Foreign Land

CHAPTER FOUR

“Oh, haven’t you two met yet?” said Rupert Walpole. “Verity Caine. George Grey. George is just back from Montenegro.”

“Montedor, actually.”

“Sorry, wrong continent. Must be the punch.”

“Oh, heavens, yes,” said Verity Caine. “Now where exactly is that?”

“On the bulge of Africa, one block down from Senegal,” George said, using the formula that had grown increasingly weary over the last fortnight.

“Oh, that side,” said Verity Caine, shifting her gaze to the slice of apple and the maraschino cherry in her punch. In St Cadix, all of West Africa was on the wrong side of the park.

The Walpoles’ Christmas party was a fixture on the county social calendar. “We’re just having a few people round here for drinks,” was how Polly Walpole put it over the telephone, but the few were many, and the cars in the street outside had come from Truro, Fowey, St Austell, Liskeard, Bodmin. Ben Dickinson had driven down from Plymouth, braving floods to make it.

The long drawing room, with its exposed beams and uncurtained picture window, smelled of Rentokil and cut flowers; the snowy carpet looked as if it had been run up from chinchilla skins. The Walpoles were lavish receivers of Christmas cards: there were six strings of them in the window where Italian madonnas hung sideways next to the stamped crests and regimental ribbons. Rupert had been Army himself, once, and people at the yacht club still sometimes called him “Major”, but Rupert had preferred to drop the title when he went into china clay. “In industrial relations,” he liked to say, “there are no officers and men — there are just chaps.”

“It cost buttons when Rupert and Polly bought the house originally,” Verity Caine was saying to George. “It was still a pilchard smokery then. They had to do a vast amount to it. Of course, all that’s dead now. They were catching pilchards here when we came, even; but there hasn’t been a pilchard boat working out of St Cadix for yonks.”

“What finished it?” George wanted to get his pipe out, but the smell of the room and the shampooed locks of that awful carpet had No Smoking signs written all over them, he thought.

“Oh, the Common Market. The ruddy French and their seine nets. The whole of the English Channel’s fished-out now.”

George looked over Verity Caine’s shoulder, to the smears of reflected light on the black estuary beyond the picture window where yawls and ketches were tugging fretfully at their mooring buoys.

Across the room, Barbara Stevenson said “When we were out in Kenya—”, and Nicola Walpole nudged her friend Sue and whispered “Two points”. Nicola and Sue were both in the Upper Fourth at Hatherup Castle. Sue was staying with the Walpoles for Christmas.

“Does that make it four or five?” Sue said.

The people at the party were known as the When-I’s, and the game was to catch them actually saying it. You got two points for an Abroad and one for a Home. Last Christmas, Nicola had scored nineteen. This year the going was slower: Robert Collins had said “When I was with Ferrantis”; Laura Nash had come up with “When we were in Highgate”; and Denis Wright had cheated by saying “In Basra, of course, we always—”.

Barbara Stevenson’s was by far the best effort so far.

Polly Walpole introduced George to old Brigadier Eliot.

“You remember George’s mother — Mary Grey.”

“Oh yes, of course. How is your mother now?”

“She’s dead actually.”

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that.”

Everyone seemed very old to George. The women had either lost their waists long ago, or been shrivelled into bags of fragile sticks bound together in peach chiffon. Two men in a corner wore deaf aids and bellowed into each other’s good ears. Wherever he listened, he heard talk of operations.

“How’s the new hip?”

“Oh, pretty good. Can’t manage stairs with it yet, of course. Thank God for the bungalow is what I say.”

“Margaret’s going in in January.”

“Hip?”

“No. Insides. Woman’s thing.”

“Oh.”

For Nicola and Sue, the pace of the game began to quicken when Philip Slater said “When I was in Cyprus”; it was still two points, even though he was only talking about a holiday in Larnaka.

George noticed, with a spasm of hope, a woman on the far side of the room. She was stubbing out a cigarette in a potted plant. If he couldn’t smoke his pipe, at least he might be able to cadge a cigarette from her. He had already turned to join her when he was grabbed by a small, spiky woman who was going distinctly bald.

“George? Betty Castle. Bet you don’t remember me. We met at your ma’s. Mary was a great chum.”

“Oh, yes, of course I do.” He had no recollection of her at all.

“Now you’re a Navy man!” She said this, too, as if she was laying a pound each way on an outsider.

“No, not really. It was just wartime Navy.”

“D’you sail?”

“Not much lately. I did a bit when I was in Aden, actually. I rather hoped to pick it up again when I came here.”

Sue said to Nicola, “The old bloke over there — the tall one. ‘When I was in Aden’. Two points.”

“That’s eleven,” Nicola said.

“You see,” Betty Castle said to George, “we sort of had you marked down for the Dunnetts’ boat. Has Alec said anything?”

“I don’t know who Alec is,” George said.

“The commodore. I mean he’s really a colonel, but he’s the commodore. Of the yacht club.”

“Oh, yes, we did meet. But he didn’t say anything about the Dunnings.”

“Dunnetts. No, Wingco Dunnett had a stroke in the spring, and poor Cynthia is right down on her uppers. Wingco’s never going to walk again, and that boat really is the last straw. They can’t possibly afford to keep the thing, but Wingco won’t hear of putting her up for sale. So what we need is a fait accompli, if you see what I mean.”

George didn’t, but said that he did in order to save trouble.

“Are you a racing man or a cruising man?” said Betty Castle.

“I don’t think I’m either—”

“It wouldn’t be any use if you were a racing man, of course, but for a cruising man it’s a super little ship. Wingco’s pride and joy. But he’s changed dreadfully since his stroke. People do.”

The picture window filled suddenly with lights. George, distracted, watched other windows sliding past, almost within touching distance. A freighter was moving upriver to the china clay docks. On her floodlit bows and stern, deckhands were busy with winches and hawsers. She was in ballast, her load line showing three feet or so above where the dark water streamed past her hull like braided rope. She was flying a charred Greek ensign. George put her at about eight thousand tons. Her passage past the room was quite soundless. A face at one bright window stared at the party, stared at George; a young Greek sailor watching a foreign country going by at arm’s length. It was George, though, who felt homesick: he measured the space between himself and the ship. It was just three weeks and a little over three thousand miles, and he had to shake himself to remember that it was out of reach, that Raymond Luis was in charge.

“Do go and have a look at her,” Betty Castle said. “Poor Cynthia’s nearly at her wits’ end. She’s such a saint, that woman. And Wingco was never any good with money, I’m afraid.”

But George wasn’t listening. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes … yes … yes.”

The score went up to fourteen when Nicola caught Mrs Downes in the act, with “When we had the cottage in the Dordogne”. With an hour at least still to go, she was confident now of breaking last year’s record.

“Have you seen the bus shelter?” said Connie Lisle to anyone who’d listen. “It’s been balkanized again. It’s all over graffiti, just as bad as last time.”

Balkanized was a code word in St Cadix. It had entered the language in the early autumn, when Hugh Traill had used it as an explanation of what was happening to Britain in the 1980s. Traill had worked for the British Council in Damascus. He was not much liked, though he was asked to all the parties. “Frankly,” said Barbara Stevenson, “I don’t really see his point,” and most people found it difficult to see the point of Traill, who wore rubber overshoes indoors and went about the place in trousers that looked as if he had made them himself. When he said that Britain was becoming balkanized, the phrase was joyfully taken up — mostly in mockery and partly in deference to his notorious cleverness. When outboard motors disappeared from the cluster of moored dinghies that jostled around the steps of the Town Quay, they had been balkanized. When work began on the new council estate at the top of the hill, that was balkanization. Most things on television news now were “pretty balkan”; Sue and Nicola were doing their best to smuggle into the general currency the expressions “Oh balk!” and “Balk off!” Less than usual had been seen of Traill himself this winter; Polly Walpole was the first of several people to say that he had probably balkanized into thin air.

George was in search of the woman with the cigarettes. He found her standing alone studying the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece and flicking ash into the log fire. It was obvious, when you looked at it, that the log fire wasn’t real; it was a sort of gas-powered artwork, and the ash lay in pale splashes on the blazing timber.

“I wonder if you could spare me a cigarette?” George said.

“Of course,” the woman said, and stared abstractedly into the gaping chaos of her handbag. Her white hair was of the kind that had once been platinum blonde.

“I’m sorry,” George said; “I usually smoke a pipe, but I feel shy about doing it here …”

“Yes, everyone gave up when Roger Mann died of cancer. They’re a bit born-again about smoking now.” She shook the contents of her bag: chaos rearranged itself and tossed g packet of Marlboro to the surface.

“Oh, Diana!” It was the Caine woman. “D’you still want that manure?”

“Please—” the woman said. “If you can spare it—”

“It’s ready and waiting. You’d better get on to the Tomses and have them pick it up in the van. So you two’ve met—”

“Not exactly,” George said. “I was just begging a cigarette.”

“Oh — Diana Pym … George Grey. George is just back from Africa. Diana’s a great gardener.”

George noticed that, indeed, the flat-heeled brown shoes of the Pym woman were flaked with dried mud. They did not go well with her black evening dress, which must have cost a lot of money about a quarter of a century ago.

Sue claimed a “When we were stationed in Malaya”, and Nicola came back with a “When I was in New York”. The score was going well enough for them to afford to disqualify “When Gilbert worked at Lazard’s”. Barbara Stevenson had said “When we were out in Kenya” for the second time, but this, too, wasn’t counted since Barbara Stevenson was a separate When-I game in her own right. The girls moved among the guests with trays of canapés, pretending they were working for MI5. Sue said that Patrick Cairns had been trying to peer down the front of her dress, but Nicola said no way; everyone knew that Cairns was only interested in little brown boys. “Unless, of course,” Nicola said, “he was just trying to see if you’d got a penis down there.”

George stood at the window and watched the spooling water. The tide had turned and it was travelling fast downstream in a sweep of simmering tar. The buoys that marked the edge of the channel were half-submerged by it, and the torn tree branches which had piled up against the buoys were waving as if they were drowning. The reflected party lay on the water in broken panes of light.

He was joined by Rupert Walpole.

“Well, how are you settling in?”

“Oh, quite nicely, thanks. Still feels a bit odd to be here, like being jetlagged with a hangover. One gets astonished by the most ordinary things.”

“It’s early days yet,” Rupert said. “I must say I rather envy you — having somewhere to retire to. I’ve only got a couple of years before I come up for the chop myself. What I dread is staying on with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs, with the works a quarter of a mile up the road. That’s going to be the hard bit.”

“Yes,” George said. “I thought of that too. That’s pretty much why I came home.”

“I suppose we just have to learn how to be old folks.” He turned back from the window to face his party. “You know what Truro people call St Cadix now? God’s waiting room.”

At 10.30, the Walpoles’ hall was pungent with the smell of wet coats. In the crush, Brigadier Eliot was being gallant under the mistletoe and Denis Wright was shouting, “Looks as if someone’s balkanized my hat.”

“George here is earless,” announced Polly Walpole. “Diana? Why don’t you drop him off? You know — Thalassa — the cottage on the bend.”

“Really — I can walk,” George said.

“It’s no trouble,” said Diana Pym. “You’re on my way.”

The long drawing room had emptied. Nicola and Sue were totting up the score.

“Thirty-two,” Sue said.

“No, thirty-one,” said Nicola. “You must have counted a Home as an Abroad.”

Diana Pym’s car was, like her shoes, old and muddy. The butts in the ashtray were packed and crusty as a nugget of iron pyrites. As George closed the passenger door and the interior light went out, he recognized a paperback book lying, dogeared and broken-spined, on the shelf under the dashboard. It was only when the car was dark and the book no more than an afterimage that he saw its cover: The Noblest Station by S. V. Grey. He glanced across at Diana Pym, who was having difficulty trying to make the engine fire on more than one uncertain cylinder. Did she know Sheila was his daughter? Did she think she had a famously insensitive patriarch for a passenger?

The car grizzled, whined and started. They rolled slowly across a grass bank and stopped short of where the Stevensons’ Daimler blocked the drive sideways on. Perry Stevenson was driving, but Barbara had the starring role. She stood in the blaze of the headlamps in a tan riding mac and shouted “Come on! Come on! Forward just a smidgeon, now!” She was waving her arms like a policeman. She turned to the audience of waiting cars in the dark garden. “Sorry everyone! We’re almost there!”

“What were you?” said Diana Pym.

“Sorry?”

“Everybody here was something. It’s like reincarnation. What were you?”

“Oh … I ran a sort of gas station cum grocer’s shop.”

“In Africa—”

“Yes,” George said. “In Africa.”

“What part?”

“Montedor. At the bottom of the bulge. One block down from Senegal.”

The Daimler showed a clean pair of red tail lights. Diana Pym followed it out into Fore Street, where it creamed along fatly ahead. The Stevensons made the street glow with their passing. They lit the fishermen’s cottages, repainted now in adobe white and crabshell pink. They lit the rustic timber shingles with the new house names. Topgallants. Spinnakers. Crow’s Nest. Malibu.

When George first visited his parents in St Cadix, Fore Street had been sober — a long and narrow tunnel of dripping slate and granite. Now it was the colour of romperwear, of second infancy. The fishermen had all gone — up to the council houses or out to the bald cemetery at St Austell; and few of the new cottagers were here on winter weekdays. Their windows were dark, their shingles rocked in the wind on the ends of their chains. A fairylit Christmas tree stood in the window of one darkened room; in another a television picture of a golf course disclosed that someone was at home.

Diana Pym drove as if there were landmines in the road, her head anxiously far forward, her hands gripping the wheel tight. Her little, angular wrists made George think of the clean skeletons of very small animals … stoats, voles, wrens. She was wincing at the dazzle of following lights in the rear view mirror. Without thinking, George reached up and twisted the mirror away from her face.

“Oh — thanks,” she said.

“How long have you been here?”

“Just coming up to five years now.” Her voice, gruff with cigarettes, had a touch of American (or was it Australian?) in it. “I suppose that puts me close to graduation.”

“Leaving, you mean?”

“No. Staying. They used to say it took twenty-five years to be accepted. Now they’ve had to cut it down to five. Pressure of circumstances. Everybody was dying long before they qualified.”

George found it difficult to put together the separate bits of Diana Pym: the miniature wrists and ragged gardener’s nails, her panicky driving and her confident, barking style of speech. She seemed to him frail and shaggy all at once.

“Thalassa, Polly said?”

“Yes,” said George.

“What a pretty name—”

“It was my father’s idea. He was very proud of his theological college Greek.”

It was one of his most irksome vanities. George could still hear him intoning complacently over the breakfast table, “, oldboy-Gnothy see-out-on. Know thyself!” He called his parishioners ; and the defining essence of hoi polloi was that they were barred from knowing the meanings of words like Thalassa. When, in 1960, George’s mother had written to him on the brand new headed notepaper (“We think the name is rather original. Daddy says it certainly has the locals foxed!”) he’d shuddered, and addressed his reply to 48, Upper Marine Walk. It was only when his father died two years later that George grudgingly adopted Thalassa. It still struck him as a perfectly absurd name for a cottage.

“He was the vicar here once, was he?”

“No, they just came here to retire.”

The car laboured in third gear up the hill, past the yacht club and the gothic hotel. Thalassa was at the top, on its own promontory of pine-fringed rock, where it straddled the angle of the bend. George had left the lights on, and the house goggled back at him from its perch. George found it impossible to think of it as his own. Its front of whitewashed lumpy stone always put him in mind of his father’s face; tonight it wore an expression of solemn petulance, as if it had spent a long and lonely evening storing up complaints against his return.

“Can I offer you a drink?” George said. The engine was still running. Diana Pym switched it off.

“Please. The Walpoles’ punch is one of the penalties one has to pay for Christmas here.” He was surprised to find an ally in Diana Pym. She hadn’t struck him as the ally type.

Outside the car, he could hear the sea burbling and sucking at the rocks a hundred feet below. Beyond the single tall chimneypot on the cottage roof, the Atlantic clouds were racing in the sky, but the headland shielded this side of the estuary from the west wind and the air was quiet.

“What a marvellous position,” Diana Pym said.

“Yes. At least, in the mornings. Night seems to start around lunchtime when the sun goes over the top of the hill.”

“You have a garden, too?”

“In theory.” He had not worked out where the garden ended and the common land of gorse, dead bracken and knobby granite outcrops began. At the back of the cottage he’d found some cabbages that had run wild and looked as if they were trying to turn into trees, three broken cloches and a variety of bamboo canes with loops of green twine hanging from them. They must have supported something once.

They walked through a soft and smelly mulch of rotten pine needles. At the door, George ferreted for his keys while Diana Pym looked at the brass dolphin doorknocker.

“That was another of my father’s ideas,” George said.

“It’s rather handsome.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid; I’m still just camping out here. I’m waiting for my stuff to come by ship and the place has been pretty well derelict since my mother died.”

George wished, suddenly, that he had not invited her in. He didn’t want anyone else to see Thalassa. The house shamed him. His parents’ houses always had shamed him; he couldn’t walk through their doors without feeling surly and half-grown, dropping ten, then twenty, now more than forty years, as he faced up to their familiar, doggish clutter.

“What can I get you? Basically, I’ve just got vodka, Scotch or gin—”

“Scotch will be fine. With a little water, please.”

The bottles were still in the cardboard box in which they’d been delivered by the off-licence. George allowed Diana Pym a measure which he thought she should be able to finish in ten minutes at the outside. For himself he poured a tall anaesthetic slug, and topped Diana Pym’s glass up with water until it was on the same level as his own.

“Who is this? A relation?” She was standing in front of a portrait of a woman sitting at a writing desk. The paint of the woods in the background had oxidised badly. The heavy gilt frame was chipped. The picture was far too big for the room.

“Oh, some remote cousin on my father’s side. My father used to call it ‘the Gainsborough’. It’s not, of course. I doubt if it’s even eighteenth century.”

He felt trapped by the Pym-woman. Glass in hand, she was touring the room as if it was a museum. Trust him to let in the village quidnunc. She peered in turn at each of the eight portrait miniatures in one large frame.

“All Greys?”

“I imagine so. My father was always getting left things by his great aunts. Being the clergyman of the family, he was a sort of natural receptacle for ancestral junk. They never left him any money.”

She had moved on to a rough-cut pane of Cornish slate on which had been painted a galleon cruising ahead under full sail. It was attached to a pin on the wall by a leather thong. An old Easter palm was propped behind it.

“That’s not an heirloom,” George said. He took a long swallow of Scotch to curb his temper; the whisky burned his throat.

“It’s odd, isn’t it — inheriting things? They never seem to fit.” She was now making a short-sighted study of a Victorian sampler. It had once hung in his bedroom when he was a child, and George knew it by heart. Decorated with a random assortment of faded dogs, trees, flowers and boats, it made two attempts at an embroidery alphabet, then launched into verse: “A Damsel of Philistine race/ In Samson’s Heart soon found a Place/ But Ah when She became his Bride/ She prov’d a Thorn to Pierce his Side”. It was signed “Eliz. Catherine Grey — Aged 12 years — February 18th 1837”, like a tombstone.

“Sweet,” said Diana Pym. “Who was Eliz.?”

“I’ve no idea,” said George. He stared irritably at the straggling ends of white hair which were distributed around the back of the neck of the black dress. “Some ancestor or other.” He realized that he had completely forgotten her face — if he’d ever noticed it in the first place. When she did eventually turn round, it would hardly have surprised him if she had revealed herself to be wearing a monkey mask. In the event, her face was smudgy; its firmest feature was the web of fine lines round her eyes and mouth. No wonder he’d forgotten it. He saw that her glass was already empty. Was the woman an alcoholic?

“Do sit down,” George said, putting a testy emphasis on the do. He pointed helpfully at his mother’s black vinyl sofa. The plastic had been grained to look like leather; it succeeded only in having the appearance of ferns petrified in coal. The quidnunc seated herself among the fossils. The sofa sounded as if it was discreetly passing wind.

Diana Pym smiled and held out her glass for more. “Thanks,” she gruffed. As he padded across the slate floor to the kitchen she called: “Watch your head!” Then, a moment later, “Oh — there’s your coat of arms. What does the motto mean?”

George, unscrewing the cap from the whisky in the kitchen, grunted. He couldn’t remember the motto. He thought — I brought this on myself.

He returned to the sitting room, handed her the refilled glass, and sank his length in the one bearable chair in the house, his father’s woodwormy chintz buttonback. “So,” he said, smiling as blandly as he dared, “what were you?”

A nimbus of cigarette smoke hid her face. She dashed it away with her hand. Her Wedgwood blue eyes were suddenly wary and reproachful. She looked as if he’d threatened to slap her. Oh, damn these people for whom the liberties they take so gaily for themselves are treated as infringements and offences if found in anyone else’s hands! Damn the woman’s impertinent questions! Damn her nettled looks!

“I was Julie Midnight,” said Diana Pym, “I thought you knew.” She blew smoke like a gusty cherub in a corner of an old map.

The name was a puzzle of letters. Then they sorted themselves out. It was impossible — surely?

It wasn’t long ago. A few years, at most. He remembered Julie Midnight. Sitting alone, bored, in his hotel room in St James’s Street, he was watching television. He was half dressed for dinner. The black and white picture was swept by snow flurries of interference. Julie Midnight was singing.

That was not quite true. She didn’t sing so much as talk, in a sad, flat little voice, over a moody backing of guitar and orchestra. Something-something-laughter … something-something-the day after. It was the appearance of the girl under the television lights that had stuck in his head: her helmet of pale hair; her severe black polo-necked jersey; her face, as white and fine boned as the face of a Donatello saint in marble; the way her eyes appealed to the camera. She was irresistibly vulnerable. You wanted to reach out and save her from the brazen glare of the studio. For three or four minutes, watching the shaky image at the end of the bed, George loved Julie Midnight with a heartstopping purity that he’d never be able to summon for a real woman.

“I’m so sorry—” George said. He was incredulous. “Of course — I should have recognized you—”

“Oh, no-one does now, thank God,” Diana Pym said. “It’s just that the village knows, like villages do.”

“Do you — still sing?” he said, feeling stupid as the question escaped him, unbidden.

“No. I garden.”

“It was … just recently, though … surely?”

“No — my last concert was in ’63. They always used to make me up to look dead; I was really dead by the time the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came in.”

“I thought I saw you singing … just a year or two ago …”

“No way-”

Diana Pym and Julie Midnight … They sat together on his mother’s sofa like twin pictures in a stereoscope, and he could not make them coalesce into a single image. Blink, and he saw one; blink, and the other had taken her place. It was true — Diana Pym had the wrists and eyes of Julie Midnight, the same slender boniness, the same stunned look. In any line of refugees, shuffling away from the scene of a catastrophe, the camera would instinctively single out that face. You would only have to see it for a moment before making out a cheque to the disaster fund. Yet Julie Midnight was Diana Pym: the kind of disaster she suggested was nothing more heart-stirring than an attack of greenfly.

She — or they, rather, were saying: “I adore your slate floor. There’s one in my cottage, but it’s been covered over with a layer of concrete about a foot thick. One would need a pneumatic drill to get at it—”

George, affronted by the thought of Julie Midnight with a pneumatic drill, said: “Yes. My father dug it out when my parents first moved here. He broke his hip on it a week later. After that he pointedly referred to it as ‘your floor’ to my mother. It was rather a bone of contention.”

“You don’t seem to have liked your parents very much,” said Diana Pym.

George found this remark unsettling. Its presumption was pure Pym, but the intimacy of the eyes that went with it was Midnight. The eyes won.

“We just never knew each other terribly well,” he said. “I was in the Middle East, then Africa. They were in Hampshire, then here. We didn’t have a lot in common. I suppose we were all a bit baffled by each other when we met. I used to think we might have done better if we’d hired an interpreter.”

“Well, everybody feels that, don’t they?” She lit a new cigarette from the butt of her last one. In the gauzy smoke, Midnight went out of focus and came back as Pym. The jaggedly cut ends of her white hair were coloured with nicotine and there was something creased and tortoiselike about her face. Too much weather, too little blood. Suppose she had been, say, thirty in 1960 … That would still put her only in her early fifties … Her alarming age made George feel shaky on his own account.

“Anyway—” her head was turned away from him; she was looking again at the big, bad, dusty portrait of that distant female cousin with her quill pen and unfinished letter on her desk. “Your parents seem to have had the last word. You’ve come home.”

“Late, as usual.”

“Better late than never.” Trying to giggle, she began to cough — a deep crackling cough that sounded like a forest on fire.

“Can I get you some water?”

“No.” Her voice was a bass croak. “This part of Cornwall’s awful for bronchitis.”

“You smoke too much,” George said, talking not to Diana Pym but to the girl on the screen in the forlorn hotel room. Diana Pym stared back at him, her blue eyes moist with coughing.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve never gone in for doing things by halves.”

“Whatever brought you to St Cadix?”

“Oh, the sea, I guess. I lived in Venice for a while. Venice, California. We were a block away from the ocean. There was a motel and a Burger King between us and it. You could just see a crack of Pacific from the bathroom window — it was about the same size as the toothbrush handle. Then I moved to Brittany, but there was a big hump of cliff and some iron railings and an ice cream kiosk. You couldn’t actually see the sea at all, there. Now it comes right up to my back garden. At spring tides, the cottage feels like a boat on the water.”

“You had friends here?”

“No. I saw a picture of it in a magazine. It looked kind of dinky.” She sat hunched intently forward, listening to herself. “It gave me a job. The house was a ruin, the garden was just rocks and turf. In the first year I was out at nights digging, with a Tilley lamp hung in a hawthorn tree. It felt like something I’d been assigned—”

Her face was alight with the recollection of it, but George saw only the empty labour, the lonely woman with the garden fork, the darkness, the light in the tree. Surely Julie Midnight could have found something better for herself than that?

“Now it’s just there. I’m like the park attendant: I go around picking up leaves and frightening the birds.” She laughed. “I have a reputation to keep up, too. The kids go past my place on their way back from school. I heard them talking once: one kid was saying to another, ‘Watch out for the old looniewoman!’ I guess that’s one way of being accepted in the village: I’m the local witch around these parts. Any day now I expect people to come round to the door asking me to cure warts and goitres.”

“Do you have a familiar?”

“Uh-uh. Cats and gardens don’t go.”

One whisky later, at a quarter to midnight, Diana Pym left. As George opened the car door for her, she said, “Someone said you were S. V. Grey’s father?”

“ … yes,” George said, feeling accused of paternal negligence by the question.

“I’m reading her now. I’ve seen her on television, of course.”

“Have you?” George had no idea that Sheila had ever been on television. The information struck him as alarming: he hoped she hadn’t been on television very often.

“Yes. Rather good, I thought. She’s a witty lady.”

“Yes, isn’t she—” George said with a hearty emphasis he didn’t feel.

“You must be proud of her.”

“Oh … very.”

He watched the tail lights of Diana Pym’s mud spattered car weave through the dark strand of pines and round the granite buttress of the headland. As the sound of the engine was lost behind the rock, it was replaced by the slow, inquisitive suck and slap of the sea below the cottage and the rattle of dry branches overhead. He found his head suddenly full of words. The girl on the screen was singing:

Tonight we kiss, tonight we talk, tonight is full of laughter;

But I know that it won’t last, my dear—

This will all have passed, my dear—

Next week, next month, or maybe the month after.

The words tinkled stupidly. They fitted themselves to the noises of the sea, and the gravelly waves turned into a band playing from a long way off. George could hear drums and saxophones in it, and the steep descending scale of a solo clarinet.

He went back in to the unwelcoming light of the cottage. On the arm of his mother’s sofa, a cigarette was still burning in a saucer. There was something disconcertingly lively about its white worm of ash. George, nursing his drink, watched it smoulder until the worm reached the filter and collapsed into the saucer. It left a thin, sour smell behind, like the exhaust fumes of a vintage car.