Believing the Lie

BRYANBARROW CUMBRIA

Because of the hour of the day, Zed Benjamin had been able to score a good table at the Willow and Well, and he’d been sitting there for fifty minutes, waiting for something to happen on the other side of a window whose lead mullions were in need of replacement. The cold seeped past them like a visitation of the angel of death, but the benefit of this discomfort was the fact that no one would question the knitted ski cap that Zed was thus able to keep planted on his head. The cap was his bow to making himself less memorable since it fully covered his flame-coloured hair. There was nothing he could do about his extreme height save slouching whenever he remembered to do so.

He was managing just that at his table in the pub. He’d been going from hunching over his pint of lager to slumping in his chair with his legs stretched out till his arse was as numb as the heart of a pimp, but in all the time he’d maintained one posture or another, nothing suggesting that illumination was in the offing had occurred in what he could see of the village of Bryanbarrow just outside of the window.

This was his third day in Cumbria, his third day of searching for the sex that would keep his story on Nicholas Fairclough from being binned by Rodney Aronson, but so far he’d come up with nothing except fifteen lines of a new poem, which, God knew, he wasn’t about to mention to Aronson when the odious editor of The Source made his daily phone call to ask meaningfully how things were going and to remind Zed that whatever costs he was incurring would be his own. As if he didn’t know that already, Zed thought. As if he were not staying in the most modest room in the most modest bed-and-breakfast he could find in the entire region: an attic bedroom in one of the multitudinous Victorian terraces that lined virtually every street in Windermere, this one on Broad Street within walking distance of the public library. He had to duck to get through the door of the room and practically do the limbo if he wanted to walk to the single window. The loo was on the floor below and the heat was by means of whatever came up from the rest of the house. But all of this made the price extremely right, so he’d snapped it up upon a single glance once he learned how little it was going to cost him. In recompense, it seemed, for the myriad inconveniences of the room, the landlady provided sumptuous breakfasts involving everything from porridge to prunes, so Zed hadn’t had to eat lunch since he’d arrived, which was just as well since he used the time he would have otherwise spent in a cafe trying to suss out who — besides himself — was prowling round the death of Ian Cresswell. But if Scotland Yard was indeed here in Cumbria in the person of a detective on the scent of the unfortunate drowning of Nicholas Fairclough’s cousin, Zed had not been able to locate that person, and until he saw him, he wasn’t going to be able to mould The Ninth Life into the Nine Lives and a Death that Rodney Aronson apparently wanted.

Naturally, Aronson knew who the Scotland Yard detective was. Zed would have put a week’s meagre wages on that. He would have put a further week’s wages on Aronson’s having a master plan to give Zed the sack upon his failure to unearth said detective, which would equate to his failure to sex up his story. That was what this was all about because Rodney couldn’t cope with the combination of Zed’s education and his aspirations.

Not that he was getting far with his aspirations and not that he would get far with them. Oh, one might survive artistically in this day and age by producing poetry, but poetry did not put a roof over one’s head.

That thought — a roof over his head — put Zed in mind of the roof in London under which he lived. It put him further in mind of the people beneath that roof. Lodged among those people were those people’s intentions, his mother’s foremost among them.

At least he didn’t have to worry about those intentions just now, Zed thought, for one morning soon after the first night of Yaffa Shaw’s presence in the family flat — which had been effected with a rapidity astounding even for his mother — the young woman waylaid Zed outside of the bathroom they were going to be forced to share, and sponge bag in hand she’d murmured, “No worries, Zed. All right?” His mind on his job, he thought at first she was speaking of what lay in front of him: yet another trip to Cumbria. But it came to him that Yaffa was actually talking about her presence in the family flat and about his mother’s determination to throw them together as much as she could until she wore down their resistance and they succumbed to an engagement, marriage, and babies.

Zed said, “Eh?” and fiddled with the belt of his dressing gown. It was too short for him, as were the trousers of his pyjamas, and he never could find slippers to fit so he was wearing what he usually wore on his feet in the morning, which was a pair of mismatched socks. He felt all at once like what Jack found at the top of the beanstalk, especially in comparison to Yaffa, who was neat and trim and all of a piece with everything on her a coordinated affair in an appealing colour that seemed to enhance both her skin and her eyes.

Yaffa looked over her shoulder in the general direction of the kitchen, from where breakfast sounds were emanating. She said quietly, “Listen, Zed. I have a boyfriend in Tel Aviv, in medical school, so you’re not to worry.” She’d pushed back a bit of her hair — dark, curly, and hanging down below her shoulders quite prettily, whereas earlier she’d worn it pulled back from her face — and she gave him a look that he’d had to call impish. She said, “I didn’t tell her that. You see, this” — with an inclination of her head towards the door of the bedroom she’d been given — “saves me heaps of money. I can cut back my hours at work and take another course. And if I can do that each term, I can finish uni earlier, and if I can do that, I’m one step closer to getting back home to Micah.”

“Ah,” he said.

“When she introduced us — you and me — I could see what your mum had in mind, so I didn’t say anything about him. I needed the room — I need the room — and I’m willing to play along if you are.”

“How?” He realised he seemed only capable of one-word responses to this young woman, and he wasn’t at all sure what this meant.

She said, “We develop a pretence.”

“Pretence?”

“We’re attracted, you and I. We play the role, we ‘fall in love’” — she sketched inverted commas in the air — “and then conveniently I break your heart. Or you break mine. It doesn’t matter except considering your mum, I’d better break yours. We’d probably have to go on one or two dates and maintain some kind of enraptured contact on our mobiles while you’re gone. You could make kissing noises occasionally and look soulfully at me over the breakfast table. It would buy me time to save the money I need to take the extra course each term and it would buy you time to get your mother off your back for a bit about getting married. We’d have to play at a little affection now and then but you’re off the hook having to sleep with me as we wouldn’t want to show such disrespect to your mum. I think it would work. What about you?”

He nodded. “I see.” He was pleased he’d advanced to two words instead of one.

“So?” she said. “Are you willing?”

“Yes.” And then in a graduation to four words: “When do we start?”

“At breakfast.”

So when Yaffa asked him over the breakfast table to tell her about the story he was working on in Cumbria, he played along. To his surprise, he found that she asked very good questions and her pretence of interest in his affairs caused his mother to beam at him meaningfully. He’d left London with his mother’s ecstatic hug and her “You see, you see, my boy?” burning in his brain, along with a note from Yaffa in his pocket: “Wait thirty-six hours, phone the flat, ask your mum if you can speak to me. I’ll give you my mobile number while she’s listening. Good hunting in Cumbria, my friend.” He’d phoned at the thirty-six-hour mark exactly, and he’d ended up again surprised to find that he actually enjoyed the brief conversation he had with Yaffa Shaw. This was due, he reckoned, to the fact that everything was out in the open between them. No pressure, he thought. And he always operated best when there was minimal pressure.

He only wished that were the case with regard to this damn story. He couldn’t think of what to do to unearth the Scotland Yard detective aside from planting himself in Bryanbarrow and waiting to see who turned up at Ian Cresswell’s farm on the scent of the man’s untimely death. The Willow and Well afforded him an unobstructed view of this place. For Bryan Beck farm sat across the small triangular green that served as the centre of the village, its ancient manor house visible behind a low stone wall and a tenant cottage making a crumbling statement at right angles to it.

As he watched, into the second hour of nursing his pint and maintaining his vigil, there was finally a sign of life at the farm. It didn’t emanate from the manor house, though, but rather from the tenant cottage. From this emerged a man and a teenage boy. They left the property side by side and walked onto the green, where the man placed a step stool that he positioned in the centre of the lawn among the fallen leaves blown from the oak trees that bordered it. He plopped himself on this stool and gestured to the boy, who was carrying what looked like an old bedsheet, along with a shoe box tucked under his arm. The bedsheet he draped round the older man’s shoulders, and from the box he took scissors, a comb, and a hand mirror. The older man removed the tweed cap he wore and jerked his head at the boy: the sign to begin. The boy set about cutting his hair.

This, Zed knew, had to be George Cowley and his teenage son Daniel. They could be no one else. He knew that the dead man Ian Cresswell had a son, but as Cresswell was dead, he didn’t reckon the son was hanging about the farm and he reckoned even less that that son would be cutting the hair of the tenant farmer. Why they were doing this in the middle of the village green was an interesting question, but cutting it there made cleaning-up simple, Zed supposed, although it wasn’t likely to endear George Cowley to the other residents of Bryanbarrow, some of whom lived in the terrace of cottages that comprised one side of the green.

Zed downed the rest of his pint, which at this point had long gone both warm and flat. He lumbered out of the pub and he approached the haircutting on the green. It was chilly outside, with a breeze, and the combined scent of wood smoke and cow dung hung on the air. Sheep were sounding off from beyond Bryan Beck farm and as if in response ducks were quacking with undue volume from Bryan Beck itself, which gushed along the west side of the village out of Zed’s view.

“Afternoon.” Zed nodded at the man and the boy. “You’re Mr. Cowley, I understand.” He understood because he’d spoken to the publican at some length during his first hour’s deployment within the Willow and Well. As far as the publican knew, Zed was one of the myriad walkers who came to the Lakes either to discover what Wordsworth had spent his creative energies extolling or to see what the profits from Peter Rabbit had managed to save from mankind’s tendency to build hideous structures upon it. He’d been more than willing to increase Zed’s knowledge of the “real Lakes” with a good period of gossip about its denizens, many of whom were “gen-u-ine Cumbrian characters,” one of whom was, ultimately and conveniently, George Cowley. “A real piece o’ work, is George,” the publican had said. “One of those blokes never lets go of a grievance. Love to feud, they do, that sort of bloke. I feel dead sorry for that boy of his ’cause the only thing George has any fondness for is feuding and his bloody dog.” His bloody dog was a border collie who’d come as far as the hedge when George Cowley and his son crossed over to the green. A word from George and the dog had dropped to its belly obediently. There it remained, a watchful eye on the proceedings, throughout Zed’s conversation with its master.

Cowley eyed Zed with no small degree of suspicion. His son held his scissors poised, but he’d stopped cutting his father’s hair. George said over his shoulder to him, “Get on with it, Dan,” and looked away from Zed. So much for friendly conversation, Zed thought.

“Lovely farm you’ve got,” Zed said. “Unusual to have it actually part of the village.”

“Not mine,” George remarked sourly.

“You run it, though, don’t you? Doesn’t that make it as good as yours?”

George cast him a look indicative of scorn. “Not hardly. And what’s it to you anyway?”

Zed glanced at the man’s son. Daniel’s face flushed. Zed said, “Nothing, actually. It merely looks an interesting place. The big house and all that. I’ve a curiosity about old buildings. It’s an old manor house, isn’t it? The bigger building?”

Cowley scowled. “Could be. Dan, are you cutting or not? I’m not ’bout to sit here all day in the cold. We’ve things to see to.”

Daniel said quietly to Zed, “Elizabethan, it is. We used to live there.”

“Dan!”

“Sorry.” He resumed his cutting. It looked like something he’d been doing for years, as he used both the comb and the scissors efficiently.

Cowley said to Zed, “So who bloody wants to know and why?”

“Eh?”

“The house. The farm. Why’re you asking about ’em? What’s your interest? You’ve some sort o’ business in the village?”

“Oh.” Zed thought of the approach that would glean him the most information with the least revelation on his part. “Just interested in the history of the places I visit. In the Willow and Well, the barman was saying that’s the oldest building in the village, that manor house.”

“Wrong, he is. Cottage’s older by a hundert years.”

“Is it really? I expect a place like that could be haunted or something.”

“That why you’re here? You looking for ghosts? Or” — sharply — “for something else?”

God, the man was suspicious, Zed thought. He wondered idly if the bloke had pieces of silver shoved up the chimney or something very like, with Zed there to case the joint, as the saying went. He said affably to Cowley, “Sorry. No. I’m only here visiting. I don’t mean to unnerve you.”

“Not unnerved. I c’n take care of m’self and Dan, I can.”

“Right. Of course. I expect you can.” Zed went for a jolly tone. “I don’t expect you get many people asking questions about the farm, eh? Or actually many people here at all, especially this time of year. Asking questions or doing anything else.” He winced inwardly. He was going to have to do something about developing a subtlety of approach.

Cowley said, “’F you like history, I c’n give you history,” but he crossed his arms beneath the sheet that was keeping the hair from his clothing, and his posture suggested nothing was forthcoming, in spite of his words.

Daniel said, “Dad,” in a tone that took a position between advising and warning.

“Didn’t say nothing, did I,” Cowley said.

“It’s only that — ”

“Just cut the bloody hair and have done.” Cowley looked away, this time to the manor house behind the wall. It was all of stone, neatly whitewashed right to the top of its chimneys, and its roof looked as if it had been recently replaced. “That,” he said, “was meant to be mine. Got bought out from under my nose, it did, with no one the wiser till the job was done. And look what happened: what needed to happen. That’s how it is. ’N am I surprised? Not bloody likely. You pay the wages in the end, you do.”

Zed looked at the man in utter confusion. He reckoned “what happened” was the death of Ian Cresswell, who, he knew, had lived in the manor house. But, “Wages?” he asked, while what he was thinking was, What the hell is the man going on about?

“Of sin,” Daniel said in a low voice. “The wages of sin.”

“That’s right, that is,” George Cowley said. “He paid the wages of sin right and proper. Well, there he is and here we are and when affairs get settled and the farm goes up for sale again, we’ll be there this time and make no mistake. Bryan Beck farm is meant to be ours, ’n we’ve not been scrimping from day one in our lives to have it go to someone else a second time.”

From this it seemed to Zed that Ian Cresswell’s sin had been purchasing Bryan Beck farm before George Cowley had been able to do so. Which meant — and this was useful, wasn’t it? — that Cowley had a motive to murder Cresswell. And that meant it was only a matter of time before New Scotland Yard came calling, which also meant that all he himself had to do was wait for their arrival. Confirm they’re here, use their presence to sex up his story, and get the hell back to London, where he could resume his life. Yes. Things were looking up.

He said, “You’re talking about Mr. Cresswell’s purchase of the farm, I take it.”

Cowley looked at him as if he were mad. “Purchase of the farm?”

“You said ‘the wages of sin.’ I reckoned purchasing the farm was his sin.”

“Bah! That was bloody wrong, that was. That put us where it did, me and Dan. But no one pays wages ’cause of property.” He loaded the final two words with derision, and he seemed to feel Zed was dim enough to require further elucidation. “Indecent, it was, him and that Arab lodger of his. And what’re those kids of his still doing there? That’s the question I ask, but no one’s answering, are they. Well, that’s indecent on top of indecent. And I tell you this: More wages are coming, an’ they’re bound to be big. You can count on that.”

SWARTHMOOR CUMBRIA

Tim Cresswell hated Margaret Fox School, but he put up with it because it spared him from having to go to a comprehensive where he might be expected to make friends, which was pretty much the last thing he wanted. He’d had friends once, but he’d learned that having them meant having to look at the smirks on their faces when they twigged what was going on in his life. Having friends meant having to overhear their murmurs of speculation as he passed them in one corridor or another on his way to lessons. The fact was, he didn’t care if he ever had a friend again, since those he’d once possessed had ceased being friends just about the time his dad had walked out on the family to arse-fuck a limp-wristed Iranian. Word had gone round about that soon enough, for Tim’s mum didn’t possess the sense to keep her outrage to herself, especially if she was certain about being the aggrieved party in a situation. And she was definitely that, wasn’t she. Turned out his dad had been fucking other men for years, exposing her to disease, disaster, disgust, disrespect, all the other disses there were, because one thing Niamh was especially good at was listing those disses to whoever wanted to hear them. She made sure Tim knew them from the word go, and in response he broke a few things, he burned a few things, he hurt a few people, he dismembered a kitten — never mind that the poor thing was already dead — and he ended up in Margaret Fox School just outside of Ulverston. Here Tim intended to stay, but to manage that he had to do just enough to be cooperative and not enough to be given the boot back into the system where the normies were educated.

Most kids boarded at Margaret Fox School because they were too disturbed to live with their families. But there were day pupils as well, and Niamh Cresswell had seen to it that Tim was placed among them. All the better to force his father or Kaveh Mehran to cart him from Bryanbarrow all the way to Ulverston and back each day, a drive that took forever, ate up their time together, and punished them for putting a real bazooble of a crater in Niamh’s pride. Tim went along with it all because it got him far away from everyone who knew the story of what had happened to his parents’ marriage, which was just about everyone in Grange-over-Sands.

But one of the things he hated about Margaret Fox School was the rule about the stupid Societies, always spelled with a capital, just like that. In addition to regular lessons, one was required to belong to three Societies: one each of academic, creative, and physical. The philosophy was that the Societies supposedly eased the whacked-out pupils of Margaret Fox School into a semblance of normal behaviour, sort of tricking them into acting as if they could function beyond the high walls that enclosed the grounds of the institution. Tim despised the Societies because they forced him into contact with the other pupils, but he’d managed to find three that kept that contact to a bare minimum. He’d signed on for the Ramblers, the Sketchers, and the Philatelists, since each of these were activities he could do alone even if other people were present. They didn’t require communication of any kind, other than listening to the staff member in charge of each Society drone on about the subject of supposed interest.

Which was exactly what was going on just now at the regular meeting of the Ramblers. Quincy Arnold was doing his usual blah blah blah at the end of their afternoon walk. This had been a nothing stagger on the public footpath from Mansriggs over to Mansriggs Hall and from there up to Town Bank Road, where the school van picked them up, but the way QA was banging on about it, you’d think they’d just scaled the Matterhorn. The big deal had been the view of Ben Cragg — wahoo to another bloody tooth of limestone, Tim thought — but the ultimate goal was evidently what all this afternoon wandering was leading up to: what QA called the Big Adventure on Scout Scar. Said adventure would not happen till spring, and in the meantime all the rambling they were doing was to prepare them for the enchantment to come. Blah blah blah whatever. QA could blather like no one else, and he could be positively orgasmic about limestone escarpments and — pound on, my heart — glacial erratics. Yew trees blasted by the winds, dangerous screes where sure footing was crucial, larks and buzzards and cuckoos on the wing, daffodils tucked into hazel coppices. It sounded about as interesting to Tim as learning Chinese writing from a blind man, but he knew the value of looking at QA when the bloke was doing his blah blahs, although he kept his expression hovering between indifference and loathing, always on guard against being deemed cured.

He had to have a piss, though. He knew he should have done a side-of-the-road job before they’d embarked on the ride back to the school at the end of the walk. But he hated pulling his prick out in public because one never knew how it would be taken among this lot with whom he had to walk. So he squeezed back the urges and now he suffered through QA’s summary of their afternoon’s timeless adventure, and when they were at last released onto the school grounds with the gates shut behind them, he made a dash for the nearest loo and let it flow. He made sure some of it went on the floor and some onto his trouser leg. When he was finished, he examined himself in the mirror and picked at a spot on his forehead. He achieved a bit of blood — always nice — and left to fetch his mobile phone.

They weren’t allowed, of course. But the day pupils could have them as long as they got checked in every morning and ticked off on a list that was kept in the headmaster’s office. To rescue them every afternoon, one had to trek to the headmaster, receive a permission slip, and then trek back to the tuck shop where in a locked bank of pigeon-holes behind the till the mobiles were deposited for safekeeping.

On this day, Tim was the last to retrieve his. He checked for messages as soon as the mobile was in his hand. There was nothing, and he felt his fingers start to tingle. He wanted to throw the mobile at someone, but instead he walked to the tuck shop door and from there to the central path that would take him to the drop-off area where he would wait with the other day pupils to score their lifts for the trip home from school. They could only ride with approved drivers, of course. Tim had three but with his dad dead he was down to two, which meant one, really, because there was no way in hell that Niamh was going to drive to fetch him, so that left Kaveh. And so far Kaveh had done the job because he had no choice and he’d not yet worked how to get out of it.

Tim didn’t care. It was nothing to him who came to fetch him. What was important now was the deal he’d struck with Toy4You and the fact that he’d had no response to his latest message, sent this morning on his way into school. He got into contact once again:

Where r u

A moment and then: Here

y didnt u anser

when

u no what i mean we agreed

no way

u promised me

no can do

y y y

not on mobl

u promised u said

lets talk

Tim looked up from the screen. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted action. He’d kept his part of the bargain and it was only fair that Toy4You do exactly the same. It always came down to this in the end, he thought bitterly. People played each other like a deck of cards and he was bloody sick and tired of it all. But what choice did he have? He could start all over, but he didn’t want that. It had taken long enough to find Toy4You.

He punched in his answer. Where

u no

2day

2night

ok

He flipped the phone closed and shoved it into his pocket. A fat girl whose name he didn’t know was watching him from a bench. His eyes met hers and she lifted her school skirt. She spread her legs. She had on no knickers. He wanted to spew all over the path but instead he went for a distant bench and sat down to wait for his ride back to Bryanbarrow. He considered the ways he could torment Kaveh on the long trip home, and he congratulated himself for the piss on his trousers. That would get up old Kaveh’s nose in more ways than one, he thought with an inward chuckle.

ARNSIDE CUMBRIA

Alatea Fairclough was mesmerised by Morecambe Bay. She’d never seen anything like it. The ebb tide emptied its vast expanse, leaving behind one hundred twenty square miles of varying kinds of sands. But these were sands so dangerous that only the unwary, the lifelong fishermen of the area, or the Queen’s Guide went out on them. If anyone else wandered into the empty bay — and people did all the time — they ran the risk of ending their days on earth by stumbling onto an area of quicksand that was, to the casual observer, indistinguishable from solid ground. Or far out in the bay they stood too long on rises of sand that seemed safe, like islands, only to find that the flood tide cut them off and then covered them in its return. And when, instead of a mere flood tide, a tidal bore brought the water swirling back into the bay at the speed of a galloping horse, things happened with a dizzying quickness as a vast surge of water covered everything in its path. And that was the thing about the tidal bore that Alatea found so hypnotic. It seemed to come from nowhere, and the speed of the torrent suggested a power driven by a force beyond any man’s control. The thought of this generally filled her with peace, however: that there was a force beyond man’s control and that she could turn to that force for solace when she was most in need.

She loved the fact that this house — a gift from her husband’s father to celebrate the occasion of her marriage to his only son — sat just above the Kent Channel, which was itself part of greater Morecambe Bay. From the edge of the property where a stone wall marked a public footpath along the channel and ultimately up to the wild, open hilltop of Arnside Knot, she could stand with a voluminous shawl wrapped round her and watch the renewing return of the salt water. She could pretend she knew something about how to read the eddies that it created.

She was there now, on this November afternoon. The sunlight was dimming as it would do earlier and earlier until late December, and the temperature was fast falling as well. A cloud bank over the rise of Humphrey Head Point across the channel to the west suggested a coming night of rain, but she wasn’t bothered by this. Unlike so many people in this adopted country of hers, she always welcomed rain with its promise of both growth and renewal. Still, she found herself uneasy. Her husband was the cause.

She hadn’t heard from him. She’d phoned his mobile during the afternoon, once she’d learned from ringing Fairclough Industries that Nicholas hadn’t gone into work that day. She’d made that phone call round eleven, when he still should have been there prior to leaving for the Middlebarrow Pele Project, where he now spent half of his workdays. She’d first assumed that he’d gone to the project earlier than usual and she’d then rung his mobile. But all she heard was that disembodied voice telling her that she had to leave a message. This she had done, three times now. The fact that Nicholas had not replied filled her with concern.

His cousin’s sudden death loomed large. Alatea didn’t want to think about it. Not only did death in general shake her, but this death in particular and the circumstances of this death filled her with a dread that took every ounce of her skill at subterfuge to hide. Ian’s drowning had hit the family hard. Particularly had it devastated Nicholas’s father. So staggered had Bernard been at first that Alatea had wondered at the nature of his exact relationship with Ian. But it was only when Bernard had begun to distance himself from Nicholas that Alatea had sensed an undercurrent beneath the older man’s grief.

Nicholas was not involved in Ian’s drowning. Alatea knew this for a hundred and one reasons but most of all she knew it because she knew her husband. He seemed weak to people because of his past, but he was no such thing. He was the rock and substance of her life, and he would become the same to many others if he only had the chance. This was what the Middlebarrow Pele Project was giving to him.

But he hadn’t been at the project today any more than he had been at Fairclough Industries. Had he been, he would have had his mobile switched on. He knew it was important to her to have contact with him periodically and he was always willing to allow her the access. He’d said at first, “Do you not trust me, Allie? I mean, if I’m going to use again, I’m going to use again. You can’t stop me with a phone call, you know,” but that hadn’t been the reason she wanted close contact with him, and through partial truths she’d ultimately been able to persuade him that her need had nothing to do with the need he himself had finally managed to conquer.

Whenever he was gone from her, she worried that something might happen to him, entirely unrelated to his addictions. A car crash, a stone falling from the old pele tower, a freak accident… exactly like what had happened to Ian. Except she wouldn’t think about Ian, she told herself. There were too many other things to consider.

She turned from the sight of the floodwaters swirling into the Kent Channel. Up the slope of the lawn in front of her, Arnside House spread out. She allowed herself a momentary feeling of pleasure as she looked upon the building. The house gave her a focus for her energies, and she wondered if Bernard had known that when he presented it to them upon their return to England.

“It was used for convalescing soldiers after the war,” he’d said as he’d walked her through it, “and then it spent some thirty years as a girls’ school. After that there were two sets of owners who did a few things to restore it to what it once was. But then I’m afraid it stood vacant for a time. Still, there’s something about it that’s very special, my dear. I think it deserves a family running about inside it. And more, it deserves someone like you to put your touch upon it.” He’d kept his hand on the small of her back as he’d walked her through the place. He had a way of looking at her that was a little disturbing. His gaze would go from Nicholas to her and back to Nicholas as if he couldn’t understand what they had between them: either where it had come from in the first place or how it was going to endure.

But that didn’t matter to Alatea. What mattered was Bernard’s acceptance of her, and she had that. She could tell he thought she possessed a form of magical power that was protecting Nicholas, a kind of sorcery perhaps. She could also tell from Bernard’s assessing looks, taking her in from top to toes, that he reckoned exactly what the sorcery was.

She went up the slope of lawn towards the house. A set of stone steps led up to a terrace, and she used these, careful of the damp moss that grew upon them. Across the lawn she made for a doorway tucked into the side of the building. There she let herself into the drawing room, whose pale yellow walls suggested sunlight even on the most dismal of days.

This was the first room she and Nicholas had restored. It overlooked the terrace, the lawn, and the channel. From its bay windows one could even see across the water to Grange-over-Sands forming a fan of lights up the hillside at night. In the evenings she and Nicholas sat here, a fire glowing in the fireplace as the shadows stretched across the floor.

It was early for the fire, but she lit it anyway, for comfort as well as for warmth. Then she checked the phone for a message from her husband and when there was no light blinking to tell her he’d phoned, she decided to ring him another time. She pressed the numbers slowly, the way one does when hoping a previously engaged line will now be unengaged. Before she finished, though, she finally heard him, his footsteps approaching along the uncarpeted corridor.

She hadn’t heard either his car or his entering the house. But she knew it was Nicholas just as she knew from the lightness of his step what mood he was in. She slipped her mobile into her pocket. Nicholas called her name and she said, “In here, darling,” and in a moment he was with her again.

He paused at the doorway. He looked cherubic in the diffused light, like an overlarge putto from a Renaissance painting, round of face with bright curls spilling over his forehead. He said, “You’re an impossibly gorgeous woman. Am I in the right house?” and he crossed the room to her. She was wearing flat-soled shoes for once, so they were of a height: both of them nearly six feet tall. This made it easier for him to kiss her, and he did so, enthusiastically. His hands went down her back to cup her bum and he pulled her close to him. He finally said with an engaging laugh, “I’m loaded, Allie, like you wouldn’t believe,” and for a terrible moment she thought he’d got himself high. But then he removed the pins and the slides that kept her hair in order and he loosened it to fall round her face and her shoulders. After that he began to unbutton her blouse and talk about “swimmers and there’re millions of them, and they’re perfect in form and let me tell you they’re ready to be perfect in function as well. Where are we in your cycle just now?” and his mouth went to her neck as his hands deftly unfastened her bra.

Her body responded even as her mind assessed. She sank to the carpet before the fire, pulled Nicholas down with her, and undressed him. He was not a man who coupled in silence. Rather, it was “Christ, the feel of you,” and “my God, Allie,” and “oh yes, just like that” and because of this, she knew every level of his rising excitement.

It matched her own. Even if her thoughts began in another place as they always did, in another time, with one or another man, they ended up centred on this man, here. Of its own accord her body met his and they created for each other a release born of pleasure that made everything else fade into insignificance.

This was enough for her. No. It was more than enough. Enough was the love and protection Nicholas afforded her. That in addition she should have found a man whose body met hers in such a way as to drive off memory and fear… This was something she had never expected that day behind the cafeteria till on a mountain in Utah when she looked up, accepted the money for his bowl of chili, and heard him say in wonder, “Jesus God, is it difficult for you?”

She’d said, “What?”

“Being so beautiful. Is it rather like a curse?” And then he’d grinned, scooped up his tray, and said, “Bloody hell. Never mind. What a line, eh? Sorry. I didn’t intend it to sound like that,” and off he went. But he was back the next day and the day after that. On the fourth time through her queue, he asked her if she’d have coffee with him that afternoon, told her he didn’t drink alcohol of any kind, told her he was recovering from methamphetamine addiction, told her he was English, told her he meant to go home to England, told her he meant to prove to his father and his mother that he was finally through with the devils that had ridden him for so many years, told her… There was a queue behind him, but he didn’t notice. She did, however, and to get him to move along she’d said, “I will meet you, yes. There is a place in the town, across from the town lift. Its name…” And she couldn’t remember the name. She stared at him in some confusion. He stared at her in much the same way. He’d said, “Believe me, I’ll find it,” and so he had.

Now they lay on the carpet before the fire, side by side. He said, “You should tilt your hips, Allie. They’re brilliant swimmers but it’ll be easier if they’re going downhill.” He rose on one elbow and observed her. “I went to Lancaster,” he said frankly. “Did you try to phone me? I switched off the mobile because I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie to you.”

“Nicky…” She heard the disappointment in her voice. She wished she could have hidden it, but at least the sound of it was better than acknowledging the sudden fear that stabbed her.

“No, listen, darling. I needed to check, just to make sure. I did such a job on my body for so many years, it was logical for me to want to know… I mean, wouldn’t you want to? In my position? With nothing happening yet?”

She turned as well, her arm stretched out over her head and her head resting upon it. She looked not at him but rather over his shoulder. The rain had begun. She could see its pattern on the bay windows. She said, “I am not a machine for babies, Nicky, how do you call it? This thing that grows them?”

“Incubator,” he said. “I know you’re not. And I don’t think of you that way. But it’s only natural… I mean, it’s been two years now… We’ve both been anxious about it… You know.” He reached out and touched her hair. She didn’t have the kind of hair a man could run his fingers through. It was kinky and disordered, the gift of one of her progenitors, and God only knew which one because they represented a mixture of races and ethnicities too varied for logic to explain how they had all ended up reproducing with each other.

She said, “That is it, Nicky. The anxious part, you know. My magazine says that anxiety alone can make this difficult for a woman.”

“I understand. I do, darling. But it could be something else, and it’s time we found out, don’t you think? That’s why I went and it’s also why you can — ”

“No.” She shook his hand off her hair and sat up.

“Don’t sit! That’ll — ”

She cast him a look. “In my country,” she said, “women are not made to feel this way: that they exist for one purpose only.”

“I don’t think that.”

“These things take time. We know this where I come from. And a baby is something to cherish. A baby is not…” She hesitated. She looked away from him. She knew the truth of the matter, far beyond what her body was and was not doing. That truth needed to be spoken between them, so she finally said, “A baby is not a way to win your father’s approval, Nicky.”

Another man would have responded in outrage or denial, but this was not Nicholas’s way. Part of her love for him derived from his absolute honesty, so strange in a man who’d given years of his life to the worship of drugs. He said, “You’re right, of course. I do want it for that reason. I owe him that much for what I put him through. He’s desperate for a grandchild and I can do that for him since my sisters didn’t. We can do that for him.”

“So you see — ”

“But that’s not the only reason, Allie. I want this with you. Because of you and because there’s an us.”

“And if I have these tests. If what comes out of it is that I am not able…?” She dropped into silence and in that silence she could feel — she would swear it — his muscles become quite tense. She didn’t know what this meant, and that fact pounded the blood down her arms and into her fingers so that she had to move. She got to her feet.

He did as well. He said, “Is that what you actually think?”

“How can I think otherwise when this” — a gesture towards the carpet, the fire, where they had lain, what they had done — “becomes only about a baby? Your little swimmers, as you call them, and how they are shaped and how they can move and how I should position myself afterwards to make certain they do what you want them to do. How am I meant to feel, faced with this and with your insistence that I visit some doctor and spread my legs and have instruments thrust into me and whatever else?”

Her voice had risen. She bent, picked up her discarded clothing, began to dress. “All this day,” she said, “I miss you so much. I worry when I phone you and you do not answer. I long for you because it’s you, while — ”

“It’s the same for me. You know that.”

“I know nothing.”

She left him. The kitchen was at the other end of the house, down the long panelled corridor, through the main hall and the dining room. She went there and began their dinner. It was far too early for this, but she wanted something to do with her hands. She was mindlessly chopping onions when Nicholas joined her again. He too was dressed, but he’d buttoned his shirt incorrectly and it hung drunkenly from his shoulders in a way that made her soften towards him. He was, she knew, a lost boy without her, just as she would be lost without him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The last way on earth I want you to feel is like a baby machine. Or whatever.”

“I am trying,” she said. “The vitamins. All the pills. My temperature. My diet. Whatever will make it easier, possible…” She stopped because she’d begun to weep. She used her arm to brush the tears from her face.

“Allie…” He came to her, turned her to him.

They stood together, in each other’s arms. One minute, two. At last he said, “Just to hold you like this, I feel a kind of awe. D’you know how lucky a man I am? I know it, Allie.”

She nodded and he released her. He cupped her face in his hands and studied it in that way of his that always made her feel that the thousand truths she had hidden from him were there, openly displayed, and he was reading them all. But he made no mention of anything but, “Forgive me?”

“Of course. And I will do as you ask. Just not quite yet. Please, Nicky. Let us wait a few more months.”

He nodded. Then he grinned and said, “Meantime, we’ll give those swimmers some exercise, all right? Firm up their sense of direction?”

She smiled in turn. “We can do that.”

“Good. Now tell me why you’re chopping a mountain of onions, because my eyes are stinging like the devil. What’re you making?”

She observed the pile she’d created. “I have no idea.”

He chuckled. “Mad woman.” He walked over to the day’s post, which was in a neat pile near the kitchen phone. He said, “Did you speak with that bloke about restoring the stained glass?”

She had, she told him. He thought he could match the glass in the other windows in the main hall, but it would take some doing. He could either take the original out for a while or he could bring glass to them, but in either case, it would be expensive. Did Nicky want…?

Their conversation found its way back to normalcy: compromise reached and tension gone. They went on to other matters that concerned them till Nicholas found the phone message that Alatea had forgotten she’d written, so intent had she been on getting past babies, doctors in Lancaster, and what Nicholas wanted and expected of her.

“What’s this, then?” he said, holding up the paper she’d torn from a notebook earlier in the day.

“Ah. You’ve had a call. A television film is being made and a woman phoned. She would like to speak with you about it. She is a… I think she called it a scout of research, something like that.”

He frowned. “What kind of film?”

“Alternative treatments for drug addiction. This is a documentary, she said. Interviews with addicts and doctors and social workers. The involvement of a film crew and someone with them — a celebrity? a presenter? I do not know — to ask the questions. I told her it is not likely you would be interested, but — ”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why’d you tell her that?”

She went for one of her cookbooks. Nicholas had created for her a recessed shelf for them above the cooker hob, and she grabbed one at random, wondering what she could possibly do with three onions chopped into tiny bits. She said, “This sort of thing… this is what feeds the ego, Nicky. We have talked about that, you and I. It cannot be good, because of where it leads. Because of all the things you must guard against.”

“Right. Right. But it’s not about me, Allie.” He looked again at the paper he held. “Where’s she from? Where’re the filmmakers from?”

“I did not ask. I did not think…” She looked at the cover of the cookbook she was holding. She gathered her thoughts, considered her approach. She said, “Nicky, you must take care with this sort of thing. You always said that your part is quiet. Behind the scenes. This is best.”

“Raising money to keep the project going is best,” he countered. “This could be what we need to make that happen.”

“And when it does not?”

“Why d’you say that?”

“The other thing… that newspaperman who was here so many times… what came of that? Nothing. And all the hours you spent with him, the talking, the walking round, the working at the pele tower with him, and what then? More nothing. He promises a story and what comes of his promise? Nothing. I do not wish to see the disappointment in your face,” she told him. Because of where it might lead was what he would add in his own head. But that could not be helped.

His expression changed, but not to hardness. Rather, he seemed to glow at her and the source of the glow was his love. He said, “Darling Allie, you’re not to worry. I do know what’s at risk for me every day.” He picked up the phone but didn’t punch in the number. “This isn’t about ego. This is about saving lives, like mine was saved.”

“You always have claimed I saved your life.”

“No,” he replied. “You made it worth living. I’d like to see what this is about” — he gestured with the phone — “but I won’t do it without your agreement.”

She saw no other way. He was asking very little. After all that he had given to her, there seemed no course available but to say, “All right, then, Nicky. If you will have a care.”

“Brilliant,” he replied. He looked at the paper and punched in the number. As he did so, he said to Alatea, “What’s the surname, Allie? I can’t read your writing.”

She came to look over his shoulder at what she’d written. “St. James,” she said.

GREAT URSWICK CUMBRIA

When the gates of Margaret Fox School opened, Manette Fairclough McGhie sighed in relief. She’d thought there was a very good chance that Niamh Cresswell wouldn’t have phoned the school to inform them that her son would be fetched on this day by someone not on the previously approved list. It would have been exactly like Niamh to have done so. Niamh knew that Manette had been close to Ian, which in Niamh’s eyes made Manette a post-divorce enemy. But it seemed that Ian’s former wife had decided that the convenience of having an additional someone willing to fetch her son outweighed her need to avenge all putative sins committed against her. She’d said, “I’ll let Gracie know. She’ll be upset if Tim doesn’t show up at his regular time,” and this made Manette feel that she ought to be taking Gracie as well as Tim, but it was Tim she wanted to see today, Tim whose face at his father’s funeral still haunted Manette’s nights. This would be her tenth attempt to get through to her cousin Ian’s son. She’d tried at the reception immediately following the funeral. She’d tried with phone calls. She’d tried by e-mail. And now she was going for the direct approach. Tim could hardly avoid her if she had him in the car.

She’d left work early, stopping by Freddie’s office to tell him she’d see him at home. “I’m fetching Tim,” she said. “Thought he might like to spend the evening with us. Dinner and a DVD. You know. Perhaps stay the night?” Freddie’s reply had somewhat surprised her. Instead of an absent-minded, “Oh, right, Manette,” her erstwhile partner in life had turned the red of a very bad sunburn and said, “Oh yes. As to that… ”, and after a bit of uncharacteristic stumbling round, had gone on with, “I’ve a date, actually, Manette.”

She’d said, “Oh,” and tried to hide her surprise.

He’d hurried on with, “I rather thought it was time. I probably should have told you before now, but I didn’t quite know how to put it.”

Manette didn’t like the way she felt about this, but she forced a smile and said, “Oh. Lovely, Freddie. Anyone I know?”

“No, no. Of course not. Just someone…”

“How’d you meet?”

He moved back from his desk. On the monitor behind him, she could see a graph and she wondered what he was working on. Profits and losses, probably. He was also due to analyse wages and benefits. And there was the not small matter of formally going through the books following Ian’s death. When on earth had Freddie even found the time to meet someone? she wondered. He said, “Actually, I’d rather not talk about it. It feels a bit uncomfortable.”

“Oh. Right.” Manette nodded. He was watching her earnestly to gauge her reaction so she was careful to give him a cheerful one. “P’rhaps you c’n bring her by, then. I’ll want to see if I approve. You don’t want to make a second mistake.”

“You weren’t a mistake,” he told her.

“Ah. Thanks for saying that.” She fished in her bag and brought out her car keys. She said brightly, “Still my best friend, then?”

“Still and always,” he replied.

What he didn’t say was what she knew: that they couldn’t go on forever as they were, divorced but housemates, everything the same in their lives save where they slept and with whom they made love. What remained was the deep friendship that had always existed between them, which was, at the end, the root of the problem. She’d often thought since the day they’d agreed to divorce that things might have been different had they been able to have children together, that their relationship wouldn’t have deteriorated to the point of their dinnertime conversation being all about the benefits of a self-cleaning and self-deodorising lavatory and how to market it. One couldn’t go on like that indefinitely without waking up one morning and wondering where the magic had gone. A friendly divorce seemed the best solution.

Well, she’d known Freddie would find someone else eventually. She intended to do the same herself. She just hadn’t thought it would happen so quickly. Now she wondered if the truth was that she just hadn’t thought it would happen at all.

She eased her car through the gates of Margaret Fox School. She’d not been here before, but Niamh had told her where Tim would be waiting. There was a supervised holding area near the administration building, Tim’s mother had said. Manette’s name would be on a list matching to Tim’s name. She was to take her identification with her. A passport was best if she had one. There would be no quibbling over that.

She found Tim easily enough since the lane into the school led directly to the administration building, with the classrooms and dormitories forming a quadrangle behind it. Her cousin’s son was hunched on a bench with a rucksack at his feet. He was doing what, in Manette’s experience, most teenagers did with their free time these days. He was texting someone.

She pulled up to the kerb, but he didn’t look up, so intent was he upon what he was doing. This gave her the chance to observe him and she did so, reflecting not for the first time upon the extremes to which Tim went in order to hide his resemblance to his father. Like Ian, he’d been late to puberty, and he still hadn’t gone through a growth spurt. So he was small for his age, and out of his school uniform, he would look even smaller. For then he donned clothes so baggy that they draped upon him, and even the baseball caps he favoured were too large. They covered his hair, which he’d not cut in ages and which he allowed to hang in his eyes. He would want, of course, to hide those eyes most of all. For like his father’s, they were large and brown and limpid and they served perfectly well as those metaphorical windows to the soul.

Manette could see he was scowling. Something wasn’t right with whoever was texting in reply to Tim. As she watched, he lifted his hand and tore at his fingers. He bit down so hard that she winced at the sight. She got out of the car quickly and called his name. He looked up. For a moment his face showed surprise — Manette wanted to call it delighted surprise, but she didn’t dare go that far — but then his features settled into the scowl again. He didn’t move from the bench.

She said, “Hey, Buster, come on. I’m your lift today. I need help with something and you’re my man.”

He said sullenly, “I got somewhere to go,” and went back to texting, or perhaps pretending to.

She replied, “Well, I don’t know how else you’re going to get there ’cause I’m the only one with wheels that you’re going to see.”

“Where’s bloody Kaveh, then?”

“What’s Kaveh got to do with it?”

Tim looked up from his mobile. Manette saw him huff. It was a derisive exhalation of breath intended to convey his judgement of her. It said stupid cow without saying stupid cow. Fourteen-year-old boys were nothing if not transparent.

“Come on, Tim,” she said. “Let’s go. The school’s not about to let anyone else fetch you today now your mum’s rung them.”

He would know the drill. Further recalcitrance was pointless. He muttered, shoved himself to his feet, and slouched over to the car, dragging his rucksack behind him. He threw himself into the passenger seat with enough force to rock the car on its wheels. She said, “Steady on,” and then, “Seat belt please,” and she waited for him to cooperate.

She felt for Tim. He’d taken too many punches. He’d been the worst possible age for his father to have walked out on the family for any reason. To have had his father walk out on the family for another man had thrown his entire world off its axis. What was he meant to do and how was he meant to understand his own dawning sexuality in such a situation? It was no wonder to Manette that Tim’s behaviour had altered on the edge of a knife, propelling him from his comprehensive into the cloistered safety of a school for the disturbed. He was disturbed. In his position who wouldn’t be?

She made a careful turn into the road outside the school gates, and she said to Tim, “CDs in the glove box. Why don’t you find us something?”

“Won’t have anything I like.” He turned a shoulder to her and stared out of the window.

“Bet I do. Have a look, Buster.”

“I got to meet someone,” he told her. “I said.”

“Who?”

“Someone.”

“Your mum know about this?”

That derisive huff of breath again. He muttered something and when she asked him to repeat it, he said, “Nothing. Forget it,” and he watched the scenery.

There was little enough of it and certainly nothing to fascinate in this part of the county. For outside of Ulverston and heading south to Great Urswick the land was open and rolling, farmland separated from the road by hedges and limestone walls, pastures in which the ubiquitous sheep grazed, and the occasional woodland of alders and paper birches.

It wasn’t a long drive. Manette’s home in Great Urswick was closer to Margaret Fox School than the homes of any of Tim’s other relatives. It was, she thought not for the first time, the most logical place for Tim to reside during the school terms, and she’d mentioned this to both Ian and Niamh shortly after they’d enrolled the boy there. But Niamh wouldn’t hear of it. There was Gracie to consider. It would devastate her to be without her brother in the after-school hours. Manette had reckoned that there was more to the matter than Gracie’s devastation, but she had not pressed it. She would, she’d decided, see the boy when she could.

Great Urswick wasn’t much of a village, one of those collections of cottages that had grown round the intersection of several country lanes, a distance inland from Bardsea and Morecambe Bay. It possessed a pub, a post office, a restaurant, two churches, and a primary school, but it had the added feature of sitting on the edge of a somewhat large pond. The posh district — as Manette and Freddie liked to call it — consisted of the houses built along the banks of this pond. They were situated near to the road but their large back gardens comprised lawns giving onto the pond itself. Reeds formed occasional barriers between the gardens and the water, and where there were no reeds, miniature jetties allowed residents access to rowingboats or places to sit and watch the ducks and the two resident swans who lived there throughout the year.

Manette and Freddie’s house was one of these. Manette pulled up to it — leaving the garage for Freddie’s use — and she said to Tim, “Come and look. Here’s where I need your help. Back here.”

“Why isn’t Freddie helping you?” Tim asked abruptly. He didn’t move to unhook his seat belt.

“Freddie?” She laughed. “Impossible. He’d have to read instructions and there’s no way he’s about to do that. The way I reckon it, I read and you build. And afterwards we cook burgers and chips.”

“Build? What? I can’t build nothing.”

“Oh yes you can. Wait and see,” she said. “It’s round the back. Come on.” She set off towards the corner of the house, without waiting to see if he would follow.

The project was a tent. Of course she could have put it up herself, with or without help from anyone. But this was not the point. The point was doing something to engage Tim and to get him talking or at least to get him relaxing enough that he might allow her a modest inroad into his suffering.

She unpacked the tent and laid it out on the lawn. It was a large affair, more suitable for a family of four than for what she had in mind, but as it wasn’t the season for tent buying, she’d had to make do with what was on offer. She was sorting through various stakes and cords when she heard Tim finally come round the side of the house. She said, “Good. There you are. Need a snack before we begin?”

He shook his head. He looked from the sprawl of canvas to her to the water. He said, “What’re you setting this up here for, then?”

“Oh, this is just practice for you and me,” she told him. “When we know what we’re doing, we’ll take it up Scout Scar.”

“What for?”

“For camping out, silly. What else would we use it for? Your mum told me you’re walking on the fells now and as I’m walking on the fells as well, we c’n do it together, soon’s you’re ready.”

“You don’t walk on the fells.”

“A lot you know. I take all kinds of exercise. Besides, Freddie doesn’t like me running along the roads any longer. He thinks I’ll be hit by a car. Come on, then. What’re you waiting for? Sure you don’t want a snack? Custard cream? Jaffa cake? Banana? Marmite toast?”

“I said no!” He sounded fierce. “Look. I already told you. I got to meet someone.”

“Where?”

“It’s important. I said I’d be there.”

“Where?”

“Windermere.”

“Windermere? Who on earth are you meeting in Windermere? Does your mum know you’re meeting someone in Windermere?” She’d been crouched among the items intended for setting up the tent, but now she stood. She said, “See here, Tim. What’s going on? Are you up to something?”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“You know very well. Drugs, drink, some sort of naughty nonsense that — ”

“No. Look, I got to be there. I got to.”

She could hear his desperation, but she couldn’t tell what it had to do with or why he was feeling it. Any idea she had in the matter was not a good one. But there was something in his eyes when they flashed in her direction, a form of suffering looking out at her and begging for her help. She said, “I can’t take you there without speaking to your mum,” and she headed in the direction of the house, saying, “I’m going to phone her and make sure — ”

“You can’t!”

“Why not? Tim, what’s going on?”

“She won’t care. She doesn’t know. It won’t matter. If you ring her… oh fuck, fuck, fuck.” And he stalked across the tent and down to the little wooden jetty that stretched into the pond. There was a rowingboat tied there, but he didn’t get into it. Instead he dropped heavily down onto the jetty and his head fell into his hands.

Manette could tell he was crying. Her heart went out to him. She crossed the lawn and went out to join him on the dock. She sat down next to him but didn’t touch him. She said, “Buster, this is a bad time for you. This is the worst. But it’s going to pass. I promise you. It is going to pass because — ”

“You don’t know anything!” He swung round and shoved her. She fell onto her side. “You don’t know shit!” He kicked her, and she felt the force of the blow in the region of her kidneys. She tried to say his name but could not get it past her lips before he kicked her again.