In the Fold

EIGHT

The next day was Saturday. Beverly was taking the day off, so we agreed to work the late-morning shift while she and Brendon did the night. This meant that we didn’t need to get to the farm until eight o’clock and had to stay through until noon, which is how I came to witness the extraordinary scene that took place amongst the Hanburys that day.

For the first time, I was left to sleep until it was light. It was a luxury for which I expected myself to be grateful after the days of hard, dark, four o’clock risings, but when I opened my eyes to the grey, established daylight I discovered instead that I had been served with the unmistakable summons of despair. It was as though thoughts of my wife had formed a sort of crust or skin around me while I slept. On opening my eyes I received a startling impression of my own bondage to these thoughts; I was encased by them, to a point that apparently precluded physical movement. I realised that by getting up early all these mornings I had cheated the part of my constitution that needed time and stillness to form the fog of feeling. Lying helpless in bed I let the grey light run in its doomy legions over me. Eventually I heard Hamish rustling in his sleeping bag, and for some reason I prayed for him not to wake up yet, for it seemed unbearable to me that I should have to confront him in this state: but he did wake up. I was aware of him laboriously getting to his feet, as though he were the first human. The quivering top of his blond head and then his face appeared beside me.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ he said.

I said, ‘We’re going home soon. Tomorrow maybe. We’re going home to see mummy.’

Hamish assumed a neutral expression, like a priest hearing a particularly gruesome confession.

‘I bet you’ve missed her, haven’t you?’

He nodded. As far as I knew Rebecca had not once telephoned to speak to Hamish; nor to me, as it happened, although I had been able to mask this omission by telephoning her myself. I had tried vainly to reach her the night before, which was doubtless one cause of my current prostration. The message on her mobile phone annoyed me so much that it caused feelings of actual hatred to course through me, not for Rebecca but for the phone itself, as though it were holding her hostage and repeatedly releasing the same fragment of her. I imagined smashing it, banging its square little face against a rock until its casing fell apart and then prising out its metallic innards.

By the time Adam and I drove up the hill, the day was windy and bright and the naked trees cast moving shadows on the grass and on the road so that sometimes their bare arms seemed to be flailing the windscreen while shards of cold sunlight hailed down from the sky. Great clouds foamed at the top of the hill, grey and white, like something beaten out of a distant ferment. I said:

‘I think we’ll be off tomorrow.’

In the shuttered, discontinuous light I waited for his reply.

‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘We expected you to stay longer.’

‘There are some problems at home I’ve got to sort out.’

A moment earlier I had felt a pressing need to make this disclosure. Now that I had, I felt vulnerable and ashamed.

‘We thought that might be the case,’ said Adam presently, with ostentatious care. He stared keenly through the windscreen.

‘The balcony fell off our house,’ I said. ‘I should really go and sort it out.’

There was a silence, during which Adam failed to recognise his obligation to enquire about the dramatic event to which I had just referred. Like some predatory animal my anger left off the trail of Rebecca and swerved hungrily towards this new source of affront. Did he think I was lying? That ‘we’!

‘It nearly killed me,’ I said. ‘It missed me by a foot.’

Still he did not speak. I thought that I might hit him. I wanted to — there was a hot feeling of excitement in my chest that made the prospect of hitting Adam seem infinitely satisfying, like the prospect of taking flight. I did not, however, hit him. I began to feel jittery and light-headed, and my hands trembled on my thighs. I looked out of the window to the side of me at the rushing hedgerows. There was a leaden sensation in my stomach. It seemed that Adam and I were no longer friends. I felt certain that he would agree, but what perplexed me was how our brief conversation, in which we had taken such different parts, could have led to both of us forming this conclusion. I supposed that he could have decided it at some earlier point in my visit. I felt then that I had exposed myself to him in every particular. I felt his solidity, his self-satisfaction, in opposition to my transience. I imagined him and Lisa laughing at Hamish and at me; I imagined, ashamed, the clarity with which they had perceived that I scorned their suburban existence, and though I scorned it still, this idea, along with their beige carpets and their aspirations and the fact especially of their hospitality, put them somehow in the right. It was one of Rebecca’s criticisms of me that I was judgmental, as though I were the last advocate of an otherwise extinct morality. What she meant was that the disapproval made me immoral myself, by which I had always understood her to be saying that her lack of discrimination made discrimination a crime.

‘Lisa’s bringing the kids up at lunchtime to see the lambs,’ said Adam, as though further to assert the simple virtues of his existence, as opposed to the snarling, duplicitous chaos of mine.

‘Will she bring Hamish?’ I said.

Adam smiled.

‘Well, I don’t think she can leave him at home,’ he said.

‘That’s nice of her,’ I said, more petulantly than I’d meant to, so that as we were bumping up the track Adam turned his head to glance at me.

There were only six pregnant ewes in the pens. I left Adam to sit with them while I loitered around the barns in a pretence of efficiency, slowly shovelling dirty straw into the wheelbarrow. Sometimes I went out and looked at the vivid blue sea below, its surface creased by wind. I saw little boats charging madly up and down. The hours passed, forced through the tiny aperture in my angry feelings of subjection. I gave the orphaned lambs their milk, sickened by the greed with which they jostled and slobbered at the teat. They kept pulling it nearly out of my hands. I saw that Adam had moved two of the ewes to their own stalls.

‘Can you take one of these?’ he called.

Reluctantly I plodded to the stalls. The ewes stood panting rapidly and staring straight ahead with their close-together eyes. Adam was sitting on a stool in one of the stalls. I went into the other.

‘Good girl,’ I heard him say over the divide.

I sat on the stool, where the ewe’s broad, woolly haunches presented themselves to me. Her sides moved in and out quickly. I stared at her livid, quivering genitals. The smell of straw and muck was pleasanter in this enclosed space than when it was mixed with the wind outside. I sat and waited, as I had seen Adam and Beverly do.

‘Is there something I should be doing?’ I called.

‘Not unless her insides start coming out,’ said Adam ominously.

‘What do I do then?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Adam after a pause. ‘I get Beverly to do those. I think you have to sort of shove them back in.’

I stared around the battered wooden sides of the stall and then put my head back and looked up at the rafters. A group of pigeons were up there and they looked quizzically down at me. Outside the wind banged the gates and rattled them against their hinges. The ewe panted. Time passed. Her little sharp breaths seemed to buffer me; they broke on me like little waves on a smooth, empty beach. I marvelled at her containment. It seemed incredible to me that anything would issue from her impassive bulk. She was without sensibility; she was like a rock, a boulder. In the presence of her rudimentary life I had a sense of the superfluity of certain things and the necessity of others.

‘Were you given a cause?’ said Adam from the other stall.

‘For what?’

‘For the balcony collapsing.’

‘Frost damage,’ I said. ‘A plant grew through a crack in the stone.’

There was a pause.

‘You’ll have problems with insurance,’ he observed.

‘I know.’

‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d look at reinforced concrete to replace it. It’s far cheaper and much easier to secure into the outside wall.’

‘It’s a listed building,’ I said.

‘That’s no problem. There’s no problem using a concrete slab. As long as the appearance is the same. Was the limestone painted?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there you go. There’s only so far a listed buildings consent will go in specifying the nature of the materials. You want to find someone who’ll run it straight into the wall rather than taking out sections of the stone. Don’t listen if they say they can’t do it. You’ll save yourselves three or four thousand pounds.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

I leaned back against the frayed wood and thick splinters pushed against my shirt. The ewe shifted a little on her delicate hooves. I closed my eyes. The wind descanted distantly.

‘— continual maintenance, that’s the problem,’ Adam said from next door.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘I was saying you’re constantly having to maintain them. Old buildings. It can be a real headache. The maintenance costs on an old building can be a real drain. Personally I’d rather spend the money on something else.’

‘I think mine’s coming,’ I said.

A rounded, shiny-blue protuberance, like a knuckle, had appeared amidst the ewe’s red, fleshy folds. It kept receding and returning, each time a little more substantially.

‘Mine too,’ Adam said. ‘I worked out that the equity on a new build is actually more stable once you factor in the running costs.’

The ewe was panting even faster: while not moving at all, she was like something running at full tilt. The knuckle edged its way out. Now it was a parcel, mottled and tightly packed, being forced through a letterbox.

‘Should I pull it out?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Adam. ‘She does it all. There, mine’s out.’ I heard a rustle of straw from his stall. ‘In Bath, though,’ he continued, ‘I should say you’d get a lot of value added just from the heritage point of view. It’s the Georgian factor — you can’t go wrong, really, in Bath. Ridiculous, isn’t it? The money people will spend on something that’s basically just an illusion.’

I turned back to my ewe and saw the parcel, greasy and bright, suspended in a long moment of obstruction before it suddenly slithered out in a rush and fell with a thud into the straw. There was a smell of old blood. I watched as it woke itself, unfolding its legs and nosing blindly at the remnants of the bag it had come in, before scrambling unsteadily to its feet. It stood there, quivering, while the ewe licked it and carelessly shoved it around. I realised my heart was thumping. I met the ewe’s depthless brown gaze. The four ewes left in the pen bayed and barged against the metal poles with their massive bodies. I inched around the edge of the stall and let myself out.

*

Later I saw the gilded figure of Hamish running across the yard with his hair flying crazily in the wind and a smile on his face so large and unaccustomed that at first I thought he must be in pain.

‘Look!’ he shrieked. ‘Look!’

He was clutching something in his hand. Lisa and Janie and the baby were behind him, moving through the yard looking this way and that, like tourists. Lisa was wearing sunglasses.

‘Look!’

‘What is it?’ I asked. It was a piece of paper but I couldn’t prise it out of his fist.

‘You got a letter from mummy, didn’t you, Hamish?’ said Lisa, tucking a strand of hair sympathetically behind his ear as though he were a poor orphan.

‘Did you?’ I said, simulating pleasure. I was surprised to feel a little stab of jealousy at this revelation. Why should she be glorified for writing, when she was forced to do it simply by the fact of her absence? And why, if she was in the mood for writing letters, didn’t she write one to me?

‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, pet?’ Lisa continued, pityingly.

‘He can’t even read,’ said Janie. ‘Why is she sending him letters if he can’t even read?’

Had Hamish not been there I might have applauded this line of questioning, and perhaps hazarded the explanation that the letter had been sent out of a confused sense of guilt, mixed with a craven liking for showy, attention-seeking gestures which required the minimum of effort and carried high parental prestige.

‘Why doesn’t she just come and see him?’ Janie added.

‘She’s busy this week,’ I said, because Lisa was listening closely. ‘She’s working. She’s got a big exhibition she’s putting on at an art gallery.’

‘Clever mummy,’ said Lisa, with a meaningful intonation.

‘We did two this morning,’ said Adam heartily. His face was red and his jacket was covered in wisps of straw. ‘I had to get Michael in there at gunpoint. He thought he might have to put his hand up something.’

‘Men!’ exclaimed Lisa, tutting. ‘It’s perfectly natural, you know,’ she said to me. ‘There’s nothing disgusting about it.’

‘There wasn’t much to do,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about.’

‘Try saying that when you’ve got a prolapsed ewe, or twins, or the cord tied round somebody’s neck,’ said Adam grimly. ‘You’d know what the fuss was about then.’

‘Laura’s up at the house,’ said Lisa. ‘I said you’d pop in and say hello.’

I remembered Laura very vaguely, as a laughing, self-possessed girl with no particular lack of grace or attractiveness, who nevertheless advanced common sense as her chief characteristic and virtue. I remembered her round, flat, white, well-modelled face, like the blank, unpainted face of a Venetian mask, from which she wore her fair hair pulled back by an Alice band. When we passed through the courtyard next to the house we saw two children playing, both extremely fair and unkempt, a boy of about eight and a slightly smaller girl. Adam greeted them, which did not prevent the boy from raising what appeared to be a small crossbow and pointing it directly at him.

‘Put that down, Rufus,’ said Adam, quite angrily. ‘Can’t you see there are children around?’

‘I’m not pointing it at them,’ said Rufus. I couldn’t tell whether he liked the fact that nobody had accused him of being a child himself, or not.

‘You shouldn’t point that thing at anybody,’ said Adam. ‘Where did you get it from?’

Rufus shrugged.

‘Mum gave it to me,’ he said.

‘I’m sure she didn’t.’

‘She did!’ squeaked the little girl.

‘Good God,’ said Adam. ‘What will she think of next?’

I guessed that these were Laura’s children. Common sense was clearly no longer something she went in for.

‘Take it out to the field, will you?’ continued Adam. ‘I don’t want it anywhere near the house.’

‘You really shouldn’t be playing with things like that, Rufus,’ said Lisa. ‘It’s actually not very nice.’

‘It’s none of your business!’ shouted Rufus.

‘Well, it is my business if one of my children gets hurt,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it, Rufus?’

‘No one’s got hurt! I haven’t done anything wrong!’ yelled Rufus furiously. ‘We were just playing!’

He stormed out of the courtyard and a minute later, with a look of uncertainty, his sister followed him.

‘Honestly,’ said Lisa, rolling her eyes, ‘I only have to come up here and I start to think I’ve gone mad.’

Inside the house Laura was nowhere to be seen. Vivian and Brendon were sitting hunched at the kitchen table peeling potatoes. After the sunlight outside it looked as though they were sitting in a great cavern, or in the belly of a gigantic animal with the ceiling beams as its black, huge ribs. I noticed that Brendon had a large piece of gauze taped to his forehead.

‘Oh, hello,’ said Vivian presently, lifting her eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know you were still here.’

‘We’ve just knocked off,’ said Adam.

‘Well, I don’t see how I can possibly be expected to feed you all! Laura’s turned up with her four and Caris will be back in a moment wanting feeding and I haven’t been able to get down to Doniford all week, you know, and I really think someone might have thought to bring just a loaf of bread or a bit of cheese with them,’ she said. ‘It’s incredible, really, how little people think. There’s Laura with a fridge at home the size of a room, all full of whatever it is her children will eat, and she takes it upon herself to have lunch here, where she says everything’s past its sell-by date. She’s been round all the cupboards, taking things out and throwing them away! Then she complains because there’s nothing left!’

‘Don’t worry, Vivian,’ said Lisa sourly. ‘We won’t be troubling you for anything to eat.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Vivian, ‘I’m sure I can find something, it’s just that you mustn’t mind what it is. I was going to boil up these potatoes, that’s all. I was sure there was a bit of ham in the larder but it seems to have gone. Perhaps the dogs took it.’

‘Mine don’t really eat ham,’ said Lisa. ‘Just a bit of pasta will be fine.’

‘I don’t know that we have pasta,’ said Vivian. She said it to rhyme with ‘faster’. ‘That’s all anybody eats now, isn’t it? When I was little we used to call it worms.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ said Janie.

‘We dropped in on dad yesterday,’ said Adam, in a significant voice. ‘He’s feeling a bit lonely.’

‘Is he?’ said Vivian. She looked around, as though expecting someone to step forward and explain why.

‘He’d like to see you,’ said Adam. ‘I think he was expecting you a couple of days ago.’

There was a silence.

‘Well,’ said Vivian finally, ‘to be completely honest, I’ve been having a few problems with the car.’

She shook her hair down over her face and then looked up at us innocently through her fringe.

‘The car?’

‘Yes. I don’t really like to drive it.’

‘Why not?’

‘There’s something wrong with the windscreen. Something’s happened to the glass.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Adam. ‘Has it broken?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that. I think it’s just got a bit old.’

‘Old?’

‘What are you talking about, Vivian?’ said Lisa.

‘It’s you who aren’t listening! I’ve told you, the glass has got too old to see through!’

With shaking hands Vivian flayed the skin from a potato and dropped it, scalped, back into the muddy pile from which she had taken it. Brendon picked it out fastidiously with his fingers and put it with the others in a saucepan of water.

‘Vivian,’ said Adam, ‘have you been to an optician lately?’

‘I don’t see what an optician’s going to do about my car!’ said Vivian, laughing rather wildly.

‘It might not be the car. It might be your eyes.’

‘There’s never been anything wrong with my eyes. It’s sitting up here in the dark all winter — they get unused to the sun. It isn’t my fault, you know! When I go to Spain,’ she said, to me, ‘the problem simply disappears, even though one’s in the brightest sun day in and day out. I barely have to wear my sunglasses!’

‘It’s p-probably stress,’ said Brendon. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with multicoloured flying saucers on it. His face looked slightly lopsided, as though he had slept heavily on it. ‘Have you ever tried St John’s wort, Vivian? I can give you some if you like — I’ve got l-loads.’

‘Look,’ said Adam, ‘I’ll drive you down to the hospital this afternoon. It’s really not such a big deal.’

‘We get no light here from November to March, you know,’ said Vivian, to me. ‘We’re north-facing, that’s the problem. The sun goes all the way around the other side of the hill, where nobody actually lives! I can’t think why they built Egypt here, can you? Perhaps they did it in the summer not knowing how it would get. Sometimes I wish I could just pick it up and turn it around the other way. There’s a day in April when it comes back — one day a little triangle of sunlight appears on the floor, and the next day it’s a little bigger, and the day after a little bigger and so on, and then before you know it it’s starting to get smaller again,’ she concluded morbidly.

‘If we could go straight after lunch that would suit me,’ said Adam. ‘I’ve got some things I have to do this afternoon.’

‘Sometimes I’ll open a door or a cupboard and without expecting it I’ll feel as though I’m falling into a void, a well of blackness,’ said Vivian. ‘I almost feel a sort of presence. Do you know,’ she said suddenly, ‘when that happens I can often hear someone speaking my name, quite clearly speaking it!’

‘Vivian? Is it all right if we go straight after lunch?’

Vivian looked at him roguishly. I wondered if she was drunk again.

‘I think I’d rather go tomorrow,’ she said.

‘But he’s coming home on Monday!’

‘Well, in that case,’ said Vivian, ‘I don’t see what everyone’s making such a fuss about.’

‘Vivian,’ said Lisa, smiling, ‘surely you’d want to see Paul while he’s in the hospital?’

‘When I had my operation,’ said Vivian, staring beadily at her, ‘I was in hospital for five days. He wouldn’t come and see me because he was worried about carrying foot and mouth on to Egypt.’

‘Well,’ said Adam, ‘at the time that was understandable, when you think about it.’

‘I was losing my womanhood!’ cried Vivian. ‘I was being mutilated, and all he cared about were his sheep!’

‘Don’t you think you should let bygones be bygones?’ said Lisa.

‘A lot of people did things then that they regret,’ said Adam. ‘Don Brice threatened the inspectors with a shotgun, for heaven’s sake.’

‘He never apologised!’

‘You know what he’s like,’ said Adam. ‘He doesn’t like it when people are ill.’

‘When I came back,’ said Vivian unsteadily, her cheeks ablaze, ‘he sent me to Coventry for forgetting to write the cheques before I left. I think that rather takes the cake, don’t you? Don’t you think that it does? He wouldn’t let me go upstairs until I’d sat at the desk and signed them all! And he wouldn’t speak to me — not a word!’

None of us said anything. Vivian looked around with a mixture of triumph and concern, as though she had unintentionally extinguished us into silence too.

‘Well,’ said Adam finally, ‘I don’t really know about that. All I know is that he repeatedly said that he wanted to see you. Doesn’t that make a difference?’

‘I know why he does,’ snapped Vivian. ‘He wants to know what I’m up to. Well, if he asks you can tell him — I’ve had enough! Tell him that and see what he says!’

‘I’d rather you told him yourself,’ said Adam.

‘You’ve got to tell him yourself,’ nodded Lisa. ‘He’s your husband, Vivian.’

‘He isn’t my husband, you know,’ said Vivian darkly. ‘Not in the eyes of the church he isn’t. I was already married, you see. In the eyes of the church we’re living in sin!’

‘Janie,’ said Lisa, alarmed, ‘can you take Hamish and play outside?’

‘I don’t want to,’ said Janie.

‘I’m asking you to,’ said Lisa.

‘I’m frightened of that boy.’

‘That’s between you and dad,’ said Adam.

There was the sound of footsteps out in the hall. A woman came into the room carrying a baby. Both of them were very large and fair-haired and wore light-coloured, clean but very crumpled clothing, so that in the gloom of the kitchen, in their detailed amplitude and luminosity they had the appearance of figures from a religious painting. The woman’s face had a sort of wistful purity to it, in the trenchant setting of her thick-bodied, abundant middle age, that deepened this impression. The yellow light from the window, which some peculiarity of the Hanburys’ kitchen dictated should remain in compact beams like those of a searchlight rather than diffuse itself around, fell squarely on her face and on the maze of creases in her clothes. Another fair-haired child, of about Hamish’s age, came behind her and stood clutching her skirt with his fists. Rosettes of colour were appended to his fat cheeks.

‘You’re all here,’ observed Laura, for it was she, recognisable to me only by the stubborn, little-girlish convexity of her forehead. ‘Have you all come up for lunch?’

There was something in the way she asked this question which made the matter of how to reply to it more complicated than it ought to have been.

‘Not really,’ said Adam. ‘We just dropped in.’

‘Because mummy’s running pretty low,’ Laura continued, heaving the baby around on her hip. ‘If you’re all going to stay someone should really go down to Doniford and pick up some things. We’ve been over at the stream,’ she added, with red in her face. ‘Toby’s been trying to spear a fish. Didn’t there used to be trout in there?’

‘They’ve netted it lower down,’ said Adam. ‘The people who bought the place at the bottom of the hill are starting a trout farm. Don’t you remember,’ he said to Brendon, ‘that was what dad went so crazy about last year.’

‘Spear it with what?’ asked Lisa. She wore an expression of distaste.

‘You just tie a penknife to the end of a stick,’ said Laura, as though Lisa was likely to try it.

‘He said he was going to put sh-sheep dip in the water,’ said Brendon. ‘But I don’t think he ever did.’

‘Do you want to run down or shall I?’ said Laura.

‘I was going to boil up these potatoes,’ said Vivian.

‘Laura,’ said Lisa, drawing confidentially to Laura’s side and speaking into her ear, ‘you might want to check on Rufus. He’s walking around with a crossbow. He says you gave it him.’

Laura looked straight ahead while Lisa addressed her ear, an expression of amusement on her face, as though she were hearing something entertaining on the telephone.

‘Is he being really awful?’ she said delightedly.

‘It’s just that he says you gave it him.’

‘He got it for his birthday,’ said Laura. ‘He’s quite a good shot, actually.’

‘The thing is,’ said Lisa discreetly, ‘the other children won’t go outside.’

‘They’ve just got to stand up to him!’ cried Laura. ‘Tell them to shout at him if he bothers them. Is he being really awful?’ she asked again. ‘Nobody at school invites him home any more, you know. They’ve been told not to invite him home. He’s quite upset about it.’

‘I think they’re a bit frightened to go out,’ said Lisa.

‘What are they frightened of? Polly’s out there, isn’t she?’

‘Polly’s got an axe,’ said Janie.

‘Look, shall I just leave the children here and run down to the shops?’ said Laura, looking around at us with purpose flaming in her pale blue eyes.

‘What do you mean?’ said Lisa.

‘She’s got an axe. I saw her.’

‘Shall I?’ said Laura. She inched towards the door. ‘Look, I’ll take the baby,’ she added, as though brokering her own escape.

‘There’s no need to go if you don’t want to,’ said Adam. ‘We don’t want much. Vivian’s going to boil the potatoes.’

‘If you let her go she won’t come back until tomorrow,’ Vivian interjected from beneath her brows. ‘I tell you, she won’t — she’ll phone from Doniford and say that something’s come up and could we keep the children overnight.’

‘That’s charming!’ shrieked Laura, laughing robustly and nevertheless keeping her hand on the door handle.

‘It’s true,’ said Vivian quaveringly. ‘You don’t realise you’ll have to do it all again,’ she said, to me. ‘It’s all right for the men — they just claim a sort of immunity, don’t they? They say they don’t know how to do it because they didn’t do it the first time and now it’s too late for them to learn, and that sort of thing, don’t they?’

‘Laura, Janie says Polly’s got hold of an axe,’ said Lisa.

‘I saw her,’ said Janie.

‘Well, you tell her it’s naughty,’ said Laura.

‘I don’t want to tell her,’ said Janie.

‘You’re not frightened of Polly too, are you?’ said Laura. ‘You’re frightened of everyone! Is she shy?’ she said to Lisa.

I heard footsteps in the hall and the kitchen door slowly opened with Laura’s hand still holding the handle. Caris put her bushy head into the room. Her manner was ostentatiously cautious. I was arrested by the distinctive expression on her face: she looked excited and slightly devious and somewhat ashamed. It was an expression I had seen before only on the face of my wife. Slowly she digested the fact of the crowded kitchen and as I watched I saw subjectivity break as though in rays or waves over her physiognomy. Her obscure knowledge of who she was rose into her face and shone glaringly through the strange derangement of her features. With her same great deliberateness of manner she stayed like that for several seconds, her body out of the room and her head in it, regarding us all with an expression of wonderment.

‘Not particularly,’ said Lisa, who had looked at Caris and looked away again.

I wondered if Caris had gone in some way mad, for she did remain in utter self-consciousness at the door, moving her eyes from one to another of us with a little smile. Her head, unbodied, began to look slightly eerie. I noticed that no one spoke to her. It struck me that this might be reinforcing her madness — that her expression could be that of someone whom numerous people are feigning an inability to see. I thought I understood, though, why no one did speak to her: it was her air of great import, which seemed to presage an announcement that never came.

‘Polly’s completely harmless,’ said Laura, who appeared not to have noticed that Caris’s face, with its mystical expression, was suspended a mere ten or twelve inches from her own. ‘You can’t be frightened of Polly!’

‘She’s got an axe,’ said Janie. ‘I saw her running after that boy with it.’

‘Oh, she’s only playing. She wouldn’t actually hurt him, you know. Oh look!’ Laura laughed, pointing at Janie. ‘She’s terrified, the poor little thing!’

Caris finally made her announcement.

‘Mum’s here,’ she said.

Vivian looked up.

‘Here?’ she said.

‘She brought me up in the car. She’s outside talking to Rufus. I thought I’d come and warn you.’

‘What’s she doing here?’ said Vivian.

From outside I could hear the sound of the dogs barking.

‘She’s just come up to say hello,’ said Caris. Her look was inscrutable.

‘Well, no one invited her,’ said Vivian. ‘It’s a bit much, just to turn up uninvited!’

‘Vivian,’ said Adam pacifically, ‘come on. Mum’s always up here with you and dad.’

‘If she wants to see him she knows where to find him,’ said Vivian. ‘She can’t just come turning up here uninvited!’

There was a commotion out in the hall and suddenly the door was thrown ajar against Laura and the dogs tumbled through, tearing around Caris’s legs and into the kitchen. They skidded over the flagstone floor and hurled themselves with a deafening volley of barks at Vivian’s chair. Vivian shrieked and got to her feet, knocking the chair to the floor. The dogs snapped their livid, fleshy muzzles at her over the upended legs and made contorted shapes around her with their scruffy bodies.

‘Get down!’ shouted Adam, lunging for their collars. He kicked one of the dogs and its skinny, unresisting legs skated over the floor.

A woman’s voice drifted in from the hall.

‘What on earth were Nell and Daisy doing locked up?’ she said. ‘I found them out in the stable — I couldn’t believe my eyes!’

Adam held both dogs by their collars and they strained madly at his arms, barking, their clawed feet skating and scratching over the flagstones.

‘What are you doing?’ said Audrey, appearing in the doorway. ‘Let them go, Adam! You look like that man at the gates of hell.’

‘I can’t,’ puffed Adam. ‘They keep going for Vivian.’

‘They just went mad,’ said Lisa.

‘I don’t like them!’ wailed Janie.

‘What do you mean, they keep going for her? They’re just a pair of silly old girls. Aren’t you? You’re just a pair of silly old girls. You don’t go for people. No, not like the hounds of hell. Not like the horrid hounds from hell.’

Audrey had advanced into the room and was caressing the dogs’ slobbering muzzles as she spoke. They made high-pitched mewling sounds. She was wearing a close-fitting brown coat made of some kind of skin or pelt. Her slim, shapely legs were bare. On her feet she wore narrow, high-heeled boots of the same brown, hairy material as the coat. I became aware of her scent, which was moving in a body over the room. It was a heady smell composed of numerous elements — perfume, face powder, soap, leather, a smell of varnish — and their notes sounded on me randomly and repeatedly.

‘Do you like my new coat?’ she said girlishly, whirling round to face us all. ‘I got it in London last week. It’s pony. Don’t you think it’s divine? The boots were made to match. They cost the earth! But I had to have them, didn’t I? The pony has to have her little hooves shod.’

‘Was it really a pony?’ said Janie to her mother. Her expression was perturbed.

‘God, it’s fantastic,’ said Laura enthusiastically, stroking Audrey’s arm.

‘Was it really?’ said Janie.

‘It’s absolutely lovely,’ said Lisa. Her tone was uncharacteristically professorial. She looked slightly stiff beneath Janie’s scrutiny.

‘I’m going to put the dogs back out in the yard,’ said Adam.

‘I love clothes,’ said Laura, ‘but I never buy them any more. Look.’ She lifted her shirt cheerfully to reveal the zip of her skirt peeled open to accommodate her white, fleshy middle. ‘I can’t do anything up.’

‘There isn’t another baby in there, is there?’ pouted Audrey.

‘Don’t!’ shrieked Laura.

‘No more babies,’ said Audrey, shaking her manicured finger.

‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ said Laura delightedly.

‘I met one of yours outside — he wanted to show me how to use his crossbow. It’s rather fun, isn’t it? I shot my bolt straight into a tree and imagined all sorts of people it might be. He was very gentlemanly when I showed him my new boots, and he climbed up and got it himself, gorgeous boy.’

‘Roger would divorce me if I had any more,’ said Laura.

‘I made Paul get his tubes tied after Brendon,’ said Audrey. ‘He protested mightily. Oh, how the lord and master protested. He said it was the death of possibility. I said to him, darling, we’ve got three lumping great possibilities already. How much more possibility do you want? I said, if I have any more possibilities I’ll have to start wearing support tights and girdles. That galvanised him, I’m telling you.’

It was difficult to get a sense of Audrey’s face, submerged as it was beneath a meticulous mask of make-up. Two pencil lines described the surprised arc of her brows. Her eyelashes stood out in great curving black fronds which fanned up and down when she blinked. It was in her mouth, a red, wrinkled, oily delta of lipstick, that her age declared itself. Her eyes glittered erratically beneath the black fronds. She had retained, I saw, the tousled hairstyle of her earlier era, although today it looked slightly askew, as though it had been thrown at her head and nearly missed. I wondered whether she had had a facelift. The skin of her face had a boiled appearance, and there was about her generally an air of frantic uplift, of a bodily effort to ascend as though from some sinking substance in which her feet were mired. Caris was looking at her mother with her arms folded and the same strange, lilting smile on her face that she had worn earlier. Brendon remained at the kitchen table, but he had pushed back his chair and was holding his arms and legs slightly out to the sides, as though someone had just placed their hands on his chest and shoved him forcefully backwards. Adam still gripped the straining dogs by their collars.

‘I’m just going to put them out,’ he said again.

‘You’ll have to shut them back in the stable,’ said Vivian, who remained as though for defence behind the upended chair. ‘Right in, do you see, otherwise they get out through the gate.’

‘What are they saying?’ said Audrey, looking about her with gracious incredulity.

‘I’m putting the dogs back in the stable.’

‘Why on earth are you doing that?’

‘They’ve got a bit wild with dad away.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Audrey. ‘Come and see mummy, darlings. Don’t listen to what those horrid people say about you.’

‘They bark at Vivian.’

‘They bark at me,’ said Caris, still smiling.

Audrey looked around the room in distress. Her garlanded eyes met mine.

‘Perhaps you can tell me what they’re talking about,’ she said sweetly. ‘They’re talking about locking up animals, aren’t they?’

‘If you’re going out I’ll go out with you,’ said Laura to Adam, edging towards the door with the baby in her arms. ‘I’m just going to run down to Doniford.’

‘Do you know Paul?’ said Audrey, to me. ‘He’s very fond of these old girls. I don’t think he’d like them being locked up, do you?’

‘They’re only dogs,’ said Vivian quaveringly. ‘They’re not children. It’s not as though we’re talking about locking up children.’

‘What an extraordinary thing to say!’ gasped Audrey comically. ‘Are you suggesting something, Vivian darling, about my reputation as a mother? Because from what Caris tells me you’ve got some history of your own in that department!’

‘I was just saying that they’re only dogs,’ Vivian said.

‘I always think you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog,’ said Audrey, to all of us. ‘Particularly men. I like a man who gives a dog a good tousling. I can’t stand it when you see a man sort of cross his legs. And the ones who claim to be allergic are the worst.’

‘I’m the one that feeds them, you know,’ said Vivian. ‘I’m the one that looks after them.’

‘Is this dogs or children, darling? I suppose you’d say it was both. The feeding hangs heavy in both cases. Still, locking them up is a little extreme. I don’t think I went down that road, even in my worst moments.’

‘They should have gone to kennels,’ said Adam. He had an uncomfortable expression on his face, as though he were slowly being suffocated by his own body.

‘I always thought that about all of you,’ Audrey said. ‘I remember there used to be a sign on the way down to Doniford that said “Cat Hotel”. Every time I passed it I used to wonder whether they’d make an exception.’

‘That isn’t actually all that funny,’ said Caris.

‘It might not seem funny to you,’ said Audrey. ‘I think people don’t really develop a sense of humour until they have children,’ she added, to me. ‘It’s hard to take things quite so seriously once you’ve wiped a few bottoms. Mine seem to think that I don’t know about their bottoms. Perhaps it’d be better if I didn’t. There’s a point at which one’s information becomes obsolete — it’s terribly bad for the brain. I often look at women my age and think that they’re just slated for extinction, like the dinosaurs.’

‘In a way, you did put them in kennels,’ Vivian said, as though the idea were not unpleasing to her. ‘The children. You did board them in a way.’

Audrey laughed. ‘What a horrible thing to say, darling! And I suppose you were the kennel master. Of course,’ she said, to me, ‘everyone forgets the fact that they were with their father. He’d never have let them go in a million years. But don’t try telling that to anyone. If you’re a woman people think you owe them an explanation. And if you ever find one that feels sorry for you it’s even worse! They start telling you what you should be doing to get them back, and sending you the names of lawyers and asking whether you’ve rung them.’

‘Janie,’ said Lisa, in her ‘discreet’ voice, ‘I asked you to take Hamish and play together outside.’

‘All right,’ said Janie. ‘I’m not going out that way, though.’

‘Go out the front,’ said Lisa, ‘where we can see you from the window.’

She came to where I stood and held out her hand for Hamish. He took it quite willingly. Together they went to the other door and a moment later I saw them through the window out on the lawn. Hamish was walking over the grass in a straight line, like a toy that had been wound up. Janie walked beside him in a crouched position that suggested vigilance.

‘And had you?’ said Caris.

‘Had I what, darling?’ said Audrey.

‘Rung them.’

‘What, rung a lawyer? Of course not! We never needed lawyers, did we, Vivian? We were all eminently reasonable. The only one who got lawyered was Vivian’s poor old husband. We lawyered him all the way to the Isle of Wight, if I remember.’

‘He threw a rock through the window,’ said Vivian, looking around her abjectly, as though expecting to find it still lying at her feet.

‘I’m not surprised he threw rocks, darling. He was terribly upset. Paul always said what a rotter he was, but then it suited him to say that. Men tend to take the path of least resistance, I find. He was actually rather sweet, wasn’t he, Vivian? And he did love you desperately. They had these pet names for one another. He was Hippo and she was — what were you, Vivian?’

‘Elephant,’ said Vivian miserably.

‘That’s right!’ said Audrey, delighted. ‘Paul told me that Ivybridge was full of them, you know, little figurines of hippos and elephants. They collected them, the two of them! They were absolutely everywhere, apparently, all over the house. Whatever happened to them?’

‘I threw them away,’ said Vivian.

‘You might have let him have them,’ said Audrey reproachfully.

‘He didn’t want them.’

‘Poor Hippo,’ said Audrey. ‘Poor submersible creature.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Caris, who was wearing her expression of wonderment again.

‘We’re talking about hippos and elephants,’ said Audrey, with an adversarial glint in her fronded eye. ‘You know what hippos and elephants are, don’t you? They’re big, sweet creatures that tolerate captivity. Some animals don’t, you know. They get sad and lethargic and their fur goes all mangy.’

Caris shook her head from side to side as though she were trying to dislodge something. Again I saw in her face the strange effort of self-realisation.

‘You make it sound so simple,’ she said.

‘Well, it was. Or is there something you don’t understand? Perhaps I’m being insensitive. The thing is, I never had the luxury of sensitivity. I had to take things as I found them. That’s the problem with children,’ she said, to me. ‘You go to the trouble of having them and then you find that all you’ve done is guarantee you’ll come in second place for ever more. I gave you life, sweetie,’ she said to Caris. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

‘It wasn’t simple for me,’ said Caris.

‘That’s so typical,’ said Adam. ‘Little Miss Self-Obsessed. If anyone found it hard it was Brendon. He was only six.’

‘The same age as Janie,’ nodded Lisa.

‘It wasn’t as bad for him as it was for me,’ said Caris, with her lilting smile.

‘Brendon used to bang his head,’ said Vivian strangely.

‘What do you mean, bang his head?’ said Adam.

‘He used to bang his head against the wall. It made the most horrible sound.’

Brendon looked around at everybody with an expression of astonishment.

‘See?’ said Adam triumphantly. ‘It was worse for him.’

‘I couldn’t stop him,’ said Vivian. ‘He did it in his sleep, you see. I used to make him go to bed wearing a hat.’

Brendon laughed loudly.

‘The things that went on!’ marvelled Audrey, drawing her coat tighter around herself. ‘It’s a good thing I wasn’t here to see it all. I don’t think I could have borne it! You see, they used to be like puppies,’ she added, to me. ‘They tumbled around together like lion cubs. Then they started to develop human characteristics — that was where the problems began, with the human characteristics. Now they’re like those countries that are always at war. They’re dug in, if you see what I mean.’

‘I’m not at war,’ Caris said.

‘When you were puppies I could resolve your disputes, darling. It was all about who had whose thing. I was rather good at that. Whoever could hang on to it could keep it as far as I was concerned. It was when the human characteristics came along that I got out of my depth. I remember I started to think about shoes. I used to lie there at night and think about the silliest, most impractical shoes I could imagine. It was the only way I kept my sanity while all of you were at each other’s throats. The problem with shoes was that I could never wear them up here. I had to move to Doniford. I exchanged human characteristics for shoes,’ she said, to me. ‘It was the most enormous relief.’

‘You make it sound as though you planned it,’ said Caris, with a smile.

‘There’s no harm in a little planning,’ said Audrey. ‘A little planning goes a long way in human affairs. The people with characteristics don’t see it like that, though. They don’t like it when you’ve got characteristics of your own. Your father used to say that you were predators. They’ll take it all, he said, if you let them. They’ll rip your heart out and eat it if they have to.’

Adam, Caris and Brendon did not, it had to be admitted, look particularly capable of this gruesome feat. Adam still held the dogs awkwardly by their collars. Lisa stood next to him with the baby on her hip. I looked at the baby’s rubescent, startled face, which shone blankly like a little sun in the gloomy room, and at her plump, soft body, possessed by incomprehension. Beside Lisa, Caris looked black and monumental and unkempt. Her arms were folded and her face looked stormy and disordered, as though it had been taken apart and wrongly reassembled. Brendon sat blanched and prostrate in his chair. The air was charged with their mother’s force of will: next to her they seemed anomalous. Behind them Vivian haunted the cooker: she hovered, dark and frayed and threadlike. Audrey, compact, scented, her face blazing in its make-up, presented herself as an advertisement for the virtues of self-preservation.

‘Audrey,’ said Lisa, ‘I’m sure Paul didn’t actually mean that.’

‘That’s sweet of you,’ said Audrey vaguely. ‘But I think he probably did. Look at you all!’ she burst out with a gay laugh. ‘You look like a queue of dissatisfied customers! I think I’d better slip away, before I have to start apologising. You don’t ever want to apologise,’ she said, to me. ‘That’s how you give people the idea that you’ve done something wrong. Vivian darling, I just came up for that cheque. I think the postman must have pocketed it. It was due last week. It doesn’t matter, if you can just write me another now.’

Vivian stood over the saucepan of potatoes, which had begun to boil. Clouds of steam enveloped her head. The lid rattled on top of the pan and the water spilled out in little hissing spurts.

‘I don’t think I can,’ she said.

‘Usually I don’t like to bother you,’ said Audrey. ‘It’s so tiresome when people bother you, isn’t it? I think it must have got lost in the post. I’ve been lying in wait like a panther for the postman all week. When he comes I leap on him.’

‘But I didn’t post it,’ said Vivian.

‘And now I’ve had to come all the way up, and I had a thousand and one things I meant to do today — it was the last thing I wanted to do, to start coming up to Egypt! I always get embroiled when I come up here. Embroilment was not in the plan today. Today I was going to be all efficiency so that I could be carefree tomorrow.’

There was a silence in the kitchen. Audrey stood in an expectant pose, one hand slightly raised, as though to catch something she believed was about to be thrown to her, or as though she were holding a vessel from which she had just poured the last dregs of an important substance.

‘Vivian,’ she said meaningfully, ‘you do see how annoying it is for me to have to come up?’

Vivian said nothing. The baby made a plaintive sound.

‘In the middle of everything I had to start getting in the car and running around! Paul always said I wasn’t to do that, you know,’ Audrey said, to me. ‘Don’t wear yourself out, he said. Women always wear themselves out. By the time they get to fifty they’re like a set of old tyres. They’ve lost their tread.’

The telephone rang in the hall and before Audrey had finished speaking Vivian had darted out of the room to answer it.

‘Has she gone?’ said Audrey smartly, looking around. ‘I didn’t know she could move so fast. It’s because she’s being evasive — she’s moving fast to evade the issue.’

‘She won’t see dad,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve been trying to get her to go in but she won’t. I don’t understand what’s going on. Dad said that none of you have been in. Only Uncle David.’

‘I sent David as a sop,’ said Audrey darkly. ‘I suspected your father of shenanigans, but now I’m not so sure. I think Vivian may be acting alone.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, mum.’

‘That was Laura,’ said Vivian abstractedly, coming in again. ‘I thought she was here but then the telephone rang and it was her. She’s in Doniford. I don’t know how she did it. She says she’s got the baby but the three older ones are still here. I haven’t seen them, have you? I don’t know how she did it,’ she said again. She looked around, as though thinking she might find her. ‘I was sure she was here.’

‘I was always good at that,’ said Audrey. ‘I used to leave you everywhere! Once I left Brendon in a shop. I completely forgot about him — he was there all afternoon. He hid like a little marsupial in a rack of clothes.’

‘You’ve had enough, don’t you think?’ said Vivian, looking at Audrey through her fringe. ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’

‘Had enough of what, darling? I’ve certainly had enough of babies. That one’s lovely but the very sight of her makes me want to run a mile.’

‘She’s really no trouble to you, Audrey,’ said Lisa, who had gone slightly white. She clutched the baby to her chest and jiggled her up and down. ‘I don’t think you can accuse her of having been any trouble.’

‘There has to be a limit,’ said Vivian. ‘It can’t just go on and on. It can’t be like a cow giving milk, on and on.’

‘A cow?’ said Audrey. She looked around at everyone in comic mystification.

‘They call me a cow,’ said Vivian flatly. ‘I heard them in the supermarket. Someone said, where does she get all her money, and they said, don’t you know, she’s got a cash cow.’

‘Who has?’ said Audrey.

‘You. Marjory said I’m your cash cow. I heard her say it. I was in the supermarket last week and I was bending down so they couldn’t see me, because they were in the next aisle, you see, and I heard them.’

‘Darling, it was probably nothing to do with you! They were probably talking about real cows, you know, moo —’

‘They said my name. They were in the next aisle, you see. It was as if they were standing right beside me. They said I was a cash cow.’

‘Well,’ said Audrey lightly, after a pause, ‘people are very silly — you know that, Vivian, as well as I do. The fact is that we have our arrangement and what other people say about it isn’t really the point, is it?’

‘It’s horrible,’ said Vivian.

‘Poor darling. Poor Vivian,’ said Audrey, slightly impatiently.

‘It means that every time you want money you come and milk me. You and Paul pull the udders and the money comes out!’

‘I know what it means,’ said Audrey, tapping her foot on the flagstones.

‘That’s what people say. It means that you exploit me.’

‘Nobody exploits you!’

‘If you keep milking me I’ll run dry, you know. I’ll have nothing left — all the money daddy gave me, and not a penny of it left for Laura and Jilly!’

‘You got plenty for it,’ said Audrey. Her voice was unkind. ‘You got plenty for your damned money. I gave you my house. I gave you my children. I gave you my man. He was my man. Mine!’ She struck her pony-haired chest unexpectedly with her small, pale fist. ‘I left the field. I bowed out gracefully and for that you had to pay.’

‘There was nothing to give, you know,’ said Vivian, to me. ‘All this talk of giving! She didn’t give me the house — I bought it.’

‘That isn’t true,’ said Caris.

‘They cooked it up between them!’ cried Vivian.

‘Mum, that isn’t true,’ said Caris.

Audrey gave a little shrug and turned to the window with her arms folded.

‘Vivian did help daddy out a little with the farm,’ she said. ‘I never knew by how much. I think I can be forgiven for not wanting to know, can’t I?’

‘He got a valuation from that friend of his in town and he said that was what I had to pay — it was far more than it was worth! My husband told me that. He said, get your name on the deeds. Whatever you do, get your name on the deeds.’

Audrey snorted.

‘What would Hippo know about the valuation?’ she said. ‘The submersible was usually submerged in gin by lunchtime.’

‘It didn’t last them long! They ran through it all!’ said Vivian. ‘All of it!’

‘Honestly, Vivian,’ said Audrey, ‘you make it sound as though you were frog-marched into it. The fact is, darling, you went to bed with my husband.’

‘He seduced me, you know,’ said Vivian forlornly, to me.

‘Nobody made you do it,’ said Audrey. ‘Nobody forced you.’

‘He sent me a lamb. It was a little white lamb for the children. We all thought it was terribly sweet but after two months it was enormous. They used to give it all sorts of food, you see, and it got very big and aggressive until in the end it used to run at them and knock them over. It was like a bull — it wasn’t like a sheep at all!’

Audrey laughed. ‘That should have told you everything you needed to know, darling.’

‘Jilly scratched her face until it bled,’ Vivian said, to me. ‘For a whole year she scratched her face. None of the women would speak to me. Then he said we should send them away to school because the house was too crowded. And I said, well, why don’t we send them all away in that case, and he said, no, we can’t do that, it would cost too much to send them all, so mine were sent and his stayed. So I was left looking after three children who weren’t mine, do you see?’

‘You didn’t have to do it,’ said Audrey.

‘I suppose I wanted him to love me,’ said Vivian. ‘Sometimes you do things you oughtn’t to, don’t you? You can be quite outside yourself.’

‘You’re very sweet to talk about love,’ said Audrey.

‘Is it Vivian’s name that’s on the deeds?’ said Adam.

‘Of course it’s not!’ scoffed Audrey. ‘Do you really think your father would do that, after everything we went through? That was definitely not part of the deal.’

‘What deal?’ said Caris.

‘The arrangement, then. Everyone makes arrangements, darling.’

‘Every month I pay her,’ said Vivian. ‘They won’t talk to me until I do.’

‘That’s my alimony!’ said Audrey. ‘That’s the least you owe me!’

‘You always get alimony, Vivian,’ said Lisa, ‘in a case like this.’

‘But it’s rather a lot,’ said Vivian. ‘It’s an awful lot, you know. It’s a bit much, isn’t it, when you think about it.’

‘Have you got anything actually written down?’ said Adam.

‘Especially since I pay for the house separately and everything separately, do you see what I mean?’

‘Why couldn’t dad pay it?’ said Caris. She seemed perplexed. ‘He’s got plenty of money. He’s always had money.’

‘He hasn’t, actually,’ said Adam, after a pause.

‘Of course he has!’ said Caris.

‘He hasn’t. I saw the accounts. He’s been running the farm at a loss.’

‘They haven’t got a penny between them, you know — that’s why they got their cash cow. They came and found me!’ said Vivian, her hands gyrating at her sides. ‘They hunted me down, both of them! Don’t you think I don’t know what you did!’ she said, to Audrey. ‘I know! Everybody knows!’ She turned to me. ‘They cooked it up between them!’ she cried. ‘Ask anyone — they’ll tell you!’

She buried her fists in her black mop of hair and looked at us all wildly. A sort of electricity seemed to be coursing through her body: her eyes were alarmed and her face wore a strange grimace, and where her hands were clutching her hair it stood on end.

‘Everybody just did what they wanted!’ she said.

‘Including you,’ said Audrey. ‘You did what you wanted. In fact, you had a high old time.’

‘They call it living in sin, you know,’ she said, to me. ‘It’s rather a good expression for it, don’t you think?’

‘Oh stop it!’ said Caris. ‘I won’t listen to it any more! All this talk about sin — if you want sin, don’t look for it here! Look for it outside in the world, because there’s plenty of it, Vivian! There are places that are drowning in it! It’s feelings that matter,’ she concluded, clutching at her heart.

‘She didn’t want them, that was part of it,’ said Vivian, to me. ‘Her own children! That was the part that was really beyond belief.’

‘I won’t hear you!’ cried Caris. ‘I won’t, I won’t!’

She put her hands over her ears. Her expression was triumphant.

‘Personally,’ Adam said presently, in a statesmanlike tone, ‘I respect mum for it. You can’t put a price on Egypt, Vivian. Our family belongs here. It wasn’t that she didn’t want us. She did it for us. There’s a bit of a difference, don’t you think?’

Audrey was looking at her son with an interested expression, her finger resting on her chin.

‘The thing is,’ said Vivian, ‘it was only because my husband told me. I wouldn’t have known otherwise. I wouldn’t have known to ask. But he said, whatever you do, stick to it. Stick to it or they’ll have you lock, stock and barrel. It’s awful in a way, when you think of how we treated him. He got nothing out of it himself, you know. He lives in a flat. Laura says it’s awfully modest. I paid far too much for it, of course. They ran through it in a year!’

‘Do stop it, darling,’ said Audrey. ‘You’re sounding positively addled. What was I supposed to do? I had to get my house — I couldn’t just go and camp in a field, could I? And that sort of property is terribly expensive in Doniford. Everyone wants it, you know.’

‘He called me a bloody viper.’

‘Who did?’

‘A bloody viper. Don’t you think that’s vicious?’ said Vivian, looking around at us. ‘He said he’d never forgive me!’

‘You had to do without Hippo’s forgiveness,’ said Audrey. ‘We all did. Thank heavens for the Isle of Wight!’

‘He said, I’m not giving Egypt to a bloody viper. I’m not giving my house to a bloody snake in the grass, that’s what he said. And I said, well, I shan’t come then, you can manage on your own. He was terribly rude, you know. But he signed. He had to sign — he had no choice, do you see? I felt rather pleased with myself. I wanted to ring my husband and tell him but of course I couldn’t by then. He wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘Sign what?’ said Adam.

‘I don’t think he ever has forgiven me, you know,’ said Vivian miserably. ‘At the time I thought I’d been rather clever, but now I wish I hadn’t done it. I sometimes think he might have felt more for me if I hadn’t. And you don’t forget it, someone calling you a bloody viper, not when you have to see them every day. It wasn’t as though I even wanted the farm! Ivybridge was much more sheltered, you know — one got the sun all year there. I wonder sometimes if my husband knew that was what would happen. He was the one who encouraged me, you know. He was the one who said I had to get it all in my name.’

There was silence in the kitchen. The Hanburys stared at one another, stared and stared, with faces that filled with calculation and then emptied and filled again. There seemed to be no air in the room, no suspending element — it was as though we stood in the lee of a gathering wave as it sucked everything back into itself. I felt the presence of a catastrophe, an emergency whose tumultuous moments we had entered as a boat might enter a field of rapids. A bitter smell assailed my nostrils. I realised that the room was filling with smoke.

‘I think the potatoes are burning,’ I said.

Just then there was a child’s cry out on the lawn, a wail that went up and down and came closer like a siren, until it was in the hall, echoing horribly in the confinement of the house. There was the sound of something being knocked over and falling with a clatter to the floor. Janie burst into the kitchen. Her face was a wreck of tears.

‘Rufus shot the little boy!’ she shrieked. ‘They’re out in the garden! You have to come! He shot the little boy with his crossbow!’

I don’t know what the others did. I ran out of the house and over the damp lawn, towards the ring of oaks where Caris and I had once kissed, and where I saw the fair heads of the children, clustered together like the bright little heads of flowers, weaving and moving as though in the ecstasy of their impermanence.