Half Broken Things

February

A few weeks later a stale sense of familiarity with what he was doing surfaced in Michael’s mind. He had had times like this before, times when dark and light became the same, when a part of him seemed to absent itself from the world that his body lived in and inhabit some ditch all of its own. Such times could come upon him without warning, but usually they followed something difficult such as his court appearance. And they were worse in the winter because around the end of the second week, when he might be feeling that he could wash or get out of bed, he would then have to overcome the cold and this extra battle could, as it had this time, delay him by several more days.

He was even thinner, because eating, like washing, was another thing that required unimaginable effort. When he absolutely had to, he would manage to trudge up to the shop and buy a half dozen or so cans of soup and a packet of bread. Over the next few days, as and when he became aware of a need to put something in his stomach, he would eat soup straight from the tin, cold. Neither the sweetish, half-rotten vegetal smell that came from it, the sticky feel of the soft lumps in his mouth nor the message his stomach would afterwards send, of being sickened rather than satisfied, seemed to have much to do with him. Nor did the accruing pile of opened and unfinished tins by the side of his bed, whose metallic stink soured the room.

As if bitterly half-in and half-out of an affair with death, he lay for days waiting to see if it would come to him, in the belief that he would let it. Uninvolved, he would put up no resistance, but nor would he seek it out. So he thought about being dead without planning suicide, which would have required of him a degree of inventiveness and purpose of which he was incapable. To engage with the problem of his body for long enough to bring about an end to its improbable beating, breathing, filling and emptying seemed overwhelmingly effortful; even the smallest deviation from habit required what felt like impossibly original thinking. And it was that, rather than pride or even a vestigial notion of decency, that made him get up when he needed to pee. Dimly he realised that a wet mattress might eventually force him to get out of bed and stay out, but his torpor was so deep that he would put off the moment until he could barely stand up straight and then, with a nearly bursting bladder, he would stumble to the bathroom.

This time he ate his soup perhaps once a day, and slept off and on. At intervals, over the top of his bedclothes, he stared at the television with the sound off. Because he did not have a television licence and guessed (for he had no idea how these things worked) that a detector van must pick up the noise somehow, he was in the habit of watching in silence. And as he was anyway unable to connect with anything he saw, the silence was also a protection against the incomprehensibility of what was happening on the screen. He watched faces: listening, talking, laughing, shouting, weeping; seeing not just strangers but beings whose functioning he observed but could neither understand nor imagine sharing. He watched and half-wondered why it was that he was so different, for it was obvious that he lacked some fundamental understanding that bound all of them together, and excluded him. Where they had opinions, hopes, ideas, peculiarities, quirks and eccentricities, he detected in himself neither feature, form nor preference. He was unbearably flat and weightless. When he slept he sometimes had dreams in which he was not a person at all, although what he might have been instead was never clear. In other people it seemed that a river flowed, some animating liquid seemed to bubble and burst along their veins whatever they were doing. His were dry, still, and silent. If he was filled with anything, it was dust. Michael sensed in himself an empty space that in other people was occupied by any number of reasons for living.

Early one morning before it was light, on the way back from the bathroom, he picked up his copy of Heidi from the floor and took it back to bed. It lay there next to him unopened for several more hours, but he touched the cover from time to time, and thought about the story. It was one of his favourites, along with David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Little Princess; books that he had been given years and years ago, in special editions for children, by Beth. She had been no reader herself so she had given them to him just to encourage his apparent interest in reading. In order to dislodge the thought of Beth, Michael sat up and opened the book. It pained him to recall how she had always tried to encourage him, without managing to understand him at all; she made such efforts with the books, with his acting. She even tried to explain away how he made up stories when everybody else said he told lies. He switched on the light by his bed, not to read but to look at the pictures. As long as he could stop Beth taking hold in his mind, he thought he might soon be all right. He knew it for certain when, having begun almost by accident to read the words, his favourite part of the story (where the gruff old Grandfather made Heidi a soft little bed all of her own in the hay loft) made him cry as it always did.

Later he got up, gathered together a change of clothes and knocked on Ken’s door across the walkway. Ken seemed grateful to see him. Michael had a bath and afterwards returned to Ken’s sitting room. The community nurse had been so Ken was doped up and not saying much, parked in his day chair in his usual combination of clothes and pyjamas with a thing on a cord round his neck that he could press if he fell, which rang an alarm somewhere. On the plastic hospital tray table next to him the nurse had left his sandwich lunch on a plate covered with cling film, the remote control for the television, yesterday’s Express and a jug of orange squash. A plastic cup with several tablets in it sat on a piece of paper with 12 O’CLOCK AFTER DINNER NOT BEFORE written on it. He seemed more bloated. His walking frame was within reach, though Michael noted that the commode chair was now positioned just behind Ken’s day chair and not in the bathroom, and the telephone had been pulled across the floor from its little table by the door so that he could reach it without getting up. Not that it ever rang. Michael was not feeling completely better, so while Ken dozed he dried his hair by the fierce gas fire, still unable to locate the space in himself that held any real pity. He did not ask if Ken had missed him. He would not have known what to do with the information, with the burden of having let him down, if Ken were to say he had. How he managed during Michael’s bad spells, when his popping in to chat or fetch his little bits of shopping came to an abrupt stop, was something they never discussed.

‘Got a big deal on today, Ken,’ he said. ‘In the Cotswolds. There’s some nice stuff going in the Cotswolds. Nurse coming back, is she?’

The nurse always came back at four thirty to wash Ken and get him ready for bed and Michael knew it, but his checking up struck a note of concern that seemed to please Ken. He nodded and croaked that he was a lucky chap, and that Michael was to mind how he went, and when he had dismissed him with a valiant lift of a hand, Michael took his leave.

The van got to Sherston under protest, but Michael was feeling so much better now that this seemed merely an added challenge. After all, a groan under the bonnet was not a thing that would trouble Jeff Stevenson, curate of St Mary’s, Burnham Norton. Michael had telephoned this time and spoken to the woman at the vicarage so the vicar was expecting Jeff Stevenson, and Michael, as he drove along, began to enjoy the transition from himself into Jeff.

It would be the usual doddle. Michael had always been able to act; he had shown a real ability in drama, his teacher had said so. In fact, he might have become an actor. If he had spent those years anywhere other than in Beth’s house on that estate on the edge of Swindon he might have made it, but it was impossible to get started from a place like that. Beth had had no idea. But he had definitely had some sort of knack for acting, for forgetting altogether that he was Michael. Probably he had been born with it, because it was the one thing he could do that felt effortless and natural. He just shucked Michael off, left him somewhere and sailed away in his mind and his body, becoming somebody else. It was like taking a holiday from yourself, and always brought with it a whoosh of joy that would make him gasp.

People were wrong if they thought it was a game, though. It was a way of life. He owned clothes that he had picked up from stalls on Walcot Market, knowing they were not really for him but for one or other of the not-Michaels. He had shooting clothes, double-breasted suits, bomber jackets, flamboyant waistcoats- even a silk cummerbund- that he would never wear as Michael. Today, the unfashionably bright blue jeans, checked thick shirt and Timberland boots were helping him to be Jeff Stevenson, and as he drove along he rehearsed Jeff Stevenson phrases about the troublesome van for the benefit of the vicar, whose name was Gordon Brookes.

Gordon Brookes was waiting in the vicarage, which sat in the shadow of the church. From the window of the parish office at the front he could see down the churchyard to the lychgate, which needed re-thatching and where used needles and condoms had been found again two days ago. Sighing, he was trying to rearrange his restless dissatisfaction about the absence of his wife, coupled with the problem of his son, and re-mould them into the shape of the lychgate problem. The lychgate seemed to him, as he looked at it, more and more of an affectation. It wasn’t as if it was ever used, he thought petulantly. Coffins came in by the south door, even Wendy’s had, on one of those wheelie things, because all the hearses went straight round to the far side where the car park was. The lychgate had probably not been used properly since the last time a horse-drawn cart carrying a coffin stopped in the lane.

Jeff Stevenson was now three minutes late and the problem of his son Simon floated to the top of Gordon’s mind. The problem troubled him because although it was as yet still vague, it was not vague enough. Certainly Simon’s deciding that he needed to ‘make a contribution to global equality’ had seemed as flimsy as most of his previous notions about what he should do with his life. But his intention, announced a fortnight ago, that he and his wife and the new baby should embark on ‘a new life based on service to others’, was solidifying in a way that Gordon did not like. Simon was leaving in four weeks’ time, and his wife was refusing to go with him. This morning his daughter-in-law had been on the phone in tears, asking him to change Simon’s mind; Gordon had felt distressed for her but at the same time irritated. It was the sort of call that Wendy would have dealt with. And the ringing of the telephone had interrupted him in a mood of guilty introspection about Wendy, so that instead of agreeing with his daughter-in-law that Simon was simply running away from his responsibilities, he had heard himself suggest that perhaps, if a person feels a calling to higher responsibilities than the ordinary domestic ones, a wife might find her own happiness in supporting him in that calling. Wendy had been happy in her supporting role for thirty-eight years, he told her in a cracking voice, hoping very much that he was right. He had been met with silence. Then he had said that not for a moment did he underestimate the effort and difficulty, even sacrifice, that would be involved. ‘Oh no?’ his daughter-in-law had asked tearfully, and rung off.

Gordon sucked on his bottom lip, feeling misunderstood and a little peeved. Women were better at these things, that was all. It had been Wendy who made sure that Simon’s many lurchings in and out of physical and psychological health, education, employment and relationships remained, to Gordon, vague; with Wendy gone Gordon now felt in danger of having too much expected of him. This raised in him a mixture of fear and indignation because, having forgiven himself within a year of Simon’s birth for a detached paternal style which some might have called inadequacy, he no longer worried that inadequacy was what it was. Since Simon had been born he had devoted himself almost entirely to parish matters that, he had persuaded both Wendy and himself, were more deserving of his attention. He had wanted, he said, to set Simon an example of life and work that would be worth following.

So the lychgate, Gordon now considered, might be a problem whose time had come. The lychgate could be his next project. And for as long as it would demand his energy (Gordon was known by his parishioners to be terribly focused) he could not be expected to lavish the kind of attention that Wendy had had time for on the grandchild with an absent father. In fact, he thought, with Wendy gone, he needed a project. Gordon liked to be committed. Over the years, ‘commitment’ was what he had come to call the habitual and sustained expenditure of his energy on a range of projects of his own devising. ‘Commitment’ was the personal quality of which he was proudest in himself. He no longer noticed much about the church or his parishioners except the things he disliked, one of which was a lack of commitment. He was just thinking he might bring it into the sermon on Sunday and also get in something about the needles and condoms (obliquely, of course) when he saw a man, presumably Jeff Stevenson, standing under the lychgate, his head raised in apparent admiration of the timbering of the roof. What was the attraction? It was not nearly as interesting as the church- you could say it detracted from it- and it was only nineteenth century, Gordon thought, simultaneously deploring Jeff Stevenson’s taste and framing the first arguments he would have to meet and demolish on his way to reinstating the lychgate in the parish’s affections. Not wishing Jeff Stevenson to see him waiting at the window, Gordon turned, selected his deerstalker from several hats hanging in the hall, pulled on his jacket and set off from the front door of the vicarage to meet him.

‘Hello there! Gordon, how are you?’ Michael demanded, meeting him on the churchyard path and advancing with a handshake. Gordon submitted his hand, Michael seized it and grabbed Gordon’s wrist with his left hand. As he beamed at him and yanked his arm up and down, Michael was trying to see beyond the smeared glasses, which reminded him of the chip shop window at the top of his road on Snow Hill. He searched through the lenses for eye contact and fixed him with a look of concern. The hat was perching so ridiculously on Gordon Brookes’s head that he had to concentrate on not staring at it.

‘How are you doing, Gordon? I’m Jeff. Jeff Stevenson.’

‘Yes, yes, hello. You’re expected. Gordon Brookes.’ Gordon lifted the hat and replaced it. He always wore a hat of one sort or another; he thought of his hats as his little trademark. Oh, the vicar and his hats, he imagined people saying, affectionately casting their eyes upwards. He found it useful that a hat created an illusion of approachability and friendliness, and at the same time kept people away. Most people were wary of eccentricity, he had found. They seldom stopped him in the village to chat, for instance, unwilling to risk being thought, by association, as barmy as the man in the barmy hat. But clearly Jeff Stevenson was not most people. For one thing, he had a most persistent handshake.

‘Great hat! How do you do?’ Michael said, thinking that Gordon Brookes’s lower lip looked too red and wet.

Gordon said, ‘I didn’t realise you knew my name. We haven’t met before, have we?’

Michael swallowed. Although Gordon Brookes’s tone of interrogation was mild, he was still asking a question. Michael had never before been asked how he knew a vicar’s name. Vicars in general seemed to assume that everybody knew who they were. Thinking fast, he worked out that he could afford to be honest about the source of that small piece of information, and that it would be easier than coming up with a lie on the spot.

‘Actually, I looked you up.’

‘Oh?’

‘In Crockford’s. I looked you up in Crockford’s; I like to do my homework, seems only right since I’m imposing on your time and goodwill,’ Michael said in his carefully unplaceable accent, and tried to rest in the fact that this was quite true. Of the books that Michael owned, many were volumes that he had acquired only because he had failed to sell them on the stall. Among them were Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy 1997, and Simon Jenkins’ England’s Thousand Best Churches. It was the combination of these two that had inspired his curate impersonation technique for robbing churches in the first place, but Gordon Brookes would not, of course, be told that. Crockford’s supplied him with his characters: the names, dates, backgrounds and present positions of the earnest churchmen, invariably curates, whom he impersonated. It supplied him with the same details of the incumbents of the churches he selected for his forays, for the rare occasions on which he might meet up with the vicar rather than a ‘parish worker’. The Jenkins book gave him details of church treasures, both fixed and architectural (which were of course irrelevant to the purpose, though Michael had at times been grateful to be able to make an admiring reference to, say, the Norman reredos or the double hammerbeam roof), but also- and more to the point for Michael- Jenkins described the treasures small, easily liftable and saleable: the minor effigies and busts, silver, pictures, chairs, lecterns, embroideries. Over and above these Michael often found a pleasing range of more humble but attractive objects waiting to be opportunistically pilfered, and the beauty of it was he wasn’t taking things that belonged to people. He was not depriving anyone of anything personal, and if he did cause upset, then at least church people had one another to turn to for comfort. And if God himself were offended, he hadn’t so far got round to showing it. In the meantime, Michael had done well out of candlesticks, church candles, tooled leather Bibles, altar cloths, small and ancient rugs, even sheet music, all of which were the kind of thing that any number of Bath people would pay money for in order to reinforce their belief that they were complex and creative souls whose originality and flair were revealed in the arrangement of their homes. He now noticed that Gordon Brookes was looking at him with some curiosity.

‘Sorry, where did you say you got my name?’

Michael swallowed again, and felt a tiny twitch of his face, the kind that might look to anyone watching like a deliberately tight blink of the eyes. The question, never before asked, was now being asked again. Perhaps it was the loss of the wife that was making this one so cagey, though he seemed to Michael more exasperated than bereaved.

‘Crockford’s. Fount of all knowledge! I say, it is all right for me to see the figures, isn’t it? I’ve looked at them behind the glass, of course, but it’ll be just tremendously exciting to get really close to them.’ He beamed again and tried to look eager. Steady, Michael, he told himself.

In the church Gordon Brookes pulled on a pair of cotton gloves from a drawer at the base of the display cabinet, unlocked the glass door and lifted out one of the two figures. ‘Here’s our St John. Vestry’s the best place, there’s a proper table there,’ he said, making his way to a door at the far end of the church. He could not carry both figures at once, but he seemed prepared to make two trips rather than hand one to Michael to bring. Michael, obedient to some etiquette that suggested it would be unseemly to do so, did not offer to help, but waited patiently by the open case. Gordon came back, took the second figure in his arms, saying only, ‘St Catharine, slightly heavier,’ and Michael followed respectfully.

The vestry smelled of paraffin and chrysanthemums. Two walls were lined with cupboards, and chairs were stacked in one corner. The only other door must lead outside, back towards the vicarage, Michael thought. From a large cardboard box on the floor with ‘Waste paper for Afghanistan’ written on its side in black marker, Gordon Brookes drew a couple of magazines. He spread them over the centre of the table. Without smiling he placed the figures on top of them. Gordon Brookes then tipped his head on one side and gazed at them sentimentally, and it seemed sensible to Michael to do the same. The St Catharine sat on her magazine, partly obliterating the cover photograph of a middle-aged man standing on a rock on the edge of a lake looking through binoculars. The white, sweet-faced Saint Catharine, her eyes cast graciously downwards, was apparently reading the headline ‘Whale watching in Manitoba’. Michael smiled, and Gordon Brookes smiled too.

‘Lovely, aren’t they?’ he said, quite kindly. Michael got his notebook and magnifying glass out of his backpack and put on a pair of spectacles. But he did not sit down, feeling that the most delicate of transactions was being conducted and that even one off-balance move, one over-zealous gesture on his part, would cause the whole fragile bargain to collapse. Gordon Brookes took a step back. Michael smiled at the figures again and then looked at Gordon.

‘Carry on,’ Gordon said, pulling off the gloves and handing them to Michael. ‘I’m no expert so I’ll leave you to get on with it. I’m assuming you know how to handle them.’

Michael almost burst into song. ‘Right! That’s terribly good of you. I do appreciate it. It’s a marvellous opportunity.’ He sat down at the table and squinted purposefully at the figures, wrinkling his nose. Gordon Brookes did not leave. Michael looked at him with the gentlest smile of dismissal he could manage.

‘I’ll be fine, now. Thanks so much,’ he said.

‘Right. Well, I’ll let you get on, while I just potter.’ So that was what he meant by leaving him to get on with it. Get on with it, but I’ll be right here behind you. In the same room. I am not going to leave. Michael’s face twitched behind his glasses. How was he going to manage the amount of bluffing that would now be required? He could drop out of the whole thing, just look at the figures and go. But how could he even think of leaving without them, after this much effort? His heart had been thumping in his throat since he arrived. He coughed. He dared not touch the figures in front of Gordon Brookes. He could not trust his hands not to shake.

‘Don’t let me, er… I’m quite happy here on my own, if you’ve got things to do.’

‘I gather it’s a study of yours. Have you published?’

‘Oh no! Oh, you know, the usual problem. Time! Takes so much time, getting anything knocked into proper shape for a publisher. That’s life. But I chip away, live in hope. You know.’ He turned and looked at the alabaster figures in what he hoped was an informed sort of way.

Gordon turned and started to busy himself with a precarious stack of books and sheets of paper. ‘Choir. They will leave things higgledy-piggledy,’ he murmured. Michael, pretending to consult his notebook, was getting desperate. He had to get Gordon Brookes to leave.

‘Honestly, don’t let me stop you getting on,’ he said. ‘I’m quite happy on my own for… well, I should think twenty minutes should do it. But naturally I’d prefer you to come back to put them back in their case.’

‘You were ordained when, Jeff?’ Gordon asked mildly.

‘Oh, only in 1996,’ Michael replied. ‘Latecomer.’ He would volunteer nothing more lest it provoke more conversation. He needed the man to go.

‘Yes. Yes, because you see, if you don’t mind, Jeff, it’s odd you’re not aware. Trivial thing, of course, but if nobody’s pointed it out to you… we never say Crockford’s, do you see. It’s Crockford, not Crockford’s. You just don’t say Crockford’zzzz, except when you’re saying the whole name, as in “Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy”. Hope you don’t mind my mentioning it.’

Michael fixed a look of polite amusement on his face and turned.

‘Oh? Well! Well, my goodness. I, er…’

‘It’s odd you’ve not picked that up so far.’

It was too late for Michael to pretend he was hard of hearing, had to lip-read and sometimes made mistakes. His mouth was dry. Gordon Brookes was about to say that he knew perfectly well that Michael was a fraud. But Michael knew, just as perfectly, that he needed the alabaster figures to get himself afloat again; he needed them so badly that he felt a rush of fury at the thought that Gordon Brookes might stop him. Just as he was thinking that the only course open to him now was physical assault, he wondered. Dare he try it again? He had done it once before with a punter who’d come back to the stall complaining that Michael had sold him some dud Cornish ware the week before. ’1930s you said and when I get it home I turn it upside down an’ it says fucking dishwasherproof on the bottom.’ The punter had not been in the right frame of mind to be convinced that dishwashers had been around for a lot longer than people realised. Michael had had to think fast. It had worked then, and it had to work now.

He pretended to turn his attention back to the figures, but stirred, then coughed, started rigidly in his chair and sucked up a noisy breath. He swung back in his chair and pulled in another breath with a sound like air being blown into a balloon. He struggled to say, ‘Asthma. Be all right… in a minute.’ And then he took another, even more shallow, pained and laborious breath to show that he would not be all right at all.

‘Oh good heavens- have you got something to take for it? An inhaler or something? Don’t you carry an inhaler?’

Michael shook his head and lurched in his chair, sucking and heaving. ‘Glass of water. Pills. Need water. Glass of water.’ He now brought fear into his eyes, which swivelled wildly round the room in search of the sink and tap, which he had already established were not there.

‘Oh! Oh right, I see, right. Hang on. I’ll just have to… er, look, will you be all right for a minute? I’ll get one from the vicarage. I’ll be back in a second, can you, are you sure you, er…’

Michael nodded. ‘Please! Please, water.’

When the vestry outside door had closed behind Gordon, Michael waited for a moment, got up, wrapped each figure quickly in the magazine on which it stood and placed them both in his backpack. Then he dashed back into the church, crossed it swiftly, let himself out and raced down through the churchyard, keeping off the path, which he knew could be seen from the vicarage. By the time the van started on the third attempt Michael was half-dead with terror, but with the pulse of fear came also a quickening surge of relief because he was, after all, alive.

My mood changed. Something happened to remove any last trace of uncertainty. Two people turned up on bicycles- imagine, in February! They were Dutch, and I believe they did say that they had hired the bicycles for the day as it was fine and they wanted to see something of the countryside outside Bath. They had all that strange clothing that people wear on bicycles. I’ve never had the slightest idea where such clothing is even to be bought or what it is called, let alone what particular purpose it might serve, and it took me a moment to get over their appearance at the door, like giant tadpoles in some sort of brightly coloured race. And they had maps, of course, and showed me the special cycle route they were doing on which certain ‘points of interest’ had been marked, including Walden Manor. They had left the marked route and come all the way down the drive, even though there is a sign saying ‘Private’ at the top, next to the road. This is Walden Manor, yes? they asked me. I couldn’t very well dispute it. So I said yes, and then I stood at the door waiting for them to go.

‘We know that the house is not open to the visitors,’ the man said. He smiled even more than the girl, which is unusual. At least the girl had the grace to look embarrassed.

‘We are so sorry to bother you, we are the students of architecture,’ she explained. The man hadn’t stopped nodding and smiling. Lovely teeth, but I distrusted such a conscious effort to charm.

‘It is so beautiful!’ he said, ‘we have nothing like this in Holland. So- we don’t know, but if you might very kindly let us take a look round…’

‘- little look, only on the outside, perhaps,’ the girl said. ‘If you can bother with us so near your house.’

Rash of me. They could have been anybody, burglars, rapists. Quite apart from it being the last thing a house sitter should do, give strangers the run of a place. They could have had coshes, knives, rope, handcuffs, anything, in those saddlebags. Supposing they’d even left me alive, I would never have recognised them again, not out of those ridiculous clingy suits and helmets. So why did I let them in? It was the ‘your house’ that did it, I suppose. I suddenly felt so proud, and I swear that all of a sudden the thought came to me, if it’s my house I can do what I like. So I heard myself saying I’d be pleased to show them round my house. They didn’t stay long. I went a bit vague about dates after ‘fifteenth century origins’ (I just made that up, it sounded about right), which gave them the chance to show off and argue between themselves over when different bits might have been built. He said they were intrigued by the building materials and methods more than the design because, evidently, he said, the house was ‘provincial’ and not by a distinguished or even a known architect. I said there was more to good design than fancy London names, and they were a bit taken aback, I think, and I was too, because I hadn’t realised I thought that. They asked how long my family had lived here, and I simply told them, oh always. And would the house stay in the family? It was the man, of course, who asked that, and his girlfriend gave him a look that said of course it will and that was an impertinent question. So I said of course it will in a voice that justified her look (and as I spoke I did feel mildly though genuinely offended). I inherited the house from my parents, I told them, another thing I hadn’t realised I thought. My mother died eighteen years ago, when she was in her eighties. I nursed her for many years, I said, and now the house is mine and my son will have it after me. I have just one son, I told them, smiling. If they wondered about where my husband might be they didn’t say. Though the girl would have sneaked a look at my ringless hands and concluded I was divorced, I suppose. Women notice things like that.

When they left I saw them off at the front door and closed it after them, and I had the sense that we both, me and the house, breathed a sigh, glad to be alone together again. I thought I would just walk through the rooms once more, and it was as I was turning to go upstairs that I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror, which by then I was describing to myself as a looking-glass. I had been smiling at those two young people. I thought perhaps I had smiled because of their youth and friendliness, smiled while putting them in their place and perhaps also at their deference and respect for me, ‘the English lady’, and for their admiration of my house. Whatever the reason, my face was much improved for it. It had not smiled like that for a long time and I liked the brightness in my eyes and the lift round my mouth. My skin looked warmer and my face rounder, as if I’d been plumped up with optimism, and I had a receptive look, as if the sound of human voices, including my own, had made me newly alert.

I was still half-smiling, long after they had gone. The reason for my continuing smile lay in the remembered pleasure of the words I had spoken, talking about my son to complete strangers.

Steph was carrying this one high. There had been a growth spurt and now it lodged right under her boobs like a strapped-on sandbag and her stretchy cotton skirt rose up at the front, well above her knees. It had been some time since her cardigan closed over the swell, and now the T-shirt she wore underneath was also too small and an acreage of skin like uncooked pastry was revealed where the T-shirt failed to meet the skirt top. She had taken the ring out of her navel, which now protruded, its vulnerable flesh like private, inside skin turned indecently outwards. She pulled the T-shirt over it a hundred times a day but always her belly shifted, the T-shirt rode up again and her navel reappeared like the inquisitive pink snout of a puppy sniffing at cold air. She had no money for new clothes.

‘Cover that up, will you.’ Jace’s eyes returned to the road in front. Steph pulled the T-shirt down and shivered. The seatbelt was uncomfortably tight, although she had let it out all she could. She thought that Jace probably could adjust it more but he would need to fiddle about with the bit clamped to the wall of the car. She had asked him to, once. She had no very clear idea how advanced her pregnancy was but it was not more than six months; she was going to get bigger still, and if Jace wouldn’t adjust the seatbelt for her, then she was going to have to go without it. But she did not think it would be worth asking again. It was the least of her worries. Jace kept saying he had no money either, but he had more than her, that was for certain. They were on their way now to look at somebody’s car stereo, for God’s sake, that Jace had seen advertised in the paper. He fancied a better one, that was all, and he was ready to spend hundreds on it, so how come she had nothing to wear, and nothing for the baby, when it came? As they drove on in silence, she considered asking him again for some money. But if she did, the conversation would go like this:

I can’t help it showing. I need some new stuff to wear, don’t I? This is too small.

Better get something then, hadn’t you?

I can’t. Aw, Jace, going to buy us something? I haven’t got any money, have I?

Get your Nan to get it. She’s the one supposed to be looking after you.

Steph sighed at the wholly expected turn that the imagined conversation would take. It was true that she was still living, though Nan called it staying, at her grandmother’s house. She had told Jace several times what the score was, that it was only temporary and Nan would rather she were not there at all, but the trouble with Jace was it didn’t matter how many times you told him something, if he didn’t like it he would just keep going on about it and in exactly the same way, whatever you said. So Steph could say now, yet again: She’s not looking after me. She says I should be in my own place. She says she’s not having a baby in the house and when all’s said and done she’s got her own life to lead. But it would make no difference. Actually, as far as Steph could see her Nan did lead her own life anyway whether Steph was there or not, but Nan often made the point and Steph supposed that, as it was Nan’s house, she was entitled to make it.

She looked at Jace. He was doing three things: driving, smoking and poking his head forwards and backwards in time to the music. He would not add conversation to these, being quite absorbed already. The music was so loud you would think the drummer plus drum kit were riding along in the back of the car. Jace, if he had anything to say to her, would have to shout to be heard and what he would say would be:

Well, then. You should do something about it, shouldn’t you? Get your benefit sorted for a start. Don’t think I’m forking out just ’cause you won’t get your money sorted.

I can’t go to the benefit office like this.

Shouldn’t have fallen pregnant, then, should you?

It wasn’t just up to me, Jace. You are its father.

So you say. I’m not forking out for a bloody kid that’s maybe not even mine. You want to get yourself sorted.

Steph stared straight ahead. The conversation always ended there, so she was right not even to have started it. It wouldn’t have been worth the breath. Every conversation started with Jace going on about something to do with the way she looked, then went on to her lack of money, at which point she would tell him again why she could not go to claim any. Early on in her pregnancy she might also have pointed out something about having to give up college for the baby, reminding him that getting to college had been important to her, and Jace would have said something dismissive about doing A-level art in the first place. Fucking useless. Where’s that leading, fucking nowhere, was how he put it. Then he would shift the attack onto different ground, saying just to torment her that he couldn’t be sure that the baby was his and so why should his money support ‘it’. And anything that she might say in reply to that would make no difference. So Steph squirmed quietly as they drove along, pulled at her T-shirt and knew she was right, again, not to have opened her mouth.

It was less exhausting to run the conversation in her head, which was the closest Steph could bear to go in confronting the mess she was in. Her Nan did not want her any more than Jace did, and she had no money for clothes or anything else. And she could not go and register for benefit because she was going to keep this baby, and if they knew she was having it they would interfere. No more could she go to a doctor, or even have it in hospital, because they would take it off her the minute it was born. Not that Jace had ever suggested she should see a doctor, he didn’t think about things like that. She should be all right, though. It was just nature, after all. She tried to swallow her fear. She would be all right, she had done it once before with no problems, and it got easier with each one, didn’t it? That was what everyone said.

She looked across at Jace again and thought without emotion that he looked bloody stupid with his head going in and out like that. He was a thin person with a very small chin, and Steph suddenly realised that he looked just like the school tortoise, speeded up. If you held out a leaf of parsley to the tortoise- she remembered it had 4F, the class number, painted on its shell but she had forgotten its name- its head would pop out like that and pop back in, just like Jace’s. Anyway, the tortoise was dead now and here she was, sitting here, knowing there was no point in saying I can’t go to the benefit office in this state, can I? They’ll get the social workers at me and then they’ll take it away when it comes and I’m not having that, right? I’m keeping this one, right? She tugged her T-shirt protectively over her belly and felt like crying.

You’re mad, you’re fucking mad, you are. And you got a bloody kid already. Jesus, look at the state of you.

I was too young. I told you that I was only fifteen with Stacey. I wanted to keep her, it’s not my fault they wouldn’t let me.

And so what’s different now? You’ve not even got a place to bring it up, have you?

She remembered, it was called Tommy. Tommy the tortoise. Steph began to cry noisily. He had got run over by a teacher’s car in the playground. That was the kind of thing that upset her now, silly things. Important things, like Stacey, upset her even more. Stacey would be nearly seven now. Seven, and somebody else’s. Steph’s sobs grew louder and more desperate. She had been too young and scared not to go along with what everybody told her to do.

That’s not my fault, is it? You said you’d get us a flat! And we’re not too young, I’m twenty-three and you’re twenty-one, there’s loads of people our age with kids! Loads! You were meant to be moving out of your mum’s and getting us a place. You said.

Jace was looking at her crumpled weeping face with scorn, but there was no let-up in the poke-poke of his head nor in the volume of sound. He shouted, ‘You do my head in, you do! Shut up, can’t you!’

And Steph did, because Jace’s voice was at a dangerous pitch and a whack might follow, even though he was driving. Jace stubbed out his cigarette. He had won that round easily and planned to win the next by changing the subject. ‘I’m out of fucking fags.’

Steph sniffed and blew her nose. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in front of me, it’s bad for the baby. And I’m not giving this one up, we’re keeping it. You said we’d keep it. You said.’

Jace turned off the music. The sudden silence rang round the car. He said, ‘Yeah, well, that was a bloody while ago.’

Steph pulled down her T-shirt again and squirmed as the baby trapped under the too-tight seatbelt wriggled and kicked.

He should not have done it. Michael was perching on the edge of the driver’s seat as lightly as he dared to while driving, as if in some way this would make him less of a load for the afflicted van. He leaned forward, trying to squeeze a little more speed out of it, but actually speed was out of the question. Keeping going, even at twenty miles an hour, was as much as he hoped for now. He should not have done it.

Maybe it was because of the latest bad time he had just gone through, maybe he had not been thinking straight, but he just had not been ready. In fact, it had been mad to go and do a job like this, the first time he had been out of the flat in weeks, and without thinking about the state of the van, without its even crossing his mind that the vicar would see it and might remember it. In fact he might even have got the number if he had been quick. Michael was not sure. He had been too petrified getting the van started to dare look up the churchyard path to see if the vicar was coming after him. If he had been, Michael thought he would have died of fright, or worse, got out of the van and done something silly to him. Without defining to himself quite what might have lain on the other side, he knew that doing something silly to the vicar would have constituted the irreversible crossing of some line. It was not that he had decided not to cross it, it was just that he had not dared look up the churchyard path. And then the van had started.

He should not have done it. As he chugged hopelessly along, Michael’s mind raced and churned with self-reproach. That bloody sprint down the path with the stuff bumping up and down in the backpack, that too had been mad. Not classy, like he took a pride in being. The smart, the classy bit was the impersonation, the getting-to-know-you thing, then lifting the stuff carefully, perhaps coming back later for it, not grabbing it then and there like some cheap little shoplifter. Later, when nobody was likely to be around, when it wouldn’t have mattered even if anybody was because he would be just that visiting curate, popping back again. That was classy, if not easy, so why had he been so stupid? Grabbing and running off with the alabaster effigies had been bad enough, but with the van in this state! There was another terminal-sounding cough from under the bonnet and Michael held his breath. He was so tense that his head pounded, and although he was staring through the windscreen he was not giving enough attention to the road. A white car swung angrily past him and cut in front with a blast of its horn. It must have been sitting on his tail for miles. The bloody van! On the way here he had been so busy feeling like Jeff Stevenson coping with a dodgy alternator or gearbox or whatever that he had not stopped to think about the van’s next journey; it fell a little short of Criminal Mastermind standard for the getaway vehicle to be on its last legs. He was sweating now, and still barely seven miles from the bloody church. If that vicar had decided to get in his car and come looking for him, Michael could be in trouble. He tried to weigh up calmly the chances of the vicar taking such direct action against the more conventional ringing for the police and waiting at the church for their arrival. But all his practical calculations were fading in importance. The more comforting thought of going to bed and staying there (should he ever reach home) was tugging at him, a wanton and persistent desire for oblivion that Michael dreaded, but which his mind was now embracing like an old, disgraceful, but already forgiven friend.

He fought the desire, and two thoughts surfaced. The first was that the van would never make it back to Bath, and the second was that it would be safer to get it off the road than to have it break down, in full view of any passing vicars, at the side of the road. Michael roused himself, and a couple of miles farther on steered the van into the forecourt of a petrol station and garage. He drove in under the canopied petrol pumps, past ranks of second-hand cars for sale, and parked at the far end next to some sheds, where a couple of lads in boiler suits were working on cars. Just in time, Michael remembered who he was for the purposes of getting the van fixed, and bounced out of the driver’s seat with an attempt at Jeff Stevenson’s smile on his face.

He was not sure that the young man in overalls with the strange curtain haircut really understood what a curate was, not even after he had explained it to him, and pleaded that he had to get the van back on the road at once because he had ‘things to deliver to some elderly people’. (It was not much of a story but there was no time to embellish.) What the curtain-haired mechanic did know, and was telling Michael, was that no way could they sort it today.

‘No, way, booked solid with MOTs and Terry’s behind anyway,’ he said, motioning with his head towards a pair of legs poking out from under a car. ‘Booked up solid. We don’t do emergencies. You’d be better getting it home and sorting it there, mate,’ he added.

Michael smiled at the bad news, as he imagined a curate would, and could not help feeling mildly scandalised at such a lack of respect for the clergy. He wished he were wearing a dog collar. Over the youth’s shoulder he watched a pregnant woman get out of a car that had just parked on the forecourt. She stood by the open passenger door and followed with her eyes as her husband, or boyfriend more like, slammed the driver’s door and stalked off to the garage shop. She looked uncomfortable, unhappy in her clothes and slightly ashamed, and Michael, only half listening to the mechanic, understood with a stab of recognition that she felt these things whether she was pregnant or not. He must have been staring, for she seemed to have caught his eye and now, to his horror, she was waddling over to him. He turned his attention back to the mechanic.

‘Number’s in the shop if you wanna call them,’ the mechanic said, turning to go. He added over his shoulder, grinning, ‘They’ll sort it for you, but they’ll charge.’ He called underneath the car where the feet were squirming. ‘Terry! They still charging eighty-five for call-out, Corsham Breakdown? You know, whatsisname, that Steve at Corsham Breakdown. Still charges eighty-five, does he?’

The legs shifted again and a muffled voice replied, ‘Oh yeah, think so. Eighty-five, mileage on top. Cash.’

‘Yeah, well, there you go,’ said curtain-hair, with the slightest and first edge of sympathy in his voice. ‘Number’s in the shop, there’s a payphone if you ain’t got a mobile.’ Michael nodded his thanks, calculating. It would cost at least a hundred in the end just to get towed back to Bath, never mind the cost of getting the van fixed. He could just hitch a lift home and forget all about the van, just leave it to rust here. But he could hardly remove the licence plates in full view of the mechanics, and the registration number would lead them straight to him. Also it was an offence to abandon a vehicle and he was in enough trouble anyway.

‘You going to Bath, by any chance?’

The pregnant woman was no more than a shivering girl, with large, greenish eyes. She was trying to sound and look casual, standing with one knee bent and her arms crossed. But she had pulled her clothes tightly round herself and over the impertinent bump, which seemed to Michael oddly prominent. It was all out in front, as if the baby had not filled out her sides at all. There was little difference between the colour of her skin and hair, which, in a spectrum between olive and dark gold, might have been striking if she had been warmer and healthier. As it was, she looked yellow in the wrong places, across her forehead and round her mouth, and greenish at the roots of her hair and under the eyes. She was small-boned and long bodied; she brought to mind a snake that has swallowed a watermelon. He tried not to look at her stomach but found himself imagining that she would be very slim after the baby was born. And here she was offering him a lift. He could leave the van here and get them to fix it when they had time, surely in a few days. In the meantime it could be pushed round the back out of sight of the road. He beamed Jeff Stevenson’s smile at her.

‘Yes! Yes, I am! You can give me a lift? How wonderful, thank you! Anywhere in Bath’s fine- drop me anywhere- how kind!’

The girl was taken aback. ‘What, isn’t that your van? I thought that was your van. I thought you might be going to Bath, that’s all. I’m looking for a lift.’

Michael stared at her and saw his own dismay in her face. ‘It is. It’s broken down. I thought you were offering me a lift. Is there something wrong with your car as well, then?’

‘No. Anyway, it’s not mine.’ She did not pretend to find the confusion amusing, or try to dislodge the disappointment that now sat on her mouth. She motioned towards the garage shop, where the boyfriend, or whoever he was, was just emerging. ‘It’s his,’ she said. ‘Him over there.’

‘Oh, I see. I see, you’re hitching, are you? That was your last lift? I thought you were with him.’

‘I am, I was, I mean- I’m not hitching,’ she said, pushing her hair back behind her ears and shaking her head. ‘Mind you, maybe I am, now.’ She tried a smile that turned out to be more a wrinkle of her nose, which was red with cold. She sniffed. ‘I just thought you was going to Bath, that’s all.’

‘Well, I am. Or I will be, but I’ve got to get the van towed back.’

‘Oh, well. Never mind.’

‘But isn’t that your car? I saw you getting out.’

The boyfriend had stopped at the door of his car and was lighting a cigarette. The girl watched him and said dully, ‘No. It’s his.’ With his hands on his hips, he scowled in her direction. She looked away. He shouted something mocking, which Michael did not quite hear. The girl turned, shook her head and the man swore, got in and turned the ignition. Loud and aggressive music pulsed from the car as he drove off with a deliberate scream of the tyres.

The girl watched until the car had disappeared. ‘Can’t I get a lift with the tow?’ she asked.

Michael could not begin to ask what it all meant, for fear that the girl, who was now looking at him with an expectant half-smile, might tell him. Something in the eyes, or perhaps in the droop of the shoulders, or the ripe bulge, or the way she shivered in her inadequate clothing, was crying out to him. Slightly flattered as Michael was by the thought that anyone could turn to him for anything, he was also bewildered and appalled. Big eyes or not, she was another thing he did not need, and already she had confused him to the point that he was no longer sure whether he was Jeff Stevenson or Michael. But it was Michael who was stuck with two stolen church effigies in the back of the useless van, the sight of which could get him picked up by the police at any minute. It was Michael who had not been alone in the company of a woman for so long it felt like years, Michael who wanted only to sink into the dark bedroom of his flat. So it was Michael who said, ‘Can’t help you, sorry. Got to make a phone call,’ and strode away. Feeling stupid, he changed his mind, walked back to the van and took the backpack from the back, glaring at Steph as he lifted it over one shoulder and made for the shop.

It crossed Steph’s mind that it was not very clever of this man to refuse her a lift and then walk off leaving the van unlocked like that. Not that she made a habit of assessing men’s intelligence. She did not assess men at all (except to wonder if and for how long they might be nice to her) so much as react to them. So as she watched Michael’s progress across the forecourt, she shivered, wondering if he, with his dark eyes, might turn out to be nice. She was often wrong. Jace had been nice to her for quite a long time before he changed. It had been after about three months that Jace had first muttered in her ear that she was so great, he was dead carried away and he couldn’t stop, she didn’t want him to stop, did she, not to put on a stupid condom, did she? The truth was that she hadn’t. So Steph had spent a lot of time thinking that it was at least partly her fault that when she got pregnant he had stopped thinking she was great, which made it partly her fault that he hit her. And he had only ever taken the back of his hand to her, never his fists. She had spent an equal amount of time hoping that after the baby was born things would change.

A waste of time, she knew. Jace had turned out to be one of those people who did nothing for your loneliness. In fact she had felt lonelier when she was with him than when she was on her own in her Nan’s empty house; lonelier even than she was now, stuck at this freezing garage in the middle of nowhere. She stared up the road where Jace had burned out of sight. Had she dumped him or he her? She could have got back in the car. Jace had not stopped her from getting back in the car, but still, he must have dumped her, because she felt so miserable. If she had done the dumping it would be Jace who was in a mess, stuck with no transport and no money. But she had noticed already that Michael’s skin was as smooth as bone and there was no threat in his eyes. When she had looked at him, perhaps she had felt a little less lonely. He was out of sight now, in the shop. She opened the van door. There was a solid wall between the van’s interior and the seats in front, and no windows in the sides. It would have been nice to find a blanket, but there were dustsheets and a couple of flattened cardboard boxes. Steph clambered in awkwardly, holding her stomach, and pulled the door shut behind her.

It was the day after the Dutch couple came that I noticed the buddleias in the garden. I must have seen them before, there were four of them and they were such huge ones, how could I not have seen them? But it was not until that afternoon that I really took them in. Perhaps until then they were simply waiting for me to pay attention to them. Perhaps it was the talk of Mother, combined with the brighter weather that day. Or perhaps it was just that the buddleias’ time had come. I had already begun to think of things coming round in their own time.

Anyway, I had allowed myself a little rest after lunch, feeling rather tired by the strain of my unexpected visitors the day before. I had got up about three o’clock and was looking down at the garden from my bedroom window, and in the sunshine and a brisk wind there they were, four enormous buddleias, waving those disgusting dead blooms at me.

In an instant I was back in Oakfield Avenue on that day eighteen years ago, in Mother’s room, the ground floor bedroom behind the kitchen that she took when she moved downstairs after Father died. She was lying in bed on her side waiting to be wiped, as usual saying nothing and with the butter-wouldn’t-melt face on her. I was trying not to look at her backside or think about her face. In fact I was trying not to be there, I suppose, because through her bedroom window I was concentrating on watching the buddleia in our back garden. It was February then, too, and I remember thinking suddenly that that buddleia out there in the garden should not be allowed to get away with it. It should not be allowed to go on waving its branches of dead flowers that looked like Mother’s long pointy turds (not a word I like, but there is no other somehow) at me. I cast my mind back to the summer before and it seemed a poor bargain, this plant trading an unreliable memory of a short season, a mere month of butterflies fluttering at its purple flowers, for its intolerable appearance now and for most of the rest of the year. Between a finger and thumb I was holding Mother’s big pants that I’d just hoicked off her, and the pad which contained the awful wobbly chocolate-coloured rope that she had squeezed out in the night and whose precise shape and colour I saw replicated on the buddleia bush swaying in the wind. The room was full of our silence, and of the familiar smell like vinegar and lavender mixed with dirt and that particular human clay. Outside, the buddleia waved its thousand old lady’s turd-tipped branches and I looked back at Mother’s offering in my hand and I thought, oh God, how many more of these, as many as wave at me from the buddleia bush? How many more squalid little starts to how many more squalid little days with me looking through a window onto a view of dead flowers?

Perhaps it would have been enough, then, if I had just gone straight out there and got busy with Father’s old saw. Who knows if some savage pruning would have been all that was needed. Then that would have been an end of it, and what happened later that day would not have happened, and life would have gone on in the same fashion for a lot longer. And do you know, weighing it up now, despite everything, I am glad it didn’t. I’m glad of the new and surprising turn things took. But eighteen years ago I did not have the knack of clarity that I have acquired here.

So it was here, on this February afternoon eighteen years on, as I looked down at those four buddleias, that it was suddenly obvious what had to be done this time. I found a saw, an axe and a crowbar, as well as Wellingtons, gloves and a waxed jacket in one of the outbuildings in the courtyard, and I got busy. Though pruning is not the word for what I did to those buddleias. It took all my strength. It was dark by the time I had finished and I got badly scratched and I pulled I don’t know how many muscles, and I don’t think I have ever been so tired, but I got all four of them out by their filthy brown roots.

No offence intended, nothing personal, but Steve of Corsham Breakdown refused to uncouple Michael’s van from the pickup until Michael paid him the hundred quid. Nothing personal, but Steve had formed the opinion after an hour’s drive with his silent, motionless passenger- silent but for short replies to Steve’s attempts at chat, and motionless but for the gripping and releasing of his fingers over the backpack on his lap- that the guy might be weird and/or broke, despite the clean, regular-looking clothes. It was a little before five o’clock when he pulled over, with difficulty, on the steep road leading up through the Snow Hill estate, and set out his terms. No offence, but I need to see your money, mate. It’s not me, it’s the boss, all right? Cashpoints still open, aren’t they? Time to get down there and get the cash, haven’t you?

Mr David closed at five thirty, sometimes earlier on a slack day. Michael set off with the backpack towards the London Road and Mr David’s shop in Walcot Street. Steve walked up the hill in the opposite direction to Fairfield Stores and bought a Sun, a pasty, a bag of crisps, a Galaxy and a Coke. It was on the way back to the cab to wait for Michael that he heard the banging from inside the van.

When Michael got back with the now flattened backpack over one shoulder, Steph was in the passenger seat of the pickup swigging at the Coke and having a laugh with Steve, for whom Michael’s weirdness was now confirmed.

‘Oi!’ he called as Michael approached the driver’s window, ‘you never said you got your flaming girlfriend in the back! She could have froze to death. Dangerous and all, illegal that is, I could have got done for that!’

Michael stared into the cab, too depleted by Mr David for anything like surprise. Steph looked back at him with a mixture of defiance and entreaty.

‘Needed a rest, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘In the van. Don’t mind, do you? He doesn’t mind,’ she added, nodding at Steve.

Steve patted her knee and said, ‘Got a bit warmed up now, have you, sweetheart?’ He turned to Michael. ‘You want to take better care. Got the cash?’ As Michael counted off the notes he went on, ‘You should have said. She should’ve gone up in front between us. There’s room for three. Even three and a half!’

Michael, wordless, stared at him. Steve looked again at Steph, reminding himself that it was none of his business. The girl seemed happy enough to be left with this guy, so maybe she was weird herself.

Steph laughed and handed back the Coke can. ‘I’ll give you three and a half! I told you, I was asleep. I’ll sleep anywhere, just at the moment. Thanks for the drink. And the warm-up.’ She slipped down from the cab more easily than would have seemed possible, for her size.

‘And the lift!’ She sauntered round to Michael. Steve shoved the notes into his jeans pocket and started the engine. ‘Van’s all yours,’ he said, nodding back over his shoulder. ‘Uncoupled it when I heard your friend banging to get out.’ With a faintly regretful wink at Steph, he drove off.

They watched the pickup truck stop at the bottom of the road, its light winking, then turn into the stream of cars heading out of the city. The sky behind the black twigs of the television aerials across Snow Hill had grown pink. Streetlights were already casting an orange gleam over satellite dishes and roof tiles. Above the noise of traffic from the London Road the shouts of a group of kids on bikes, wobbling home up Snow Hill along the gutter and trading their insults and goodbyes on the street corner, were faint. Twilight crushed the whites and reds and blues out of the clothes of girls with dogs and pushchairs as they passed by on the pavement below; it stole their colours and discarded them in the greying winter air of the afternoon.

Steph said, ‘I’m freezing. I’m going to freeze to death if I stay out here.’ She placed her hand in Michael’s. ‘See? I’m freezing.’ He nodded but did not tighten his fingers round her hand, nor let it go. People walked home, receding into shadows under walls. Across the estate, strip lights blinked on in kitchens where women dumped bags and made toast and put on kettles; the sick blue pulse of unwatched televisions in rooms with undrawn curtains winked a message to Michael and Steph on the cold pavement- a message about other people, not like the two of them standing there as the sky emptied its darkness into them, but of other people, people who had homes to go to. And when, a moment later, Michael turned without speaking and began to make his way up the hill to his own flat at the end of Maynard Terrace, Steph pulled her T-shirt over her stomach and went too, knowing that the frailty in his eyes and his failure to drop her hand were the nearest she would get to an invitation.

Michael opened the door of the flat and snapped on the bleak overhead light in the sitting room. Dropping the backpack, which sagged at his feet and then fell over, he sank onto a small and unreliable-looking sofa. It seemed to be made entirely of blocks of sponge covered in some brown material which, as he eased into them, shifted behind his defeated back like rectangular rocks in a soft earthquake. Apart from a low table on thin black legs that stood between the sofa and a square fireplace with a cold gas fire, there was not much other furniture: just two chairs, metal folding ones, standing at a small circular table in one corner and two low wicker stools, one with an empty candlestick and a box of matches, the other with a pale blue lamp, at each side of the sofa. Three shelves by the side of the fireplace held toppled-over books, newspapers, a dead plant in a plastic pot, some shoeboxes. On the lowest shelf were a group of small brasses, a stack of plates and jugs, and three or four unsuccessful and empty vases. The arrangement looked as if the things were being stored rather than displayed, as if the person who had placed them there had no faith in them as decorative objects.

Steph, to whom the look of things mattered, gazed for a while, wondering what it was that she recognised in this room. She had thought a great deal about rooms. She had planned rooms in the detailed way that some girls plan their weddings, and just as putative brides mentally arrange in ‘the perfect fairytale setting’ a full entourage of co-ordinated guests and attendants and bridegroom, but leave the faces blank, so Steph had dreamt up rooms beyond her means in houses that did not exist, where she would imagine living with a family she did not have. The only places where Steph actually had lived, since her mother had moved in with her boyfriend when Steph was fifteen, had been places which, no matter how long she stayed, remained other people’s. Even when she had had a bit of money from some job or other to spend on a rug or a picture or some cushions, gestures which she intended to at least legitimise if not cele-brate her presence, she found herself still inhabiting places whose surfaces she could not soften and whose depths would not admit her. She only half-recognised that it was a kind of belonging that she ached for, and only half-acknowledging the ache, she fell short of any belief that she deserved relief from it. She grew to believe that the shortcoming was hers, and that something more profound than a different paint colour or new cushions was called for, something beyond aspiration, outlay and some colour sense, beyond even the intensity of her need. Steph watched the man under the pitiless light, collapsed on the sofa, and understood why the room was familiar. His listless attempts at homemaking betrayed the same ache, and perhaps the same lack of conviction.

She stood in the doorway, unsure of what she should say or do. A remark about how cold it was? He was sitting hunched up with his head almost on his knees, and had not moved to turn on the gas fire. How unwelcoming he was being. She was beginning to wonder if he was quite aware of her presence. She should think of something teasing and sarcastic to say, about the cold or the salty smell, or there being no lampshade or proper curtains, something to make him laugh and break the ice. But the window’s reflection was showing her to herself, hesitant in the doorway, too heavy for the empty metal chairs and too clumsy for sassy remarks. She pulled the T-shirt down, feeling there was too much of her and that she did not fit; although the walls were neutrally patterned and beige, she clashed with them. Just then from above their heads came the bark of a large-sounding dog, followed by pounding noises, which could have been the upstairs neighbour’s feet or missiles missing the dog and landing on the floor. From farther off the sounds of traffic and occasional calling voices from the street reached into the silence of the room through the black glass of the window.

‘Got a toilet?’ she asked. Michael raised his head and nodded past her, through the doorway where she was standing. She backed out, closing the door behind her, into the tiny entrance hall. At least now he had sort of given her permission to find the toilet, so she could try the other doors and see what kind of place it was. A tiny, practically empty kitchen. Only the one bedroom as she’d expected, and the smell was coming from there, which surprised her because the man himself was beautifully clean. A freezing bathroom, not exactly fresh but not filthy. Either he kept it fairly nice or he didn’t use it. But he must, because he was definitely clean himself and he even shaved. It was a pity about the bedroom, not that she would be sharing it, the way things were going. But just getting warm would be enough. Or almost enough, because now she thought about it, she was also starving.

When she returned, the cold bright air of the room had swollen and grown cruel with misery. Michael was hunched forward, crying. Steph dropped down beside him and pulled his hands away. He turned his twisted face from her and tried to bury his head in the back of the sofa. She looked round, working out that there would be no talking to him for a bit, even if she could think of anything to say. Meanwhile, he had pulled his legs up and was hugging his knees, as if to stop up a great overfilled sump of grief somewhere inside him. The sound of his sobs made Steph want to cry too. She was so cold. At least if they got warm, they might both still want to cry, but how could they feel any worse? She got up and turned the dial on the top of the gas fire. After some cranking and twisting, a blue flame whupped behind the chrome bars and the room filled with the smell of burning dust. Michael pulled himself upright and opened his mouth, gulping.

‘Can’t do that- costs a bomb, that fire.’

‘Got to warm the place up, haven’t we? Or we’ll freeze to death.’

Michael sucked in a deep breath. He should explain how he didn’t ever turn the fire on. He should explain about Ken across the way, how Ken’s place was always warm and that Ken was always in. How Ken seemed content to share his heat and hot water in return for a bit of company, even if the occasions when he and Michael were both capable of conversation did not often coincide. He should explain about the money, the fines, getting the stall going again, the electric, the TV licence. He should explain about Mr David and the sudden drop in price, how he only got two hundred and fifty for the figures, half of what he had been promised, and how half of that had already gone on getting the van towed back and it still needed fixing. But talking was too difficult, as would be the effort of making this woman go away. What did she want from him?

‘Got any money?’ Of course. She had seen him count out the notes for the man in the pickup and must have noticed that he hadn’t given him the lot. Michael leaned forward again and covered his face, feeling the backs of his hands soften in the first heat from the fire. Steph picked up the backpack from the floor, watching him carefully, pulled it open and brought out two crumpled magazines. Michael lifted his face but said nothing while she shook them about as if there might be banknotes lurking in them. Then she peered again into the empty backpack, stuffed the magazines into it and dropped it back on the floor.

‘Haven’t you got any? Go on, give us some money and I’ll go out and get us something to eat. Go on.’ She spoke with an odd mixture of authority and impatience, like somebody much older than she appeared. Like somebody much older than he was, Michael thought, looking closely at her face for the first time. Like she was his mother or something, and she must be twenty years younger. He pulled a tenner from his pocket.

‘Give us another. Go on, twenty’s better. I’ll bring you the change.’ As she folded the second note she said, ‘I could do with a bath. Don’t suppose there’s any hot water, is there? While I’m out you can put the hot water on, OK? And don’t turn the fire off.’

Michael cleared his throat to object, but sank back in the sofa.

‘Bloody freezing out there,’ Steph said, lingering. Would he not volunteer to go instead?

There was a silence while Michael looked at the slice of pink mottled belly between Steph’s T-shirt and skirt. Clumsily he stood up.

‘Take this,’ he managed to say, pulling off his jacket as if he had just remembered what it was for. Holding it out, he said, ‘It’s warm.’ He retreated back into the sofa.

It was better than nothing. Steph slipped on the jacket, smiling in the manner of all women trying on something new with somebody else waiting to see her in it. It fitted over her bump. She did up the last button, thrust her hands in the pockets and looked up, but Michael’s eyes were closed and his face was crumpled again with crying. Upstairs the dog barked and was yelled at once more.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, fingering the two ten pound notes in the pocket.

Michael’s eyes blinked open. ‘Michael.’

‘Mine’s Steph.’

It may have been in the exchange of names, but when the door closed behind her Michael felt oddly certain that she was not going to disappear with his jacket and twenty pounds, and Steph was confident that when she returned he would not still be weeping.

That evening winter returned. It was dark by the time I came in from the garden, knowing that the sunshine that afternoon had been only the illusion of spring. I ached all over and I was chilled from being out for so long. My exertions had kept me warm for as long as I worked, but as soon as I stopped I could feel that the cold had got right into me. I ran a very hot bath in my lovely white, green and yellow bathroom and lay in it, luxuriating in the knowledge that the drawing-room fire which I had just lit would be blazing for me when I came down. It crossed my mind that it was burning unattended, but I didn’t worry. It was such a benign presence, the drawing-room fire, I knew no sparks would fly from it and burn the rug. A fire can be a great comfort.

After her bath Jean sat by the fire in her alpaca dressing gown and silk pyjamas. Her face burned from the warm water and the tingle of soft cream after the punishment of the wind in the afternoon. Beneath the pyjamas, that were slipping over her shoulders and breasts and across her stomach as she breathed, her body felt and returned every stroke of the supple silk, yet it was stiffening up after all her work in the garden. The hardness in her arms and legs made her slightly triumphant, aware less of the age of her limbs than of their strength, as if she were a schoolgirl flexing them ready to make a long jump. But although the skin all over her body was soothed, at her core she was still cold and it was difficult to tell if she felt better than usual, or about to become ill. Better, she decided. Better, and more than that: it was as if her mind had just made the discovery that she actually had a body, and her body, just very slightly sorry for itself, was basking in the attention.

The body might, she also thought, be telling her that she was actually very, very hungry, a thing it had not told her, or that she had not heard it say, for years. In fact she ought perhaps to be listening a little more carefully, because she had the feeling that since she had arrived she had grown if anything a little thinner. As Jean had begun to enjoy the loosening of the customary austerity with which she managed her physical needs, she had been considering herself with a new gentleness. Her habitual tone of self-chastisement had quietened down; if she felt like resting in the afternoons, she did so, the word lazy barely crossing her mind. And she did now recall that she had made a little half-promise to herself, on what she now thought of as Wardrobe Day, that she would try to fill out her new clothes a little more convincingly. She was still a little small for them. Now, she recognised, if she were properly to fit her new life, the time had come to attend to the matter of feeding herself as if she still had some growing to do.

First, though, the chill in her joints called for a drink. She had noticed without concern or surprise on her first or second day that the decanters in the dining room were empty. She should have preferred to make her first visit to the cellar in daylight and when she was feeling less tired, but she rose, fetched the key, opened the low panelled door in the corner of the dining room and descended the cellar steps.

In the sudden fluorescent light and thick underground smell, Jean paused. From the bottom of the steps she could see, stretching down both sides of the cellar, a series of whitewashed, arched bays that were filled with metal racks laden with bottles. At Jean’s end, close to the steps, stood an old oak table. She looked at it closely. It was like nearly everything else in the house: old, imperfect, beautiful, and although the wood now looked hungry, having been left so long unpolished, Jean could imagine it being used as a dining table in many houses not much humbler than this one. On it sat a small torch, a candle in a metal holder, a leather-bound book and a number of corkscrews, one of which had, inexplicably, a brush on one end. There was also an unnerving sort of circular cutter that looked as if it had been designed for removing fingertips. On the wall behind the table a pair of metal tongs hung from a hook. Jean immediately felt intimidated, as if she had happened upon the instruments of a painful, semi-surgical religious ceremony of quite Masonic abstruseness. She scraped quietly along the flagged floor, peering into the racks and reading labels which told her nothing except how ignorant she was: Lйoville-Poyferrй, Batailley, Domaine de Chevalier. The shape of the bottles changed; she read Chambolle-Musigny, Vosne-Romanйe and sighed, unenlightened. It was easy to recognise the champagne bottles by their corks but it was not champagne she wanted now. Some treacherous-looking bottles on the lowest racks had lost their labels altogether and bore only a number and a daub of white paint, presumably having been caught by a swipe of the brush when the cellar was being whitewashed. Passing by them, knowing better than to open such dangerously old, unlabelled bottles, she walked on, reading names she could not pronounce and feeling, rather aggressively, that the whole thing was unnecessarily complicated. A nice red wine, or a glass of port or sherry, was all she wanted. It was absurd to be frightened by a lot of foreign names, but the trouble was not simply that they were the names of places she had never been to and of wines she had never drunk. They spoke of qualities she did not possess. Permanence and graciousness, let alone pedigree, had scarcely been the hallmarks of her life so far, she thought, lapsing for a moment into old habits and almost forgetting that she was not that Jean any more. She pulled out another bottle, of which there were at least half a dozen identical ones in the rack. Above the words ‘Chвteau Palmer 1982’ was a picture of the chвteau and she sighed again, this time with relief. At last, a name she could read, a nice ordinary English name. She recalled that there had been a Palmer family in Oakfield Avenue. And the chвteau on the label was, really, just a house when it came to it. Or rather not just a house like the one in Oakfield Avenue, it was a house like this one, Walden Manor. Her house. The thought gave her confidence. She scanned the drawing, imagining the heavy French furniture behind the tall drawing-room windows. There might be a pretty boudoir upstairs with another window looking over the back perhaps, onto a view of a terrace and gardens and vineyards. She turned the bottle in her hand, almost as if she thought that the far side would show the back of the house, and turned it back to the drawing. Who would live in this place? A woman, certainly. Madame, a woman of Jean’s age, would be at her dressing table under the window attending to her hair, pinning it into a simple, elegant chignon. I shall grow mine, Jean thought, patting her own, which was still damp at the ends from her bath. In fact, now that she thought about it, she would have to grow it, since she was not going to go out any more. The label drew her attention again. What a delightful place it was. On a summer morning, the chestnut trees- that Jean felt sure were there, flanking the courtyard just out of the frame of the drawing- would rustle in the breeze with a soft shivering note that would carry upon it the fluting calls of pigeons and doves. Madame would hear them from the open window at the back as she embedded the final long pin in her coiffure, and then she would look up to see- who? Her son, perhaps. Yes, definitely her son, some way off, moving thoughtfully between the vines, inspecting the grapes. Madame would know by the tilt of his head as he passed down the rows and as he paused to look up at the sky, that he was worrying a little, wondering if the weather would hold. Would the sun shine right up until the last day before the harvest? Jean smiled, then turned and made her way up the cellar steps, picking up a corkscrew as she went. The label had told her all she needed to know about the wine, whatever it might taste like.

It was nice, that first bottle of wine. It certainly loosened my poor old joints, at least. It was strong and I suppose what you’d call dry. I liked it more the more I drank, and it went well with my supper. Because after the first glass by the fire I started to think about food again. I’m no cook, or I wasn’t then- I’ve learned all that since. Up till then I hadn’t bothered with the Aga. I only had cereal or sandwiches, or I used the microwave for scrambled eggs or soup if I wanted something hot. I didn’t bother much. But that night I needed something more. I got the key to one of the two big freezers in the utility room and found bacon, sausages, butter. I noticed one or two other very tempting-looking things at the same time. For another day, I thought, half-expecting Michael. I’d already got eggs and tomatoes and bread. The Aga behaved itself. There was nothing difficult about it. There was an excellent pan for a big fry-up, and I sipped the wine while I cooked and the kitchen filled with the most wonderful smell. How they would have hated it, the owners! All of it: the smell of bacon and sausages, the fat-spattered Aga and the way I disobeyed their instructions about where I ate. I took my supper on a tray and ate by the drawing-room fire and finished the bottle of wine with some cheese. By then I felt rather sleepy so I made some very good coffee (theirs) and threw out my jar of instant as I waited for the kettle to boil. I wanted to stay awake, because after that wine label and everything that the chвteau had told me, I had been thinking about the importance of pictures. Photographs in particular.

I had taken a look at the photographs round the place, while I was dusting. There were two tables in the drawing room covered with photographs in silver frames, and others elsewhere in the house. I collected them all up and brought them over to the fireside for a proper look. The wedding ones I didn’t go for. I was pretty certain it was them, the owners, and the woman- blonde, quite a bit younger than him- looked tall and solid enough to fit my clothes, as far as I could tell by how she looked in the wedding dress, which was cream and heavy-looking, not proper white. Not a shred of decent chiffon either, just a flat veil with a little tiara. He was quite heavy-looking in that English male way that often ages well and they were smiling at each other, looking safe and polished and pleased. I suppose I mean rich. They did not so much as glance out of the photograph. I burned it.

There were others of him and her both singly and together, and with older people, parents or relatives I supposed, and some with friends. They seemed to go on holiday a lot. Sometimes they were tanned, or holding skis, or sitting at tables, and her hair changed, both colour and length, but it always looked expensive. Those pictures went in the fire, too. But there were others: proper portraits of the older people, and early snaps taken on beaches when they were white squinting children in baggy bathing costumes, holding up buckets, balancing on rocks. And there they were, older, at their own weddings or with their babies on christening day, and there were black and white pictures of men in uniform who looked hopeful and unironic in a way that you don’t get now. It was sad, but I burned all of them too. I will admit I did hesitate, but it would have been wrong to get sentimental about them. They had all begun to jar. The time for their stories had been and gone. They did not belong here, with me and all the other things, the vases and bowls and books and trinkets and little boxes. These people had nothing to do with this house, or with me and my son. It was time for our stories now.