Collected Stories

The Blue Dress

My cinder-grey room has a window, but I have never in all my time here looked out of it. It’s easier to remember, to conjure up this scene or that, to eavesdrop. Americans give arms away, Russians promise tanks. In Brussels an English politician breakfasts with his mistress; a pornographer pretends he’s selling Christmas cards. Carefully I listen, as in childhood I listened to the hushed conversation of my parents.

I stand in the cathedral at Vézelay, whose bishops once claimed it possessed the mortal remains of Mary Magdalene, a falseness which was exposed by Pope Boniface VIII. I wonder about that Pope, and then the scene is different.

I sit in the Piazza San Marco on the day when I discovered a sea of corruption among the local Communists. The music plays, visitors remark upon the pigeons.

Scenes coalesce: Miss Batchelor passes along the promenade, Major Trubstall lies, the blue dress flutters and is still. In Rotterdam I have a nameless woman. ‘Feest wezen vieren?’ she says. ‘Gedronken?’ In Corniglia the wine is purple, the path by the coast is marked as a lover’s lane. I am silly, Dorothea says, the dress is just a dress. She laughs, like water running over pebbles.

I must try, they tell me; it will help to write it down. I do not argue, I do precisely as they say. Carefully, I remember. Carefully, I write it down.

It was Bath, not Corniglia, not Rotterdam or Venice, not Vézelay: it was in Bath where Dorothea and I first met, by chance in the Pump Room. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, actually bumping into her.

She shook her head, saying that of course I hadn’t hurt her. She blamed the crowds, tourists pushing like mad things, always in a hurry. But nothing could keep her out of the Pump Room because of its Jane Austen associations.

‘I’ve never been here before.’

‘Goodness! You poor thing!’

‘I was on the way to have some coffee. Would you like some?’

‘I always have coffee when I come.’

She was small and very young – twenty-one or -two, I guessed – in a plain white dress without sleeves. She carried a basket, and had very fair hair, quite straight and cut quite short. Her oval face was perfect, her eyes intense, the blue of a washed-out sky. She smiled when she told me about herself, as though she found the subject a little absurd. She was studying the history of art but when she finished that she didn’t know what on earth she was going to do next. I said I was in Bath because my ex-wife’s mother, who’d only come to live there six months ago, had died. The funeral had taken place that morning and my ex-wife, Felicity, had been furious that I’d attended it. But I’d always been fond of her mother, fonder in fact than Felicity had ever been. I’d known of course that I would have to meet her at the funeral. She’d married again, a man who ran a wine business: he had been there too.

‘Is it horrible, a divorce?’ the girl asked me while we drank our weak, cool coffee. ‘I can never think of my parents divorcing.’

‘It’s nice you can’t. Yes, it’s horrible.’

‘Did you have children?’

‘No.’

‘There’s that at least. But isn’t it odd, to make such a very rudimentary mistake?’

‘Extraordinary.’

I don’t know what it was about her manner that first morning, but something seemed to tell me that this beautiful creature would not be outraged if I said – which I did – that we might go somewhere else in search of a better cup of coffee. And when I said, ‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said it confidently. She telephoned her parents’ house. We had lunch together in the Francis Hotel.

‘I went to a boarding-school I didn’t like,’ she told me. ‘Called after St Catherine but without her charity. I was bad at maths and French and geography. I didn’t like a girl called Angela Tate and I didn’t like the breakfasts. I missed my brothers. What about you? What was your wife like?’

‘Fond of clothes. Very fine tweed, a certain shade of scarlet, scarves of every possible variation. She hated being abroad, trailing after me.’ I didn’t add that Felicity had been unfaithful with anyone she had a fancy for; I didn’t even want to think about that.

The waiter brought Dorothea veal escalope and steak au poivre for me. It was very like being in a dream. The funeral of my ex-mother-in-law had taken place at ten o’clock, there had been Felicity’s furious glances and her husband’s disdain, my walking away when the ceremony was over without a word to anyone. I’d felt wound up, like a watch-spring, seeing vividly in my mind’s eye an old, grey woman who’d always entertained me with her gossip, who’d written to me when Felicity went to say how sorry she was, adding in a postscript that Felicity had always been a handful. She and I had shared the truth about her daughter, and it was that I’d honoured by making the journey to her funeral.

‘They say I am compulsively naughty,’ Dorothea said, as if guessing that I wondered what she had said to her parents on the telephone. I suspected she had not confessed the truth. There’d been some excuse to account for her delay, and already that fitted in with what I knew of her. Certainly she would not have said that she’d been picked up by a middle-aged journalist who had come to Bath to attend a funeral. She spoke again of Jane Austen, of Elizabeth Bennet, and Emma and Elinor. She spoke as though these fictional characters were real. She almost loved them, she said, but that of course could not have been quite true.

‘Who were encumbered with low connections and gave themselves airs? Who bestowed their consent with a most joyful alacrity?’

I laughed, and waited for her to tell me. I walked with her to a parked car, a white Mini that had collected a traffic warden’s ticket. Formally we shook hands and all the way to London on the train I thought of her. I sat in the bar drinking one after another of those miniature bottles of whisky that trains go in for, while her face jumped about in my imagination, unnerving me. Again and again her white, even teeth smiled at me.

Within a day or two I was in Belfast, sending reports to a Washington newspaper and to a syndicate in Australia. As always, I posted photocopies of everything I wrote to Stoyckov, who operates a news bureau in Prague., Stoyckov used to pay me when he saw me, quite handsomely in a sense, but it was never the money that mattered: it was simply that I saw no reason why the truth about Northern Ireland should not be told behind the Iron Curtain as well as in Washington and Adelaide.

I had agreed to do a two-months stint – no longer, because from experience I knew that Belfast becomes depressing. Immediately afterwards I was to spend three days in Madrid, trying to discover if there was truth in the persistent rumour that the Pope was to visit Spain next year. ‘Great Christ alive,’ Felicity used to scream at me, ‘call this a marriage?’

In Belfast the army was doing its best to hush up a rape case. I interviewed a man called Ruairi O Baoill, whom I’d last seen drilling a gang of terrorists in the Syrian desert. ‘My dear fellow, you can hardly call this rape,’ a Major Trubstall insisted. ‘The girl was yelling her head off for it.’ But the girl had been doing no such thing; the girl was whey-faced, unable to stop crying; the girl was still in pain, she’d been rushed to hospital to have stitches. ‘Listen,’ Major Trubstall said, pushing a great crimson face into mine, ‘if a girl goes out drinking with four soldiers, d’you think she isn’t after something?’ The Red Hand of Ulster meant what it said, O Baoill told me: the hand was waiting to grasp the hammer and the sickle. He didn’t say it to his followers, and later he denied that he had said it at all.

Ruairi O Baoill is a sham, I wrote. And so, it would appear, is a man called Major TrubstalL Fantasy rules, I wrote, knowing it was the truth.

All the time in Northern Ireland and for three days in Spain Dorothea’s voice continued about Emma and Elinor and Elizabeth Bennet, and Mrs Elton and Mr Woodhouse. I kept imagining us together in a clean, empty house that appeared to be our home. Like smoke evaporating, my failed marriage wasn’t there any more. And my unhappy childhood slipped away also, as though by magic.

‘Dorothea?’

‘No, this is her mother. Please hold on. I’ll fetch her.’

I waited for so long I began to fear that this was Mrs Lysarth’s way of dealing with unwelcome telephone callers. I felt that perhaps the single word I’d spoken had been enough to convey an image of my unsuitableness, and my presumption.

‘Yes?’ Dorothea’s voice said,

‘It’s Terris. Do you remember?’

‘Of course I remember. Are you in Bath again?’

‘No. But at least I’ve returned from Northern Ireland. I’m in London. How are you, Dorothea?’

‘I’m very well. Are you well?’

‘Yes.’ I paused, not knowing how to put it.

‘It’s kind of you to ring, Terris.’

‘D’you think we might meet?’

‘Meet?’

‘It would be. nice to see you.’

She didn’t answer. I felt I had proposed marriage already, that it was that she was considering. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I began to say.

‘Of course we must meet. Would Thursday do? I have to be in London then.’

‘We could have lunch again.’

‘That would be lovely.’

And so it was. We sat in the bow window of an Italian restaurant in Romilly Street, and when anyone glanced in I felt inordinately proud. It was early September, a warm, clear day without a hint of autumn. Afterwards we strolled through Leicester Square and along Piccadilly. We were still in Green Park at six o’clock. ‘I love you, Terris,’ Dorothea said.

*

Her mother smiled a slanting smile at me, head a little on one side. She laid down an embroidery on a round, cane frame. She held a hand out.

‘We’ve heard so much,’ she said, still smiling, and then she introduced her sons. While we were drinking sherry Dorothea’s father appeared, a thin, tall man, with spectacles on a length of leather, dancing on a tweed waistcoat.

‘My dear fellow.’ Vaguely he smiled and held a hand out: an amateur archaeologist, though by profession a medical doctor. That I was the divorced middle-aged man whom his young daughter wished to marry was not a fact that registered in his face. Dorothea had shown me a photograph of him, dusty in a crumpled linen suit, holding between finger and thumb a piece of glazed terracotta. ‘A pleasure,’ he continued as vaguely as before. ‘A real pleasure.’

‘A pleasure to meet you, Dr Lysarth.’

‘Oh, not at all.’

‘More sherry?’ Dorothea suggested, pouring me whisky because she knew I probably needed it.

‘That’s whisky in that decanter, Dorothea,’ her brother Adam pointed out and while I was saying it didn’t matter, that whisky actually was what I preferred, her other brother, Jonathan, laughed.

‘I’m sure Mr Terris knows what he wants,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, and Dorothea said:

‘Terris is his Christian name.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘You must call him Terris, Mother. You cannot address a prospective son-in-law as Mister.’

‘Please do,’ I urged, feeling a word from me was necessary.

‘Terris?’ Adam said.

‘Yes, it is an odd name.’

The brothers stood on either side of Dorothea’s chair in that flowery drawing-room. There were pale blue delphiniums in two vases on the mantelpiece, and roses and sweet-peas in little vases everywhere. The mingled scent was delicious, and the room and the flowers seemed part of the family the Lysarths were, as did the way in which Adam and Jonathan stood, protectively, by their sister.

They were twins, both still at Cambridge. They had their mother’s oval face, the pale blue eyes their parents shared, their father’s languid tallness. I was aware that however protective they might seem they were not protecting Dorothea from me: I was not an interloper, they did not resent me. But their youth made me feel even older than I was, more knocked about and less suitable than ever for the role I wished to play.

‘You’ve travelled a great deal,’ Mrs Lysarth said. ‘So Dorothea says.’

‘Yes, I have.’

I didn’t say I’d been an only child. I didn’t mention the seaside town where I’d spent my childhood, or reveal that we’d lived in a kind of disgrace really, that my father worked ignominiously in the offices of the trawling business which the family had once owned. Our name remained on the warehouses and the fish-boxes, a daily reminder that we’d slipped down in the world. I’d told Dorothea, but I didn’t really think all that would interest the other Lysarths.

‘Fascinating, to travel so,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, politely smiling.

After dinner Dr Lysarth and I were left alone in the dining-room. We drank port in a manner which suggested that had I not been present Dr Lysarth would have sat there drinking it alone. He talked about a Roman pavement, twenty feet below the surface somewhere. Quite suddenly he said:

‘Dorothea wants to marry you.’

‘We both actually –’

‘Yes, so she’s told us.’

I hesitated. I said:

‘I’m – I’m closer to your age, in a way, than to hers.’

‘Yes, you probably are. I’m glad you like her.’

‘I love her.’

‘Of course.’

‘I hope,’ I began.

‘My dear fellow, we’re delighted.’

‘I’m a correspondent, Dr Lysarth, as Dorothea, I think, has told you. I move about a bit, but for the next two years I’ll be in Scandinavia.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He pushed the decanter towards me. ‘She’s a special girl, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know, Dr Lysarth.’

‘We’re awfully fond of her. We’re a tightly bound family – well, you may have noticed. We’re very much a family.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘But of course we’ve always known that Dorothea would one day wish to marry.’

‘I know I’m not what you must have imagined, Dr Lysarth, when you thought of Dorothea’s husband. I assure you I’m aware of that.’

‘It’s just that she’s more vulnerable than she seems to be: I just want to say that. She’s really a very vulnerable girl.’

The decanter was again moved in my direction. The tone of voice closed the subject of Dr Lysarth’s daughter. We returned to archaeological matters.

I spent that night at Wistaria Lodge and noticed at breakfast-time how right Dr Lysarth had been when he’d said that the family was a tightly bound one. Conversation drifted from one Lysarth to the next in a way that was almost artificial, as though the domestic scenes I witnessed belonged in the theatre. I formed the impression that the Lysarths invariably knew what was coming next, as though their lines had been learnt. My presence was accommodated through a telepathy that was certainly as impressive, another piece of practised theatre.

‘Yes, we’re like that,’ Dorothea said in the garden after breakfast. ‘We never seem to quarrel.’

She taught me how to play croquet and when we’d finished one game we were joined by her brothers. Adam was the best of the three and he, partnering Dorothea, easily beat Jonathan and myself. Mrs Lysarth brought a tray of drinks to a white table beside the lawn and we sat and sipped in the sunshine, while I was told of other games of croquet there had been, famous occasions when the tempers of visitors had become a little ragged.

‘It’s a perfect training for life,’ Mrs Lysarth said, ‘the game of croquet.’

‘Cunning pays,’ Adam continued. ‘Generosity must know its place.’

‘Not that we are against generosity, Terris,’ Adam said. ‘Not that we’re on the side of cunning.’

‘What a family poor Terris is marrying into!’ Dorothea cried, and on cue her mother smiled and added:

‘Terris is a natural croquet-player. He will one day put you all to shame.’

‘I doubt that very much.’ And as I spoke I felt I said precisely what was expected of me.

‘You must teach the Scandinavians, Dorothea,’ Adam said. ‘Whatever else, you must flatten out a lawn in your little Scandinavian garden.’

‘Oh yes, of course we shall. So there.’

After lunch Dorothea and I went for a walk. We had to say goodbye because the next day I was to go away; when I returned it would almost be the day we’d set for our wedding. We walked slowly through the village and out into the country. We left the road and passed along a track by the side of a cornfield. We rested by a stream which Dorothea had often told me about, a place she’d come to with her brothers as a child. We sat there, our backs against the same ivy-covered tree-stump. We talked about being married, of beginning our life together in Copenhagen. I made love to Dorothea by her stream, and it was afterwards that she told me the story of Agnes Kemp. She began it as we lay there, and continued while we washed and tidied ourselves and began the journey back to Wistaria Lodge.

‘She was twelve at the time, staying with us while her parents were abroad. She fell from the beech tree. Her neck was broken.’

I only nodded because there isn’t much anyone can say when a fact like that is related.

‘I had always wanted to climb that tree, I had been told I never must. “I dare you,” she said. “I dare you, Dorothea.” I was frightened, but when no one was looking we climbed it together, racing one another to the top.’

She spoke of the funeral of Agnes Kemp, how the dead child’s parents had not been present because it had been impossible to contact them in time. ‘We don’t much hear of them now,’ Dorothea said. ‘A card at Christmas. Agnes was an only child.’

We walked a little in silence. Then I said:

‘What was she like?’

‘Oh, she was really awfully spoilt. The kind of person who made you furious.’

I suppose it was that last remark that started everything off, that and the feeling that Wistaria Lodge was a kind of theatre. The remark passed unnoticed at the time, for even as she made it Dorothea turned round, and smiled and kissed me. ‘It’s all forgotten now,’ she said when that was over, ‘but of course I had to tell you.’

It was certainly forgotten, for when we arrived in the garden the white table had been moved beneath the beech tree out of the glare of the sun, and tea with scones and sandwiches and cake was spread all over it. I felt a dryness in my mouth that was not dispelled when I drank. I found it hard to eat, or even to smile in unison with the smiling faces around me. I kept seeing the spoilt child on the grass and Dr Lysarth bending over her, saying she was dead, as no doubt he must have. I kept thinking that the beech tree should have been cut down years ago, no matter how beautiful it was.

‘You’re mad,’ Felicity shouted at me more than once. ‘You’re actually mad.’ Her voice in its endless repetition is always a reminder of my parents’ faces, that worry in their eyes. All I had wanted to know was the truth about ourselves: why did the offices and the warehouses still bear our name, what had my grandfather done? ‘Best just left,’ my mother said. ‘Best not bothered with.’ But in the end they told me because naturally I persisted – at eight and twelve and eighteen: naturally I persisted. My grandfather had been a criminal and that was that: a drunkard and an embezzler, a gambler who had run through a fortune in a handful of years: I’d guessed, of course, by the time they told me. I didn’t know why they’d been so reluctant, or why they’d displayed concern when I persisted about Miss Batchelor: why did she weep when she walked along the promenade? I had to guess again, because all my childhood Miss Batchelor’s tears possessed me so: she wept for the music teacher, who was married arid had a family, and I did not forgive my parents for wishing to keep that covered up. Passionately I did not forgive them, although my mother begged me, saying I made myself unhappy. ‘You sound so noble,’ Felicity snapped at me. ‘Yet what’s so marvellous about exposing a brothel-keeper for peddling drugs? Or a grimy pederast and a government minister?’ Felicity’s mother called her ‘a tricky kind of customer’. Arid tricky was just the word. Tricky, no doubt, with bank tellers and men met idly in bars. Tricky in beds all over the place, when I was so often away, having to be away.

I crossed the bedroom to the window. The beech tree was lit by moonlight now. Gazing at it, I heard the voices that had haunted me ever since Dorothea told me the story.

‘Then I dare you to,’ Dorothea angrily shouts, stopping suddenly and confronting the other girl.

‘You’re frightened of it, Dorothea. You’re frightened of a tree.’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘Then I dare you to.’

In the garden the boys, delighted, listen. Their sister’s cheeks have reddened. Agnes Kemp is standing on one foot and then the other, balancing in a way she has, a way that infuriates Dorothea.

‘You’re a horrid person,’ Dorothea says. ‘You aren’t even pretty. You’re stupid and spoilt arid greedy. You always have two helpings. There’s something the matter with your eyes.’

‘There isn’t, Dorothea Lysarth. You’re jealous, that’s all.’

‘They’re pig’s eyes.’

‘You’re just afraid of a tree, Dorothea.’

They climb it, both at the same time, from different sides. There’s a forked branch near the top, a sprawling knobbly crutch, easily distinguishable from the ground: they race to that.

The boys watch, expecting any moment that an adult voice will cry out in horror from the house, but no voice does. The blue dress of Agnes Kemp and the white one of Dorothea disappear into a mass of leaves, the boys stand further back, the dresses reappear. Agnes Kemp is in front, but their sister has chosen a different route to the top, a shorter one it seems. The boys long for their sister to win because if she does Agnes Kemp will at least be quiet for a day or two. They don’t call out, although they want to: they want to advise Dorothea that in a moment she will have overtaken her challenger; they don’t because their voices might attract attention from the house. From where they stand they can hear the grandfather clock in the hall striking ten. Most of the windows are open.

Dorothea slips and almost falls. Her shoes aren’t right for climbing and when she glances to her left she can see that Agnes’s are: Agnes has put on tennis shoes, knowing she will succeed that morning in goading Dorothea. This is typical of her, and when it is all over Dorothea will be blamed because of course Agnes will blurt it out, in triumph if she wins, in revenge if she doesn’t.

The blue dress reaches the fork and then advances along one of its prongs, further than is necessary. Dorothea is a yard behind. She waits, crouched at the knobbly juncture, for Agnes Kemp’s return. The boys don’t understand that. They stare, wondering why their sister doesn’t climb down again so that they can all three run away from Agnes Kemp, since it is running away from her that has been in their minds since breakfast-time. They watch while Agnes Kemp reaches a point at which to pose triumphantly. They watch while slowly she creeps backwards along the branch. Their sister’s hand reaches out, pulling at the blue dress, at the child who has been such a nuisance all summer, who’ll be worse than ever after her victory. There is a clattering among the leaves and branches. Like a stone, the body strikes the ground.

‘Now what did anyone dream?’ Mrs Lysarth inquired at breakfast. Knives rattled on plates, toast crackled, Dr Lysarth read The Times. It was a family thing to talk about dreams. I had been told that there were dreaming seasons, a period when dreams could be remembered easily and a time when they could not be. It was all another Lysarth game.

‘I’ been skipping French classes again,’ Adam said. ‘For a year or even longer I’d been keeping so low a profile that Monsieur Bertain didn’t even know I existed. And then some examination or other loomed.’

‘Adam often has that dream,’ Dorothea confided to me.

‘I was in Istanbul,’ Jonathan said, ‘Or at least it seemed like Istanbul. A man was selling me a stolen picture. A kind of goat, by Marc Chagall.’

‘I had only a wisp of a thing,’ Mrs Lysarth contributed. ‘A bit out of Dorothea’s birth.’

‘I dreamed that Terris’s wife was picking scallions in the garden,’ Dorothea said. ‘ “You’re wrong to think there’s been a divorce,” she said.’

‘Did you dream, Terris?’ Mrs Lysarth asked, buttering toast, but I was so confused about the night that had passed that I thought it better to say I hadn’t.

‘What’s the criterion for As You Like It, ten letters, beginning with “T”?’ Dr Lysarth asked.

‘Touchstone,’ Dorothea said, and another Lysarth game began. ‘Lord of Eden End’ was ‘North’, ‘poet’s black tie ruined by vulcanized rubber’ was ‘ebonite’. Within ten minutes the crossword puzzle was complete.

The faces laughed and smiled around the breakfast table, the conversation ran about. Especially for my benefit a description of Monsieur Bertain, Adam’s French master, was engaged upon. His accent was imitated, his war wound designated as the cause of his short temper. Dr Lysarth looked forward to a dig in Derbyshire in the autumn; his wife was to accompany him and would, as always on archaeological occasions, spend her time walking and reading. Jonathan said he intended to visit us in Scandinavia. Dorothea pressed him and I found myself doing the same.

In the sunny room, while marmalade was passed and the flowered china had all the prettiness of a cottage garden, the horror was nonsensical. Mrs Lysarth’s elegance, her perfect features and her burnished hair, would surely not be as they were. No wrinkles creased her face; the doctor’s eyes were honestly untroubled, forget-me-not blue, a darker shade than Dorothea’s. And Dorothea’s hands would surely be less beautiful? The fingers clawing at the blue dress would have acquired some sign, a joint arthritic, a single bitten nail. The faces of the boys could not have shed all traces of the awful ugliness. ‘Dear, it isn’t our affair, why Miss Batchelor is troubled,’ my mother agitatedly protested. ‘senseless,’ Felicity shouted. ‘You frighten me with your senseless talk.’

On Tuesday afternoon, three days away, we would marry and the car would take us to the station at Bath after the champagne on the lawn. Our flight to Paris was at five past seven, we would have dinner in the Chez les Anges. We would visit Versailles and Rouen, and the Jeu de Paume because Dorothea had never been there. I may for a moment have closed my eyes at the breakfast table, so lost was I in speculation and imaginings.

‘Well, I have a surgery,’ Dr Lysarth announced, folding the newspaper as he rose from the table.

‘And I have Castlereagh to wonder about,’ Adam said. ‘That fascinating figure.’

For a moment in the sunny room the brothers again stood by Dorothea, an accidental conjunction or perhaps telepathy came into play: perhaps they guessed the contents of my mind. There was defiance in their stance, or so I thought, a reason for it now.

‘When I was little I used to ride here on my ponies. On Jess first. Later on Adonis.’

We walked as we had on the day we’d made love, through a spinney, along the track by the cornfield. Poppies, not in bloom before, were everywhere now, cow-parsley whitened the hedges.

‘The first thing I remember,’ Dorothea said, ‘is that bits of grass had got into my pram.’

I told myself that I should mention Agnes Kemp, but I did not do so. And when we reached the stream I did not embrace the girl who was to be my bride in a few days’ time. We sat with our backs against the tree-trunk, watching the ripple of the water.

‘I was lifted up,’ Dorothea said, ‘and there was a great tutting while the grass cuttings were removed. Years went by before I can remember anything else.’

Murder was not like stealing a pencil-sharpener at school, or spilling something. Agnes Kemp had been detested, a secret had afterwards become a way of life. Few words had perhaps been spoken within the family, Dr Lysarth’s giving the cause of death as a broken neck being perhaps the only announcement as to how the future was to be. The faces of the boys on the lawn returned to me, and Dorothea’s face as she looked down at the still body. Had she afterwards ridden her pony, Jess or Adonis, whichever it happened to be, by the cornfield and the poppies? ‘I dreamed of Agnes,’ was what she didn’t say at breakfast any more, because the family had exorcised the ghost.

Alone, Miss Batchelor walks; the winter waves tumble about. ‘Sea-spray,’ my mother lies. ‘Sea-spray on her cheeks, dear.’ How can my father, morning after morning, leave our gaunt house in order to perform his ignominious work, pretending it is work like any other? How can he hope that I will not scratch away the falsehoods they tell? My father is caught like a creature in a trap, for ever paying back the debts his own father has incurred. It isn’t nice, Miss Batchelor and a music teacher; it isn’t nice, the truth in Northern Ireland. None of it is nice. ‘No, no,’ they tell me, ‘you must be quiet, Terris.’ But I am always quiet. I make no noise in the small grey room where I have to be alone because, so they say, it is better so. The room is full of falseness: then I must write it down, they tell me, quite triumphantly; it will be easier if I write it down.

Americans give arms away, Russians promise tanks. I stand again in the cathedral at Vézelay, pleased that Pope Boniface exposed the pretence about Mary Magdalene. Felicity passes me a drink, smiling with ersatz affection. Our fingers touch, I know how she has spent that afternoon. ‘Poor Dorothea,’ Mrs Lysarth comforts, and the boys are angry because Dorothea has always needed looking after, ever since the day of the accident, the wretched death of a nuisance. I know I am right, as that Pope knew also. They hold me and buckle the thing on to me, but still I know I am right. Flowers are arranged in vases, croquet played beneath the beech tree. Ruairi O Baoill adopts a hero’s voice to proclaim his pretence of a cause, Major Trubstall’s smile is loaded with hypocrisy. The blue dress flutters and is still, telling me again that I am right.