Shape of Snakes

*2*

I recognized Dr. Arnold as soon as I opened the door to her, although there was no answering smile of recognition from her. I wasn't surprised. We were both twenty years older, and I had changed a great deal more than she had after two decades abroad. She was silver-haired and thinner, late fifties, I judged, but she still had the same rather searching gray eyes and air of unassailable competence. On the only other occasion I'd met her, I'd found her thoroughly intimidating, but today she gave me a sisterly pat on the arm when I told her my husband was complaining of chest pains."He says it's a pulled muscle," I said, leading the way up the stairs of our rented farmhouse, "but he had a coronary six months ago and I'm worried he's about to have another one."

In the event, Sam was right-it was a pulled muscle from too much digging in the garden the day before-and I concealed my total lack of surprise behind an apologetic smile. Dr. Arnold reproved him for scoffing at my concern. "You can't take chances," she told him, folding her stethoscope, "not when you've had one close shave already."

Sam, whose memory for faces was almost as bad as his memory for names, buttoned his shirt and cast an irritable glance in my direction. "It's a ridiculous fuss about nothing." he complained. "I said I'd go to the surgery but she wouldn't let me ... just takes it into her head to start treating me like a blasted invalid."

"He's been biting my head off all morning," I told Dr. Arnold. "It's one of the reasons I thought it might be serious."

"Goddamit!" Sam snapped. "What's the matter with you? All I said was, I had a small twinge in my side ... which isn't surprising in view of the number of weeds I hauled out yesterday. The garden's a mess, the house is falling down. What am I supposed to do? Sit on my hands all day?"

Dr. Arnold poured oil on troubled waters. "You should be grateful you have someone who still cares enough to make the phone call," she said with a laugh. "I had a patient once whose wife left him to writhe in agony on the kitchen floor while she downed half a bottle of gin to celebrate her imminent widowhood."

Sam wasn't the type to stay angry for long. "Did he survive?" he asked with a grin.

"Just about. The marriage didn't." She studied his face for a moment, then looked curiously toward me. "I feel I know you both but I can't think why."

"I recognized you when I opened the door," I said. "It's an extraordinary coincidence. You were our GP in Richmond. We lived in Graham Road from '76 to the beginning of '79. You came to our house once when Sam had a bout of bronchitis."

She nodded immediately. "Mrs. Ranelagh. I should have recognized the name. You're the one who found Annie Butts. I've often wondered where you went and what happened to you."

I looked casually from her to Sam, and was relieved to see surprised pleasure on both their faces, and no suspicion...

Sam landed a job as overseas sales director for a shipping company, which took us in turn to Hong Kong, Australia and South Africa. They were good times, and I came to understand why black sheep are so often sent abroad by their families to start again. It does wonders for the character to cut the emotional ties that bind you to places and people. We produced two sons who grew like saplings in the never-ending sunshine and soon towered over their parents, and I could always find teaching jobs in whichever school was educating them.

As one always does, we thought of ourselves as immortal, so Sam's coronary at the age of fifty-two came like a bolt from the blue. With doctors warning of another one being imminent if he didn't change a lifestyle that involved too much traveling, too much entertaining of clients and too little exercise, we returned to England in the summer of '99 with no employment and a couple of boys in their late teens who had never seen their homeland.

For no particular reason except that we'd spent our honeymoon in Dorset in '76, we decided to rent an old farmhouse near Dorchester, which I found among the property ads in the Sunday Times before we left Cape Town. The idea was to have an extended summer holiday while we looked around for somewhere more permanent to settle. Neither of us had connections with any particular part of England. My husband's parents were dead and my own parents had retired to the neighboring county of Devon and the balmy climate of Torquay. We enrolled the boys at college for the autumn and set out to rediscover our roots. We'd done well during our time abroad and there was no immediate hurry for either of us to find a job. Or so we imagined.

The reality was rather different. England had changed into New Labor's "Cool Britannia" during the time we'd been abroad, strikes were almost unknown, the pace of life had quickened dramatically and there was a new widespread affluence that hadn't existed in the '70s. We couldn't believe how expensive everything was, how crowded the roads were and how difficult it was to find a parking space now that "shopping" had become the Brits' favorite pastime. Hastily the boys abandoned us for their own age group. Garden fetes and village cricket were for old people. Designer clothes and techno music were the order of the day, and clubs and theme pubs were the places to be seen, particularly those that stayed open into the early hours to show widescreen satellite feeds of world sporting fixtures.

"Do you get the feeling we've been left behind?" Sam asked glumly at the end of our first week as we sat like a couple of pensioners on the patio of our rented farmhouse, watching some horses graze in a nearby paddock.

"By the boys."

"No. Our peers. I was talking to Jock Williams on the phone today"-an old friend from our Richmond days-"and he told me he made a couple of million last year by selling off one of his businesses." He made a wry face. "So I asked him how many businesses he had left, and he said, only two but together they're worth ten million. He wanted to know what I was doing so I lied through my teeth."

I took time to wonder why it never seemed to occur to Sam that Jock was as big a fantasist as he was, particularly as Jock had been trumpeting "mega-buck sales" down the phone to him for years but had never managed to find the time-or money?-to fly out for a visit. "What did you say?"

"That we'd made a killing on the Hong Kong stock market before it reverted to China and could afford to take early retirement. I also said we were buying an eight-bedroom house and a hundred acres in Dorset."

"Mm." I used my foot to stir some clumps of grass growing between the cracks in the patio, which were symptomatic of the air of tired neglect that pervaded the whole property. "A brick box in a modern development more likely. I had a look in a real estate agent's window yesterday and anything of any size is well outside our price range. Something like this would cost around Ł300,000 and that's not counting the money we'd need to spend doing it up. Let's just hope Jock doesn't decide to visit."

Sam's gloom deepened at the prospect. "If we'd had any sense we'd have hung on to the house on Graham Road. Jock says it's worth ten times what we paid for it in '76. We were mad to sell. You need to keep a stake in the property market if you want to trade up to something reasonable."

There were times when I despaired of my husband's memory. It was a peculiarly selective one that allowed him to remember the precise details of past negotiating triumphs but insisted he forgot where the cutlery was kept in every kitchen we'd ever had. It had its advantages-he was easily persuaded he was in the wrong-but once in a while it caught me on the raw. At the very least, he ought to have remembered the weeks of abuse that followed the inquest into Annie's death...

"It was my choice to leave," I said flatly, "and I don't care if we end up living in a caravan, it's one decision I'll never regret. You might have been able to stay on Graham Road ... I certainly couldn't ... not once the phone calls started anyway."

He eyed me nervously. "I thought you'd forgotten all that."

"No."

The horses kicked up their heels for no apparent reason to canter to the other side of the field, and I wondered how good their hearing was and whether they could pick up vibrations of anger in a single word. We watched them in silence for a moment or two, and I put money on Sam backing away as usual from the period in our lives that had brought us to the brink of divorce. He chose to follow a tangent.

"In purely financial terms Jock's probably right, though," he said. "If we'd kept the house and let it, we'd not only have had an income all these years but we'd have made a 1,000 percent increase on our capital to boot."

"We had a mortgage," I told him, "so the income would have gone straight into paying it off and we'd never have seen a penny of it."

"Except Jock says..."

I only half-listened to Jock's views on the beneficial effects to borrowers of the galloping inflation of the late '70s and early ' 80s and how the Thatcher revolution had freed up entrepreneurs to play roulette with other people's money. I hadn't had much time for him when we lived in London, and from Sam's reports of the conversations he'd had with him via the international phone network over the years, I could see no reason to change my opinion. Theirs was a competitive relationship, based on vainglorious self-promotion from Jock and ridiculous counterclaims from Sam, which anyone with an ounce of intelligence would see straight through.

I roused myself when Sam fell silent. "Jock Williams has been lying about money since the first time we met him." I murmured. "He latched on to us in the pub for the sole purpose of getting free drinks because he claimed he'd left his wallet at home. He said he'd pay us back but he never did. I didn't believe him then and I don't believe him now. If he's worth ten million"-I bared my teeth-"then I've got the body of a twenty-year-old."

I was doing Sam a kindness although he couldn't see it because it would never occur to him that I might know more about Jock than he did. How could I? Jock and I had had no contact since our strained farewells on the day Sam and I left London. Yet I knew exactly what Jock was worth, and I also knew that the only person likely to lose sleep over it was Jock himself when his braggadocio lies finally came home to roost.

Sam's gloom began to lift. "Oh, come on," he said. "Things aren't that bad. The old bum's spread a bit, admittedly, but the tits still hold their shape."

I gave him an affectionate cuff across the back of the head. "At least I've still got all my hair."