the regulars; old men with dun-coloured jackets nursing their solitary pints of beer, and middle-aged women with pinched faces and sugar-sabotaged teeth, who slump in their seats and wait in the dull hope that something approximating to love might once again show itself. As she leaves the jukebox and moves back to their table she decides that there is no reason at all why she should tell him that this is her first time in this pub, which looks as though a jumble sale has exploded in the place. Confession, at this stage, is not going to help the evening to pass.

He places both drinks neatly onto cardboard coasters and, as he does so, she looks up at him with her “hello” face. He moves his still-emaciated briefcase from the bench and onto a chair, and plops down next to her. Then he takes a large mouthful of a pint of what looks suspiciously like lager and lime, and she picks up her half-pint of Guinness and toasts him. “Cheers.” She looks at him and wonders if he truly is this nervous, or if this is part of a game that he plays. He looks around himself.

“Nice place, isn’t it?” She is out of touch with this kind of conversation.

“And so you teach geography?” she says.

“If I can’t see the world, I may as well talk about it.”

“Oh,” she says. “Why can’t you see it?” He laughs now, and for the first time she sees his perfectly spaced white teeth. He is a handsome man, despite the crow’s feet that decorate the corners of his eyes.

“Commitments. I’ve got a wife and child. And they don’t pay us like they ought to. Worse if you’re just a supply teacher. But you know all this already.” She finds herself nodding slightly.

“I’ve never done supply, but I can imagine.”

“Well, I don’t recommend it, but it does serve a purpose.” She turns around to face him more directly, aware of the fact that as she does so her skirt rides up so that her right knee is exposed. She still has good legs. In fact, they are her best feature. Brian was always jealous of the way that men looked at her legs, and he used to compliment her if she wore a trouser-suit. After he left for Spain she put her two trouser-suits, one blue and one grey, into a black-plastic bin liner and put them out with the rubbish.

After two more pints of beer, and one half-pint of Guinness, it is his idea that they should go for a meal. He suggests La Spiaggia, imagining that she will be familiar with the place. She tells him that she generally does not go out to eat, but that she will be happy to dine with him. Her glass is still half-full, but his pint glass is almost empty and he seems unsure of what to do. She solves the problem for him by suggesting that he go fetch himself a half-pint. She watches as he makes his way to the bar, this time with more confidence, and he appears pleased that the barman pulls his beer without his having to ask. He turns round and smiles at her.

La Spiaggia is a family-owned establishment that looks suspiciously like a chain restaurant, but she imagines that the owners prefer it this way. In this town too much individuality will not be rewarded. He chooses a table by the window and they begin to study their four-page menus, but she reads without absorbing any of the meaning from the words.

“The veal is good,” he says. “If you eat meat, that is.”

“I’d just like some pasta. That should see me fine.”

He laughs. “You’ll waste away.”

They order, and he chooses a red that he describes as “special,” but to her it seems quite ordinary. Through the window they watch a group of young boys in designer clothes shouting and swearing at each other, and competing for the attention of two girls who walk on ahead, seemingly oblivious to the pandemonium behind them. The spectacle seems to unsettle him and he takes another sip of wine and laughs nervously.

“There seem to be a lot of gangs in the town. Well, hooligans really, but it’s their body language more than what they say, I suppose. You start to wonder if they’re not carrying knives, or worse.”

“Well,” she begins, “according to the talk in the staffroom, they’re all on hard cider and even harder drugs. We’re expected to believe that they’re looking to cause trouble, or steal something, simply because they’re bored.” She laughs now. “And so there we have it. I suppose we can’t expect the modern kid to find satisfaction by doing ‘bunny hops’ on his or her bike.” She turns towards the window and wonders if she’s boring her new friend.

When the food arrives, he orders another bottle of wine. She has only just finished her first glass, but he asks for neither her opinion nor her approval. He starts to eat and he speaks with his mouth full, but at least he makes some attempt to chew before he begins his sentences.

“It’s worrying though, isn’t it? I mean these days everyone’s a victim and nobody’s responsible. Do you think it’s because there’s a lack of discipline and order in schools? Are we to blame?”

Again she laughs. “You sound like my father. He died a few years ago.”

He stops eating. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. He lived his life, I suppose. It’s just that he began to worry about young people. He worried that they no longer had any fear, that it wasn’t just how they talked that bothered him, it was what they would do. I suppose he’d have said it was to do with discipline in the home, more than with discipline in the schools. And immigration.”

“Immigration?”

“Well, you know, to some people everything’s to do with immigration.”

“But these kids were not black.” He gestures out of the window. “They were not out to mug anyone.”

“I know.” She lowers her eyes and concentrates on the remains of her plate. “I know. I agree with you.” She picks up her still-full wine glass by the stem and rolls it in her fingers. “Your wife and child, they won’t be coming here then?”

“Maybe at the end of the year. After the affair with the squash player burns itself out.” He laughs loudly now, throwing back his head. The waiter looks across, but quickly looks away. “Bit of a cliché really, isn’t it? But that’s the truth. I’m just giving them space.”

“That’s good of you,” she says, taking a sip from her glass.

“I go back to Nottingham at the weekends. To see my daughter, Claire. But I thought it best to get out of town for a while, and this local authority had jobs, so here I am.” He pours a fresh glass of red wine, and he drinks quickly. She watches as he swallows the mouthful that marks the line between coherence and mess. “I’m staying in lodgings with a landlady. Like I’m a sodding student again.” He laughs and with one hand he loosens his tie. “Who’d have thought it.”

“Thought what?”

“That I’d come to this.” She looks into his eyes and sees the vulnerability beneath the bluster. “Thank you, though.”

“For what?”

“For asking me for a drink. I’ve been dreading the evenings. Leaving my temporary job and going back to my temporary lodgings. Sitting in the living room watching stupid television programmes with Mrs. Johnson, and then having to endure the embarrassment of her offering me a cup of Horlicks and a plate of biscuits. It’s either put up with her, or go out to the local pub and find somebody to play darts with and bore to death with my life story. So thanks.”

She takes a sip of wine and smiles broadly at him.

“My pleasure.” And then she continues. “Perhaps we ought to be going now.” He looks at her as though shocked. Then he puts down his glass and reaches across the table and takes her hands in both of his.

“I mean it. I’m really grateful. Thank you.” She lowers her eyes and then gently wriggles her hands out from under his grip. He clears his throat. “Are you still married to your husband?”

“No, we’re divorced.”

“Happily?”

She does not say, no, he washed his hands of me. “Everything runs its course.”

“Lonely?”

She does not say, I used to be the fancy woman for the Asian man in the corner shop, but he dropped me. “I’m comfortable with my own company.” She laughs. “Most of the time.”

As they wait by the bus stop he drapes a protective arm around her shoulders, but she senses that in all probability he is simply trying to maintain his balance. A homeless man, who pulls a filthy sleeping bag after him, crosses the street and looks as though he is walking towards them. She feels her protector grow tense and then, as the tramp ignores them and walks on his way, he releases an audible sigh.

They both look down the street in the direction that they imagine the bus will arrive from. Across the road in the pub car park, some louts, who are all tattoos and bared teeth, are now pushing and shoving each other and making the loud braying noises that suggest they are having a good time. She notices that two among them are brazenly advertising the contents of their bladders in triumphal watery arches, and then to her horror she realises that their performances are competitive. She wonders if any of the young vagabonds are pupils of hers, and then she catches herself and realises that she is ignoring her escort.

“You know, you really don’t have to wait for me. The bus won’t be long.” He dares to finger her cheek. She hopes that he won’t speak, for his words have long since begun to slide, one into the other. And then she hears the sound of the bus rumbling up the hill towards them. He quickly retrieves his hand.

“Ah, your chariot approaches.”

“It’s been a lovely evening.” The bus idles before her and then the doors swoosh open accordion-style.

“You saved me from an evening of hell.” He laughs. “Or you saved somebody from an evening of hell.”

She moves quickly before he can say anything further. Once on board she fishes in her purse for the exact change, and then she takes her ticket. It’s a short ride so she sits by the door. As the bus lurches away she turns and sees him still standing by the bus stop. He waves.

The following morning she waits in the staffroom. Everybody arrives in one mad rush. Sally Lomax, the young head of English, flashes her a bright, but clearly manufactured, smile.

“I’ll have to bring George and Samantha tonight. But they’ve got colouring books and crayons, so they should be fine.”

She nods at Sally, who is too busy to register the fact that there has been a response to her statement. As Sally turns away, she can see again just how much the poor woman’s body has thickened and run to fat at the waist and hips, which no doubt accounts for her enthusiasm for exercise. Sally gulps down a final mouthful of coffee, then throws the rest in the sink. The cup goes in after the coffee. She is one of those who cannot be bothered to rinse their cup and then turn it up on the draining board. Memos have been posted, but hardly anybody takes the time to read them. She waits in the staffroom until everybody has left, but there is still no sign of Geoff Waverley. It is too late to go into assembly now. The head abhors lateness from pupils. A teacher being late for assembly is an open invitation to a hastily scribbled note of admonishment from Mr. Jowett. Instead, she goes straight to her classroom and sits at the piano. A single C establishes a tone. A beginning. But she is too anxious to develop the pattern. Through the window she sees stragglers bolting across the school playground in a pantomime of unpunctuality, their shirt-tails flying in the wind. They will clatter through the door and straight into the clutches of a prefect, but they have forgotten this. Again she hits a single C, and she listens closely to the rise and fall of this one note.

When the bell goes she walks briskly to the computer room. She pulls up the school home page, taps in her password and under “new staff” she clicks on his name. The screen flickers for a moment, as though dying, and then it bursts to life and all the details are glowing before her eyes. His degree, his previous employment, his wife’s name, Claire’s full name, her age and their address in Nottingham. The phone number has been omitted, but this will not pose a problem. She pushes the print button and then quickly makes her way past the pupils playing computer games, and those sending lovesick emails. Hers is the first sheet printed at the central terminal and she quickly folds the warm piece of paper into four and tucks it into her bag. One of her fifth-formers, a talented cellist, is staring at her.

“Morning, Miss.”

“Morning, Amanda.” She knows that of all her pupils poor Amanda with the thick ankles will continue to pursue the cello, while others will soon abandon music for more worldly pleasures.

George and Samantha sit at a table by the side of the court. They have been arguing for most of the set, pulling the single colouring book first one way and then the next. Now George throws his crayon at his older sister, who retaliates, marking George across his cheek with an orange gash. Sally comes to the net.

“I’m sorry, but I’ll have to see to them.”

She watches as Sally talks firmly to her children. Tennis with Sally has proved to be something of a mixed blessing, for she still has problems with her hips, but she does enjoy the competition. After Brian left she tried golf, but that served only to reinscribe the loneliness. And mistakes had to be viewed purely in the light of individual incompetence. At least with tennis she can win the occasional point off her opponent’s mistakes. Like life itself. A distraught-looking Sally wanders back to the net.

“I’m sorry, but I think we should stop now. Maybe five-all is as good a place as any.” She decides to say nothing, but privately wonders what on earth made Sally imagine that a four-year-old and a six-year-old would sit patiently while their mother hit a ball back and forth across a net.

The children seem happier in the cafeteria, pulling joyfully on their straws and slurping Coca-Cola all over their faces and clothes. She drinks an orange juice while Sally sits with a cup of tea and analyses the game.

“You’re getting stronger all the time. I think you’re a bit of a natural.”

She graciously accepts the younger woman’s compliments. However, if it was not for Sally she would not be here. There is nobody else that she knows in the leisure centre, and she has no desire to join up. The woman on the front desk has twice told her that she is losing money doing it this way, and that it would be much cheaper to become a member, but she prefers her temporary arrangement. Sally glances at the two children, who continue to enjoy their newly harmonious, if messy, friendship. Then she looks back at her older companion.

“Tongues are wagging in the staffroom.”

She stares blankly at her, but in a manner that forces Sally to continue.

“It’s just that I know you’ve never been much of a mixer, but these days you seem to keep yourself to yourself. As if you’re too grand for everybody, but I know that’s not how you really feel. It’s just what some people are saying.”

Through the glass, and down on the court below them, she can see two men furiously thrashing a ball back and forth with little concern for finesse. Theirs is a game of brute strength and endurance. She turns to look at Sally. The younger woman’s face is calm and etched with concern, but she resents her younger colleague’s words. Warning? Admonishment? It matters little. The words are inappropriate and she will not play tennis with this woman again.

Geoff seems slightly less animated than he was at the restaurant. Wine, she thinks. More wine, and she pours him another glass and makes a point of leaving the bottle uncorked. This morning, she slipped a note in Sally’s pigeonhole cancelling next week’s tennis. She gave no reason. Then she found the hastily scribbled note from Geoff. “Dinner? Tonight?” She put the note up against the wall and under his double question she scrawled, “My place, 8 p.m.” Then she wrote down her address, folded the note twice and tucked it into his box. She had hoped for a note from him on the morning after their dinner, but better late than never, she thought. And now, as he sips at his new glass of wine, he finally explains his failure to write.

“Claire hurt herself at school, but my wife made it sound as though the child was going to have a leg amputated. But when I got there we argued, of course. I missed the whole of yesterday, and I didn’t get back till one o’clock this morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

He empties his glass in one and pours himself another glass. Again he praises the food, but she knows that there is nothing to praise about tuna casserole. It is nice of him, but not necessary. They move into the living room and he reclines back into the sofa. She takes the armchair and sits opposite him, and then he points to the gilt-framed photograph on top of the piano.

“Your parents?” She nods.

“They were born in this town, and they lived and died here. They’re both buried in the local cemetery, side by side.” He sits forward now.

“How do you feel about that?”

About what? she wonders. About parents who had neither the means nor, in the case of her father, the desire to escape their working-class lives? Who never recovered from the shock of their eldest child going off to university in another town? Who resented their youngest child for having the temerity to abandon them and go and seek her fortune in London among the lights? How did she feel? She didn’t feel that she owed them anything, but she couldn’t deny that she had come running home when her own life had collapsed. She had, in essence, returned to their world, albeit with council houses sold off, Indians controlling the local economy, and new town houses that cost six figures for those who worked in the technology sector. Were her parents to step from their graves and re-enter this world, theirs would no longer be a town that they would recognise. She looks at her guest, and then she returns her gaze to the photograph of her parents. What she cannot tell this man is the degree to which she despises that which has been bequeathed to her. The genetic stain. Cowardice.

It is late. A kiss hangs in the air, but he seems incapable of leaning over and taking it.

“I think I’d better go now, before Mrs. Johnson slams and bolts the door on me.” He stands. They have talked about music. They have talked about travel, and about how he loved to ride the trains on Inter-rail both during and after college. Every summer he did this, skipping from Germany to France, from France to Holland and so on, moving around as the mood took him. Geoff Waverley had experienced many adventures on the road, though none, as far as she could tell, of the amorous variety. She hears the words before she has time to sort and arrange them.

“You don’t have to go. You’re more than welcome to stay here.” Her eyes light upon the clock on the mantelpiece. Again she speaks. “It’s still reasonably early.” He is standing by himself, marooned. She feels uncomfortable leaving him in this position and so she too stands. She faces him, but it is he who reaches out and takes her hand.

“I don’t think we should be doing this.”

“Doing what?” she asks.

They lie side by side. She stares at the ceiling, but his eyes are closed. She lied about her age when he complimented her.

“Fifty,” she said. “Is that too old?”

He laughed in a manner that let her know that her question was absurd. And then he fell silent and closed his eyes, while she stared at the ceiling. She can feel the surge of guilt begin to course through his stiffening body. She considers putting on some music, or opening another bottle of wine so that they can both have a drink. However, she knows that to leave the bed will break the spell. Sharing his body is one thing. Sharing his thoughts is clearly another thing altogether. And then he rolls over onto his shoulder and he faces her.

“I’ve got to go.” Her eyes meet his and she nods. “My head,” he says. “It’s spinning and I’ll just keep you awake all night.”

“I understand.” She strokes his face. “I had a good time. Thank you.” He smiles and then in one movement he rolls away from her and sits on the edge of the bed. She turns her back on him to give him some privacy, and she stares at the blank wall.

The next day she leaves a note for him in his pigeonhole. A simple note, thanking him for coming over to dinner and wondering if he is free this weekend. She reads and rereads the note a dozen times before folding it and putting it into an envelope. The sealed envelope she places between memos and other mail, most of which looks to be of little import. In the staffroom she makes an extra effort to be polite to those she encounters. However, she informs a disappointed Sally that she will not only have to miss next week’s game, but tennis will have to be indefinitely postponed because of her private music lessons. Sally has already anticipated this, although she does her best to seem both surprised and disappointed. Clearly Sally wishes to keep things amicable.

“You’ll let me know when things change, won’t you?”

“Of course,” she says. And so the day begins. It is her heavy teaching day. No free periods, and three classes of beginners. Before the cutbacks there used to be a part-time music teacher to steer the younger classes through recorder lessons and basic music appreciation, but now she has to endure the discordant tones of “Green-sleeves,” and tolerate their blank faces as she explains the difference between a concerto and a symphony. Boy groups, they understand. Girl groups, they understand. Rap. Hip-hop. But this generation has finally forced her to accept the possibility that the pleasures of the classical world are in danger of becoming extinct. After her last class she gathers up her books and then finds some extra chores to do in the classroom. In due course, having exhausted all possible tasks, she makes her way along the semi-deserted corridors to the staffroom. She looks first in her box, but there is no note. And then in his, where her note, together with his other mail, has disappeared. She is dumbfounded. She feels the sap of rejection rise in her throat, but not wishing to be discovered lingering by the mail boxes she turns quickly and walks away.

The following afternoon she goes again to her box. He has had the whole of the previous evening to frame his rejection letter, but there is nothing. Only a letter from the union demanding dues, an invitation to apply for cheap travel insurance, and a note from a parent explaining why Jenny Sommerville will be away for the next three weeks. But nothing from Mr. Waverley. She is tempted to rifle through his box in an attempt to discover any clue as to his silence, but on reflection she decides to quickly pen him another note and leave it for him to discover. In the staffroom only the two new games teachers linger. She sits at a table and writes quickly, urging her friend to contact her. She feels uncomfortable, but she desires no awkwardness between them. Almost anything else she can tolerate, but not awkwardness. She considers making a plea based on the fact that they work together, but she decides against this. After all, he is a supply teacher and he will soon be leaving. She plays the awkwardness card and leaves it at that. As she gets to her feet Sally bursts into the staffroom. She apologises to the games teachers for keeping them waiting. Clearly she is going to help out, probably with hockey practice. Then Sally sees her former tennis partner.

“Hi, you’re here late. Waiting for anyone?” Before she has a chance to shake her head and deny that she is waiting for anybody, Sally laughs and continues. “Mr. Waverley is on a field trip, if that’s who you’re looking for. Quite like the look of him myself. Half my Shakespeare class have gone with him.” Again she laughs. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining.” The games teachers are becoming impatient and they hover by the door. “Look, I’ve got to rush. See you.”

Sally leaves the door open as she disappears down the corridor. She waits until Sally is out of sight and then she steps outside and puts the note into Geoff Waverley’s box. She does not bother to close the staffroom door.

At ten o’clock that night the doorbell rings. She goes to the door and sees his dishevelled person standing before her. His hair is rumpled and he looks as though he has not slept for days. She wonders if he is angry with her for leaving a second note, but as she scrutinises his face she can see that he is more tired than angry.

“Can I come in?”

She steps to one side.

“Of course. What happened?” She pours a glass of red wine and sets it before him at the table. He takes a mouthful and then looks up at her.

“Do you have any food?” She makes him some pasta while he in turn pours himself a second and then a third glass from the bottle. He eats quickly and then pushes the plate away. “Thank you.” She pours herself a half-glass.

“Do you want to talk?”

He looks at her.

“My wife. I’m not sure if it’s going to work.”

“You mean the reconciliation?”

“I went there yesterday. And then again today after the field trip.” He reaches over and makes contact with her hand. “Can I stay here? Just for tonight, I mean.” She nods. “On the sofa. I don’t think we can do that again, not if I’m still trying to go back with her.” Again she nods.

“I’ll make you up a bed.”

As she puts a fresh pillowcase on the pillow she looks over at him. He is exhausted and he sits with his left elbow on the table top, his face cupped into his left palm and his tired eyes closed. As much as she wants to go to him and slip an arm around his shoulders, she knows that she cannot. This is his misery. By respecting this she hopes that she will, of course, make herself necessary.

The next day, after school, she pours herself a cup of tea and then she calls his wife, Vivian. Her voice is young, and thin; a blonde voice full of good cheer mixed with bemusement. “Who am I speaking to?”

“I am a colleague of your husband’s and I’m slightly worried about his behaviour.” There is silence on the other end of the telephone, and for a moment it is difficult to determine what this silence means. She continues. “Mrs. Waverley?”

“Ms. Ford.” The voice fizzes with indignation. His wife continues. “What exactly do you want?” She draws a deep breath.

“I suppose I just want to let you know that your husband’s behaviour is causing many of us some concern. He seems to be upset all of the time.”

“And what is it that you want me to do?”

“I’m not sure. I just thought you might like to know.”

“And so now you’ve told me.” The silence lingers in the air for a few moments, then she hears the click and the irritable burr of an open line. Ms. Vivian Ford has hung up on her. For a few moments she holds the telephone in her hand. She strikes a pose, as though performing before an audience, and then she runs a hand carefully back through her grey hair and gently replaces the telephone on the receiver. Dignity has been restored.

He waits until most people have left the staffroom before speaking to her. The few who remain can see that this is an encounter that is fraught with tension.

“Don’t you have some explaining to do?”

She looks surprised, as though not sure what he is talking about. She deliberately keeps her voice lower than his. This will be her tactic. Whatever he says, she will reply in a whisper.

“I thought I was helping. You seemed so helpless the other night, and I was worried.” She sees the anger flare on his face, and she worries now, for she has no desire to have a public confrontation. He stares at her. She is aware that others are watching them and there is a sense of relief when he utters his one word, “Outside,” as though he were a schoolboy inviting her into the playground for a fight. They go into an empty classroom. Religious studies, judging by the writing on the blackboard. The names of the prophets are listed, somewhat strangely, in alphabetical order.

“Are you listening to me?” he asks. She turns back to face him.

“You know,” she begins, “I really don’t need your anger or your hostility. You come to me when you’re in trouble and you need help, and I stay up all night worrying about you, trying to find a way to help you. If I made a mistake, I’m sorry. But I want to help. That’s all.”

“So you call my wife? And where did you get the number?” She laughs now.

“For heaven’s sake, Geoff. These days you don’t need to be a detective to find things out.” He stares at her with a malevolence that she knows she has elicited. But he shouldn’t have slept with her if he couldn’t face the consequences. Maybe his past escapades have involved having a quick roll with whoever happened to take his fancy, but if this is what he’s bargaining for, then he’s made a terrible mistake.

“You have no right to call my wife, and you have no right to enter my life in this way. Have you any idea how much damage you’ve caused?” She realises that at the present time there is nothing that she can do or say to defuse his anger. However, she will continue to be there for him. He will need to come and see her, and she will help him to understand that although he has begun this relationship by being led by blind desire, it doesn’t mean that he’ll end up being trapped. She’s not that kind of woman, and after all he will need somebody to take to La Spiaggia. He will need somebody to guide him. A firm hand. This will be her role. Although tempted to smile, she understands that such a gesture will be misinterpreted, so there will be no smile. Suddenly she is conscious of her blank expression, so she turns back to the blackboard and wonders just why the prophets are listed in alphabetical order.

“Are you listening?” She nods, but without turning her head. “You and I are finished. I want you out of my life.” She waits until she hears him storm purposefully out of the classroom, and only now does she turn around. The truth is, there is something comforting about hearing that they are finished, implying as it does that they were actually started.

Her letter is short and to the point. She reminds him that abandonment is a state that is not alien to man. That throughout the ages people have voluntarily or involuntarily left behind people in their lives and gone on to higher and better things. There is nothing unusual about this. She stops short of rehearsing her own story with Brian, but it is all implied. She is making a plea for him to see himself in a bigger context and move on. She does not say who he should move on to, but again this is implied. She reads the letter through, correcting the odd ambiguity in the shaping of her letters and making sure that it is absolutely legible. Then she reads the letter through for grammar, and once she is satisfied she folds it neatly and tucks it into an envelope. She stands and walks to the door, where she unhooks her coat and steps into her walking shoes. His lodgings are easy to find, for on their first “date” he had described them as a big corner house on Manor Farm Road overlooking the park. There is only one big corner house, and it has the look of a place that takes boarders, for the front garden has been dug up and replaced with gravel. Guests can park off the street behind the hedge. She stands by the gateway and realises that she will have to be stealthy, for the house is ablaze with lights.

She walks back by a different route, aware that she is simply killing time. At this time of night the streets are relatively empty, and even pleasant to walk through, but at 10:30 p.m. there will be a sudden rush of people from the twin-cinema complex, some making their way home, but most dashing to the city-centre pubs for a final drink. Of course, these new pubs with their security staff, and sawdust on the floor and loud thumping music bear no resemblance to what she recognises as a pub, but mercifully she is under no obligation to enter such hovels. At 11 p.m., when the places finally close, the unwashed rabble will slouch out into the streets, full of drink and spoiling for trouble, but she will be safely tucked up in bed. However, at the moment everything is quiet; the lull before the storm. And then she sees him. In the window of La Spiaggia with a woman. She stands across the road and looks at them, sitting at the table right next to the one that they had sat at. She should have brought the letter here. Delivered it to him personally, in front of this woman. She steps back into shadow in order to gather her thoughts, then her mind is clear and she knows what to do. She steps out and crosses towards them. When she is halfway across the road, he looks up and stares directly at her. The woman follows his eyes and turns and looks out of the window. The woman sees her, then looks quickly across at her date, then back at her. He looks angry, and moves as though he is going to get to his feet, but he remains seated as she walks by with her head held high. She is going home. She just happened to be passing La Spiaggia. Nothing planned or premeditated. This is a genuine coincidence. She just happened to be passing by. She continues to walk on her way and she wonders how Geoff Waverley will explain this to his friend. In fact, the more she thinks about it, the more she realises that this could not have turned out much better for her.

She is telephoned before she leaves for school.

“I’m afraid I need to speak to you on a matter of some urgency.” She waits for Mr. Jowett to go on. “This morning, after assembly, in my office.” He pauses and clears his throat. “I’m sorry for disturbing you so early, but as I’m sure you understand, I would not do so unless it was important.” She finishes her cup of tea and dresses slowly, as though for a funeral. Why would he do something like this? It’s between the two of them, and it doesn’t concern anybody else. It’s nobody else’s business. She draws the curtains and can see that it is a grey, overcast morning, the type of day that will refuse to change its character. Across the street she sees that the paper boy is doing wheelies on his bike and it occurs to her that she could always have the Daily Mail delivered. She misses her morning paper, and there’s really no reason why she should have to go without. Especially if the paper boy stops messing about and can actually be bothered to stuff some of the papers in his bag through people’s letterboxes.

When she gets to school Miss Arthurton, Mr. Jowett’s tall angular secretary, ushers her into the head’s office and pulls in the door behind her. Trapped. The deputy-head, Miss Mitchell, is seated to one side of Mr. Jowett’s desk. It is an awkward place to sit, for she has no place to rest her papers, which she balances uncomfortably in her lap. However, she knows that this suits Miss Mitchell, for she’s the type of career woman who likes to cross and recross her legs in the hope that she might accidentally reveal a bit of stocking top.

“Please.” Mr. Jowett gestures to the single chair in front of the desk. She sits and looks at him in his smug little cardigan and corduroy jacket, with not a button under pressure. “I’ll get straight to the point, although I suspect that you know what this is about.” He waits for her to reply, but she says nothing. “Very well. I arrived at school this morning to discover Mr. Waverley outside my office. I’m afraid he has lodged some very serious complaints at your doorstep and they will have to be fully investigated. Luckily we have a local-authority code of behaviour and Miss Mitchell here has brought a copy of the guidelines.” Miss Mitchell fishes through the pile of papers in her lap and hands her a flimsy document. “Now what two consenting adults do outside of this school is, quite frankly, none of my business. Mr. Waverley informs me that you two have had a full relationship, but this is not the point. At issue here is harassment, which is preventing a fellow member of staff from doing his job.”

Miss Mitchell coughs. And then she speaks.

“The charges are that you have repeatedly left Mr. Waverley notes in his box. That you called his wife and, on behalf of all teachers at this school, expressed concern over his mental and physical health. That you have visited his lodgings and left him abusive mail. And that just last night while he was having dinner with his sister, you stood outside the restaurant window and stared at them both. All of these transgressions have contributed to a climate in which Mr. Waverley feels he can no longer carry out his work here, and he has asked Mr. Jowett to relieve him of his duties.” Miss Mitchell’s speech is over and she leans back in her chair. But then she remembers one other thing. “If you have anything to say, I think that now would probably be the time to say it.”

She looks at this woman, then at the benevolent, avuncular figure of Raymond Jowett. Do they seriously believe that a fifty-five-year-old divorcee can terrorise a forty-year-old grown man? She begins to laugh. Mr. Jowett sighs.

“I’m afraid this is no laughing matter. These days there are laws and guidelines that protect the individual’s right to peaceful coexistence with colleagues in the workplace. Unless you categorically tell me that you did not leave inappropriate messages either at his home or in his pigeonhole; that you did not call Mr. Waverley’s wife; that you did not stalk him last night, then I’m afraid I will have to suspend you from your duties for two weeks while we take statements from all parties concerned, including colleagues of yours with whom you work closely. I’m afraid it’s the law.” She shakes her head in disbelief.

“Are you serious? This has to be a joke.” But nobody is laughing. Miss Mitchell stands up. She turns to her superior.

“Mr. Jowett, if I may.” Mr. Jowett nods surreptitiously, but with sadness. Miss Mitchell turns to face her. “You have a copy of the code. Either myself, or somebody from the district office, will be in touch regarding your interview. This should take place in the next ten days or so. As of now, as the head says, you should consider yourself on a two-week leave with full pay. This will, of course, be kept strictly confidential.”

She looks from the upright Miss Mitchell to Mr. Jowett, but he merely nods in helpless agreement. She gets to her feet.

In the evening she calls her sister in London. Sheila is surprised to hear from her, and she knows immediately that something is the matter.

“Nothing,” she says. “I just thought that I’d come and see you, if that’s all right.” There is a short pause. She knows that Sheila is trying to decide whether it is best to have the discussion now, or save it until they are together, for she knows that her impatient sister does not like to be lied to.

“What time are you arriving?”

“I haven’t checked on the buses yet, but I’ll call you from the station tomorrow.” Again there is a short pause, and then Sheila remembers her manners.

“Good. It’s been too long.”

“Yes, it has.” After she has spoken with Sheila she pours herself a glass of white wine. Then she sits at the piano, her fingers resting lightly on the keys, but she cannot summon the energy to disrupt the silence. Instead she stares at the score, and sees small anecdotes and exclamation points of advice that over the years she has scratched in the margins. It would appear that back then she was afraid of nothing, for difficult passages are circled in a manner which suggests that one should be aware of the upcoming problem but tackle it nonetheless. But this evening she cannot find it within herself to do anything other than lightly brush the keys with the tips of her fingers.

She wakes early the next morning. The sky is still dark, but she knows that the day will soon arrive. She sits in bed and brushes her hair with idle strokes, transforming her grey locks into a flowing tail. Then, once she sees the first rays of dawn, she gets up and showers and then dresses herself with quiet anxiety coursing through her veins. She has made no preparations. There is no booked seat, no bag standing by the door. She has not cleaned the house, or cancelled the milk. Nothing. It is all very unlike her and it serves to remind her of how unsure she is about what she is doing. She locks the door and steps out into the street as daylight begins to brighten the sky. As she walks to the bus stop she notices that the bold circular disc of the moon is still visible, which leads her to wonder whether night has lingered too long or morning arrived too soon. Once she reaches the main bus station she buys a return ticket on the first coach to London, and then she calls Sheila and tells her what time she will be arriving. Sheila is still asleep, she can hear it in her voice, but her sister tries to pretend otherwise. She buys a copy of the Daily Mail, plus a couple of women’s magazines, and then she boards the coach and finds a seat behind the driver and close to the front. There are still twenty minutes to go before the scheduled departure time, but her efforts to settle in are undermined by the driver’s conversation with a young man who stands by the door to the bus clutching his bicycle. He wants to put the bike in the luggage space underneath the coach, but the driver is pointing out to him that unless the bike folds up flat, then this cannot happen. Soon the young man is shouting at the driver, then cursing him in foul language. The driver looks at the abusive youngster, who could be his son, with a look of sad bemusement etched on his face. The young man continues to jab his finger in the driver’s direction and bellow at the top of his lungs. She looks away, ashamed and puzzled. It is one thing to be frustrated by rules, but it is another thing to flout authority in such a vulgar manner. These are not happy times for anybody.

About halfway to London they stop at a motorway service station. She has been sleeping, and as she opens her eyes she finds herself peering out at the bleak scene of unappetising fast-food places, an RAC stand, rows of unused telephones and neon-lit petrol pumps. Most choose to leave the coach, but she decides to stay on board. It is only a fifteen-minute stop, and if she needs the bathroom then there’s one on the coach. The man across the aisle begins to make a performance out of loudly munching an apple, and then salting a hard-boiled egg and taking a bite, before switching back to the apple. She looks away in dismay, and then thinks of Sheila, who could never live up to her big sister’s exam results. In fact, she fell comfortably beneath them and eventually took off for London where she found work as a secretary in a law firm. Within six months, she had met Roger who, having finished his time as a trainee in music and arts at the BBC, was now dipping his toes into the world of documentary film-making. Whenever she and Brian would travel to London from Birmingham, either to attend a play or a concert, or on one of Brian’s business trips, they would generally take Sheila and Roger out for a meal. Then, as Roger’s career began to flourish, the young couple moved into a flat of their own in Maida Vale that was in the middle of a bland neighbourhood of crushing respectability whose tedious streets neither gained nor changed character. It all seemed so unlike Sheila, but she thought it best to say nothing to her sister. On a few occasions, Sheila and Roger had them round and insisted on cooking for them, although Brian usually objected to this as he claimed that vegetarian food made him sick. However, never once did Sheila mention marriage, or, more puzzlingly, children. When she got the letter from her sister announcing her split with Roger (who was by now winning awards for his documentary films) and informing her that Sheila was now setting up home with a Maria Kingston “across the river,” she was shocked. After twenty-five years with a man, her sister was only now discovering that she wanted to be with a woman? Brian smirked, and then began to laugh. He claimed that he had always had his suspicions.

With this move came a career change for Sheila, who finally left the legal world and became a full-time employee of the local Labour Party. Two years after the letter, Dorothy met her sister’s friend Maria for the first and only time at their mother’s funeral. Their father was both too ill and too grief-stricken to notice that Sheila had brought her “girlfriend” to the funeral, but if it wasn’t for Brian’s stern words she would definitely have said something to her younger sister. As it was, everybody managed to be civil to everybody else, and then, within a year, her father died, but Sheila and Maria did not bother with this funeral. Roger sent flowers, but Brian removed the card and tore it into pieces, claiming that he’d never liked Roger’s holier-than-thou attitude. And then Brian left her, and she left Birmingham and moved back home. As the coach thundered its way towards London she calculated that it was now over six years since she had last seen Sheila at her mother’s funeral. The odd Christmas card maintained the illusion of some kind of intimacy, but in reality all that bound them together was blood and the increasingly distant memories of a past that they shared. However, right now, on this coach to London, this was enough.

There was no sign of Maria Kingston. Sheila, however, was clearly visible behind the barriers. She had become thin, emaciated even, but her lopsided grin remained intact. As the coach swooped in an unnecessarily flamboyant semi-circle, she looked at her sister, who as yet did not seem to realise that of the many coaches pulling in and out of Victoria Station, this was the one that she was waiting for. She scrutinised Sheila, then realised that it was not so much that she looked older; the point was her sister appeared to be calmer and more centred. The thin, middle-aged lady with the long coat bore little resemblance to the fiery young woman who loved to tease Brian over dinner, but when a subject close to her own heart came up, hers were always the first eyes to ignite. Everything always had to be extreme with Sheila. Yes, I will do this. No, I won’t do that. No flexibility. But after nearly six years, and even before she has spoken with her sister, she can see that Sheila is radiating a new calm. And, if truth be told, this is what she has come to London for. She has travelled south in search of calmness.

Sheila’s house has a sloppy bohemian feel to it that suggests a letting go. She looks around. Her sister has changed not only in appearance, but also in aesthetic taste. With Roger it was stripped pine, and furniture with hard angles and clean lines. The new Sheila appears to embrace hand-woven fabrics, prints, glass jars full of organic pastas, and cats. She wonders what her sister would make of her own ordered existence, but realises that it would, undoubtedly, remind her of their parents, and therefore bring forth little more than contempt. Sheila pours the water onto the two tea bags and then she puts the kettle back onto the stove. She pushes a pile of newspapers to one side, and as she does so she plonks the two mugs down on the table top.

“Herbal tea only. I’m afraid I’m a bit purist these days.” She smiles at her younger sister, but the sadness in Sheila’s eyes is clearly visible. She takes the mug of tea and warms her hands on it. “Rosehip,” says Sheila. “It’s all I have at the moment. I’m sorry if it’s not to your taste.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “Just fine.”

“Maybe after you finish the tea we can go for a walk around the garden. Or we could take the tea with us. I bought this place for next to nothing with Maria.” She puts down her cup and looks at Sheila.

“Isn’t it a bad area, Brixton? I mean, you hear so much on the news about problems.” Sheila laughs.

“The news? If you believed everything you heard on the news you’d never go anywhere in London. There are places all over this city where middle-class people take a five-minute ride in a mini-cab to the tube station because the silly buggers are afraid of being mugged. But I suppose you can always hide if you’ve got money. It’s no different down here than anywhere else. And besides, it was the only place we could afford.” Sheila pauses and takes a sip of her tea. “Anyhow, I hope you get to see Maria. I think she’ll be back in the next day or so.”

She tries to look pleased, but she knows that it is not going to be possible for her to have this, or any other kind, of conversation unless she says something to her sister.

“Sheila,” she says. “The wig.” Sheila laughs.

“Lung cancer. That’s what you get for years of smoking roll-ups, isn’t it?”

She pushes her mug of tea to one side and reaches over and takes her younger sister’s bony hands in between her own.

“Sheila. What’s going on?”

Her sister lowers her eyes and her shoulders begin to shake, at first slowly, then with a juddering rhythm that passes through her whole body.

“Not now, Dorothy. Later, perhaps, but not now.”

She lies in bed and stares at the bright-blue wallpaper, which seems to be in stark contrast to the rest of the house, and she listens to the wind whipping around the roof and rattling the window panes. Stubborn Sheila who, having endured her sister’s silent wrath at bringing her girlfriend to their mother’s funeral, simply refused to attend the funeral of their father. As a result Dorothy stood by the grave, along with her father’s distraught drinking friends, and a large turnout of neighbours, thinking the whole while of Sheila safe in London, insulated from the hurt and confusion of the ceremony. And then it started to rain, huge drops of fat water, each drop a shower in its own right. Sheila had tucked herself safely away in London and left her big sister to grieve alone in a muddy cemetery in the north of England. And now, crisp between two tightly folded sheets, her sister has again discarded her. Left her to discover for herself facts that should have been shared. But rather than feel angry towards Sheila, she stares at the wallpaper and tries to understand. She wonders if there is not some element of revenge to her sister’s behaviour. Sheila was already fifteen when Dorothy left for Manchester University, but perhaps she ought to have written more, or come home more often, not immediately buried her aspirations beneath those of Brian. Through the open window she can see the dark sky, and it surprises her that in London stars can be so bright. And then she understands that she owes her sister the sacrifice of her company, and although she has not told Sheila about her own situation back “home,” she knows now that this is where she should be. It is right that she is in London with her younger sister and her crooked wig, and when Maria comes back her companion will simply have to work around the two sisters. This is how it will be in the future.

The elderly doctor appears to be a kindly man, but he is nervous. There is something discomforting about the way he keeps moving around in his chair, and his eyes seem to be focused on a spot a few inches above her head. When the nurse announced that Sheila had arrived with her sister, he asked if he might speak with the sister alone. Sheila seemed unconcerned and simply went off for more tests.

“I think,” he continues, “that as the next of kin, so to speak, I have to be blunt with you.” She looks at this man, who appears to be still fascinated by whatever it is that is hovering over her head. “Your sister’s cancer is inoperable. I have asked her to stop working. To keep working will only accelerate her deterioration.” He lowers his eyes, as though curious to see how she is taking this news. She stares directly at him, so he once more looks to the ceiling. “Will you be staying with her for long?”

“I’m not sure. She has a friend, Maria, who should be back soon. Maybe until then.” She is not about to disclose her own resolutions to the doctor.

“I see.” He waits a beat. Then he once again lowers his eyes to meet her own. “It’s never easy for a patient to come to terms with this situation, but your sister possesses a tranquillity which is in many ways quite remarkable.” The doctor seems worried now, as though wondering if he ought to explain exactly what he means. But she does not require any explication from this doctor. She has seen it for herself. The only thing that puzzles her is whether this tranquillity was there before the illness, or if the illness has brought this on. “Is there anything that you need to ask me?” The word “need” seems a little strange to her, but she simply shakes her head. “There are,” he says “various agencies who specialise in counselling of one sort or another. The nurse can give you their numbers if you’re interested.” She is momentarily puzzled and wonders if he means counselling for her or for Sheila, but she decides not to trouble this man any further.

“Thank you,” she says. He gets to his feet.

“Your sister shouldn’t be too long now.” He hands her a card that he takes from a tray on his desk. “Please call me if there’s anything at all that’s worrying you. This will not be an easy time for her, and I can see how much of a shock this has been for you.”

In the evening she sits at the back of the hall at the local Labour Party meeting. Resting on the chair next to her is a plastic shopping bag full of files and papers that Sheila has asked her to return to her employers, along with a letter of resignation. After this morning’s tests they walked around her sister’s garden, and Sheila pointed out all the plants that she and Maria had planted, and she occasionally stopped to pluck off a brown leaf, or break back a weed or a stray branch. Then they sat at the small wooden picnic table, with its two neatly arranged benches, and Sheila confessed to her sister that she was extremely tired. She admitted that her job as the secretary of the local Labour Party was simply too much, and then she rolled her eyes and declared that Tony Blair’s revolution would just have to do without her. At least for now. She laughed at Sheila’s comment and agreed to take back the necessary files that evening.

Derek is just as Sheila has described him. A tall man who carries himself awkwardly, and who possesses a face that positively oozes nervous concern. He winds up the meeting, fields some gently pitched enquiries, and then strolls towards her at the back of the hall. She stands up to greet him, and he extends his hand.

“I’m happy to meet you,” he says, welcoming her with a smile that she imagines he bought somewhere. “But I’m sorry to hear about Sheila’s resignation. She’ll be sorely missed.” She picks up the shopping bag.

“Sheila asked me to bring these for you. She wanted you to have them straight away.”

“Well, it’s typical of her to be so thoughtful.” She stares at this man, who seems somewhat unnerved by this encounter.

“Do you have somebody lined up to take her job?”

He laughs nervously. “Well, I’m only the local chair. And mine’s a voluntary position. Sheila’s job will have to be decided on by the whole committee, including our MP, but as it’s the only full-time job we have there’s bound to be plenty of competition.” Then he stops, as though suddenly aware of what he has just said. “Would you be interested in the job?” He is clearly embarrassed that this has not already occurred to him. She smiles.

“Thank you, but I already have a job.” This poor nervous man.

“Of course.” He laughs skittishly. “Well,” he says, “we usually go to the pub for a tipple and to thrash things around somewhat. You know, set the world to rights.” He glances towards a small knot of people who are waiting for him by the door. “Would you like to join us?”

“No, but thanks very much. I’ve got to get back.”

“Of course,” he says, “I understand.” They stare at each other and then he once again holds out his hand, which she shakes. “Please convey our warmest wishes to Sheila for a speedy recovery.”

“I will,” she says, and she watches as he turns to leave. “Don’t forget the papers.” He stops and laughs. She hands him the shopping bag, which he cradles in his arms like a child.

“How stupid of me.”

The following evening the sisters go to the local cinema to see a film by a friend of Roger’s. Sheila is adamant that she and Brian met the director one night at dinner. Sheila is also convinced that Roger has always been jealous of his friend’s successful move into features, while Roger has been stuck, albeit at the high end, in television documentary. But she does not remember this man, nor does she remember Roger’s jealousy. As she watches the film, her mind wanders. It must be nearly forty years since she last sat with her sister in the dark. No doubt her parents had bullied her into taking Sheila to some cartoon or other, but the rediscovery of something as simple as a trip to the cinema with Sheila fills her with a cautious joy. After all, so much between them continues to remain unspoken. Sheila, for all her new-found serenity, still appears to be unreceptive to intimacy, and the hours between meals are stitched together in silence. There has been no sharing of photographs, or affable tumbling down the paths of old memories. Her sister appears to be grateful for her presence, but she remains hermetically sealed.

She looks across at Sheila. She wants to tell her about how, after she left to go off with Maria, Roger had called her and suggested that the next time she came to London they should meet for a drink. And how she manufactured an excuse to Brian about a concert at Wig-more Hall, and met Roger in a club in Soho that lay behind a single unmarked door. Once she was buzzed inside, and had climbed the seemingly endless steps, she entered a smoky room that appeared to be full of over-confident men. Roger waved to her from the bar and immediately pressed a drink upon her and told her that he was heart-broken to be “dumped” by Sheila, but as the evening progressed it was unclear what purpose she served, other than to provide him with an audience for his self-pity. Corrosion was the order of the evening: Roger soon began to refer to Maria as “the lesbian bitch”; the Labour Party became “the fucking reds”; and Sheila was castigated as “self-righteous and jealous of my success.” She listened until it was time to take the last train back. Sadly, she would have to mark school papers on the train, and she was already worried that she might have drunk too much wine. As she stood to leave, Roger offered to walk her back downstairs to the door. He had spotted some friends from the world of commercial film standing at the other end of the bar, and so he was staying. She thanked him, but told him that she would let herself out, which she did, and on the train back to Birmingham she didn’t know whether to feel pity for Roger or for herself. And now, sitting here in the dark, watching Roger’s friend’s dreadful film, all she wants to do is reach over and take her sister’s hand and tell her about that evening, to share with her how she feels about this betrayal, but Sheila appears to be moored in a peaceful place. She sits with her sister, tears beginning to form in her eyes, and waits. And then eventually the credits begin to roll, and she quickly wipes her eyes, and as the house lights come up, her sister gives her that lopsided grin of hers.

The telephone rings twice and then she picks it up. The man’s voice is pleasant, but he speaks with a strangely detached authority. She confirms her name, but as she does so she wonders how this man knows who she is. She has not given anybody Sheila’s telephone number.

“I’m calling you from St. Thomas’s Hospital.” Immediately she knows that something is wrong, for this is not Sheila’s hospital. “I’m a police officer. Your sister has been the victim of a mugging attack, but she’s fine. We’re bringing her home by car and we just want to make sure that you’ll be there to receive her.”

“Can I speak to her?”

The officer laughs slightly, as though mocking her concern. “Believe me, she’s fine. She’s actually already in the car. We won’t be long.”

She puts down the telephone and feels as though she could scream with frustration. This morning Sheila had insisted in her usual cold manner that she would go to the hospital by herself, and not wishing to cause any argument she had simply let her sister have her own way. She takes a deep breath and then decides that there’s little else that she can do except put on the kettle and wait for the police to bring her sister home.

Sheila has a huge piece of white gauze on her forehead that is held in place by two broad strips of Elastoplast.

“It’s just where I hit my head when I fell.” Sheila sips at her cup of hot water. “And the bloody wig came off, lot of use that is. They put in some stitches.”

“Some stitches?”

“About a dozen, they said. I don’t remember. But I’m all right.”

“What did he take?” Sheila shrugs her shoulders.

“My bag, but there wasn’t much in it. A credit card, some ID, bits and pieces.”

“Shouldn’t we stop the card?”

“The nurse at the hospital did that for me.” She stands and pours herself another cup of tea, then sits again, this time next to Sheila.

“Has this ever happened before?”

“Christ, this is London, not Afghanistan. It was just a mugging. I didn’t resist, and I got away, okay?”

“But you saw him, right?”

Sheila laughs now. “Oh, I saw him all right. Strapping bastard, and cocky with it.”

“But you’d recognise him?”

“Not really, they all look the same.” She pauses. “Of course I’d recognise him.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Sheila takes another sip of her hot water.

“Look, I was a little shaken up. I admit it. And I don’t much like the sight of blood, especially my own. But I’m all right.” Sheila arches her eyebrows. “And, I’m glad you’re here. Thank you.”

In the afternoon, it is a plain-clothes officer who takes a seat in the living room. He is older than the man who brought Sheila back from the hospital, and he seems more business-like. Either he joined the force late, after a false start in another career, or he is simply not very good at his job and promotion has passed him by. He flips open a pad, jams the head of the ballpoint against his leg so that the nib pops out, and then he looks up at the two sisters who sit on the sofa before him.

“Right then, we’ve already got the description from the other officer, but is there anything that you’d like to add.” Sheila shakes her head. “Clothes? Distinguishing facial marks? Voice? What did he sound like? London accent? Jamaican? Anything will help.” Again Sheila shakes her head. The officer sighs.

“He did speak, didn’t he? There must be something that you can remember.” Sheila looks across at the officer.

“I don’t want to press charges. It doesn’t matter.” The policeman seems surprised, but he responds as though he has heard this line before.

“You mean, if you’ll excuse my language, you want to leave the bastard on the street so he can do this to somebody else? Except maybe the next person won’t be as lucky as you were.” Sheila is adamant.

“I don’t want to press charges, and that’s the end of it, okay?” Dorothy looks at Sheila in surprise. The officer senses the futility of the situation.

“Is there some reason why you don’t want to prosecute this man? He knocked you to the ground, he took your bag and left you bleeding. Do you think you owe him something? Or do you know him, is that it?”

“I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him before in my life, but what’s going to happen to him when you lot get hold of him? Accidentally fall over and bang his head in the cell, will he? Or by some mysterious process will his belt find its way around his neck? I know what happens to young blacks in police cells. You just can’t wait, can you?” The officer snaps his pad shut and gets to his feet.

“You know, if that’s what you think, then maybe you deserve to have these people loose on the streets.”

“These people?” There is a note of triumph in Sheila’s voice, but the policeman is unperturbed.

“Criminals.” He spits the word out. “Crackheads who’ll dump you down a rubbish chute, or pour petrol through your door, if you look at them wrong. That’s who I mean. Violent bastards who don’t respect the law, and whose only ambition in life is to score some draw and stab people up.”

Sheila laughs. “But you know how to teach them to respect the law, don’t you?”

The officer and Sheila stare at each other. Then the policeman reaches into his pocket and pulls out a card. He drops it on the coffee table, and then he turns to face Dorothy. She stands.

“If your sister comes to her senses, that’s where you can find me. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your day. I’ll let myself out.”

She hears the door slam and she sits again, this time in the chair opposite Sheila. She looks at her sister, who stares blankly at the wall. She can see that Sheila is tired and wants to go to bed, and she has not got the heart to argue with her.

Her sister sleeps right through until the morning. She is sitting at the kitchen table when the phone rings and she grabs it, keen that it should not wake Sheila. She recognises Mr. Jowett’s voice.

“Ah, I didn’t expect you to answer the phone.”

“Mr. Jowett.”

“Well, Miss Jones, thoughtful of you to leave your sister’s number, for as it turns out things have moved ahead rather quickly. We’ve tentatively scheduled a preliminary hearing for you tomorrow. Would this be convenient for you?”

“A hearing?”

“It’s just a formality, but it’s much better if you’re here in person to account for yourself.” She pauses before answering.

“You mean defend myself?”

“I’m merely informing you of the process.” Now it is his turn to pause. He sighs deeply, and then he continues. “Please, Dorothy, there’s really no need for this to become confrontational, now is there?” She wants no more of this discussion.

“What time tomorrow?”

“Two p.m.”

“I’ll be there.” Before Mr. Jowett has a chance to say anything further she puts down the receiver. And then she looks up and sees Sheila in her nightdress, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “I’ve got to go back. That was the headmaster.” Sheila moves towards her and sits at the table.

“Holiday over, then?”

“I’ll be back. I just have to sort something out.” She stands and runs water into the kettle, and then she puts it on the stove. Sheila yawns and leans back in her chair. Her sister slowly pushes her hands in the air.

“I’ll be fine. I might volunteer at the communal gardens.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Of course it’s a good idea. I can’t just lie around here all day.”

“Tea or water?”

“Water, please.”

“Any idea when Maria is coming back from Brighton?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Sheila glares at her. Then she sighs. “Look, I don’t know what’s going on with her. We’ve not been getting on too well.”

“Nice timing.”

“I don’t expect her to stop her life just because I’ve got cancer.”

“Isn’t she supposed to want to be here for you?”

“She’s supposed to do whatever she wants to do.”

“Water or tea?”

“I said water, not tea. What’s the matter with you?”

She looks at Sheila, who lowers her eyes.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep very well. I kept seeing his bloody face.”

“Whose face?”

“Tony Blair’s, who do you think? The mugger’s of course. I just can’t get it out of my head.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to press charges?”

“Come on, what’s the bloody point?”

She pours the hot water, and then she reaches for an herbal tea bag. And then she remembers. She hands Sheila her hot water, but she places the tea bag on the side. Sheila can make up her own mind. She leaves her sister to contemplate, and she goes upstairs to pack her bag.

She sits in Mr. Jowett’s office, but is somewhat surprised to find that only he is present. Miss Arthurton shuts the door gingerly, careful to make no noise whatsoever. She leaves them alone. And now Mr. Jowett speaks. He places both hands on the desk in front of him, and she wonders if he is aware of the fact that he is striking an awkward, even vaguely ridiculous, pose.

“First of all, I want to thank you for coming all the way back here from London. As it turns out we don’t really have a procedure that is adequate to cover the full nature of Mr. Waverley’s complaints. I did take the matter up with the local education authority, but I’m afraid we now find ourselves at a bit of an impasse.” She stares at him.

“An impasse? I don’t follow you, Mr. Jowett.”

“No, of course not.” He clasps his hands and then brings them both up to his chin. “Well, there is a bit of a problem. You see it looks as though we’ll be offering Mr. Waverley a full-time position among us. His family situation seems to have resolved itself, and we are in dire need of a geography teacher.” He pauses to allow her to speak, but she says nothing. “I think it might be best if you were to leave, don’t you? Mr. Waverley is prepared to let bygones be bygones, and I think I can offer you a decent early retirement package. There will be no question of censure, of course. You’re simply doing what so many of your colleagues are doing these days and taking advantage of this new window on life. I believe they call it the third age.” She looks at Mr. Jowett, who she is sure never dared imagine that he would ever ascend to such professional heights. To be a history master was probably the full extent of his ambitions, but good fortune has enabled him to exercise an unimagined authority. She stands.

“Thank you, Mr. Jowett.” He looks somewhat panicked.

“Well, will you be taking up our offer?”

“I shall let you know.” She turns and begins to walk out before Mr. Jowett can uncouple himself from his desk. There is no point closing his door behind her. The mousy-haired Miss Arthurton, who looks up from her desk, will see to that. But only after she has brought Mr. Jowett a nice cup of tea.

She looks through the window of the bus at the people in the streets below. Her town feels small after London. She had thought this as she rode home in the taxi from the bus station. She literally dropped her bags in the hallway, nudged the mail to one side with the outside of her shoe, and then dashed back out and into the taxi whose meter continued to tick. She had asked the driver to wait so that she would not be late for her appointment with what she imagined would be a panel of stern-faced interrogators. She smiles at her folly and gazes down at the mid-afternoon trickle of shoppers. And then she sees the newly daubed signs on the sloping slate roofs, signs that are meant to be read from the upper deck. In tall white letters somebody has painted GOD IS GOOD, and on the neighbouring roof, CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS. If her mother had had her way, such sentiments would have meant something to her but, with some regret in her heart, she has to acknowledge that her father’s opinions in these matters enjoy total dominion. This being the case, she looks at the defaced roofs and finds it surprising that the council doesn’t have rules and regulations against this type of graffiti.

When the bus reaches her stop she gets to her feet and moves quickly down the stairs to the lower deck, and then she steps down and onto the pavement. It is as though she has no control over her decision. She walks straight to the shop and as she opens the door she hears the familiar tinkle of the doorbell. He is alone. Mahmood seems neither shocked nor angry. In fact, he seems curiously shy.

“I just thought I’d come by and say hello. But I’ll go if you want me to. It’s just that I may be away for some time and, well, it just seems silly.” Mahmood puts down the pile of magazines that he is holding.

“You seem very tired. Have you been sleeping?”

“I’m going away, Mahmood. My sister is not very well, and I’ve got to help her.” Mahmood seems puzzled.

“But I did not think the two of you got along.”

“Well, we didn’t. But things change, and there you have it. And how have you been?” He now looks somewhat dejected.

“Oh, so and so.” As he says this he shakes his head from side to side so that it wobbles as though it might, at any minute, fall off.

“Listen, I’m sorry about the awkwardness with Feroza. I won’t come back again, but I just wanted to let you know. About my sister, that is.”

“You can come back in whenever you like. I can control my wife. I am the man of this house. But since the child she is crazy. I cannot allow my wife to smoke and drink. The English they have spoiled her so that she is like them, and happy to sit around and play with the child and expect the wage cheque or the dole cheque.” She looks at Mahmood, and cannot remember having seen him so agitated. But she has often thought that the child in him was put down far too early. “I have been thinking that I should take my chance and drive a mini-cab rather than suffer all this newsagent business by myself. In fact, this England is crazy. I go in the streets and after all these years in this country they tell me, ‘Your mother fucks dogs.’ Why does my mother fuck dogs? They do not know my mother. In my home there is problems. Out on the street there is problems.” Mahmood stops and looks at her. “I am sorry, but today is not a good day. It is a very bad day.”

“I am sorry, Mahmood.” She takes a step towards him. “Things will pick up.”

“You, of all people, must not be sorry. You understand Mahmood.” She looks at her friend and finds herself wishing that she had not come into his shop. Not on this bad day.

“I should go now, Mahmood.” She wants to pamper him, innocently. She wants to feel the warmth of his skin. However, she knows that this would be unwise. She smiles weakly, and then she quickly turns and leaves Mahmood’s shop.

At home she puts the letters, all of them, into a metal pail. She walks to the back door and pulls it open. The door sticks. It has always stuck, but without a man to help she has had to learn to tolerate the door. For a moment she wonders if she should rummage through the letters in case there is one from Geoff Waverley. A permanent job? Does the man have any idea of what he is doing? She thinks not. She strikes the match against the large household box, and then she drops the lighted stick into the pail. She watches as the flames begin to dance now. The smoke will attract some attention, but most of her neighbours will be at work. It will burn quickly. There is no need to unpack, of course. There is no need to even telephone Sheila. In the morning she will place flowers on the graves of her parents, and then take the bus to London. Once there she will telephone Mr. Jowett and accept his offer. Early retirement. And nothing to fill her life with, apart from Sheila. But this is a new blessing. A purpose, and a chance to repair history. She feels fortunate. As though life is now finally beginning. And almost everybody seems happy with her.

When she reaches Brixton she discovers the house to be in darkness. She places her bag on the kitchen table and shouts for Sheila, but her sister does not respond. She goes upstairs and turns on the lights, and then she moves along the hallway to her sister’s bedroom and pushes gently at the door. Her sister is lying in bed, and the room is illuminated by a single lighted candle that burns on top of the chest of drawers. Sheila’s discarded wig lies on the laundry basket like an unloved pet. She tries not to make any noise as she spies on Sheila, who looks both peaceful and exhausted, although it’s apparent that life is slowly leaking out of her. She wonders about the wisdom of having a candle burning in this fashion, but she does not want to blow it out in case her sister has some special reason for the candle being lit. So she closes the door and leaves Sheila at rest. Downstairs she puts on the kettle and makes herself a cup of tea. Then she hears a light knocking at the door and she rushes to open it before the person can knock again. She recognises Derek from the Labour Party meeting, but he is looking at her in a strange fashion, and his eyes are slightly watery, as though he has been crying.

“Sheila told me you’d be back today. I called earlier. I was wondering if we might go out for a drink?” She looks at this man in astonishment.

“A drink?”

“I mean so we can talk privately.” She thinks for a moment, and then she opens the door a little wider.

“Sheila’s asleep. If you want to talk privately, then we can do so here.” He hesitates for a moment, and then he realises that he has to make a decision.

“All right then. If you’re sure that this is fine by you.” She stands back to let him pass, and then she shuts the door behind him. He takes a seat at the kitchen table and she crosses the room and takes a cup from the cupboard over the sink.

“Tea?” He nods.

“Yes, please. Nothing in it.” She quickly makes the tea, places it before him, and then she sits opposite him. She picks up her bag and removes it from the table.

“Now then, is there something the matter?” Derek takes a sip of his tea and looks directly at her.

“I suppose there’s no easy way to say this, but it’s to do with Maria.”

“She’s not coming back, is she?”

“Well, it’s not that straightforward. Maria is outside in the car.” She opens her mouth to speak, but before she can ask any questions he continues. “Maria and I are, well, I suppose the easiest way of putting it is, an item.” She stares at Derek.

“You mean Maria has left Sheila for you?” He nods. “And does Sheila know this?”

“No, of course not, but I didn’t want to keep you in the dark.”

“I see, but you don’t mind keeping Sheila in the dark, is that it?”

“Well, that’s just the point. We’re both worried about what effect it will have on Sheila’s health if she finds out.”

“So you want it to be our little secret?”

Derek says nothing. He paws his mug of tea as though he is about to drink it, but then he gently pushes it away.

“I’m sorry, I’d better go.”

“Yes, you’d better. Especially if she’s outside in the car. We wouldn’t want her to get lonely, would we?”

Derek stands. “I can see you’re upset and I don’t blame you. But these things happen.”

She laughs. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”

She and Derek stare at each other, but she decides to say nothing more, not wanting the responsibility of further curdling this man’s already inadequate sense of himself. Derek lowers his shameful eyes and turns to leave, and she follows him to the door. He waits before opening it, and then he turns to face her.

“For what it’s worth, Maria is devastated by this situation.”

“You mean the Maria who is sitting outside in the car, right now?”

Derek opens the door and she closes it behind him without bothering to glance out into the street. She begins to wash the cups and the teapot, and having done so she puts everything back into the cupboard and then she sits in a spotless kitchen. The moonlight is streaming in through the kitchen window and again she remembers her father’s funeral, and Sheila’s wilful absence, but as the years have passed by she has found it increasingly difficult to blame her sister for her absence. After all, her sister’s pain is connected to her own guilt with a bond that neither of them can untie, and all that she now hopes for is the belated opportunity to repair the damage that has been wrought between them. Perhaps Sheila could move back north, and maybe buy a place by the seaside. They might walk together on the beach, and occasionally contemplate taking trips together. They might even go abroad. These are pleasant thoughts that will help her to survive another night in London in her sister’s lonely home. She turns off the kitchen light and then slowly climbs the stairs. Before going to her own room she checks on Sheila, but her sister is still sleeping peacefully. This time she decides to go in and blow out the candle.

The first policeman, the one in uniform, fingers the pencil with increasing frustration. He stares at her, and although he sympathises with her situation there is precious little that he can do. He has said this a number of times, and his body language makes this abundantly clear. And then the senior officer arrives, the one without a uniform, and he sits down beside her. He fails to reintroduce himself, but it is clear that he has been briefed on the situation.

“I’m sorry, but if your sister doesn’t wish to press charges, then there’s nothing that we can do. I mean, we’re pretty sure we know who he is.”

The officer pushes a piece of paper in front of her. She sees his sour face, and beneath it all his vital statistics. Details of his date of birth, height, weight, colour of eyes, everything. His address, phone number, it all seems so straightforward.

“I know it’s difficult to believe, but we just haven’t got a case without your sister’s co-operation.”

She stares at the officer, but there is effectively nothing further to be said. They both know that Sheila won’t change her mind. When Dorothy left the house this morning her sister was still in bed. Sheila had asked for a cup of hot water, and before she went to fetch it she relit her sister’s candle. All thoughts of the assault seemed to have fled from her mind. In fact, it was difficult for her to know what, if anything, Sheila was thinking about. The officer scrapes back his chair and gets to his feet.

“I’m sorry, love, but unless you can talk some sense into her, we’ve got to move on. It’s not as if we’re short of work round here.”

She sits on the upper deck of the bus, and to the left-hand side, so that she can keep an eye out for Imran’s Southern Fried Chicken. The uniformed policeman had told her that it would be the stop after this, and he had warned her to be careful. He’d laughed, “Don’t wear your Rolex,” but wishing to maintain some loyalty to Sheila she’d said nothing in reply. The bus is full of schoolchildren whom she knows should be at school, but who seem determined to make as much noise as possible. Her natural reflex as a teacher is to shout at them and demand that they calm down, but she has to remind herself that soon she will no longer be a teacher. That part of her life will presently be over. And even if she were still a teacher, these are London kids and highly unlikely to take any notice of a little old lady who should be downstairs anyhow. And then she sees Imran’s Southern Fried Chicken and her hand reaches up to the bell. As she steps from the bus the estate unfolds before her like a dark shadow, a vast landscape of council flats, barking dogs and worn-out grass. Filth is strewn everywhere, and a group of kids are playing what seems to be an organised game of football using a tin can instead of a ball. She walks past Bojangles, which she can see is a former Catholic church that has now become the estate disco, and then she passes the cracked and peeling outdoor swimming pool, which looks as though it has never seen any water.

Pretoria Drive leads to Pretoria Mansions, and she climbs the stinking urine-stained circular staircase to the third floor. Once there, she walks along the balcony and knocks at the door. He answers with a child, a half-caste girl whom she guesses to be about three, clutching one leg. “Yeah, what do you want?” He seems neither puzzled nor concerned as to why this woman has knocked at his door. No doubt he imagines her to be a social worker or a probation officer.

“I’ve come about my sister,” she says.

“What about your sister? I don’t know who your sister is.”

“You attacked and robbed her.” He reaches down and encourages the girl to go back into the flat. Then he steps out onto the third-floor balcony, forcing her to move back. He pulls the door behind him, then slowly, and very deliberately, he looks her up and down.

“You got a parachute?” She says nothing. “Cos you’re gonna fucking need one if you come round here talking like that.”

“You can keep the money, I just want her things back, that’s all.” He looks her up and down again.

“You know, you’ve got some front, but you can just fuck off. If I ever set eyes on you again you’re gonna get hurt, am I making myself clear?” She stares at him and wonders what possible nobility Sheila sees in such savages. He was making himself perfectly clear, standing there sweating his filth and spewing his words. Two steps removed from the jungle.

A week after Dorothy came back from Pretoria Mansions, Sheila died. The elderly doctor came to the house twice during the final day, but he said very little. What could he say? Sheila had refused the services of a nurse, and had made it clear that she would not be going near a hospital. There was always a candle burning in her room now, day and night. Redcurrant was her favourite scent, and its pungency permeated the whole house. Conscious almost to the last moment, Sheila lay back, her bald head supported by two pillows, and she stared at her sister. Her skeletal body could no longer summon the energy to maintain conversations, but there was nothing more to be said. At one point Derek telephoned. She took the call downstairs, but having listened to him express his regrets and then wonder if it might be all right for him and Maria to visit, she hung up. She went back upstairs, but Sheila did not ask her who had just called. Sheila never asked anything. Sheila trusted her. An hour later her sister died. She sat with her for a few minutes, and then she blew out the candle and left Sheila in the dark. Downstairs she was momentarily startled by a low gurgling sound that came from the fridge, but she soon regained her wits. She thought of her mum, who always told her eldest child not to search for God in a time of distress because that’s when he’s out of sight and busily taking care of you. “Wait till you’ve dried your eyes, love, then go looking for him. He’ll have more time then.” But her eldest child had never looked for God, and now it was too late.

She made a cup of tea and then sat down at the table and settled herself. To go back upstairs was out of the question, and so she had little choice now but to wait patiently in the hope that she might soon be released from the night that lay ahead. If only she had her piano to hand, for the patterns of music that she had been trying to stitch together in her mind for so long, they all made sense now. But not just music, for there was also a choral accompaniment of voices. Sitting at her sister’s table she could feel this powerful surge of music coursing through her body. For a moment she panicked and wondered if she should transcribe the patterns, but she immediately calmed down. She would not forget. The music had been a long time coming, and its disparate pieces were now secured by grief. They would never again become unstitched.

Dorothy sits before Mr. Jowett. During the past month she has suffered the misery of organising her sister’s affairs. Maria and Derek showed up at the brief cremation ceremony, along with others whom she had never met, but who she presumed had some affiliation with the Labour Party. Roger was conspicuous by his absence, but he sent flowers. The day after the cremation she put Sheila’s house on the market, and she found an unwed professional couple who were not in a chain. They didn’t seem to mind that she intended to leave the curtains and the kitchen blinds, but she got a company to clear the rest of the house. It almost broke her heart to see the huge patches that suddenly glared from the walls where furniture had once stood or pictures had been hung. And then Dorothy fled London and returned home, where she discovered that all her utility bills were red, that the streets were claustrophobically small and narrow, and that everything was so much bleaker in the north. She also discovered that she was truly by herself. The terms of her early retirement package had arrived in the mail. She required a signature from Mr. Jowett, and so an appointment was made with Miss Arthurton. And now she sits opposite Mr. Jowett and listens as he idly asks her what her plans might be, given the fact that she has all this time on her hands. As he speaks he hurriedly signs the papers, in triplicate. Might she be travelling abroad? As he asks this question he leans back, and she listens to the sickening creak of his chair. She says nothing and waits for him to hand her the papers. His good humour offends her, but this will be the last time that she will have to see Mr. Jowett, so she steels herself for the rest of the ordeal. It does not last long. He hands back the papers, but he still seems keen for a conversation to develop. She takes the papers and climbs to her feet. He extends a hand, which she shakes without enthusiasm, and then she turns and leaves, without closing the door behind her.

Instead of walking out of the school she strays in the direction of the staffroom. She stands outside the door, but decides against entering. After all, it is mid-period and it is unlikely that there will be anybody in there. So she walks from one classroom to the next, peering in through the windows and then quickly moving on before anybody can see her. And then she comes to his classroom and she sees him standing at the head of the class with his back to the door. Some of the pupils see her staring in at them. Slowly he turns to face her. He manages to maintain his composure. He throws her a little raised eyebrow of acknowledgement, but this is all. She does not move and now all the pupils are looking at her. He is uncomfortable. Has he found somebody else’s shoulder to cry on? Or has his wife left her squash player and decided to come and live in this town too? What, she wonders, has happened to his life? She feels sorry for him. Helpless man. As he finally gives up the dance of concentration and begins to move towards the door, she turns and walks away from his classroom. She hears the door open behind her, but nobody calls her name and she does not hear the sound of feet pounding down the corridor behind her. She walks out of the school in silence, with Geoff Waverley’s eyes on her back.

She sits in her bungalow at the top of the hill in this village that is five miles outside her home town. She counts the weeks. Eight. Two months have passed. It is a new beginning, in a place in which nobody knows her. She saw a drawing of Stoneleigh in the local paper and she bought her bungalow over the phone. Somehow, the phrase “a new development” sounded comforting. Selling her house was surprisingly easy, largely because she was determined to accept the first offer that was made. In the end it was a decent offer and the buyer, a young Asian doctor, was ready to move in immediately. When she eventually took the bus out to Stoneleigh she was not disappointed. The bungalow was neat, with all mod cons, and it was exactly what she had imagined. They have just finished off the houses in the other cul-de-sac, but the area remains something of a muddy field. Still, she is happy. She looks out of her window and sees the man next door who’s washing his car. He keeps it neatly outside his house as though it’s a prized possession. Aside from this man, there is nobody else in sight on this bleak afternoon. Just this lonely man who washes his car with a concentration that suggests that a difficult life is informing the circular motion of his right hand. His every movement would appear to be an attempt to erase a past that he no longer wishes to be reminded of. She looks at him and she understands.