The Collected Stories

Obediently listening in their rows of worn desks, the children wondered what on earth all this was about. No geography or history lesson had ever been so bewildering; those who found arithmetic difficult would have settled for attempting to understand it now. They watched the lined face of their teacher, still thin as she’d said it had been in childhood, the fair hair grey now. The mouth twitched and rapidly moved, seeming sometimes to quiver as if it struggled against tears. What on earth had this person called Penelope Vade to do with anything?

‘She died believing that hell had come already. She’d lost all faith in human life, and who can blame her? She might have stayed in Haslemere, like anyone else would have. Was she right to go to the city where her husband had been murdered, to show its other victims that her spirit had not been wholly crushed?’

No one answered, and Attracta was aware of the children’s startled gaze. But the startled gaze was a natural reaction. She said to herself that it didn’t matter.

‘My story is one with hers,’ she said. ‘Horror stories, with different endings only. I think of her now and I can see quite clearly the flat she lived in in Belfast. I can see the details, correctly or not I’ve no idea. Wallpaper with a pattern of brownish-purple flowers on it, gaunt furniture casting shadows, a tea-caddy on the hired television set. I drag my body across the floors of two rooms, over a carpet that smells of dust and cigarette ash, over rugs and cool linoleum. I reach up in the kitchen, a hand on the edge of the sink: one by one I eat the aspirins until the bottle’s empty.’

There was a silence. Feet were shuffled in the schoolroom. No one spoke.

‘If only she had known,’ Attracta said, ‘that there was still a faith she might have had, that God does not forever withhold His mercy. Will those same men who exacted that vengeance on her one day keep bees and budgerigars? Will they serve in shops, and be kind to the blind and the deaf? Will they garden in the evenings and be good fathers? It is not impossible. Oh, can’t you see,’ she cried, ‘what happened in this town? Here, at the back of beyond. Can’t you appreciate it? And can’t you see her lying there, mice nibbling her dried blood?’

The children still were quiet, their faces still not registering the comment she wished to make. It was because she’d been clumsy, she thought. All she’d meant to tell them was never to despair. All she had meant to do was to prepare them for a future that looked grim. She had been happy, she said again. The conversation of Mr Purce had been full of the truth but it hadn’t made sense because the years had turned the truth around.

To the children she appeared to be talking now to herself. She was old, a few of them silently considered; that was it. She didn’t appear to understand that almost every day there was the kind of vengeance she spoke of reported on the television. Bloodshed was wholesale, girls were tarred and left for dead, children no older than they were armed with guns.

‘I only hope,’ they heard her saying, ‘she knows that strangers mourn her.’

Another silence lingered awkwardly and then she nodded at a particular child and the child rose and rang a hand-bell. The children filed away, well-mannered and docile as she had taught them to be. She watched them in the playground, standing in twos and threes, talking about her. It had meant nothing when she’d said that people change. The gleam of hope she’d offered had been too slight to be of use, irrelevant in the horror they took for granted, as part of life. Yet she could not help still believing that it mattered when monsters did not remain monsters for ever. It wasn’t much to put against the last bleak moments of Penelope Vade, but it was something for all that. She wished she could have made her point.

Twenty minutes later, when the children returned to the schoolroom, her voice no longer quivered, nor did it seem to struggle against tears. The older children learnt about agriculture in Sweden, the younger ones about the Pyrenees, the youngest that Munster had six counties. The day came to an end at three o’clock and when all the children had gone Attracta locked the schoolroom and walked to the house she had inherited in North Street.

A week later Archdeacon Flower’s successor came to, see her, his visit interrupting further violence on the television news. He beat about the bush while he nibbled biscuits and drank cups of tea by the fire; then he suggested that perhaps she should consider retiring one of these days. She was over sixty, he pointed out with his clerical laugh, and she replied that Mr Ayrie had gone on until seventy. Sixty, the clergyman repeated with another laugh, was the post’s retirement age. Children were a handful nowadays.

She smiled, thinking of her sixteen docile charges. They had chattered to their parents, and the parents had been shocked to hear that they’d been told of a man decapitated and a girl raped seven times. School was not for that, they had angrily protested to the clergyman, and he had had no option but to agree. At the end of the summer term there’d be a presentation of Waterford glass.

‘Every day in my schoolroom I should have honoured the small, remarkable thing that happened in this town. It matters that she died in despair, with no faith left in human life.’

He was brisk. For as long as most people could remember she had been a remarkable teacher; in no way had she failed. He turned the conversation to more cheerful topics, he ate more biscuits and a slice of cake. He laughed and even made a joke. He retailed a little harmless gossip.

Eventually she stood up. She walked with her visitor to the hall, shook hands with him and saw him out. In the sitting-room she piled the tea things on to a tray and placed it on a table by the door. She turned the television on again but when the screen lit up she didn’t notice it. The face of Penelope Vade came into her mind, the smile a little crooked, the freckled cheeks.

A Dream of Butterflies

Various people awoke with a sense of relief. Sleepily, Colin Rhodes wondered what there was to be relieved about. As he did in the moment of waking every morning, he encased with his left hand one of his wife’s plump breasts and then remembered the outcome of last night’s meeting. Miss Cogings, alone in her narrow bed and listening to a chorus of house-martins, remembered it with the same degree of satisfaction. So did the Poudards when their Teasmade roused them at a quarter to seven. So did the Reverend Feare, and Mr Mottershead and Mr and Mrs Tilzey, and the Blennerhassetts, who ran the Village Stores. Mrs Feare, up since dawn with an ailing child, was pleased because her husband was. There would be peace when there might have been war. A defeat had been inflicted.

The Allenbys, however, awoke in Luffnell Lodge with mixed feelings. What to do with the Lodge now that it remained unsold? How long would they have to wait for another buyer? For having made their minds up, they really wanted to move on as soon as possible. A bridging loan had been negotiated at one point but they’d decided against it because the interest was so high. They planned to buy a bungalow in a part of Cornwall that was noted for its warmth and dryness, both of which would ease Mrs Allenby’s arthritis. Everything that had been said at the meeting made sense to Mr and Mrs Allenby; they quite understood the general point of view. But they wished, that morning, that things might have been different.

‘That’s really bizarre,’ Hugh said in the Mansors’ breakfast-room.

‘Dreams often are.’

‘But butterflies –’

‘It has to do with the meeting.’

‘Ah, of course, the meeting.’

He saw at once what had been happening. He traced quite easily the series of his wife’s thoughts, one built upon the last, fact in the end becoming fantasy.

Emily buttered toast and reached for grapefruit marmalade. ‘Silly,’ she said, not believing that it was.

‘A bit,’ he agreed, smiling at her. He went on to talk of something else, an item in The Times, another airliner hijacked.

The sun filled their breakfast-room. It struck the bones of his compact features; it livened his calm grey hair. It found the strawberry mark, like a tulip, on her neck; it made her spectacles glint. They were the same age, fifty-two, not yet grandparents but soon to be. He dealt in property; she’d once been a teacher of Latin and Greek. She was small and given to putting on weight if she wasn’t careful: dumpy, she considered herself.

‘Don’t let it worry you,’ Hugh said, folding The Times for further perusal on the train.’It’s all over now.’

He was handsome in his thin way, and she was plain. Perhaps he had married her because he had not felt up to the glamour of a beautiful woman: as a young man, unproved in the world, he had had an inferiority complex, and success in middle age had not managed to shake it off. It wouldn’t have surprised him if the heights he’d scaled in his business world all of a sudden turned out to be a wasteland. He specialized in property in distant places, Jamaica, Spain, the Bahamas: some economic jolt could shatter everything. The house they lived in, on the edge of a Sussex village, was the symbol of his good fortune over the years. It was also his due, for he had worked doggedly; only his inferiority complex prevented him from taking it for granted. It puzzled him that he, so unpromising as a boy at school, had done so well; and occasionally, but not often, it puzzled him that they’d made a success of their marriage in times when the failure rate was high. Perhaps they’d made a go of it because she was modest too: more than once he’d wondered if that could be true. Could it be that Emily, so much cleverer than he, had found a level with him because her lack of beauty kept her in her place, as his inferiority complex kept him? She had said that as a girl she’d imagined she would not marry, assuming that a strawberry mark and dumpiness, and glasses too, would be too much for any man. He often thought about her as she must have been, cleverest in the class; while he was being slow on the uptake. ‘You’re very kind’ was what most often, in the way of compliments, Emily said to him.

‘Have a good day’ was what she said now, forcing cheerfulness on to her face, for the dream she’d had still saddened her and the memory of the meeting worried her.

‘I’ll be on the five o’clock.’ He touched her cheek with his lips, and then was gone, the door of the breakfast-room opening and closing, the hall door banging. She listened to the starting of the car and the sound of the wheels on the tarmac, then the engine fading to nothing in the distance.

She felt as he did, that together they had not done badly in twenty-seven years of marriage. She’d been a Miss Forrest; becoming Mrs Mansor had seemed the nicest thing that yet had happened to her; and for all their married life – the worries during the lean years, the bringing up of their three children-she had regretted nothing, and in the end there’d been the reward of happiness in middle age. She missed their son and daughters, all of whom were now married themselves, but in compensation there was the contentment that the house and garden brought, and the unexacting life of the village. As well, there were the visits of their children and her memories of girls whom she had taught, some of whom kept up with her. It was still a pleasure to read Horace and the lesser Greek poets, to find in an experimental way a new interpretation in place of the standard, scholar’s one.

Their house, in the style of Queen Anne though in fact of a later period, was hidden from the road and the surrounding fields by modest glades of silver birches. It was a compact house, easy to run and keep clean, modernized with gadgets, warm in winter. Alone in it in the mornings Emily often played Bach or Mozart on the sitting-room hi-fi system, the music drifting into the kitchen and the bedrooms and the breakfast-room, pursuing her agreeably wherever she went.

But this morning she was not in the mood for Bach or Mozart. She continued to sit as her husband had left her, saying to herself that she must come to terms with what had happened. She had raised her voice but no one had cared to listen to it. Only Golkorn had listened, his great tightly cropped head slowly nodding, his eyes occasionally piercing hers. At the meeting her voice had faltered; her cheeks had warmed; nothing had come out as she’d meant it to.

Unladylike assortment of calumnies. In the train on the way to Waterloo he couldn’t think of a nine-lettered word. As a chore, he did The Times crossword every day, determined to do better with practice. There’s none of the Old Adam in a cardinal (6). He sighed and put the paper down.

It worried him that she’d been so upset. He hadn’t known what to say, or to do, when she’d stood up suddenly at the meeting to make her unsuccessful speech. He’d felt himself embarrassed, in sympathy or shame, he couldn’t tell which. He hadn’t been quite able to agree with her and had been surprised when she’d stood up because it wasn’t like her to do anything in public, even though she’d been saying she was unhappy about the thing for months. But then she was so unemphatic as a person that quite often it was hard to guess when she felt strongly.

With other suited men, some carrying as he did a briefcase and a newspaper, he stepped from the train at Waterloo. He strode along the platform with them, one in an army, it often seemed. In spite of how she felt, he really couldn’t help believing that the village had been saved. Their own house and garden, and the glades of silver birches, would in no way suffer. The value of the house would continue to rise with inflation instead of quite sharply declining. There would be calm again in the village instead of angry voices and personal remarks, instead of Colin I hodes saying to Golkorn’s face that he was a foreigner. Thank God it was all over.

‘There’s been a telex,’ Miss Owen informed him in his office. ‘That place in Gibraltar.’

In the breakfast-room Emily’s thoughts had spread out, from her dream of butterflies and the meeting there had been the night before. She saw images of women as they might have been, skulking in the woods near the village, two of them sitting on the stone seat beside the horse-trough on the green, another in a lane with ragwort in her hand. They were harmless women, as Golkorn had kept insisting. It was just that their faces were strange and their movements not properly articulated; nothing, of course, that they said made sense. ‘Anywhere but here,’ snapped the voice of Colin Rhodes, as vividly she recalled the meeting. ‘My God, you’ve got the world to choose from, Golkorn.’

Golkorn had smiled. Their village was beautiful, he had irritatingly stated, as if in reply. Repeatedly it had been said at the meeting last night, and at previous meetings, that the village was special because it Was among the most beautiful in England. The Manor dated back to Saxon times, it had been said, and the cottages round the green were almost unique. But it was that very beauty, and the very peacefulness of the lanes and woods, that Golkorn had claimed would be a paradise for his afflicted women. It was why he had chosen Luffnell Lodge when it went up for sale. Luffnell Lodge was less impressive than the Manor, and certainly nothing like as old. It was larger and less convenient, colder and in worse repair, yet ideal apparently for Golkorn’s purpose. In her dream Emily had been walking with him in a field and he had pointed at what at first she’d taken to be flowers but had turned out to be butterflies. ‘You’ve never seen that before,’ he’d said. ‘Butterflies in mourning, Mrs Mansor.’ They flew away as he spoke, a whole swarm of them, busily flapping their black wings.

She rose and cleared away the breakfast things. She carried them on a tray through the hall and into the kitchen. Her dog, an old Sealyham called. Spratts, wagged his tail without getting out of his basket. On the window-sill in front of the sink, hot with morning sunshine, a butterfly was poised and she thought at once that that was a coincidence. Its wings were tightly closed; it might have been dead but she knew it wasn’t, and when she touched it and the wings opened they were not sinister.

Of course it had been for the best when the Allenbys had realized that to sell Luffnell Lodge to Golkorn would have caused havoc: dealing with the telex about the place in Gibraltar, Hugh found himself yet again thinking that. Golkorn was a frightful person; it was Golkorn’s presence rather than his sick women that one might reasonably object to. Luffnell Lodge would put the village on the map, Golkorn had confidently promised, once it was full of his patients: in medical terms he was making a breakthrough. And Hugh knew that what he had offered the Allenbys was more than they’d get otherwise. You couldn’t blame them, elderly and wanting to get rid of what they’d come to think of as a white elephant, for listening to Golkorn’s adroit arguments. The Allenbys had done nothing wrong and in the end had made the sacrifice. They’d sell the Lodge eventually, it stood to reason, even if they had to wait a bit. ‘You see, we don’t particularly want to wait,’ old Mr Allenby had said. ‘That’s just the trouble. We’ve waited two years as it is.’ The Allenbys had asked Hugh’s advice because they thought that being in the international property market he might know a little more than Musgrove and Carter, who after all were only country estate agents. ‘Dr Golkorn is offering you a most attractive proposition,’ he’d had to admit, no way around that. ‘It could be a while before anyone matched it.’ Mr Allenby had asked if he’d care to handle the sale, in conjunction with Musgrove and Carter, but Hugh had had to explain that property in England was outside his firm’s particular field. ‘Oh, dear, it’s all so difficult,’ Mrs Allenby had disconsolately murmured, clearly most unhappy at the prospect of having to hang on in the Lodge for another couple of years. Hugh had always liked the Allenbys. In many ways, as a friend and as an expert, he should have told them to accept immediately Golkorn’s offer. But he hadn’t and that was that; it was all now best forgotten.

For Hugh that day passed as days did at the office. He dictated letters and received telephone calls. He lunched with a client in the Isola Bella, quite often he thought about his wife. Emily was unhappy because of everything that had happened. She felt, but had not said so, that he had let the Allenbys down. She felt that she herself had let the inmates of Golkorn’s home down. Hugh tried not to think about it; but in his mind’s eye he kept seeing her again, standing up at the meeting and saying that afflicted women have to live somewhere Like mongol children, she had said, stammering; or the blind. ‘That’s quite appreciated, Mrs Mansor,’ the Reverend Feare had murmured, and as if to come to her assistance Golkorn had asked if he might address the meeting. He had nodded his heavy razored head at Emily; he had repeated what she’d said, that afflicted women, like mongol children and the blind, have to go somewhere. He had smiled and spread his hands out, impatient with those who were protesting and yet oilily endeavouring to hide it. A woman present, he’d even suggested, might one day need the home he proposed for Luffnell Lodge. Hugh sighed, remembering it too clearly. He would take Emily out to dinner, to the Rowan House Hotel. He was about to pick up the telephone in order to ask to be put through to her when it rang. Odd, he thought as he picked up the receiver, that she had dreamed so strangely of butterflies.

‘It’s a Dr Golkorn,’ his secretary’s voice said. ‘On the other line, Mr Mansor.’

He hesitated. There was no point in speaking to Golkorn; at half past ten last night Golkorn had lost his case; the matter was closed. Yet something – perhaps just politeness, he afterwards thought – made him pick up the other telephone. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘It’s Golkorn,’ Golkorn said. ‘Look, Mr Mansor, could we talk?’

‘About the Lodge? But that’s all over, Dr Golkorn. The Allenbys –’

‘Sir, they agreed beneath all this pressure not to let me have the house. But with respect, is that just, sir? At least agree to exchange another word or two with me, Mr Mansor.’

‘It would be useless, I’m afraid.’

‘Mr Mansor, do me a favour.’

‘I would willingly do you a favour if I thought –’

‘I ask you only for ten minutes. If I may come to see you for ten minutes, Mr Mansor, I would esteem it.’

‘You mean, you want to come here?’

‘I mean, sir, I would like to come to your very pleasant home. I would like to call in at seven tonight if that might be convenient. The reason I am suggesting this, Mr Mansor, is I am still in the neighbourhood of the village. I am still staying in the same hotel.’

‘Well, yes, come over by all means, but I really must warn you –’

‘I am used to everything, Mr Mansor.’ Laughter accompanied this remark and then Golkorn said, ‘I look forward to seeing you and your nice wife. I promise only to occupy ten minutes.’

Hugh telephoned Emily. ‘Golkorn,’ he said. ‘He wants to come and see us.’

‘But what for?’

‘I really can’t think. I couldn’t say no.’

‘Of course not.’

‘He’s coming at seven.’

She said goodbye and put the receiver down. The development astonished her. She thought at least they had finished with Golkorn.

The telephone rang again and Hugh suggested that they should go out to dinner, to Rowan House, where they often went. She knew he was suggesting it because she’d been upset. She appreciated that, but she said she’d rather make it another night, mainly because she had a stew in the oven. ‘I’m sorry about that wretched man,’ Hugh said. ‘He wasn’t easy to choke off.’ She reassured him, making a joke of Golkorn’s insistence, saying that of course it didn’t matter.

In the garden she picked sweet-peas. She sat for a moment in the corner where she and Hugh often had coffee together on Saturday and Sunday mornings. She put the sweet-peas on the slatted garden table and let her glance wander over lupins and delphiniums, and the tree geranium that was Hugh’s particular pride. On trellises and archways which he’d made roses trailed in profusion, Mermaid and Danse du Feu. She loved the garden, as she loved the house.

At her feet the Sealyham called Spratts settled down to rest for a while, but she warned him that she didn’t intend to remain long in the secluded corner. In a moment she picked up the sweet-peas and took them to the kitchen, where she arranged them in a cut-glass vase. The dog followed her when she carried it to the sitting-room. Was it unusual, she wondered, to pick flowers specially for a person you didn’t like? Yet it had seemed a natural thing to do; she always picked flowers when a visitor was coming.

‘Ten minutes I promised,’ Golkorn said at seven o’clock, having been notably prompt, ‘so ten minutes it must be.’ He laughed, as if he’d made a joke of some kind. ‘No, no drink for me, please.’

Hugh poured Emily a glass of sherry, Harvey’s Luncheon Dry, which was what she always had. He smeared a glass with Angostura drops and added gin and water to it for himself. Perhaps there was something in the fact that he had rescued her, he thought, wanting to think about her rather than their visitor. Even though she loved the subject, she had never been entirely happy as a teacher of Classics because she was shy. Until she came to know them she was nervous of the girls she taught: her glasses and her strawberry mark and her dumpiness, the very fact that she was a teacher, seemed to put her into a certain category, at a disadvantage. And perhaps his rescuing of her, if you could so grandly call it that, had in turn given him something he’d lacked before. Perhaps their marriage was indeed built on debts to one another.

‘Orange juice, Mr Golkorn?’ Emily suggested, already rising to get it for him.

He waved a hand, denying his need of orange juice. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to beat about the bush. I want to come to the point. Luffnell Lodge, Mr Mansor. You’re a man of business, you know those people wouldn’t ever get that price. They’ll lose a lot. You know that.’

‘We’ve been through all of it, Dr Golkorn. The Allenbys do not wish to sell their property to you.’

‘They’re elderly people –’

‘That has nothing to do with it.’

‘With respect, Mr Mansor, it may have. Our elderly friends could be sitting there in that barracks for winter after winter. They could freeze to death. The old lady’s crippled with arthritis as it is.’

‘Mrs Allenby’s illness cannot enter into this. The Allenbys –’

‘With respect, sir, they came to you for advice.’

‘That is so.’

‘With respect, sir, the advice you gave them was unfortunate.’

‘If they’d sold the Lodge to you they’d be hated in the village.’

‘But they’d be gone, Mr Miansor. They’d have kicked the dust off their heels. They’d be imbibing the sun on some island somewhere. As their doctor advised.’

‘They’ve lived in this village for more than fifty years. It matters to them what the village thinks of them. We’ve been all through this, you know. I can’t help you, Dr Golkorn.’

Golkorn bent his head for a moment over clasped hands, as if praying for patience. He was slightly smiling. When eventually he looked up there was a glint in his dark, clever eyes which suggested that, despite appearances, he held the more useful cards. His black pinstriped suit was uncreased, his smooth black shoes had a glassy glow. He wore a blue shirt and a blue bow tie with small white spots on it. The night before, at the meetings he’d been similarly dressed except for his shirt and tie. The shirt had last night been pink and the tie a shade of deep crimson, though also with white spots.

‘What do you think, Mrs Mansor?’ he said in his sort, unhurried voice, still smiling a little. ‘How do you see this unhappy business?’ His manner suggested that they might have been his patients. Any moment now, Hugh thought, he might tell them to go out for a walk.

‘I feel as my husband does,’ Emily said. ‘I feel the Allenbys have given you their answer,’

‘I mean, madam, how do you feel about the people I wish to help? I do not mean the Allenbys, Mrs Mansor; I mean of course those who would one day be my patients in Luffnell Lodge.’

‘You heard what my wife said last night, Dr Golkorn,’ Hugh interjected quickly.’she is sympathetic towards such people.’

‘You would not yourself object to these patients in your village, Mrs Mansor? Did I understand you correctly when you spoke last night?’

‘That is what I said. I would personally not object.’

‘With respect, madam, you feel a certain guilt? Well, I assure you it is natural to feel a certain guilt. By that I mean it is natural for some people.’ He laughed. ‘Not Colin Rhodes of course, or Mr Mottershead, or Mr and Mrs Tilzey, or Miss Cogings. Not your clergyman, Mr Feare, even though he is keen to show his concern for the unwell. I think you’re different, madam.’

‘My wife –’

‘Let us perhaps hear your wife, eh? Mrs Mansor, you do not believe the village would be a bear garden if a handful of unhappy women were added to it: that was what you implied last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘But the vote went against you.’

‘No vote was taken,’ Hugh said sharply. ‘The meeting was simply to explain to you why the Allenbys had decided not to sell.’

‘But there had been other meetings, eh? At which I naturally was not present. There have been six months of meetings, I think I’m correct in stating. You’ve argued back and forth among yourselves, and sides have naturally been taken. In the end, you know, the question we have to ask is should our elderly friends not be allowed to do what is best for them since they have done so much for the village in the past? The other question we have to ask is would it be the end of the universe to have a handful of mentally ill women in Luffnell Lodge? With respect, madam, you feel guilty now because you did not fight hard enough for justice and humanity. And you, sir, because in your efforts to see everyone’s point of view you permitted yourself to be bulldozed by the majority and to become their tool.’

‘Now look here, Dr Golkorn –’

‘With respect, you misinformed the vendors, sir. They’ll be in Luffnell Lodge till they die now.’

‘The house will be sold to another buyer. It’s only a matter of time.’

‘It’s what you call a white elephant, sir.’

‘I think we’d rather you went, Dr Golkorn.’

Golkorn leaned back in his chair. He crossed one leg over the other. He smiled, turning his head a little so that the smile was directed first at Hugh and then at Emily. He said:

‘You are both of you upset. In my profession, Mr Mansor, which has to do with the human heart as much as the human mind, I could sense last night that you were both upset. You were saying to yourself, sir, that you had made an error of judgement. Mrs Mansor was wanting to weep.’

‘I admit to no error of judgement –’

‘Shall we refer to it as a mistake then, sir? You have made a mistake with which you will live until the white elephant is sold. And even then, if ever it is sold in the lifetime of the vendors, the mistake will still be there because of the amount they will have forfeited. In good faith they called you in, sir, taking you to be an honest man –’

‘You’re being offensive, Dr Golkorn.’

‘I apologize for that, sir. I was purely making a point. Let me make another one. Your wife, as long as she has breath to keep her alive, will never forgive herself.’

Emily tried not to look at him. She looked at the sweet-peas she’d arranged. Through her shoes she could feel the warmth of the Sealyham, who had a way of hugging her feet. She felt there was nothing she could say.

Hugh rose and crossed the room. He noticed that Emily hadn’t touched her sherry. He shook the little bottle of Angostura bitters over his own glass, and added gin and water.

‘Actually, sir,’ Golkorn said, ‘all I am suggesting you should do is to pick up the telephone. And you, madam, all that is necessary is to say how you feel to Mrs Allenby. She, too, has humanitarian instincts.’

His beadiness had discovered that they were the weak links in the chain. When he’d argued with the others the night before, trying to make them see his point of view, opinion had hardened immediately. And when he’d persisted, anger had developed. ‘In blunt terms,’ Golin Rhodes had shouted at him, ‘we don’t want you here. If you’re going to be a blot on the landscape, we’d be obliged if you could be it somewhere else.’ And Colin Rhodes would say it even more forcibly now: there’d have been no point in Golkorn’s insinuating his way into the Rhodes’s sitting-room, or the sitting-room of the Reverend Feare, or the sitting-room of Mr Mottershead or Miss Cogings. There’d have been no point in tackling the Poudards, or taking on the Tilzeys, or making a fuss with Mr and Mrs Blennerhassett in the Village Stores.

‘My trouble is,’ Golkorn said softly, laughing as if to dress the words with delicacy, ‘I cannot accept no for an answer.’

She imagined telling him now that she had dreamed of butterflies in mourning. She imagined his cropped head carefully nodding, going slowly up and down in unspoken delight. Eventually he would explain the dream, relishing the terms he employed, telling her nothing she did not already know. He was a master of the obvious. He took ordinary, blunt facts and gave them a weapon’s edge.

‘Which comes first,’ he inquired quite casually, ‘the beauty of an English village, like a picture on a calendar, or the happiness of the wretched?’ He went on talking, going over the same ground, mentioning again by name the Poudards and the Tilzeys and the Blennerhassetts, Mr Mottershead, Miss Cogings, Colin Rhodes and the Reverend Feare and Mrs Feare, comparing these healthy, normal people with other people who were neither. He made them seem like monsters. He mentioned the Middle Ages and referred to the people of the village as belonging to an inferno of ignorance out of which the world had hauled itself by its own bootstraps. He himself, he threw in for some kind of good measure, had been a poor man once; he had worked his way through a foreign university, details of which he gave; he was devoted to humanity, he said.

But the Poudards and the Tilzeys were not monsters. The Blennerhassetts just felt strongly, as the others, varying in degree, did also. Mr Mottershead would do anything for you; the Feares had had children from Northern Ireland to stay for two summers running; Miss Cogings cleane old Mrs Dugdall’s windows for her because naturally old Mrs Dugdall couldn’t do it herself any more. Having sherry with Colin Rhodes after church on Sundays was a civilized occasion; you couldn’t in a million years say that Colin Rhodes and Daphne were a pair of monsters.

‘Listen, you’ve got this all wrong, Dr Golkorn,’ Hugh said.

‘I wouldn’t have said so, sir.’

‘Your patients would be all over the neighbourhood. You admitted that yourself. They would be free to wander in the village –’

‘I see now, sir, I should have told a lie. I should have said these unhappy people would be safely behind bars; I should have said that no suffering face would ever disturb the peace of your picture-postcard village.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ Emily asked, unable to restrain curiosity.

‘Because with respect, madam, it is not in my lifestyle to tell lies.’

They had to agree with that. In all he had said to the Allenbys and at the meeting last night he had been open and straightforward about what he had intended to do with Luffnell Lodge. He might easily have kept quiet and simply bought the place. It was almost as if he had wished to fight his battle according to the rules he laid down himself, for if lies were not his style deviousness made up for their absence. He knew that if they approached the Allenbys with the second thoughts he was proposing the Allenbys would not hesitate. Deliberately he had let the rowdier opposition burn itself out in righteous fury, and had accepted defeat while seeing victory in sight. His eyes had not strayed once to Emily’s tulip-shaped birthmark, nor lingered on her spectacles or her dumpiness, as such eyes might so easily have done. He had not sought to humiliate Hugh with argument too fast and clever.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘all three of us know. You are decent people. You cannot turn your backs.’

In Luffnell Lodge the women would be comforted, some even cured. Emily knew that. She knew he was not pretending, or claiming too much for himself. She knew his treatment of such women was successful. He was right when he said you could not turn your back. You could not build a wall around a pretty village and say that nothing unpleasant should be permitted within it. No wonder she had dreamed of butterflies mourning the human race. And yet she hated Golkorn. She hated his arrogance in assuming that because his cause was good no one could object. She hated his deviousness far more than the few simple lies he might have told. If he’d told a lie or two to the Allenbys all this might have been avoided.

Hugh wanted him to go. He didn’t need Golkorn to tell him he had misled the Allenbys. In misleading them he had acted out of instincts that were not dishonourable, but Golkorn would not for a second understand that.

‘I have my car,’ Golkorn said. ‘We could the three of us drive up to Luffnell Lodge now.’

Hugh shook his head.

‘And you, Mrs Mansor?’ Golkorn prompted.

‘I would like to talk to my husband.’

‘I was hoping to save you petrol, madam.’ He spoke as if, at a time like this, with such an issue, the saving of petrol was still important.

‘Yes, we’d like to talk,’ Hugh said.

‘Indeed, sir. If I may only phone you from the hotel in an hour or so? To see how you’ve got on.’

They knew he would. They knew he would not rest now until he had dragged their consciences out of them and set them profitably to work. If they did not go to Luffnell Lodge he would return to argue further.

‘You understand that if we do as you suggest we’d have to leave the village,’, Hugh pointed out.’We couldn’t stay here.’

Golkorn frowned, seeming genuinely perplexed. He gestured with his hands. ‘But why, sir? Why leave this village? With respect, I do not understand you.’

‘We’d have been disloyal to our friends. We’d be letting everyone down.’ ‘You’re not letting me down, sir. You’re not letting two elderly persons down, nor women in need of care and love –’

‘Yes, we’re aware, of that, Dr Golkorn.’

‘Sir, may I say that the people of this village will see it our way in time? They’ll observe the good work all around them, and understand.’

‘In fact, they won’t.’

‘Well, I would argue that, sir. With respect –’

‘We would like to be alone now, Dr Golkorn.’

He went away and they were left with the dying moments of the storm he had brought with him. They did not say much but in time they walked together from the house, through the garden, to the car. They waved at Colin Rhodes, out with his retrievers on the green, and at Miss Cogings hurrying to the post-box with a letter. It wasn’t until the car drew up at Luffnell Lodge, until they stood with the Allenbys in the hall, that they were grateful they’d been exploited.

The Bedroom Eyes of Mrs Vansittart

‘You couldn’t trust those eyes,’ people on Cap Ferrat say, for they find it hard to be charitable where Mrs Vansittart is concerned. ‘The Wife Whom Nobody Cares For,’ Jasper remarks, attaching a tinselly jangle to the statement, which manages to suggest that Mrs Vansittart belongs in neon lights.

At fifty-four, so Jasper has remarked as well, she remains a winner and a taker, for in St Jean and Monte Carlo young men still glance a second time when the slim body passes by, their attention lingering usually on the rhythmic hips. Years ago in Sicily – so the story is told – a peasant woman spat at her. Mrs Vansittart had gone to see the Greek ruins at Segesta, but what outraged the peasant woman was to observe Mrs Vansittart half undressed on the grass, permitting a local man to have his way with her. And then, as though nothing untoward had happened, she waited at the railway station for the next train to Catania. It was then that the woman spat at her.

Mrs Vansittart is American, but when she divides her perfect lips the voice that drawls is almost that of an English duchess. Few intonations betray her origins as a dentist’s daughter from Holland Falls, Virginia; no phrase sounds out of place. Her husband, Harry, shares with her that polished Englishness – commanded to, so it is said on Cap Ferrat, as he is commanded in so much else. Early in their marriage the Vansittarts spent ten years in London, where Mrs Vansittart is reported to have had three affairs and sundry casual conjunctions. Harry, even then, was writing his cycle of songs.

The Vansittarts live now in the Villa Teresa just off the Avenue du Sémaphore, and they do not intend to move again. Their childless marriage has drifted all over Europe, from the hotels of Florence and Berlin to those of Château d’Oex and Paris and Seville. To the Villa Teresa the people from the other villas come to play tennis twice a week. In the evening there is bridge, in one villa or another.

Riches have brought these people to Cap Ferrat, riches maintain them. They have come from almost all the European countries, from America and other continents. They have come for the sun and the bougainvillaea, purchasing villas that were created to immortalize the personalities of previous owners – or building for themselves in the same whimsical manner. The varying styles of architecture have romance and nostalgia in common: a cluster of stone animals to remind their owners of somewhere else, a cupola added because a precious visitor once suggested it. Terracotta roofs slope decoratively, the eyes of emperors are sightless in their niches. Mimosa and pale wistaria add fairy-tale colour; cypresses cool the midday sun. Against the alien outside world a mesh of steel lurks within the boundary hedges; stern warnings abound, of a Chien Méchant and the ferocious Sécurité du Cap.

In her middle age Mrs Vansittart’s life is one of swimming pools that are bluer than the blue Mediterranean, and titles which recall forever a mistress or a lover, or someone else’s road to success, or an obsession that remains mysterious: Villa Banana, Villa Magdalene, Morning Dew, Waikiki, Villa Glorietta, Villa Stephen, So What, My Way. The Daimlers and the Bentleys slide along the Boulevard Général de Gaulle, cocktails are taken on some special occasion in the green bar of the Grand-Hotel. The Blochs and the Cecils and the Borromeos, who play tennis on the court at the Villa Teresa, have never quarrelled with Mrs Vansittart, for quarrels would be a shame. Jasper is her partner: her husband plays neither tennis nor bridge. He cooks instead, and helps old Pierre in the garden. Harry is originally of Holland Falls also, the inheritor of a paper-mill.

The Villa Teresa is as the Vansittarts wish it to be now; and as the years go by nothing much will change. In the large room which they call the salon there is the timeless sculptured wall, a variety of colours and ceramic shapes. There are the great Italian urns, the flowers in their vases changed every day; the Persian rugs, the Seurat, and the paperweights which Harry has collected on his travels. Carola and Madame Spad come every morning, to dust and clean and take in groceries. The Villa Teresa, like the other villas, is its own small island.

‘Ruby, don’t you think it’s ridiculous?’ Mrs Vansittart said a month or so ago.’Don’t you, Jasper?’

Mrs Cecil inclined her head. Jasper said:

‘I think that sign they’ve put up is temporary.’

‘If they spell it incorrectly now they’ll do it again.’

Two tables of bridge were going, Mrs Cecil and Signor Borromeo with Jasper and Mrs Vansittart at one, the Blochs, Signora Borromeo and Mr Cecil at the other. In the lull halfway through the evening, during which Harry served tea and little pâtisseries which he made himself, the conversation had turned to the honouring of Somerset Maugham: an avenue was, to be named after him, a sign had gone up near the Villa Mauresque, on which, unfortunately, his surname had been incorrectly spelt.

‘Then you must tell them, my dear,’ urged Jasper, who liked to make mischief when he could. ‘You must go along and vigorously protest.’

‘Oh, I have. I’ve talked to the most awful little prat.’

‘Did he understand?’

‘The stupid creature argued. Harry, that’s a polished surface you’ve put your teapot on.’

Harry snatched up the offending teapot and at once looked apologetic, his eyes magnified behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. Harry isn’t tall but has a certain bulkiness, especially around the waist. His hands and feet are tiny, his mouse-coloured hair neither greying nor receding. He has a ready smile, is nervous perhaps, so people think, not a great talker. Everyone who comes to the villa likes him, and sympathizes because his wife humiliates him so. To strangers he seems like a servant about the place, grubbily on his knees in the garden, emerging from the kitchen regions with flour on his face. Insult is constantly added to injury, strangers notice, but the regular tennis-companions and bridge-players have long since accepted that it goes rather further, that Harry is the creature of his wife. A saint, someone once said, a Swedish lady who lived in the Villa Glorietta until her death. Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch have often said so since.

‘Oh, Harry, look, it has marked it.’

How could she tell? Mrs Cecil thought. How could it be even remotely possible to see half-way across the huge salon, to ascertain through the duskiness – beyond the pools of light demanded by the bridge tables – that the teapot had marked the top of an escritoire? Mrs Cecil was sitting closer to the escritoire than Mrs Vansittart and couldn’t see a thing.

‘I think it’s all right,’ Harry quietly said.

‘Well, thank God for that, old thing.’

‘Delicious, Harry,’ Mrs Cecil murmured quickly, commenting upon the pâtisseries.

‘Bravo! Bravo!’ added Signor Borromeo, in whom a generous nature and obesity are matched. He sampled a second cherry tart, saying he should not.

‘We were talking, Harry,’ Mrs Vansittart said, ‘of the Avenue Somerset Maugham.’

‘Ah, yes.’

He pressed the silver tray of pâtisseries on Signora Borromeo and the Blochs, a wiry couple from South Africa. ‘Al limone?’ Signora Borromeo questioned, an index finger poised. Signora Borromeo, though not as stout as her husband, is generously covered. She wears bright dresses that Mrs Vansittart regards with despair; and she has a way of becoming excited. Yes, that one was lemon, Harry said.

‘I mean,’ Mrs Vansittart went on, ‘it wouldn’t be the nicest thing in the world if someone decided to call an avenue after Harry and then got his name wrong.’

‘If somebody –’ Mr Cecil began, abruptly ceasing when his wife shook her head and frowned at him.

‘No, no one’s going to,’ Mrs Vansittart continued in a dogged way, which is a characteristic of hers when her husband features in a conversation. ‘No, no one’s going to, but naturally it could happen. Harry being a creative person too.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch swiftly and simultaneously.

‘It’s not outside the bounds of possibility,’ added Mrs Vansittart, ‘that Harry should become well known. His cycle is really most remarkable.’

‘Indeed,’ said Jasper.

No one except Mrs Vansittart had been permitted to hear the cycle. It was through her, not its author, that the people of the villas knew what they did: that, for instance, the current composition concerned a Red Indian called Foontimo.

‘No reason whatsoever,’ said Jasper, ‘to suppose that there mightn’t be an Avenue Harry Vansittart.’

He smiled encouragingly at Harry, as if urging him not to lose heart, or at least urging something. Jasper wears a bangle with his name on it, and a toupee that most remarkably matches the remainder of his cleverly dyed hair. Sharply glancing at his lip-salve, Mrs Vansittart said:

‘Don’t be snide, Jasper.’

‘Someone’s bought La Souco,’ Mrs Cecil quickly intervened. ‘Swiss, I hear.’

Harry gathered up the teacups, the bridge recommenced. While the cards at his table were being dealt, Jasper placed a hand lightly on the back of one of Mrs Vansittart’s. He had not meant to be snide, he protested, he was extremely sorry if he had sounded so. The apology was a formality; its effect that which Jasper wished for: to make a little more of the incident. ‘I wouldn’t hurt poor Harry for the world,’ he breathlessly whispered as he reached out for his cards.

It was then, as each hand of cards was being arranged and as Harry picked up his tray, that a bell sounded in the Villa Teresa. It was not the telephone; the ringing was caused by the agitating of a brass bell-pull, in the shape of a fish, by the gate of the villa.

‘Good Lord!’ said Mrs Vansittart, for unexpected visitors are not at all the thing at any of the villas.

‘I would not answer,’ advised Signor Borromeo. ‘Un briccone!’

The others laughed, as they always do when Signor Borromeo exaggerates. But when the bell sounded again, after only a pause of seconds, Signora Borromeo became excited. ‘Un briccone!’ she cried. ‘In nome di Dio! On briccone?’

Harry stood with his laden tray. His back was to the card-players. He did not move when the bell rang a third time, even though there was no servant to answer it. Old Pierre comes to the garden of the Villa Teresa every morning and leaves at midday. Carola and Madame Spad have gone by five.

‘We’ll go with you, Harry,’ the wiry Mr Bloch suggested, already on his feet.

Mr Cecil stood up also, as did Jasper. Signor Borromeo remained where he was.

Harry placed the tray on a table with a painted surface – beneath glass – of a hunting scene at the time of Louis XIV. Nervously, he shifted his spectacles on his nose. ‘Yes, perhaps,’ he said, accepting the offer of companionship on his way through the garden to the gate. Signora Borromeo fussily fanned her face with her splayed cards.

It was Jasper who afterwards told of what happened next. Mr Bloch took charge. He said they should not talk in the garden just in case Signor Borromeo was right when he suggested that whoever sought entry was there with nefarious purpose. He’d had experience of intruders in South Africa. Each one caught was one less hazard to the whole community: the last thing they wanted was for a criminal to be frightened away, to bide his time for another attempt. So as the bell rang again in the villa the four marched stealthily, a hand occasionally raised to smack away a mosquito.

The man who stood at the gate was swarthy and very small. In the light that went on automatically when the gate was opened he looked from one face to the next, uncertain about which to address. His glance hovered longer on Harry’s than on the others, Jasper reported afterwards, and Harry frowned, as if trying to place the man. Neither of them appeared to be in the least alarmed.

‘It is arranged,’ the man said eventually. ‘I search for Madame.’

‘Madame Spad is not here,’ Harry replied.

‘Not Madame Spad. The Madame of the villa.’

‘Look here, my old chap,’ Mr Cecil put in, ‘I doubt that Madame Vansittart is expecting you.’ Mr Cecil is not one to make concessions when the nature of an occasion bewilders him, but it was Jasper’s opinion that the swarthy visitor did not look like anyone’s old chap. He thought of saying so, sotto voce, to Mr Bloch, but changed his mind.

‘Better,’ he advised the man instead, ‘to telephone in the morning.’

‘My wife is playing bridge tonight,’ Harry explained. ‘It’s no time to come calling.’

‘It is arranged,’ the man repeated.

In a troop, as though conveying a prisoner, they made their way back through the garden. The man, although questioned further by Mr Bloch, only shrugged his shoulders. No one spoke after that, but similar thoughts gathered in each man’s mind. It was known that old Pierre would shortly be beyond it: after tennis one evening Mrs Vansittart had relayed that information to her friends, inquiring if any of them knew of a younger gardener. What would seem to have happened was that this present individual had telephoned the villa and been told by Mrs Vansittart to report for an interview, and now arrived at ten o’clock in the evening instead of the morning. When they reached the villa Mr Cecil began to voice these conclusions, but the man did not appear to understand him.

He was placed in the hall, Jasper and Mr Bloch guarding him just to be on the safe side. The others re-entered the salon and almost, immediately Mrs Vansittart emerged. As she did so, Jasper took advantage of the continuing interruption in order to go to the lavatory. Mr Bloch returned to the salon, where Harry picked up his tray of tea things and proceeded with it to the kitchen.

‘I told you not to come here,’ Mrs Vansittart furiously whispered. ‘I had no idea it could possibly be you.’

‘I tell a little lie, Madame. I say to the men there is arrangement.’

‘My God!’

‘This morning I wait, Madame, and you do not appear.’

‘Will you kindly keep your voice down.’

‘We go in your kitchen?’

‘My husband is in the kitchen. I could not come this morning because I did not wake up.’

‘I am by the lighthouse. It is time to fix the tablecloths but I stand by the lighthouse. How I know you ever come?’

‘You could have telephoned, for God’s sake,’ whispered Mrs Vansittart, more furiously than before. ‘All you had to do was to pick up the damn telephone. I was waiting in all day.’

‘Yes, I pick up the damn telephone, Madame. You husband answer, I pick it down again. All the time Monsieur Jean watch me. “It is no good this time to fix the tablecloths!” he shout when I come running from the lighthouse. My hand make sweat on the tablecloths. I am no good, he shout, lam bad waiter, no good for Grand-Hotel –’

‘I cannot talk to you here. I will meet you in the morning.’

‘This at the lighthouse, Madame?’

‘Of course at the lighthouse.’

All this Jasper heard through the slightly open lavatory door. It was not, he recognized at once, a conversation that might normally occur between Mrs Vansittart and a prospective gardener. As he passed through the hall again his hostess was saying in a clenched voice that of course she would wake up. She would be at the lighthouse at half past six.

‘He’s a waiter from the Grand-Hotel,’ Jasper reported softly in the salon, but not so softly that the information failed to reach anyone present. ‘They’re carrying on in the mornings at the lighthouse.’

Signor Borromeo won that night, and so did Mrs Cecil. At a quarter to twelve Harry carried in a tray with glasses on it, and another containing decanters of cognac and whisky, and bottles of Cointreau, cherry brandy and yellow Chartreuse. He drank some Cointreau himself, talking to Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch about azaleas.

‘Harry dear, you’ve dribbled that stuff all over your jacket!’ Mrs Vansittart cried. ‘Oh, Harry, really!’

He went to the kitchen to wipe at the stain with a damp cloth. ‘Hot water, Harry,’ his wife called after him. ‘Make sure it’s really hot. And just a trace of soap.’

He’d had a bad day, she reported when he was out of earshot. In his Red Indian song Foontimo’s child-wife – the wife who was not real but who appeared to Foontimo in dreams – continued to be elusive. Harry couldn’t get her name right. He had written down upwards of four hundred names, but not one of them registered properly. For weeks poor Harry had been depressed over that.

While they listened they all of them in their different ways disliked Mrs Vansittart more than ever they had before. Even Jasper, who had so enjoyed eavesdropping at the lavatory door, considered it extravagantly awful that Mrs Vansittart’s seedy love life should have been displayed in front of everyone, while Harry washed up the dishes. Mrs Bloch several times tightened her lips during Mrs Vansittart’s speech about the difficulties Harry was having with his creation of an Indian child-wife; her husband frowned and looked peppery. It was really too much, Mrs Cecil said to herself, and resolved that on the way home she’d suggest dropping the Vansittarts. There were all kinds of people in this world, Signor Borromeo said to himself, but found that this reflection caused him to like Mrs Vansittart no more. A cornuto was one thing., but a man humiliated in pubblico was an unforgivable shame. Harry was buono, Signora Borromeo said to herself, Harry was like a bambino sometimes. Mr Cecil did not say anything to himself, being confused.

At midnight the gathering broke up. The visitors remarked that the evening had been delightful. They smiled and thanked Mrs Vansittart.

‘She has destroyed that man,’ Mrs Cecil said with feeling as she and her husband entered their villa, the Villa Japhico.

Signora Borromeo wept in the Villa Good-Fun, and her husband, sustaining himself with a late-night sandwich and a glass of beer, sadly shook his head.

‘She has destroyed that man,’ Jasper said to his friend in El Dorado, using the words precisely a minute after Mrs Cecil had used them in the Villa Japhico. In the Villa Hadrian the Blochs undressed in silence.

Mrs Vansittart lit a cigarette. She sat down at her dressing-table and removed her make-up, occasionally pausing to draw on her cigarette. Her mind contained few thoughts.

Her mind was tired, afflicted with the same fatigue that deadened, just a little, the eyes that people are rude about.

Harry sat at the piano in the snug little room he called his den. It was full of things he liked, ornaments and pictures he’d picked up in Europe, bric-a-brac that was priceless or had a sentimental value only. The main lights of the room were not switched on; an ornate lamp lit his piano and the sheets of music paper on the small table beside him. He wore a cotton dressing-gown that was mainly orange, a Javanese pattern.

The child-wife who visited the dreams of Foontimo said her name was Soaring Cloud. She prepared a heaven for Foontimo. She would never leave him, nor would she ever grow old.

Harry smiled over that, his even white teeth moist with excitement. He had known she could not elude him for ever.

The following morning Jasper watched from the rocks near the lighthouse. He carried with him a small pair of binoculars, necessary because the lie of the land would prevent him from getting close enough to observe his quarry profitably. He had to wait for some minutes before Mrs Vansittart appeared. She looked around her before descending a path that led to a gap among the rocks from which, later in the day, people bathed. She sat down and lit a cigarette. A moment later the swarthy waiter from the Grand-Hotel hurried to where she was.

Jasper moved cautiously. He was slightly above the pair, but well obscured from their view. Unfortunately it would be impossible to overhear a word they said. Wedging himself uncomfortably, he raised his binoculars and adjusted them.

A conversation, apparently heated, took place. There were many gestures on the part of the swarthy man and at one point he began to go away but was recalled by Mrs Vansittart. She offered him a cigarette, which he accepted. Then Mrs Vansittart took a wallet from a pocket of her trousers and counted a large number of notes on the palm of her companion. ‘My God,’ said Jasper, aloud, ‘she pays for it!’

The couple parted, the waiter hurrying back towards the Grand-Hotel. Mrs Vansittart sat for a moment where he had left her and then clambered slowly back to the coastal path. She disappeared from Jasper’s view.

Privately, Mrs Vansittart keeps an account of her life. While Harry composes his songs she fills a number of hard-backed notebooks with the facts she does not wish to divulge to anyone now but which, one day after her death and after Harry’s, she would like to be known. Of this particular day she wrote:

I paused now and again to watch the early-morning fishermen. I had paid ten thousand francs. At the end of the season the man might go and not return, as he had promised. But I could not be sure.

The morning was beautiful, not yet even faintly hot, the sky a perfect blue. The houses of Beaulieu seemed gracious across the glittering sea, yet the houses of Beaulieu are as ordinary as houses anywhere. A jogger glanced at me as I stood aside to let him pass, perspiration on his nose and chin. He did not speak or smile. I sometimes hate it on Cap Ferrat.

On the coastal path that morning I thought about Harry and myself when we were both eleven; I was in love with him even then. In Holland Falls he’d brought me to his mother’s bedroom to show me the rings she crowded on to her plump fingers, her heavily stoppered scent bottles, her garish silk stockings. But I wasn’t interested in his mother’s things. Harry told me to take my clothes off, which I shyly did, wanting to because he’d asked me and yet keeping my head averted. Everyone knew that Harry loathed his mother, but no one thought about it or blamed him particularly, she being huge and pink and doting on her only child in a shaming way. ‘God!’ he remarked, looking at my scrawny nakedness among his mother’s frills. ‘God, Jesus!’ I had wires on my teeth, and spindly arms and legs; I didn’t have breasts of any size. I took off Harry’s red windcheater, and after that the rest of his clothes and his shoes. We lay side by side between his mother’s scented sheets, while two floors down she talked to Mrs Gilliland. ‘Now, that’s just a damned lie!’ she afterwards shrieked at Rose when Rose said what she’d seen. I’ll never forget poor Rose’s pretty black face in the bedroom doorway, her eyes as round as teacups, bulging from her head. Harry’s mother got rid of her because of it, but the story ran all over Holland Falls and someone told my own mother, who sat down and cried. My father bawled at me, his fury a single crimson explosion of lips and tongue, his dotted necktie gulping up and down. It wasn’t Harry’s fault, I said, I’d tempted Harry because I loved him. Besides, I added, nothing had happened. ‘At eleven years of age?’ my father yelled. ‘It’s not the point, for God’s sake, that nothing happened!’

On the coastal path that morning I told myself it wasn’t fair to remember my father in the moment of his greatest rage. He’d been a gentle man, at his gentlest when operating his high-speed dentist’s drill, white-jacketed and happy. Even so, he never forgave me.

We ran away from Holland Falls when we were twenty-two. Harry had already inherited the paper-mill but it was run by a manager, by whom it has been run ever since. We drove about for a year, from town to town, motel to motel. We occupied different rooms because Harry had begun to compose his cycle and liked to be alone with it at night. I loved him more than I could ever tell him but never again, for Harry, did I take my clothes off. Harry has never kissed me, though I, in parsing, cannot even now resist bending down to touch the side of his face with my lips. A mother’s kiss, I dare say you would call it, and yet when I think of Harry and me I think as well of Héloïse and Abelard, Beatrice and Dante, and all the others. Absurd, of course.

I left the coastal path and went down to the rocks again, gazing into the depths of the clear blue water. ‘You’re never cross enough,’ Harry said, with childish petulance in the City Hotel, Harrisburg, when we were still twenty-two. I had come into my room to find the girl lying on my bed, as I had lain on his mother’s with him. In my presence he paid her forty dollars, but I knew he had not laid a finger on her, any more than he had on me when I was her age.

We went to England because Harry was frightened when a police patrol stopped our car one day and asked us if we’d ever been in Harrisburg. I denied it and they let us go, but that was why Harry thought of England, which he took to greatly as soon as we arrived. It became one of the games in our marriage to use only English phrases and to speak in the English way: Harry enjoyed that enormously, almost as much as working on his cycle. And loving him so, I naturally did my best to please him. Any distraction a harmless little game could provide, any compensation: that was how I saw my duty, if in the circumstances that is not too absurd a word. Anyway, the games and the distractions worked, sometimes for years on end. A great deal of time went by, for instance, between the incident in Harrisburg and the first of the two in England. ‘It’s all right,’ the poor child cried out in London when I entered my room. ‘Please don’t tell, Mrs Vansittart.’ Harry paid her the money he had promised her, and when she had gone I broke down and wept. I didn’t even want to look at Harry, I didn’t want to hear him speak. In an hour or so he brought me up a cup of tea.

It was, heaven knows, simple enough on the surface of things: I could not leave Harry because I loved him too much. I loved his chubby white hands and tranquil smile, and the weakness in his eyes when he took his spectacles off. If I’d left him, he would have ended up in prison because Harry needs to be loved. And then, besides, there has been so much happiness, at least for me: our travelling together, the pictures and the furniture we’ve so fondly collected, and of course the Villa Teresa. It’s the strangest thing in the world, all that.

A fisherman brought his boat near to the rocks where I was sitting. I had lit a cigarette and put my sunglasses on because the glare of daytime was beginning. I watched the fisherman unloading his modest catch, his brown fingers expertly arranging nets and hooks. How different, I thought, marriage would have been with that stranger. And yet could I, with anyone else, have experienced such feelings of passion as I have known?

‘I’m sorry,’ Harry began to say, a catch-phrase almost, in the 1950s. He’s always sorry when he Comes in from the flowerbeds with clay on his shoes, or puts the teapot on a polished surface, or breaks the promises he makes. In a way that’s hard to communicate Harry likes being sorry.

‘Bonjour, madame,’ the fisherman said, going by with his baskets of sole or whatever fish it was.

‘Bonjour’, I replied, smiling at him.

Harry would be still in bed, having worked on his cycle until three or four in the morning. Old Pierre and Carola and Madame Spad would not arrive for another hour, and in any case I did not have to be there when they did. But at the back of my mind there’s always the terror that when I return to the Villa Teresa Harry will be dead.

I clambered back to the coastal path and continued on my way. In England, after the first occasion, there was the convent girl in her red gymslip, who wasn’t docile like the other ones but shouted at me that she loved Harry more than I did. Sometimes she was there when I returned from shopping in the afternoons, sometimes there was only the rumpling of my bed to remind me of her visit. We had to leave England because of the scenes she made, and after the awful melancholy that had seized him Harry promised that none of it would ever happen again.

My presence at the lighthouse that morning had to do with a German girl in Switzerland eleven years ago. The waiter who is at the Grand-Hotel for the season was at the Bon Accueil in Château d’Oex. The German girl was given wine at dinnertime and suddenly burst into tears, hysterically flinging her accusations about. I simply laughed. I said it was ridiculous.

We were gone by breakfast-time and Harry has kept his promise since, frightened for eleven years. Dear, gentle Harry, who never laid a finger on any of those girls, who never would.

Later that morning Jasper’s friend shopped in St Jean, with Jasper’s terrier on a lead. When he had finished he sat down to rest at the cafe by the bus stop to have a jus d’abricot. He watched the tourists and the young people from the yachts. The terrier, elderly now, crept beneath his chair in search of shade.

‘Ah, Mrs Bloch!’ Jasper’s friend called out after a little while, for the lean South African lady was shopping also. He persuaded her to join him – rather against her will, since Mrs Bloch does not at all care for Jasper’s friend. He then related what Jasper had earlier related to him: that Mrs Vansittart now paid money for the intimate services she received from men. He described in detail, with some natural exaggeration, the transaction by the lighthouse. Repelled by the account, Mrs Bloch tightened her lips.

On the way back to the Villa Hadrian she called in at the Villa Japhico with two mouse-traps which she had promised last night she would purchase for Mrs Cecil. The Cecils, with neither gardener nor cleaning woman, do not easily find the time for daily shopping and the chandler’s store in St Jean will not deliver mouse-traps. Mrs Bloch waited to be thanked and then began.

‘To think that man came last night for money! With Harry there and everyone else!’

Mrs Cecil shook her head in horror. Jasper was a troublemaker and so was his rather unpleasant friend, yet neither would surely tell an outright lie. It was appalling to think of Mrs Vansittart conducting such business with a waiter. The satisfying of lust in a woman was most unpleasant.

‘I really can’t think why he doesn’t leave her,’ she said.

‘Oh, he never would. That simply isn’t Harry’s style.’

‘Yes, Harry’s loyal.’

That morning the Cecils had discussed the dropping of the Vansittarts, but had in the end agreed that the result of such a course of action would be that Harry would suffer. So they had decided against it, a decision which Mrs Cecil now passed on to her friend.

Mrs Bloch gloomily agreed.

Mrs Vansittart plays an ace and wins the trick. It is autumn, the season is over, the swarthy waiter has gone.

Harry enters the salon with his tray of tea, and the pâtisseries he has made that morning. He is so quiet in the shadows of the room that Mrs Bloch recalls how strangers to the villa have occasionally taken him for a servant. Mrs Cecil throws a smile in his direction.

Mr Bloch and Mr Cecil and Signor Borromeo, all of whom know about the transaction that took place near the lighthouse, prefer not to think about it. Jasper hopes that Mrs Vansittart will commit some further enormity shortly, so that the gossip it trails may while away the winter. It would be awfully dull, he often remarks to his friend, if Mrs Vansittart was like Mrs Bloch and Mrs Cecil and Signora Borromeo.

‘Oh, my dear, don’t pour it yet!’ she cries across the room, and then with some asperity, ‘We really aren’t quite ready, old thing.’

Harry apologizes, enjoying the wave of sympathy her protest engenders. He waits until the hand is played, knowing that then her voice will again command him. He can feel the stifled irritation in the room, and then the sympathy.

He pours the tea and hands the cups around. She lights a cigarette. Once, at the beginning of their time in the Villa Teresa, she had a way of getting up and helping him with the teacups, but then she sensed that that was wrong. She senses things in a clumsy kind of way. She is not clever.

‘Oh, look, you’ve made marzipan ones again! You know no one likes marzipan, dear.’

But Mrs Cecil and Mrs Bloch both select the marzipan ones, and Harry is apologetic. He is not aware that people have ever said his wife had three affairs and sundry casual conjunctions when they lived in England; nor does he know it is categorically stated that a peasant woman once spat in her face. It would not upset him to hear all this because it’s only gossip and its falsity doesn’t matter. It is a long time now since she sensed his modest wish, and in answer to it developed the rhythmic swing of her hips and the look in her eyes. Unconsciously, of course, she developed them; not quite in the way she allows the English intonations to creep into her voice. When he looks at her in the company of these people it’s enjoyable to imagine the swarthy waiter undressing her among the rocks, even Signor Borromeo trying something on beneath the bridge table.

Harry smiles. He goes around with the teapot, refilling the cups. He wishes she would say again that an avenue on Cap Ferrat would be called after him. It’s enjoyable, the feeling in the room then, the people thinking she shouldn’t have said it. It’s enjoyable when they think she shouldn’t swing her hips so, and when they come to conclusions about her made-up English voice. It’s enjoyable when she listens to his saga of Soaring Cloud the child-wife, and when her face is worried because yet another song has a theme of self-inflicted death. Harry enjoys that most of all.

Mrs Vansittart loses, for her attention had briefly wandered, as it sometimes does just after he has brought the tea around. She tried not to love him when her father was so upset. She tried to forget him, but he was always there, wordlessly pleading from a distance, so passionately demanding the love she passionately felt. She’d felt it long before the day she took her clothes off for him, and she remembers perfectly how it was.

For a moment at the bridge table the thoughts that have slipped beneath her guard make her so light-headed that she wants to jump up and run after him to the kitchen. She sees herself, gazing at him from the doorway, enticing him with her eyes, as first of all she did in Holland Falls. He puts his arms around her, and she feels on hers the lips she never has felt.

‘Diamonds,’ someone says, for she has asked what trumps are. Her virginal longing still warms her as the daydream dissipates. From its fragments Harry thanks her for the companion she has been, and her love is calm again at the bridge table.

Downstairs at Fitzgerald’s

Cecilia’s father would sit there, slowly eating oysters. Cecilia would tell him about school and about her half-brothers, and of course she’d have to mention her mother because it was impossible to have a conversation without doing that. She’d mention Ronan also, but because of her father’s attitude to her stepfather this was never an embarrassment.

‘Aren’t they good today?’ Tom, the waiter at Fitzgerald’s, would remark, always at the same moment, when placing in front of Cecilia’s father his second pint of stout.

‘Great, Tom,’ her father would unhesitatingly reply, and then Tom would ask Cecilia how her bit of steak was and if the chips were crisp. He’d mention the name of a racehorse and Cecilia’s father would give his opinion of it, drawing a swift breath of disapproval or thoughtfully pursing his lips.

These occasions in Fitzgerald’s Oyster Bar – downstairs at the counter – were like a thread of similar beads that ran through Cecilia’s childhood, never afterwards to be forgotten. Dublin in the 1940s was a different city from the city it later became; she’d been different herself. Cecilia was five when her father first took her to Fitzgerald’s, the year after her parents were divorced.

‘And tell me,’ he said some time later, when she was growing up a bit, ‘have you an idea at all about what you’ll do with yourself?’

‘When I leave school, d’you mean?’

‘Well, there’s no hurry, I’m not saying there is. Still and all, you’re nearly thirteen these days.’

‘In June.’

‘Ah, I know it’s June, Cecilia.’ He laughed, with his glass half-way to his lips. He looked at her over the rim, his light-blue eyes twinkling in a way she was fond of. He was a burly man with a brown bald head and freckles on the back of his hands and all over his forehead and his nose.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she said.

‘Some fellow’ll snap you up. Don’t worry about that.’ He swallowed another oyster and wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘How’s your mother?’

‘She’s fine.’

He never spoke disparagingly of her mother, nor she of him. When Cecilia was younger he used to drive up the short avenue of the house in Chapelizod in his old sloping-backed Morris, and Cecilia would always be ready for him. Her mother would say hullo to him and they’d have a little chat, and if Ronan opened the door or happened to be in the garden her father would ask him how he was, as though nothing untoward had ever occurred between them. Cecilia couldn’t understand any of it, but mistily there was the memory of her father living in the house in Chapelizod, and fragments from that time had lodged in her recollection. By the fire in the dining-room he read her a story she had now forgotten. ‘Your jersey’s inside out,’ he said to her mother and then he laughed because it was April Fools’ Day. Her father and Ronan had run a furniture-making business together, two large workshops in Chapelizod, not far from the house.

‘Lucky,’ he said in Fitzgerald’s. ‘Any fellow you’d accept.’

She blushed. At school a few of her friends talked of getting married, but in a way that wasn’t serious. Maureen Finnegan was in love with James Stewart, Betsy Bloom with a boy called George O’Malley: silly, really, it all was.

‘The hard case,’ a man in a thick overcoat said to her father, pausing on his way to the other end of the bar. ‘Would I chance money on Persian Gulf?’

Cecilia’s father shook his head and the man, accepting this verdict, nodded his. He winked at Cecilia in the way her father’s friends sometimes did after such an exchange, an acknowledgement of her father’s race-track wisdom. When he had gone her father told her that he was a very decent person who had come down in the world due to heavy drinking. Her father often had such titbits to impart and when he did so his tone was matter-of-fact, neither malicious nor pitying. In return, Cecilia would relate another fact or two about school, about Miss O’Shaughnessy or Mr Horan or the way Maureen Finnegan went on about James Stewart. Her father always listened attentively.

He hadn’t married again. He lived on his own in a flat in Waterloo Road, his income accumulating from a variety of sources, several of them to do with horse-racing. He’d explained that to her when she’d asked him once about this, wondering if he went to an office every day. She had never been to his flat, but he had described it to her because she’d wondered about that too.

‘We’ll take the trifle?’ he suggested, the only alternative offered by Fitzgerald’s being something called Bonanza Cream, over which Tom the waiter had years ago strenuously shaken his head.

‘Yes, please,’ she said.

When they’d finished it her father had a glass of whiskey and Cecilia another orange soda, and then he lit the third of his afternoon’s cigarettes. They never had lunch upstairs at Fitzgerald’s, where the restaurant proper was. ‘Now come and I’ll show you,’ her father had offered a year or so ago, and they had stared through a glass door that had the word Fitzgerald’s in elaborate letters running diagonally across it. Men and women sat at tables covered with pink tablecloths and with scarlet-shaded electric lamps on them, the lamps alight even though it was the afternoon. ‘Ah no, it’s nicer downstairs,’ her father had insisted, but Cecilia hadn’t entirely agreed, for downstairs in Fitzgerald’s possessed none of that cosiness. There were green tiles instead of the pink peacock wallpaper of the upper room, and stark rows of gin and whiskey bottles, and a workmanlike mahogany food-lift that banged up and down loaded with plates of oysters. Tom the waiter was really a barman, and the customers were all men. Cecilia had never seen a woman downstairs in Fitzgerald’s.

‘Bedad, isn’t her ladyship growing up,’ Tom said when her father had finished his whiskey and they both stood up. ‘Sure, it’s hardly a day ago she was a chiseler.’

‘Hardly a day,’ Cecilia’s father agreed, and Cecilia blushed again, glancing down at her wrists because she didn’t know where else to look. She didn’t like her wrists. They were the thinnest in Class Three, which was a fact she knew because a week ago one of the boys had measured everyone’s wrists with a piece of string. She didn’t like the black hair that hung down on either side of her face because it wasn’t curly like her mother’s. She didn’t like her eyes and she didn’t like the shape of her mouth, but the boy who had measured her wrists said she was the prettiest girl in Class Three. Other people said that too.

‘She’s a credit to yourself, sir,’ Tom said, scooping up notes and coins from the bar. ‘Thanks very much.’

Her father held her coat for her, taking it from a peg by the door. It and the hat he handed her were part of her school uniform, both of them green, the hat with a pale blue band. He didn’t put on his own overcoat, saying that the afternoon wasn’t chilly. He never wore a hat.

They walked past Christ Church Cathedral, towards Grafton Street. Their lunchtime encounters always took place on a Saturday, and sometimes in the middle of one Cecilia’s father would reveal that he had tickets for a rugby international at Lansdowne Road, or a taxi-driver would arrive in Fitzgerald’s to take them to the races at Phoenix Park. Sometimes they’d walk over to the Museum or the National Gallery. Cecilia’s father no longer drove a car.

‘Will we go to the pictures?’ he said today. ‘Reap the Wild Wind at the Grafton?’

He didn’t wait for an answer because he knew she’d want to go. He walked a little ahead of her, tidy in his darkish suit, his overcoat over his arm. On the steps of the cinema he gave her some money to go up to Noblett’s to buy chocolate and when she returned he was waiting with the tickets in his hand. She smiled at him, thanking him. She often wondered if he was lonely in his flat, and at the back of her mind she had an idea that what she’d like best when she left school would be to look after him there. It gave her a warm feeling in her stomach when she imagined the flat he had described and thought about cooking meals for him in its tiny kitchen.

After the cinema they had tea in Roberts’ and then he walked with her to the bus stop in the centre of the city. On the way he told her about an elderly couple in the café who’d addressed him by name, people who lived out in Greystones and bred Great Danes. ‘Till next time then,’ he said as the bus drew in, and kissed her shyly, in the manner of someone not used to kissing people.

She waved to him from her seat by the window and watched him turn and become lost in the crowded street. He would call in at a few public houses on his way back to the flat in Waterloo Road, places he often referred to by name, Toner’s and O’Donoghue’s and the upstairs lounge of Mooney’s, places where he met his friends and talked about racing. She imagined him there, with men like the man who’d asked if he should chance his money on Persian Gulf. But again she wondered if he was lonely.

It was already dark and had begun to rain by the time Cecilia reached the white house in Chapelizod where her father had once lived but which was occupied now by her mother and Ronan, and by Cecilia and her two half-brothers. A stove, with baskets of logs on either side of it, burned in the square, lofty hall where she took her coat and hat off. The brass door-plates and handles gleamed in the electric light. From the drawing-room came the sound of the wireless. ‘Ah, the wanderer’s returned,’ Ronan murmured when she entered, smiling, making her welcome.

Her half-brothers were constructing a windmill out of Meccano on the floor. Her mother and Ronan were sitting close together, he in an armchair, she on the hearthrug. They were going out that night, Cecilia could tell because her mother’s face was already made up: cerise lipstick and mascara, smudges of shadow beneath her eyes that accentuated their brownness, the same brown as her own. Her mother was petite and dark-haired – like Claudette Colbert, as Maureen Finnegan had once said.

‘Hullo,’ her mother said. ‘Nice time?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

She didn’t say anything else because they were listening to the wireless. Her father would be drinking more stout, she thought, his overcoat on a chair beside him, a fresh cigarette in his mouth. There wasn’t a public house between Stephen’s Green and Waterloo Road in which he wouldn’t know somebody. Of course he wasn’t lonely.

The voices on the wireless told jokes, a girl sang a song about a nightingale. Cecilia glanced at her mother and Ronan, she snuggling against his legs, his hand on her shoulder. Ronan was very thin, with a craggy face and a smile that came languidly on to his lips and died away languidly also. He was never cross: in the family, anger didn’t play the part it did in the households of several of Cecilia’s school friends, where there was fear of a father or a mother. Every Sunday she went with Ronan to the workshops where the furniture was made and he showed her what had been begun or completed during the week. She loved the smell of wood-shavings and glue and French polish.

When the programme on the wireless came to an end her mother rose to go upstairs, to finish getting ready. Ronan muttered lazily that he supposed he’d have to get himself into a suit. He stacked logs on to the fire and set the fireguard in place. ‘Your tweed one’s ironed,’ Cecilia’s mother reminded him sternly before she left the room. He grimaced at the boys, who were showing him their completed windmill. Then he grimaced at Cecilia. It was a joke in the family that Ronan never wanted to put on a suit.

Cecilia went to a school across the city from Chapelizod, in Ranelagh. It was an unusual place in the Dublin of that time, catering for both boys and girls, for Catholics and Protestants and Jews, and for Mohammedans when that rare need arose. Overflowing from a large suburban house into the huts and prefabricated buildings that served as extra classrooms, it was run by a headmaster, assisted by a staff of both sexes. There were sixty-eight pupils.

In spite of the superficially exotic nature of this establishment Cecilia was the only child whose parents had been divorced, and in the kind of conversations she began to have when she was twelve the details of that were increasingly a subject of curiosity. Divorce had a whiff of Hollywood and wickedness. Betsy Bloom claimed to have observed her parents naked on their bed, engaged in the act of love; Enid Healy’s father had run amok with a sofa leg. What had happened within the privacy of Cecilia’s family belonged in that same realm, and Cecilia was questioned closely. Even though her parents’ divorce had had to be obtained in England owing to the shortcomings of the Irish law, the events leading up to it must clearly have occurred in Chapelizod. Had Cecilia ever walked into a room and found her mother and her stepfather up to something? Was it true that her mother and her stepfather used to meet for cocktails in the Gresham Hotel? What exactly were cocktails? Had detectives been involved? Her mother and Ronan were glanced at with interest on the very few occasions when they put in an appearance at a school function, and it was agreed that they lived uρ to the roles they had been cast in. The clothes her mother wore were not like the all-purpose garments of Mrs O’Reily-Hamirton or Kitty Benson’s mother. ‘Sophisticated,’ Maureen Finnegan had pronounced. ‘Chic.’

But in the end Cecilia was aware of her schoolfellows’ disappointment. There had been no detectives that she could recall, and she didn’t know if there had been meetings in the Gresham Hotel. She had never walked into a room to find something untoward taking place and she could remember no quarrels – nothing that was even faintly in the same category as Enid Healy’ father brandishing a sofa leg. In America, so the newspapers said, kidnappings occasionally took place when the estranged couples of divorce could not accept the dictates of the law where their children were concerned. ‘Your daddy never try that?’ Maureen Finnegan hopefully prompted, and Cecilia had to laugh at the absurdity of it. A satisfactory arrangement had been made, she explained for the umpteenth time, knowing it sounded dreary: everyone was content.

The headmaster of the school once spoke to her of the divorce also, though only in passing. He was a massively proportioned man known as the Bull, who shambled about the huts and prefabricated buildings calling out names in the middle of a lesson, ticking his way down the columns of his enormous roll-book. Often he would pause as if he had forgotten what he was about and for a moment or two would whistle through his breath ‘The British Grenadiers’, the marching song of the regiment in which he had once served with distinction. The only tasks he had ever been known to perform were the calling out of names and the issuing of an occasional vague announcement at the morning assemblies which were conducted by Mr Horan. Otherwise he remained lodged in his own cloudlands, a faint, blue-suited presence, benignly unaware of the feuds that stormed among his staff or the nature of the sixty-eight children whose immediate destinies had been placed in his care.

To Cecilia’s considerable surprise the Bull sent for her one morning, the summons interrupting one of Miss O’shaughnessy’s science periods. Miss O’shaughnessy was displaying how a piece of litmus paper had impressively changed colour, and when Mickey, the odd-job boy, entered the classroom and said that the headmaster wanted Cecilia an immediate whispering broke out. The substance of this was that a death must have taken place.

‘Ah,’ the Bull said when Cecilia entered the study where he ate all his meals, read the Irish Times and interviewed prospective parents. His breakfast tray was still on his desk, a paper-backed Sexton Blake adventure story beside it. ‘Ah,’ he said again, and did not continue. His bachelor existence was nicely expressed by the bleak furnishings of the room, the row of pipes above a damply smouldering fire, the insignia of the Grenadier Guards scattered on darkly panelled walls.

‘Is anything the matter, sir?’ Cecilia eventually inquired, for the suggestion that a death might have occurred still echoed as she stood there.

The headmaster regarded her without severity. The breathy whistling of the marching song began as he reached for a pipe and slowly filled it with tobacco. The whistling ceased. He said:

‘The fees are sometimes a little tardy. The circumstances are unusual, since you are not regularly in touch with your father. But I would be obliged, when next you see him, if you would just say that the fees have of late been tardy.’

A match was struck, the tobacco ignited. Cecilia was not formally dismissed, but the headmaster’s immense hand seized the Sexton Blake adventure story, indicating that the interview was over. It had never occurred to her before that it was her father, not her mother and Ronan, who paid her school fees. Her father had never in his life visited the school, as her mother and Ronan had. It was strange that he should be responsible for the fees, and Cecilia resolved to thank him when next she saw him. It was also embarrassing that they were sometimes late.

‘Ah,’ the Bull said when she had reached the door. ‘You’re – ah – all right, are you? The – ah – family trouble…?’

‘Oh, that’s all over, sir.’

‘So it is. So it is. And everything…?’

‘Everything’s fine, sir.’

‘Good. Good.’

Interest in the divorce had dwindled and might even have dissipated entirely had not the odd behaviour of a boy called Abrahamson begun. Quite out of the blue, about a month after the Saturday on which Cecilia and her father had gone to see Reap the Wild Wind, Abrahamson began to stare at her.

In the big classroom where Mr Horan’s morning assemblies were held his eyes repeatedly darted over her features, and whenever they met in a corridor or by the tennis courts he would glance at her sharply and then glance away again, trying to do so before she noticed. Abrahamson’s father was the solicitor to the furniture-making business and because of that Abrahamson occasionally turned up in the house in Chapelizod. No one else from the school did so, Chapelizod being too distant from the neighbourhoods where most of the school’s sixty-eight pupils lived. Abrahamson was younger than Cecilia, a small olive-skinned boy whom Cecilia had many times entertained in the nursery while his parents sat downstairs, having a drink. He was an only child, self-effacing and anxious not to be a nuisance: when he came to Chapelizod now he obligingly played with Cecilia’s half-brothers, humping them about the garden on his back or acting the unimportant parts in the playlets they composed.

At school he was always called by his surname and was famous for his brains. He was neither popular nor unpopular, content to remain on the perimeter of things. Because of this, Cecilia found it difficult to approach him about his staring, and the cleverness that was reflected in the liquid depths of his eyes induced a certain apprehension. But since his interest in her showed no sign of diminishing she decided she’d have to point out that she found it discomfiting. One showery afternoon, on the way down the shrubbed avenue of the school, she questioned him.

Being taller than the boy and his voice being softly pitched, Cecilia had to bend over him to catch his replies. He had a way of smiling when he spoke – a smile, so everyone said, that had to do with his thoughts rather than with any conversation he happened to be having at the time.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry, Cecilia. I didn’t know I was doing it.’

‘You’ve been doing it for weeks, Abrahamson.’

He nodded, obligingly accepting the truth of the accusation. And since an explanation was required, he obligingly offered one.

‘It’s just that when you reach a certain age the features of your face aren’t those of a child any more. I read it in a book: a child’s face disguises its real features, but at a certain age the disguise falls off. D’you understand, Cecilia?’

‘No, I don’t. And I don’t know why you’ve picked on me just because of something you read in a book.’

‘It happens to everyone, Cecilia.’

‘You don’t go round staring at everyone.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry, Cecilia.’

Abrahamson stopped and opened the black case in which he carried his school-books. Cecilia thought that in some clever way he was going to produce from it an explanation that made more sense. She waited without pressing the matter. On the avenue boys kicked each other, throwing caps about. Miss O’shaughnessy passed on her motorized bicycle. Mr Horan strode by with his violin.

‘Like one?’ Abrahamson had taken from his case a carton containing two small, garishly iced cakes. ‘Go on, really.’

She took the raspberry-coloured one, after which Abrahamson meticulously closed the carton and returned it to his case. Every day he came to school with two of these cakes, supplied by his mother for consumption during the eleven o’clock break. He sold them to anyone who had a few pence to spare, and if he didn’t sell them at school he did so to a girl in a newsagent’s shop which he passed on his journey home.

‘I don’t want to tell you,’ he said as they walked on. ‘I’m sorry you noticed.’

‘I couldn’t help noticing.’

‘Call it quits now, will we?’ There was the slightest of gestures towards the remains of the cake, sticky in Cecilia’s hand. Abrahamson’s tone was softer than ever, his distant smile an echo from his private world. It was said that he played chess games in his head.

‘I’d like to know, Abrahamson.’

His thin shoulders just perceptibly shifted up and down. He appeared to be stating that Cecilia was foolish to insist, and to be stating as well that if she continued to insist he did not intend to waste time and energy in argument. They had passed through the gates of the school and were standing on the street, waiting for a number 11 bus.

‘It’s odd,’ he said, ‘if you want to know. Your father and all that.’

‘Odd?’

The bus drew up. They mounted to the upper deck. When they sat down Abrahamson stared out of the window. It was as if he had already said everything that was necessary, as if Cecilia should effortlessly be able to deduce the rest. She had to nudge him with her elbow, and then – politely and very swiftly – he glanced at her, silently apologizing for her inability to understand the obvious. A pity, his small face declared, a shame to have to carry this burden of stupidity.

‘When people get divorced,’ he said, carefully spacing the words, ‘there’s always a reason. You’ll observe that in films. Or if you read in the paper about the divorce of, say, William Powell and Carole Lombard. They don’t actually bother with divorce if they only dislike one another.’

The conductor came to take their fares. Again the conversation appeared to have reached its termination.

‘But what on earth’s that got to do with what we’re talking about, Abrahamson?’

‘Wouldn’t there have been a reason why your parents got divorced? Wouldn’t the reason be the man your mother married?’

She nodded vehemently, feeling hot and silly. Abrahamson said:

‘They’d have had a love affair while your father was still around. In the end there would have been the divorce.’

‘I know all that’, Abrahamson.’

‘Well, then.’

Impatiently, she began to protest again but broke off in the middle of a sentence and instead sat there frowning. She sensed that the last two words her companion had uttered contained some further declaration, but was unable to grasp it.

‘Excuse me,’ Abrahamson said, politely, before he went.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’ her mother asked, looking across the lace-trimmed white cloth on the dining-room table. ‘You haven’t been gorging yourself, have you?’

Cecilia shook her head, and the hair she didn’t like swung about. Her half-brothers giggled, a habit they had recently developed. They were years younger than Cecilia, yet the briskness in her mother’s voice placed her in a category with them, and she suddenly wondered if her mother could somehow guess what had come into her mind and was telling her not to be silly. Her mother was wearing a green dress and her fingernails had been freshly tinted. Her black bobbed hair gleamed healthily in watery afternoon sunshine, her dimples came and went.

‘How was the Latin?’

‘All right.’

‘Did you get the passive right?’

‘More or less.’

‘Why’re you so grumpy, Cecilia?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Well, I think I’d disagree with that.’

Cecilia’s cheeks had begun to burn, which caused her half-brothers to giggle again. She knew they were kicking one another beneath the table and to avoid their scrutiny she stared through the french windows, out into the garden. She’d slept in a pram beneath the apple tree and once had crawled about among the flowerbeds: she could just remember that, she could remember her father laughing as he picked her up.

Cecilia finished her cup of tea and rose, leaving half a piece of coffee-cake on her plate. Her mother called after her when she reached the door.

‘I’m going to do my homework,’ Cecilia said.

‘But you haven’t eaten your cake.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘That’s rude, you know.’

She didn’t say anything. She opened the door and closed it softly behind her. Locked in the bathroom, she examined in the looking-glass the features Abrahamson had spoken of. She made herself smile. She squinted, trying to see her profile. She didn’t want to think about any of it, yet she couldn’t help herself. She hated being here, with the door locked at five o’clock in the, evening, yet she couldn’t help that either. She stared at herself for minutes on end, performing further contortions, glancing and grimacing, catching herself unawares. But she couldn’t see anywhere a look of her stepfather.

‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ Abrahamson explained. ‘It’s difficult to analyse your own face.’

They walked together slowly, on the cinder-track that ran around the tennis courts and the school’s single hockey pitch. She was wearing her summer uniform, a green-and-blue dress, short white socks. Abrahamson wore flannel shorts and the elaborate school blazer.

‘Other people would have noticed, Abrahamson.’

He shook his head. Other people weren’t so interested in things like that, he said. And other people weren’t so familiar with her family.

‘It isn’t a likeness or anything, Cecilia. Not a strong resemblance, nothing startling. It’s only a hint, Cecilia, an inkling you could call it.’

‘I wish you hadn’t told me.’

‘You wanted me to.’

‘Yes, I know.’

They had reached the end of the cinder-track. They turned and walked back towards the school buildings in silence. Girls were playing tennis. ‘Love, forty,’ called the elderly English master, No-teeth Carroll he was known as.

‘I’ve looked and looked,’ Cecilia said. ‘I spend hours in the bathroom.’

‘Even if I hadn’t read about the development of the features I think I’d have stumbled on it for myself. “Now, what on earth is it about that girl?” I kept saying to myself. “Why’s her face so interesting all of a sudden?” ’

‘I think you’re imagining it.’

‘Well, maybe I am.’

They watched the tennis-players. He wasn’t someone who made mistakes, or made things up; he wasn’t like that at all. She wished she had her father’s freckles, just a couple, anywhere, on her forehead or her nose. ‘Deuce,’ No-teeth Carroll called. ‘No, it’s definitely deuce,’ he insisted, but an argument continued. The poor old fellow was on a term’s notice, Abrahamson said.

They walked on. She’d heard it too, she agreed, about the term’s notice. Pity, because he wasn’t bad, the way he let you do anything you liked provided you were quiet.

‘Would you buy one of my cakes today?’ Abrahamson asked.

‘Please don’t tell anyone, Abrahamson.’

‘You could buy them every day, you know. I never eat them myself.’

A little time went by. On the 15th of June Cecilia became thirteen. A great fuss was made of the occasion, as was usual in the family whenever there was a birthday. Ronan gave her A Tale of Two Cities, her mother a dress which she had made herself, with rosebuds on it, and her half-brothers gave her a red bangle. There was chicken for her birthday lunch, with roast potatoes and peas, and then lemon meringue pie. All of them were favourites of hers.

‘Happy birthday, darling,’ Ronan whispered, finding a special moment to say it when everyone else was occupied. She knew he was fond of her, she knew that he enjoyed their Sunday mornings in the workshops. She liked him too. She’d never thought of not liking him.

‘Really happy birthday,’ he said and it was then, as he smiled and turned away, that something occurred to her which she hadn’t thought of before, and which Abrahamson clearly hadn’t thought of either: when you’d lived for most of your life in a house with the man whom your mother had married you could easily pick up some of his ways. You could pick them up without knowing it, like catching a cold, his smile or some other hint of himself. You might laugh the way he did, or say things with his voice. You’d never guess you were doing it.

‘Oh, of course,’ Abrahamson obligingly agreed when she put it to him. ‘Of course, Cecilia.’

‘But wouldn’t that be it then? I mean, mightn’t that account –’

‘Indeed it might.’

His busy, unassuming eyes looked up into hers and then at the distant figure of No-teeth Carroll, who was standing dismally by the long-jump pit.

‘Indeed,’ Abrahamson said again.

‘I’m certain that’s it. I mean, I still can’t see anything myself in my looks –’

‘Oh, there’s definitely something.’ He interrupted sharply, his tone suggesting that it was illogical and ridiculous to question what had already been agreed upon. ‘It’s very interesting, what you’re saying about growing like someone you live with and quite like. It’s perfectly possible, just as the other is perfectly possible. If you asked your mother, Cecilia, she probably wouldn’t know what’s what any more than anyone else does. On account of the circumstances.’

He was bored by the subject. He had acceded to her request about not telling anyone. It was best to let the subject go.

‘Chocolate and strawberry today,’ he said, smiling again as he passed over the two small cakes.

There was another rendezvous in Fitzgerald’s Oyster Bar. Cecilia wore her new rosebud dress and her red bangle. On her birthday a ten-shilling note had arrived from her father, which she now thanked him for.

‘When I was thirteen myself,’ he said, pulling the cellophane from a packet of Sweet Afton, ‘I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.’

Cecilia kept her head averted. At least the light wasn’t strong. There was a certain amount of stained glass in the windows and only weak bulbs burned in the globe-topped brass lamps that were set at intervals along the mahogany bar. She tried not to smile in case the inkling in her face had something to do with that.

‘Well, I see your man’s going up in front of the stewards,’ Tom the waiter remarked. ‘Sure, isn’t it time they laid down the law on that fellow?’

‘Oh, a terrible chancer that fellow, Tom.’

Their order was taken, and shouted down the lift-shaft.

‘We might indulge in a drop of wine, Tom. On account of her ladyship’s birthday.’

‘I have a great little French one, sir. Macon, sir.’

‘That’ll suit us fine, Tom.’

It was early, the bar was almost empty. Two men in camel-coloured coats were talking in low voices by the door. Cecilia had seen them before. They were bookies, her father had told her.

‘Are you all right?’ he inquired. ‘You haven’t got the toothache or anything?’

‘No, I’m all right, thanks.’

The bar filled up. Men stopped to speak to her father and then sat at the small tables behind them or on stools by the bar itself. Her father lit another cigarette.

‘I didn’t realize you paid the fees,’ she said.

‘What fees do you mean?’

She told him in order to thank him, because she thought they could laugh over the business of the fees being late every term. But her father received the reprimand solemnly. He was at fault, he confessed: the headmaster was quite right, and must be apologized to on his behalf.

‘He’s not someone you talk to,’ Cecilia explained, realizing that although she’d so often spoken about school to her father she’d never properly described the place, the huts and prefabricated buildings that were its classrooms, the Bull going round every morning with his huge roll-book.

She watched Tom drawing the cork from the bottle of red wine. She said that only yesterday Miss O’shaughnessy’s motorized bicycle had given up the ghost and she repeated the rumour that poor old No-teeth Carroll was on a term’s notice. She couldn’t say that she’d struck a silent bargain with a boy called Abrahamson, who brought to the school each day two dainty little cakes in a carton. She’d have liked just to tell about the cakes because her father would have appreciated the oddity of it. It was strange that she hadn’t done so before.

‘Now,’ said Tom, placing the oysters in front of her father and her steak in front of her. He filled up their wine-glasses and drew a surplus of foam from the surface of someone else’s stout.

‘Is your mother well, Cecilia?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And everyone in Chapelizod?’

‘They’re all well.’

He looked at her. He had an oyster on the way to his mouth and he glanced at her and then he ate the oyster. He took a mouthful of wine to wash it down.

‘Well, that’s great,’ he said.

Slowly he continued to consume his oysters. ‘If we felt like it,’ he said, ‘we could catch the races at the Park.’

He had been through all of it, just as she had. Ever since the divorce he must have wondered, looking at her as he had looked at her just now, for tell-tale signs. ‘They’d have had a love affair while your father was still around,’ came the echo of Abrahamson’s confident voice, out of place in the oyster bar. Her father had seen Abrahamson’s inkling and had felt as miserable as she had. He had probably even comforted himself with the theory about two people in the same house, she picking up her stepfather’s characteristics. He had probably said all that to himself over and over again but the doubt had lingered, as it had lingered with her. Married to one man, her mother had performed with another the same act of passion which Betty Bloom had witnessed in her parents’ bedroom. As Abrahamson had fairly pointed out, in confused circumstances such as these no one would ever know what was what.

‘We’ll take the trifle, will we?’ her father said.

‘Two trifle,’ Tom shouted down the lift-shaft.

‘You’re getting prettier all the time, girl.’

‘I don’t like my looks at all.’

‘Nonsense, girl. You’re lovely.’

His eyes, pinched a bit because he was laughing, twinkled. He was much older than her mother, Cecilia suddenly realized, something which had never struck her before.

Were the fees not paid on time because he didn’t always have the money? Was that why he had sold his car?

‘Will we settle for the races, or something else? You’re the birthday lady today.’

‘The races would be lovely.’

‘Could you ever put that on for me, sir?’ Tom requested in a whisper, passing a pound note across the bar. ‘Amazon Girl, the last race.’

‘I will of course, Tom.’

His voice betrayed nothing of the pain which Cecilia now knew must mark these Saturday occasions for him. The car that was due to collect them was late, he said, and as he spoke the taxi man entered.

‘Step on it,’ her father said, ‘like a good man.’

He gave her money and advised her which horses to gamble on. He led her by the hand when they went to find a good place to watch from. It was a clear, sunny day, the sky without a cloud in it, and in the noise and bustle no one seemed unhappy.

‘There’s a boy at school,’ she said, ‘who brings two little cakes for the eleven o’clock lunch. He sells them to me every day.’

He wagged his head and smiled. But in a serious voice he said he hoped she didn’t pay too much for the cakes, and she explained that she didn’t.

It was odd the way Maureen Finnegan and all the others, even the Bull, had suspected the tidy settlement there’d been. It would be ridiculous, now, ever to look after him in his flat.

‘I hate to lose poor Tom’s money for him.’

‘Won’t Amazon Girl win?’

‘Never a hope.’

Women in brightly coloured dresses passed by as Cecilia’s father paused for a moment by a bookmaker’s stand to examine the offered odds. He ran a hand over his jaw, considering. A woman with red hair and sunglasses came up. She said it was good to see him and then passed on.

‘We’ll take a small little flutter on Gillian’s, Choice,’ he finally said. ‘D’you like the sound of that, Cecilia?’

She said she did. She put some of the money he had given her on the horse and waited for him while he transacted with another bookmaker. He approached a third one with Tom’s pound for Amazon Girl. It was a habit of his to bet with different bookmakers.

‘That red-haired woman’s from Carlow,’ he said as they set off to their vantage point. ‘The widow of the county surveyor.’

‘Yes,’ she said, not caring much about the red-haired woman.

‘Gillian’s Choice is the one with the golden hoops,’ he said. ‘Poor Tom’s old nag is the grey one.’

The horses went under starter’s orders and then, abruptly, were off. In the usual surprisingly short space of time the race was over.

‘What did I tell you?’ He laughed down at her as they went to collect the winnings from their two different bookmakers. He had won more than three hundred pounds, she fourteen and sixpence. They always counted at the end; they never lost when they went together. He said she brought him luck, but she knew it was the other way round.

‘You’ll find your way to the bus, Cecilia?’

‘Yes, I will. Thanks very much.’

He nodded. He kissed her in his awkward way and then disappeared into the crowd, as he always seemed to do when they parted. It was standing about in the sun, she thought, that caused him to have so many freckles. She imagined him at other race-courses, idling between races without her, sunning himself while considering a race-card. She imagined him in his flat in Waterloo Road and wondered if he ever cried.

She walked slowly away, the money clenched in her hand because the rosebud dress had no pockets. He did cry, she thought: on the Saturdays when they met, when he was on his own again. It was easy to imagine him because she wanted to cry herself, because on all their occasions in the future there would be the doubt. Neither of them would ever really know what being together meant, downstairs at Fitzgerald’s or anywhere else.

Mulvihill’s Memorial

The man, naked himself, slowly removed the woman’s clothes: a striped red-and-black dress, a petticoat, stockings, further underclothes. In an armchair he took the woman on to his knees, nuzzling her neck with his mouth.

A second man entered the room and divested himself of his clothes. A second woman, in a grey skirt and jersey, was divested of hers. The four sprawled together on the armchair and the floor. Complex sexual union took place.

The film ended; a square of bright light replaced the sexual antics on the sheet of cartridge paper which Mulvihill had attached to the back of his drawing-office door. He switched on a green-shaded desk light, removed the cartridge paper and the drawing-pins that had held it in place. Packing away his projector in the bottom drawer of his filing-cabinet, he hummed beneath his breath an old tune from his childhood, ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’. The projector and Mulvihill’s films were naturally kept under lock and key. Some of his films he could project at home and often did so; others he did not feel he could. ‘Whatever are you doing, dear?’ his sister some- times called through the door of the garden shed where now and again he did a bit of carpentry, and of course it would be terrible if ever she discovered the stuff. So every Friday evening, when everyone else had left the Ygnis and Ygnis building – and before the West Indian cleaners arrived in the corridor where his office was – Mulvihill locked the door and turned the lights out. He’d been doing it for years.

He was a man with glasses, middle-aged, of medium height, neither fat nor thin. Given to wearing Harris tweed jackets and looking not unlike an advertisement for the Four Square tobacco he smoked, he travelled every day to the centre of London from the suburb of Purley, where his relationship with his slightly older sister was cemented by the presence in their lives of a Scotch terrier called Pasco. By trade Mulvihill was a designer of labels – labels for soup-tins and coffee in plastic packets, for seed-packets and sachets of shampoo. The drawing-office he shared with a Hungarian display artist called Wilkinski reflected the work of both of them. The walls were covered with enlarged versions of designs that had in the past been used to assist in the selling of a variety of products; cardboard point-of-sale material stood on all the office’s surfaces except the two sloping drawing-boards, each with its green-shaded light. Paintbrushes and pencils filled jam jars, different-coloured papers were stored in a corner. In different colours also, sheaves of cellophane hung from bulldog-clips. Tins of Cow paper adhesive were everywhere.

Being at the ordinary end of things, neither Mulvihill nor Wilkinski created the Ygnis and Ygnis glamour that appeared on the television screen and in the colour supplements: their labels and display material were merely echoes of people made marvellous with a red aperitif on the way to their lips, of women enriched by the lather of a scented soap, and men invigorated by the smooth operation of a razor-blade. From Ygnis and Ygnis came images lined always with a promise, of happiness or ecstasy. Girls stood aloof by castle walls, beautiful in silk. Children laughed as they played, full of the beans that did them good. Ygnis and Ygnis was of the present, but the past was never forgotten: the hot days of summer before the worst of the wars, brown bread and jam, and faded flowered dresses. The future was simple with plain white furniture and stainless steel and Japanese titbits. In the world of wonders that was Ygnis and Ygnis’s, empresses ate Turkish Delight and men raced speedboats. For ever and for ever there was falling in love.

Mulvihill took his mackintosh from a peg on the wall, and picked up the two short pieces of timber he’d purchased during the lunch hour and with which, that weekend, he hoped to repair a bookcase. He didn’t light his pipe, although while watching ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ he had filled it with Four Square, ready to ignite it in the lift. ‘Evening, Violet,’ he said to the big West Indian lady who was just beginning to clean the offices of the corridor. He listened for a moment while she continued what she had been telling him last Friday, about a weakness her son had developed in his stomach. He nodded repeatedly and several times spoke sympathetically before moving on. He would call in at the Trumpet Major for a glass of red wine, as he did every Friday evening, and chat for a quarter of an hour to the usual people. It was all part of the weekend, but this time it wasn’t to be. In the lift which Mulvihill always took – the one at the back of the building, which carried him to the garage and the mews – he died as he was lighting his pipe.

In the Trumpet Major nobody missed Mulvihill. His regular presence on Friday evenings was too brief to cause a vacuum when it did not occur. Insisting that a single glass of wine was all he required, he never became involved in rounds of drinks, and it was accepted that that was his way. R.B. Strathers was in the lounge bar, as always on Friday, with Tip Dainty and Capstick and Lilia. Other employees of Ygnis and Ygnis were there also, two of the post-boys in the public bar, Fred Stein the art buyer. At a quarter past eight Ox-Banham joined Strathers and his companions, who had made a place for themselves in a corner. Like Mulvihill, Ox-Banham was known to work late on Fridays, presumed to be finishing anything that had become outstanding during the week. In fact, like Mulvihill, he indulged a private hobby: the seduction, on the floor of his office, of his secretary, Rowena.

‘Well, how are we all?’ Ox-Banham demanded. ‘And, more to the point, what are we having?’

Everyone was having the same as usual. Lilia, the firm’s most important woman copywriter, was drunk, as she had been since lunchtime. R.B. Strathers, who had once almost played rugby for South Africa and was now the managing director of Ygnis and Ygnis, was hoping to be drunk shortly. Tip Dainty occasionally swayed.

Ox-Banham took a long gulp of his whisky and water and gave a little gasp of satisfaction. Rowena would be leaving the building about now, since the arrangement was that she stayed behind for ten minutes or so after he’d left her so that they wouldn’t be seen together. In normal circumstances it didn’t matter being seen together, an executive and his secretary, but just after sexual congress had taken place it might well be foolish: some tell-tale detail in their manner with one another might easily be still floating about on the surface. ‘Point taken of course,’ Rowena had said, being given to speaking in that masculine way. Hard as glass she was, in Ox-Banham’s view.

‘The confectionery boys first thing Monday,’ he said now. ‘Neat little campaign we’ve got for them, I think.’

Lilia, who was middle-aged and untidy, talked about shoes. She was clutching a bundle of papers in her left hand, pressing it tightly against her breast as if she feared someone might snatch it from her. Her grey hair had loosened, her eyes were glazed. ‘How about Cliff Hangers?’ she said to Tip Dainty, offering the term as a name for a new range of sandals.

Lilia’s bundle of papers was full of such attempts to find a title for the new range. The sandals were well designed, so Ygnis and Ygnis had been told, with a definite no-nonsense look. Tip Dainty said Cliff Hangers sounded as if something dreadful might happen to you if you wore the things, and Lilia grinned extravagantly, her lean face opening until it seemed entirely composed of teeth. ‘Hangers?’ she suggested. ‘Just Hangers?’ But Tip Dainty said Hangers would make people think of death.

Ox-Banham talked to Capstick and R.B. Strathers about the confectionery people and the preparations that had been made by Ygnis and Ygnis to gain the advertising of a new chocolate bar. Again there had been the question of a name and Ygnis and Ygnis in the end had settled for Go. It was Mulvihill who had designed the wrapper and the various cartons in which the bar would be delivered to the shops, as well as window-stickers and other point-of-sale material.

‘I like that Go idea,’ Ox-Banham said, ‘and I like the moody feel of that scene in the cornfield.’ His back was a little painful because Rowena had a way of digging her fingernails into whatever flesh she could find, but of course it was worth it. Rowena had been foisted on him by her father, Bloody Smithson, the awful advertising Manager of McCulloch Paints, and when Ox-Banham had first seduced her he’d imagined he was getting his own back for years of Smithson’s awkwardness. But in no time at all he’d realized Rowena was using him as much as he was using her: she wanted him to get her into the copywriting department.

‘How about Strollers?’ Lilia was asking, and Tip Dainty pointed out that Clark’s were using it already. ‘Cliff Hangers, Strath?’ Lilia repeated, but in his blunt, rugby-playing way R.B. Strathers said Cliff Hangers was useless.

Mulvihill’s sister, who was the manageress of a mini-market, was surprised when Mulvihill didn’t put in an appearance at a quarter to nine, his usual time on Fridays. Every other evening he was back by ten past seven, in time for most of the Archers, but on Fridays he liked to finish off his week’s work so as to have a clean plate on Monday. He smelt a little of the wine he drank in the Trumpet Major, but since he always told her the gossip he’d picked up she never minded in the least having to keep their supper back. She knew it wasn’t really for the gossip he went to the public house but in order to pass a few moments with Ox-Banham and R.B. Strathers, to whom he owed his position at Ygnis and Ygnis. Not that either Ox-Banham or R.B. Strathers had employed him in the first place – neither had actually been at Ygnis and Ygnis in those days – but Ox-Banham had since become the executive to whom Mulvihill was mainly responsible and R.B. Strathers was naturally important, being the managing director. Miss Mulvihill had never met these men, but imagined them easily enough from the descriptions that had been passed on to her: Ox-Banham tight-faced in a striped dark suit, R.B. Strathers big, given to talking about rugby matches he had played in. Lilia was peculiar by the sound of her, and Capstick, who designed the best advertisements in Ygnis and Ygnis, was a bearded little creature with a tendency to become insulting when, he reached a certain stage in drunkenness. Tip Dainty became genial.

Miss Mulvihill missed these people, her Friday people as she thought of them: she felt deprived as she impatiently waited, she even felt a little cross. Her brother had said he was going to pick up the timber pieces for the bookcase, but he’d have done that in his lunchtime. Never in a million years would he just stay on drinking, he didn’t even like the taste. Shortly after ten o’clock the Scotch terrier, Pasco, became agitated, and at eleven Miss Mulvihill noticed that her crossness had turned to fear. But it wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that she telephoned the police.

On the following Monday morning the employees of Ygnis and Ygnis arrived at the office building variously refreshed after their weekend. The body had been removed from the back lift, no trace of the death remained. The Hungarian, Wilkinski, was surprised that Mulvihill was not already in the office they shared, for normally he was the first of the two to arrive. He was still pondering the cause of this when the tea-woman, Edith, told him she’d heard Mulvihill had died. She handed Wilkinski his tea, with two lumps of sugar in the saucer, and even while she released the news she poured from her huge, brown enamel teapot a cup for the deceased. ‘Oh, stupid thing!’ she chided herself.

‘But however dead, Edith? However he die, my God?’

Edith shook her head. It was terrible, she said, placing the edge of the teapot on Mulvihill’s drawing-board because it was heavy to hold. She still couldn’t believe it, she said, laughing and joking he’d been Friday, right as rain. ‘Well, it just goes to show,’ she said. ‘Poor man!’

‘Are you sure of this, Edith?’ The fat on Wilkinski’s face was puckered in mystification, his thick spectacles magnifying the confusion in his eyes. ‘Dead?’ he said again.

‘Definitely,’ Edith added, and moved on to spread the news.

My God, dead! Wilkinski continued to reflect, for several minutes unable to drink his tea and finding it cold when he did so. Mulvihill had been the easiest man in the world to share an office with, neither broody nor a bore, a pleasant unassuming fellow, perhaps a little over-worried about the safety of his job, but then who doesn’t have faults in this world? He’d been happy, as far as Wilkinski had ever made out, with his sister and their dog in Purley, a few friends in on a Saturday night to cheese and wine, old films on the television. Anything to do with films had interested him, photography being as much of a hobby as his do-it-yourself stuff. In 1971, when Wilkinski’s elder daughter married, Mulvihill had recorded the occasion with the camera he’d just bought. He’d made an excellent job of it, with titles he’d lettered himself, and a really impressive shot of the happy couple coming down the steps of the reception place. Unfortunately the marriage had broken up a year ago, and the film was no longer of interest. As dead as poor old Mulvihill, Wilkinski thought sadly: my God, it just goes to show. Ernie Tap low, the art buyer’s assistant, came in at that point, shaking his head over the shock of it. And then Len Billings came in, and Harry Plant, and Carol Trotter the typographer.

Elsewhere in the building life continued normally that morning. The confectionery manufacturers arrived to see the proposals Ygnis and Ygnis had to put to them concerning the promotion of their new chocolate bar. Ox-Banham displayed posters and advertisements, and the labels and window-stickers Mulvihill had designed. ‘Go,’ one of the confectionery men said. ‘Yes, I like that.’ Ox-Banham took them down to the television theatre and showed them a series of commercials in which children were dressed up as cowboys and Indians. Afterwards his secretary, Rowena, poured them all drinks in his office, smiling at them and murmuring because it was part of her duty to be charming. Just occasionally as she did so she recalled the conjunction that had taken place in the office on Friday evening, Ox-Banham’s wiry body as brown as a nut in places, the smell of his underarm-odour preventive. She liked it to take place in the dark, but he preferred the lights on and had more than once mentioned mirrors, although there were no mirrors in the office. They took it in turns, his way one week, hers the next. The only trouble was that personally she didn’t much care for him. ‘I want you to fix it immediately,’ she’d said in her no-nonsense voice on Friday, and this morning he’d arranged for her to be moved into the copy department at the end of the month. ‘I’ll need a new girl,’ .he’d said, meaning a secretary. ‘I’ll leave that to you.’

Ox-Banham introduced the confectionery men to R.B. Strathers, in whose office they had another drink. He then took them to lunch, referring in the taxi to the four times Strathers had been a reserve for the South African rugby team: often a would-be client was impressed by this fact. He didn’t mention Mulvihill’s death, even though there might have been a talking point in the fact that the chap who’d designed the wrapper for the Go bar had had a heart attack in a lift. But it might also have cast a gloom, you never could tell, so he concentrated instead on making sure that each of the confectionery men had precisely what he wished to have in the way of meat and vegetables, solicitously filling up the wine-glass of the one who drank more than the others. He saw that cigars and brandy were at hand when the moment came, and in the end the most important man said, ‘I think we buy it.’ All the others agreed: the image that had been devised for the chocolate bar was an apt one, its future safe in the skilful hands of Ygnis and Ygnis.

‘Wednesday,’ said Miss Mulvihill on the telephone to people who rang with messages of sympathy. ‘Eleven-thirty, Putney Vale Crematorium.’

As the next few weeks went by so life continued smoothly in the Ygnis and Ygnis building. Happy in the copy writing department, Rowena practised the composition of slogans and thought up trade names for shoes, underwear and garden seeds. She wrote a television commercial for furniture polish, and explained to Ox-Banham that there would now be no more Friday evenings. She began to spend her lunchtimes with a new young man in market research. Unlike Ox-Banham, he was a bachelor.

Bloody Smithson telephoned Strathers to say he was dissatisfied with Ygnis and Ygnis’s latest efforts for McCulloch Paints. Typical, Ox-Banham said when Strathers sent for him: as soon as little Rowena’s home and dry the old bugger starts doing his nut again. ‘Let us just look into all that,’ he murmured delicately to Bloody Smithson on the telephone.

‘There are private possessions,’ Wilkinski said to Mulvihill’s sister, on the telephone also. ‘Maybe we send a messenger to your house with them?’

‘That’s very kind, Mr Wilkinski.’

‘No, no. But the filing-cabinet he had is locked. Maybe the key was on his person?’

‘Yes, I have his bunch of keys. If I may, I’ll post it to you, Mr Wilkinski.’

Everything else Wilkinski had tidied up: Mulvihill’s paintbrushes and his pencils, his paints and his felt pens. Strictly speaking, they were the property of Ygnis and Ygnis, but Wilkinski thought Miss Mulvihill should have them. The filing-cabinet itself, the drawing-board and the green-shaded light, would pass on to Mulvihill’s successor.

When the keys arrived, Wilkinski found that Mulvihill had retained samples of every label and sticker and wrapper, every packet and point-of-sale item he had ever designed. The samples were stuck on to sheets of white card, one to a sheet, and the sheets neatly documented and filed. Wilkinski decided that Mulvihill’s sister would wish to have this collection, as well as the old Four Square tobacco tins containing drawing-pins and rubber bands, a pair of small brass hinges, several broken pipes, some dental fixative and two pairs of spectacles. Mulvihill’s camera was there, side by side with his projector. And in the bottom drawer, beneath ideas for the lettering on a toothpaste tube, were his films.

Pleased to have an excuse to walk about the building, Wilkinski made his way to the basement and asked Mr Betts, the office maintenance man, for a large, strong cardboard carton, explaining why he wanted it. Mr Betts did his best to supply what was necessary and Wilkinski returned to his office with it. He packed the projector and the camera with great care and when he came to the vast assortment of neatly titled films, all in metal containers, he looked out for one that Carol Trotter wanted, to do with her father’s retirement party. ‘A Day in the Life of a Scotch Terrier’, he read, and then ‘A Scotch Terrier Has His Say’ and ‘A Scotch Terrier at Three’. A note was attached to the label, ‘Mr Trotter’s Retirement Occasion’, a reminder that the film still needed some editing. Wilkinski put it aside for Carol Trotter and then, to his surprise, noticed that the label on the next tin said, ‘Confessions of a Housewife’. He examined some of the others and was even more surprised to read, ‘Virgins’ Delight’, ‘Naughty Nell’ and ‘Bedtime with Bunny’.

Closer examination of the metal film-containers convinced Wilkinski that while most of the more exotic titles were not Mulvihill’s own work, two or three of them were. ‘Easy Lady’, for instance, had a reminder stuck to it indicating that editing was necessary; ‘Let’s Go, Lover’ and two untitled containers had a note about splicing. ‘My God!’ Wilkinski said.

He didn’t know what to think. He imagined Mulvihill wandering about Soho in his lunch hour, examining the pictures that advertised the strip joints, entering the pornographic shops where blue films were discreetly for sale. None of that fitted Mulvihill, none of it was like him. Quite often Wilkinski had accompanied him and his camera to Green Park, to catch the autumn, or the ducks in springtime.

Wilkinski sat down. He ran the tip of his tongue over his rather thick lips. They had shared an office since 1960, yet he had never known a thing about this man. Clearly Mulvihill had bought ‘Virgins’ Delight’ and ‘Bedtime with Bunny’ to see how it was done, and then he had begun to make blue films himself. Being in terror of losing his job, he had every day passed humbly through the huge reception area of Ygnis and Ygnis, its walls enriched by pictures of shoes and seed-packets and ironworks, and biscuits and whisky bottles. Humbly he had walked the corridors that rattled with the busyness of typewriters and voices in trivial conversation; humbly he had done his duty by the words and images that were daily created. Wilkinski recalled his saying that he’d always wanted to be a photographer: had he decided in the end to attempt to escape from his treadmill by becoming a pornographer instead? It was a sad thing to have happened to a man. It was an ugly thing as well.

Still, Wilkinski had a job to do and he knew that in the carton destined for Purley he must not include such items as ‘Let’s Go, Lover’ and ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ because of the embarrassment they would cause. His first thought was that he should simply throw the pornographic films away, but even though he had emigrated from Hungary in 1955 Wilkinski was still aware that he had to be careful in a foreign country. Assiduously he avoided all trouble and was notably polite in tube trains and on the street: it seemed a doubtful procedure, to destroy the possessions of a dead man.

‘Films?’ Ox-Banham said on the telephone. ‘You mean they’re dirty?’

‘Some you might call domestic. Others I think they could offend a lady.’

‘I’ll come and have a look.’

‘Some are of a dog.’

Later that day Ox-Banham arrived in Wilkihski’s small office and took charge of the films, including the ones of the dog. He locked them away in his own office, for he was personally not in the least interested in pornography and certainly not curious to investigate this private world of a label-designer who had remotely been in his charge. He didn’t destroy the films because you never could tell: an occasion might quite easily arise when some client or would-be client would reveal, even without meaning to, an interest in such material. Topless waitresses, gambling clubs, or just getting drunk: where his clients were concerned, Ox-Banham was endlessly solicitous, a guide and a listener. It was unbecoming that Mulvihill should have titillated himself in this way, he reflected as he stood that evening in the Trumpet Major, getting more than a little drunk himself. Nasty he must have been, in spite of his pipe and his Harris tweed jackets.

In time the carton containing Mulvihill’s effects was delivered to Purley. Miss Mulvihill returned from the mini-market one evening to find it on the doorstep. In the hall, where she opened it, she discovered that her brother’s keys had been returned to her, Sellotaped on to one of the carton’s flaps; only the key of the filing-cabinet had been removed, but Miss Mulvihill didn’t even notice that. She looked through the white cards on which her brother had mounted the items he had designed at Ygnis and Ygnis; she wondered what to do with his old pipes. In the end she put everything back into the carton and hauled it into the cubbyhole beneath the stairs. Pasco bustled about at her feet, delighted to be able to make a foray into a cupboard that was normally kept locked.

An hour or so later, scrambling an egg for herself in the kitchen, Miss Mulvihill reflected that this was truly the end of her brother. The carton in the cubbyhole reminded her of the coffin that had slid away towards the fawn-coloured curtains in the chapel of the crematorium. She’d been through her brother’s clothes, setting most of them aside for Help the Aged. She’d told the man next door that he could have the contents of the workshed in the garden, asking him to leave her only a screwdriver and a hammer and a pair of pliers.

She had always been fond of her brother; being the older one, she had looked after him as a child, taking him by the hand when they crossed a street together, answering his questions. Their mother had died when he was eight, and when their father died thirty years later it had seemed natural that they should continue to live together in the house in Purley. ‘Let’s have a dog,’ her brother had said one Saturday morning nine years ago, and soon after that Pasco had entered their lives. The only animal the house had known before was Miss Muffin, their father’s cat, but they’d agreed immediately about Pasco. Never once in their lives had they quarrelled, her brother being too nervous and she too even-tempered. Neither had ever wished to marry.

She’d put a rose in, she thought as she ate her scrambled egg, the way you could in the grounds of the crematorium, a living thing to remember him by.

A year went by in Ygnis and Ygnis. The new man who shared Wilkinski’s office was young and given to whistling. On the telephone he addressed his wife as ‘chick’, which began to grate on Wilkinski’s nerves. He possessed a 1951 Fiat, which he talked about; and a caravan, which he talked about also.

Established now in the copy department, Rowena Smithson was responsible for a slogan which won a prize. She had been put in charge of a frozen foods account and had devised a television campaign which displayed an ordinary family’s preference for a packet of fish to a banquet. In Ygnis and Ygnis it was said more than once that Rowena Smithson was going places. Foolish in her dishevelled middle age, Lilia was said to be slipping.

During the course of that year Ox-Banham interested himself in one of Ygnis and Ygnis’s three receptionists, a girl who wanted to get into the art department. The Trumpet Major continued to profit from the drinking requirements of Capstick, Lilia, Tip Dainty and R.B. Strathers. Several office parties took place during the year and at the end of it the Ygnis and Ygnis chairman was awarded an OBE.

‘Well, I quite appreciate that of course,’ Ox-Banham said on the telephone one morning after that year had passed. He was speaking to Bloody Smithson, who had not ceased to give him a bad time, forgetful of all that had been arranged in the matter of placing his daughter in her chosen career. Rowena was shortly to marry the man she’d begun to go out with, from the market research department. The man was welcome to her as far as Ox-Banham was concerned, but when her father was disagreeable it gave him no satisfaction whatsoever to recall how he’d repeatedly pleasured himself with her on the floor of his office. ‘Let’s iron it out over lunch,’ he urged Bloody Smithson.

The lunch that look place was a sticky one, bitter with Bloody Smithson’s acrimony. Only when coffee and glasses of Hine arrived on the table did the man from McCulloch Paints desist and Ox-Banham cease inwardly to swear. Then, quite unexpectedly, Bloody Smithson mentioned blue films. His mood was good by now, for he’d enjoyed being a bully for two hours; he described at length some material he’d been shown on a trip to Sweden. ‘Awfully ripe,’ he said, his large blood-red face inches from his companion’s.

Until that moment Ox-Banham had forgotten about the metal containers he had locked away after Mulvihill’s death. He didn’t mention them, but that evening he read through their neatly labelled titles, and a week later he borrowed a projector. He found what he saw distasteful, as he’d known he would, but was aware that his own opinion didn’t matter in the least. ‘I’ve got hold of a few ripe ones that might interest you,’ he said on the telephone to Bloody Smithson when he next had occasion to speak to him.

In the comfort of the television theatre they watched ‘Confessions of a Housewife’, ‘Virgins’ Delight’ and ‘Naughty Nell’. Bloody Smithson liked ‘Virgins’ Delight’ best. Ox-Banham explained how the cache had fallen into his hands and how some of the films were apparently the late Mulvihill’s own work. ‘Let’s try this “Day in the Life of a Scotch Terrier”,’ he suggested. ‘Goodness knows what all that’s about.’ But Bloody Smithson said he’d rather have another showing of ‘Virgins’ Delight’.

Ox-Banham told the story in the Trumpet Major. ‘Not a word to my daughter, mind,’ Bloody Smithson had insisted, chortling in a way that was quite unlike him. The next day all of it went around the Ygnis and Ygnis building, but it naturally never reached the ears of Rowena because no one liked to tell her that her father had a penchant for obscene films. Mulvihill’s name was used again, his face and clothing recalled, a description supplied to newcomers at Ygnis and Ygnis. Wilkinski heard the story and it hurt him that Mulvihill should be remembered in this way. It was improper, Wilkinski considered, and it made him feel guilty himself: he should have thrown the films away, as his first instinct had been. ‘Mulvihill’s Memorial came to be called, and the employees of Ygnis and Ygnis laughed when they thought of an overweight advertising manager being shown ‘Virgins’ Delight’ in the television theatre. It seemed to Wilkinski that the dead face of Mulvihill was being rubbed in the dirt he had left behind him. It worried Wilkinski, and eventually he plucked up his courage and went to speak to Ox-Banham.

‘We shared the office since 1960,’ he said, and Ox-Banham looked at him in astonishment. ‘It isn’t very nice to call it “Mulvihill’s Memorial”.’

‘Mulvihill’s dead and gone. What d’you expect us to do with his goodies?’

‘Maybe put them down Mr Betts’ incinerator.’

Ox-Banham laughed and suggested that Wilkinski was being a bit Hungarian about the matter. The smile that appeared on his face was designed to be reassuring, but Wilkinski found this reference to his origins offensive. It seemed that if Mulvihill’s wretched pornography brought solace to a recalcitrant advertising manager, then Mulvihill had not died in vain. The employees had to be paid, profits had to be made. ‘It isn’t very nice,’ Wilkinski said again, quietly in the middle of one night. No one heard him, for though he addressed his wife she was dreaming at the time of something else.

Then two things happened at once. Wilkinski had a telephone call from Miss Mulvihill, and Ox-Banham made a mistake.

‘It’s just that I was wondering,’ Miss Mulvihill said. ‘I mean, he definitely made these little films and there’s absolutely no trace of them.’

‘About a dog maybe?’

‘And a little one about the scouts. Then again one concerning Purley.’

‘Leave the matter with me, Miss Mulvihill.’

The telephone call came late in the day, and when Wilkinski tried to see Ox-Banham it was suggested that he should try again in the morning. It pleased him that Miss Mulvihill had phoned, that she had sought to have returned to her what was rightfully hers. He’d considered it high-handed at the time that Ox-Banham hadn’t bothered to divide the films into two groups, as he had done himself. ‘Oh, let’s not bother with all that,’ Ox-Banham had said with a note of impatience in his voice.

Wilkinski hurried to catch his train on the evening of Miss Mulvihill’s call; Ox-Banham entertained Bloody Smithson in the television theatre. ‘No, no, no,’ Bloody Smithson protested. ‘We’ll stick with our Virgins, Ox.’

But Ox-Banham was heartily sick of ‘Virgins’ Delight’, which he had seen by now probably sixty times. He thought he’d die if he had to watch, yet again, the three schoolgirls putting down their hockey sticks and beginning to take off their gymslips. ‘I thought we were maybe wearing it out,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d better have a copy made.’

‘You mean it’s not here?’

‘Back in a week or so, Smithy.’

They began to go through the others. ‘Let’s try this “Day in the Life of a Scotch Terrier”,’ Ox-Banham suggested, and shortly afterwards a dog appeared on the screen, ambling about a kitchen. Then the dog was put on a lead and taken for a walk around a suburb by a middle-aged woman. Back in the kitchen again, the dog begged with its head on one side and was given a titbit. There was another walk, a bus shelter, the dog smelling at bits of paper on the ground. ‘Well, for God’s sake!’ Bloody Smithson protested when the animal was finally given a meal to eat and put to bed.

‘Sorry, Smithy.’

‘I thought she and the dog –’

‘I know. So did I.’

‘Some bloody nut made that one.’

Ox-Banham then showed ‘Naughty Nell’, followed by ‘Country Fun’, ‘Oh Boy!’ and ‘Girlie’. But Bloody Smithson wasn’t in the least impressed. He didn’t care for ‘Confessions of a Housewife’ any more than he had the first time he’d seen it. He didn’t care for ‘Nothing on Tonight’ and wasn’t much impressed by anything else. Ox-Banham regretted that he’d said ‘Virgins’ Delight’ was being copied. This tedious search for excitement could go on all night, for even though Smithson continued to say that everything was less good than ‘Virgins’ Delight’ Ox-Banham had a feeling that some enjoyment at least was being derived from the continuous picture show.

‘You’re sure there isn’t another reel or something to that dog stuff?’ the advertising manager even inquired. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that dame with her undies off.’ He gave a loud laugh, draining his glass of whisky and poking it out at Ox-Banham for a refill.

‘I think that’s the bloke’s sister actually. I don’t think she takes anything off.’ Ox-Banham laughed himself, busy with glasses and ice. ‘Call it a day after this one, shall we?’

‘Might as well run through the lot, Ox.’

They saw ‘Come and Get It’, ‘Girls on the Rampage’, ‘A Scotch Terrier Has His Say’, ‘Street of Desire’, a film of boy scouts camping, scenes on a golf course, ‘Saturday Morning, Purley’ and ‘Flesh for Sale’. It was then, after a few moments of a film without a title, that Ox-Banham realized something was wrong. Unfortunately he realized it too late.

‘Great God almighty,’ said Bloody Smithson.

‘You opened the filing-cabinet, Wilkinski, you took the films out. What did you do next?’ Ox-Banham ground his teeth together, struggling with his impatience.

‘I say myself it’s not nice for the sister. The sister phoned up yesterday, I came down to see you –

‘You didn’t project any of the films?’

‘No, no. I think of Mulvihill lying dead and I think of the sister. What the sister wants is the ones about the dog, and anything else, maybe boy scouts, is there?’

‘You are absolutely certain that you did not project any of the films? Not one called “Easy Lady” or another, “Let’s Go, Lover”? Neither of the two untitled ones?’

‘No, no. I have no interest in this. I get the box from Mr Betts –’

‘Is it possible that someone else might have examined the films? Did you leave the filing-cabinet unlocked, for instance?’

‘No, no. I get the box from Mr Betts, maybe ten minutes. The cabinet is closed and locked then. The property of a dead man, I say myself –’

‘So no one could possibly have projected one of these films?’

‘No, no. The sister rings me yesterday. She is anxious for the dog ones, also boy scouts and others.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Wilkinski!’

‘I promise I find –’

‘They’ve all been destroyed. Everything’s been destroyed.’

‘Destroyed? But I thought –’

‘I destroyed them myself last night.’

Returning to his office, Wilkinski paused for a moment in a corridor, removed his spectacles and polished them with his handkerchief. People hurried by him with proofs of new advertisements and typewritten pages of copy, but it was easier to think in the corridor than it would be in the office because of the whistling of Mulvihill’s successor. Ox-Banham had looked almost ill, his voice had been shaky. Wilkinski shook his head and slowly padded back to his drawing-board, baffled by the turn of events. He didn’t know what he was going to say to Mulvihill’s sister.

What happened next was that Bloody Smithson removed the McCulloch Paints account from Ygnis and Ygnis. Then Rowena Smithson walked out. She didn’t hand in her notice, she simply didn’t return after lunch one day. The man in market research to whom she was engaged let it be known that the engagement had been broken off, and made it clear that it was he who had done the breaking. A rumour went round that the big shoe account – a Quaker concern and one of Ygnis and Ygnis’s mainstays – was about to go, and a week later it did. Questions were asked by the men of the chocolate account which Ox-Banham had gained a year ago, and by the toiletries people and by the men of Macclesfield Metals. Hasty lunches were arranged, explanations pressed home over afternoon brandy. Ygnis and Ygnis in Trouble a headline in a trade magazine was ready to state, but the headline – and the report that went with it – was abandoned at the eleventh hour because it appeared that and Ygnis had weathered their storm.

Wilkinski tried to piece things together, and so did the other employees. In the Trumpet Major it was said that for reasons of his own Bloody Smithson had sworn to bring Ygnis and Ygnis to its knees, but neither Wilkinski nor anyone else knew why he had become so enraged. Then, making a rare appearance in the Trumpet Major, the market research man to whom Rowena Smithson had been engaged drank an extra couple of Carlsbergs while waiting for the rain to cease. Idling at the bar, he told Tip Dainty in the strictest confidence of a scene which had taken place at the time of the crisis in the Smithsons’ house in Wimbledon: how he’d been about to leave, having driven Rowena home, when Bloody Smithson had thundered his way into the sitting-room, ‘literally like a bull’. Mrs Smithson had been drinking a cup of Ovaltine at the time, Rowena had not yet taken off her coat. ‘You filthy young prostitute!’ Bloody Smithson had roared at her. ‘You cheap whore!’ It apparently hadn’t concerned him that his daughter’s fiancé was present, he hadn’t even noticed when the cup of Ovaltine fell from his wife’s grasp. He had just stood there shouting, oaths and obscenities bursting out of him, his face the colour of ripe strawberries.

By half past ten the following morning the story was known to every Ygnis and Ygnis employee: Mulvihill had made a film of Ox-Banham and Rowena Smithson banging away on the floor of Ox-Banham’s office. Mulvihill had apparently hidden himself behind the long blue Dralon curtains, which in the circumstances had naturally been drawn. The lights in the room had been on and neither protagonist in the proceedings had been wearing a stitch.

At lunchtime that day, passing through the large, chic reception area, the people of Ygnis and Ygnis hardly noticed the images displayed on its walls. The messages that murmured at them were rich in sexual innuendo, but the hard facts of a dead pornographer briefly interested them more. ‘Mulvihill!’ some exclaimed in uneasy admiration, for to a few at least it seemed that Mulvihill had dealt in an honesty that just for a moment made the glamour of the images and the messages appear to be a little soiled. Wilkinski thought so, and longed to telephone Mulvihill’s sister to tell her of what had occurred, but of course it was impossible to do that. He wrote a letter instead, apologizing for taking so long in replying to her query and informing her that the films she’d mentioned had been destroyed in error. It was not exactly a lie, and seemed less of one as the day wore on, as the glamour glittered again, undefeated when it came to the point.

Beyond the Pale

We always went to Ireland in June.

Ever since the four of us began to go on holidays together, in 1965 it must have been, we had spent the first fortnight of the month at Glencorn Lodge in Co. Antrim. Perfection, as Dekko put it once, and none of us disagreed. It’s a Georgian house by the sea, not far from the village of Ardbeag. It’s quite majestic in its rather elegant way, a garden running to the very edge of a cliff, a long rhododendron drive – or avenue, as they say in Ireland. The English couple who bought the house in the early sixties, the Malseeds, have had to build on quite a bit but it’s all been discreetly done, the Georgian style preserved throughout. Figs grow in the sheltered gardens, and apricots, and peaches in the greenhouses which old Mr Saxton presides over. He’s Mrs Malseed’s father actually. They brought him with them from Surrey, and their Dalmatians, Charger and Snooze.

It was Strafe who found Glencorn for us. He’d come across an advertisement in the Lady in the days when the Malseeds still felt the need to advertise. ‘How about this?’ he said one evening at the end of the second rubber, and then read out the details. We had gone away together the summer before, to a hotel that had been recommended on the Costa del Sol, but it hadn’t been a success because the food was so appalling. ‘We could try this Irish one,’ Dekko suggested cautiously, which is what eventually we did.

The four of us have been playing bridge together for ages, Dekko, Strafe, Cynthia and myself. They call me Milly, though strictly speaking my name is Dorothy Milson. Dekko picked up his nickname at school, Dekko Deakin sounding rather good, I dare say. He and Strafe were in fact at school together, which must be why we all call Strafe by his surname: Major R.B. Strafe he is, the initials standing for Robert Buchanan. We’re of an age, the four of us, all in the early fifties: the prime of life, so Dekko insists. We live quite close to Leatherhead, where the Malseeds were before they decided to make the change from Surrey to Co. Antrim. Quite a coincidence, we always think.

‘How very nice,’ Mrs Malseed said, smiling her welcome again this year. Some instinct seems to tell her when guests are about to arrive, for she’s rarely not waiting in the large, low-ceilinged hall that always smells of flowers. She dresses beautifully, differently every day, and changing of course in the evening. Her blouse on this occasion was scarlet and silver, in stripes, her skirt black. This choice gave her a brisk look, which was fitting because being so busy she often has to be a little on the brisk side. She has smooth grey hair which she once told me she entirely looks after herself, and she almost always wears a black velvet band in it. Her face is well made up, and for one who arranges so many vases of flowers and otherwise has to use her hands she manages to keep them marvellously in condition. Her fingernails are varnished a soft pink, and a small gold bangle always adorns her right wrist, a wedding present from her husband.

‘Arthur, take the party’s luggage,’ she commanded the old porter, who doubles as odd – job man. ‘Rose, Geranium, Hydrangea, Fuchsia.’ She referred to the titles of the rooms reserved for us: in winter, when no one much comes to Glencorn Lodge, pleasant little details like that are seen to. Mrs Malseed herself painted the flower-plaques that are attached to the doors of the hotel instead of numbers; her husband sees to redecoration and repairs.

‘Well, well, well,’ Mr Malseed said now, entering the hall through the door that leads to the kitchen regions. ‘A hundred thousand welcomes,’ he greeted us in the Irish manner. He’s rather shorter than Mrs Malseed, who’s handsomely tall. He wears Donegal tweed suits and is brown as a berry, including his head, which is bald. His dark brown eyes twinkle at you, making you feel rather more than just another hotel guest. They run the place like a country house, really.

‘Good trip?’ Mr Malseed inquired.

‘Super,’ Dekko said. ‘Not a worry all the way.’

‘Splendid.’

‘The wretched boat sailed an hour early one day last week,’ Mrs Malseed said.’Quite a little band were left stranded at Stranraer.’

Strafe Jaughed. Typical of that steamship company, he said. ‘Catching the tide, I dare say?’

‘They caught a rocket from me,’ Mrs Malseed replied goodhumouredly. ‘I couple of old dears were due with us on Tuesday and had to spend the night in some awful Scottish lodging-house. It nearly finished them.’

Everyone laughed, and Γ could feel the others thinking that our holiday had truly begun. Nothing had changed at Glencorn Lodge, all was well with its Irish world. Kitty from the dining-room came out to greet us, spotless in her uniform. ‘Ach, you’re looking younger,’ she said, paying the compliment to all four of us, causing everyone in the hall to laugh again. Kitty’s a bit of a card.

Arthur led the way to the rooms called Rose, Geranium, Hydrangea and Fuchsia, carrying as much of our luggage as he could manage and returning for the remainder. Arthur has a beaten, fisherman’s face and short grey hair. He wears a green baize apron, and a white shirt with an imitation-silk scarf tucked into it at the neck. The scarf, in different swirling greens which blend nicely with the green of his apron, is an idea of Mrs Malseed’s and one appreciates the effort, if not at a uniform, at least at tidiness.

‘Thank you very much,’ I said to Arthur in my room, smiling and finding him a coin.

We played a couple of rubbers after dinner as usual, but not of course going on for as long as we might have because we were still quite tired after the journey. In the lounge there was a French family, two girls and their parents, and a honeymoon couple – or so we had speculated during dinner – and a man on his own. There had been other people at dinner of course, because in June Glencorn Lodge is always full: from where we sat in the window we could see some of them strolling about the lawns, a few taking the cliff path down to the seashore. In the morning we’d do the same: we’d walk along the sands to Ardbeag and have coffee in the hotel there, back in time for lunch. In the afternoon we’d drive somewhere.

I knew all that because over the years this kind of pattern had developed, We had our walks and our drives, tweed to buy in Cushendall, Strafe’s and Dekko’s fishing day when Cynthia and I just sat on the beach, our visit to the Giant’s Causeway and one to Donegal perhaps, though that meant an early start and taking pot-luck for dinner somewhere. We’d come to adore Co. Antrim, its glens and coastline, Rathlin Island and Tievebulliagh. Since first we got to know it, in 1965, we’d all four fallen hopelessly in love with every variation of this remarkable landscape. People in England thought us mad of course: they see so much of the troubles on television that it’s naturally difficult for them to realize that most places are just as they’ve always been. Yet coming as we did, taking the road along the coast, dawdling through Ballygally, it was impossible to believe that somewhere else the unpleasantness was going on. We’d never seen a thing, nor even heard people talking about incidents that might have taken place. It’s true that after a particularly nasty carry-on a few winters ago we did consider finding somewhere else, in Scotland perhaps, or Wales. But as Strafe put it at the time, we felt we owed a certain loyalty to the Malseeds and indeed to everyone we’d come to know found about, people who’d always been glad to welcome us back. It seemed silly to lose our heads, and when we returned the following summer we knew immediately we’d been right. Dekko said that nothing could be further away from all the violence than Glencorn Lodge, and though his remark could hardly be taken literally I think we all knew what he meant.

‘Cynthia’s tired,’ I said because she’d been stifling yawns. ‘I think we should call it a day.’

‘Oh, not at all,’ Cynthia protested. ‘No, please.’

But Dekko agreed with me that she was tired, and Strafe said he didn’t mind stopping now. He suggested a nightcap, as he always does, and as we always do also, Cynthia and I declined. Dekko said he’d like a Cointreau.

The conversation drifted about. Dekko told us an Irish joke about a drunk who couldn’t find his way out of a telephone box, and then Strafe remembered an incident at school concerning his and Dekko’s housemaster, A.D. Cowley-Stubbs, and the house wag, Thrive Major. A.D. Cowley-Stubbs had been known as Cows and often featured in our after-bridge reminiscing. So did Thrive Major.

‘Perhaps I am sleepy,’ Cynthia said. ‘I don’t think I closed my eyes once last night.’

She never does on a sea crossing. Personally I’m out like a light the moment my head touches the pillow; I often think it must be the salt in the air because normally I’m an uneasy sleeper at the best of times.

‘You run along, old girl,’ Strafe advised.

‘Brekky at nine,’ Dekko said.

Cynthia said good-night and went, and we didn’t remark on her tiredness because as a kind of unwritten rule we never comment on one another. We’re four people who play bridge. The companionship it offers, and the holidays we have together, are all part of that. We share everything: the cost of petrol, the cups of coffee or drinks we have; we even each make a contribution towards the use of Strafe’s car because it’s always his we go on holiday in, a Rover it was on this occasion.

‘Funny, being here on your own,’ Strafe said, glancing across what the Malseeds call the After-Dinner Lounge at the man who didn’t have a companion. He was a red-haired man of about thirty, not wearing a tie, his collar open at the neck and folded back over the jacket of his blue serge suit. He was uncouth-looking, though it’s a hard thing to say, not at all the kind of person one usually sees at Glencorn Lodge. He sat in the After-Dinner Lounge as he had in the dining-room, lost in some concentration of his own, as if calculating sums in his mind. There had been a folded newspaper on his table in the dining-room. It now reposed tidily on the arm of his chair, still unopened.

‘Commercial gent,’ Dekko said. ‘Fertilizers.’

‘Good heavens, never. You wouldn’t get a rep in here.’

I took no part in the argument. The lone man didn’t much interest me, but I felt that Strafe was probably right: if there was anything dubious about the man’s credentials he might have found it difficult to secure a room. In the hall of Glencorn Lodge there’s a notice which reads: We prefer not to feature in hotel guides, and we would be grateful to our guests if they did not seek to include Glencorn Lodge in the Good Food Guide, the Good Hotel Guide, the Michelin, Egon Ronay or any others. We have not advertised Glencorn since our early days, and prefer our recommendations to be by word of mouth.

‘Ah, thank you,’ Strafe said when Kitty brought his whisky and Dekko’s Cointreau. ‘Sure you won’t have something?’ he said to me, although he knew I never did.

Strafe is on the stout side, I suppose you could say, with a gingery moustache and gingery hair, hardly touched at all by grey. He left the Army years ago, I suppose because of me in a sense, because he didn’t want to be posted abroad again. He’s in the Ministry of Defence now.

I’m still quite pretty in my way, though nothing like as striking as Mrs Malseed, for I’ve never been that kind of woman. I’ve put on weight, and wouldn’t have allowed myself to do so if Strafe hadn’t kept saying he can’t stand a bag of bones. I’m careful about my hair and, unlike Mrs Malseed, I have it very regularly seen to because if I don’t it gets a salt-and-pepper look, which I hate. My husband, Terence, who died of food-poisoning when we were still quite young, used to say I wouldn’t lose a single look in middle age, and to some extent that’s true. We were still putting off having children when he died, which is why I haven’t any. Then I met Strafe, which meant I didn’t marry again.

Strafe is married himself, to Cynthia. She’s small and ineffectual, I suppose you’d say without being untruthful or unkind. Not that Cynthia and I don’t get on or anything like that, in fact we get on extremely well. It’s Strafe and Cynthia who don’t seem quite to hit it off, and I often think how much happier all round it would have been if Cynthia had married someone completely different, someone like Dekko in a way, except that that mightn’t quite have worked out either. The Strafes have two sons, both very like their father, both of them in the Army. And the very sad thing is they think nothing of poor Cynthia.

‘Who’s that chap?’ Dekko asked Mr Malseed, who’d come over to wish us good-night.

‘Awfully sorry about that, Mr Deakin. My fault entirely, a booking that came over the phone.’

‘Good heavens, not at all,’ Strafe protested, and Dekko looked horrified in case it should be thought he was objecting to the locals. ‘Splendid-looking fellow,’ he said, overdoing it.

Mr Malseed murmured that the man had only booked in for a single night, and I smiled the whole thing away, reassuring him with a nod. It’s one of the pleasantest of the traditions at Glencorn Lodge that every evening Mr Malseed makes the rounds of his guests just to say good-night. It’s because of little touches like that that I, too, wished Dekko hadn’t questioned Mr Malseed about the man because it’s the kind of thing one doesn’t do at Glencorn Lodge. But Dekko is a law unto himself, very tall and gangling, always immaculately suited, a beaky face beneath mousy hair in which flecks of grey add a certain distinction. Dekko has money of his own and though he takes out girls who are half his age he has never managed to get around to marriage. The uncharitable might say he has a rather gormless laugh; certainly it’s sometimes on the loud side.

We watched while Mr Malseed bade the lone man good-night. The man didn’t respond, but just sat gazing. It was ill-mannered, but this lack of courtesy didn’t appear to be intentional: the man was clearly in a mood of some kind, miles away.

‘Well, I’ll go up,’ I said. ‘Good-night, you two.’

‘Cheery-bye, Milly,’ Dekko said. ‘Brekky at nine, remember.’

‘Good-night, Milly,’ Strafe said.

The Strafes always occupy different rooms on holidays, and at home also. This time he was in Geranium and she in Fuchsia. I was in Rose, and in a little while Strafe would come to see me. He stays with her out of kindness, because he fears for her on her own. He’s a sentimental, good-hearted man, easily moved to tears: he simply cannot bear the thought of Cynthia with no one to talk to in the evenings, with no one to make her life around. ‘And besides,’ he often says when he’s being jocular, ‘it would break up our bridge four.’ Naturally we never discuss her shortcomings or in any way analyse the marriage. The unwritten rule that exists among the four of us seems to extend as far as that.

He slipped into my room after he’d had another drink or two, and I was waiting for him as he likes me to wait, in bed but not quite undressed. He has never said so, but I know that that is something Cynthia would not understand in him, or ever attempt to comply with. Terence, of course, would not have understood either; poor old Terence would have been shocked. Actually it’s all rather sweet, Strafe and his little ways.

‘I love you, dear,’ I whispered to him in the darkness, but just then he didn’t wish to speak of love and referred instead to my body.

If Cynthia hadn’t decided to remain in the hotel the next morning instead of accompanying us on our walk to Ardbeag everything might have been different. As it happened, when she said at breakfast she thought she’d just potter about the garden and sit with her book out of the wind somewhere, I can’t say I was displeased. For a moment I hoped Dekko might say he’d stay with her, allowing Strafe and myself to go off on our own, but Dekko-who doesn’t go in for saying what you want him to say – didn’t. ‘Poor old sausage,’ he said instead, examining Cynthia with a solicitude that suggested she was close to the grave, rather than just a little lowered by the change of life or whatever it was.

‘I’ll be perfectly all right,’ Cynthia assured him. ‘Honestly.’

‘Cynthia likes to mooch, you know,’ Strafe pointed out, which of course is only the truth. She reads too much, I always think. You often see her putting down a book with the most melancholy look in her eyes, which can’t be good for her. She’s an imaginative woman, I suppose you would say, and of course her habit of reading so much is often useful on our holidays: over the years she has read her way through dozens of Irish guidebooks. ‘That’s where the garrison pushed the natives over the cliffs,’ she once remarked on a drive. ‘Those rocks are known as the Maidens,’ she remarked on another occasion. She has led us to places of interest which we had no idea existed: Garron Tower on Garron Point, the mausoleum at Bonamargy, the Devil’s Backbone. As well as which, Cynthia is extremely knowledgeable about all matters relating to Irish history. Again she has read endlessly: biographies and autobiographies, long accounts of the centuries of battling and politics there’ve been. There’s hardly a town or village we ever pass through that hasn’t some significance for Cynthia, although I’m afraid her impressive fund of information doesn’t always receive the attention it deserves. Not that Cynthia ever minds; it doesn’t seem to worry her when no one listens. My own opinion is that she’d have made a much better job of her relationship with Strafe and her sons if she could have somehow developed a bit more character.

We left her in the garden and proceeded down the cliff path to the shingle beneath. I was wearing slacks and a blouse, with the arms of a cardigan looped round my neck in case it turned chilly: the outfit was new, specially bought for the holiday, in shades of tangerine. Strafe never cares how he dresses and of course she doesn’t keep him up to the mark: that morning, as far as I remember, he wore rather shapeless corduroy trousers, the kind men sometimes garden in, and a navy-blue fisherman’s jersey. Dekko as usual was a fashion plate: a pale-green linen suit with pleated jacket pockets, a maroon shirt open at the neck, revealing a medallion on a fine gold chain. We didn’t converse as we crossed the rather difficult shingle, but when we reached the sand Dekko began to talk about some girl or other, someone called Juliet who had apparently proposed marriage to him just before we’d left Surrey. He’d told her, so he said, that he’d think about it while on holiday and he wondered now about dispatching a telegram from Ardbeag saying, Still thinking. Strafe, who has a simple sense of humour, considered this hugely funny and spent most of the walk persuading Dekko that the telegram must certainly be sent, and other telegrams later on, all with the same message. Dekko kept laughing, throwing his head back in a way that always reminds me of an Australian bird I once saw in a nature film on television. I could see this was going to become one of those jokes that would accompany us all through the holiday, a man’s thing really, but of course I didn’t mind. The girl called Juliet was, nearly thirty years younger than Dekko. I supposed she knew what she was doing.

Since the subject of telegrams had come up, Strafe recalled the occasion when Thrive Major had sent one to A.D. Cowley-Stubbs: Darling regret three months gone love Beulah. Carefully timed, it had arrived during one of Cows’ Thursday evening coffee sessions. Beulah was a maid who had been sacked the previous term, and old Cows had something of a reputation as a misogynist. When he read the message he apparently went white and collapsed into an armchair. Warrington P.J. managed to read it too, and after that the fat was in the fire. The consequences went on rather, but I never minded listening when Strafe and Dekko drifted back to their schooldays. I just wish I’d known Strafe then, before either of us had gone and got married.

We had our coffee at Ardbeag, the telegram was sent off, and then Strafe and Dekko wanted to see a man called Henry O’Reilly whom we’d met on previous holidays, who organizes mackerel-fishing trips. I waited on my own, picking out postcards in the village shop that sells almost everything, and then I wandered down towards the shore. I knew that they would be having a drink with the boatman because a year had passed since they’d seen him last. They joined me after about twenty minutes, Dekko apologizing but Strafe not seeming to be aware that I’d had to wait because Strafe is not a man who notices little things. It was almost one o’clock when we reached Glencorn Lodge and were told by Mr Malseed that Cynthia needed looking after.

The hotel, in fact, was in a turmoil. I have never seen anyone as ashen-faced as Mr Malseed; his wife, in a forget-me-not dress, was limp. It wasn’t explained to us immediately what had happened,, because in the middle of telling us that Cynthia needed looking after Mr Malseed was summoned to the telephone. I could see through the half-open door of their little office a glass of whiskey or brandy on the desk and Mrs Malseed’s bangled arm reaching out for it. Not for ages did we realize that it all had to do with the lone man whom we’d speculated about the night before.

‘He just wanted to talk to me,’ Cynthia kept repeating hysterically in the hall. ‘He sat with me by the magnolias.’

I made her lie down. Strafe and I stood on either side of her bed as she lay there with her shoes off, her rather unattractively cut plain pink dress crumpled and actually damp from her tears. I wanted to make her take it off and to slip under the bedclothes in her petticoat but somehow it seemed all wrong, in the circumstances, for Strafe’s wife to do anything so intimate in my presence.

‘I couldn’t stop him,’ Cynthia said, the rims of her eyes crimson by now, her nose beginning to run again. ‘From half past ten till well after twelve. He had to talk to someone, he said.’

I could sense that Strafe was thinking precisely the same as I was: that the red-haired man had insinuated himself into Cynthia’s company by talking about himself and had then put a hand on her knee. Instead of simply standing up and going away Cynthia would have stayed where she was, embarrassed or tongue-tied, at any rate unable to cope. And when the moment came she would have turned hysterical. I could picture her screaming in the garden, running across the lawn to the hotel, and then the pandemonium in the hall. I could sense Strafe picturing that also.

‘My God, it’s terrible,’ Cynthia said.

‘I think she should sleep,’ I said quietly to Strafe. ‘Try to sleep, dear,’ I said to her, but she shook her head, tossing her jumble of hair about on the pillow.

‘Milly’s right,’ Strafe urged. ‘You’ll feel much better after a little rest. We’ll bring you a cup of tea later on.’

‘My God!’ she cried again. ‘My God, how could I sleep?’

I went away to borrow a couple of mild sleeping pills from Dekko, who is never without them, relying on the things too much in my opinion. He was tidying himself in his room, but found the pills immediately. Strangely enough, Dekko’s always sound in a crisis.

I gave them to her with water and she took them without asking what they were. She was in a kind of daze, one moment making a fuss and weeping, the next just peering ahead of her, as if frightened. In a way she was like someone who’d just had a bad nightmare and hadn’t yet completely returned to reality. I remarked as much to Strafe while we made our way down to lunch, and he said he quite agreed.

‘Poor old Cynth!’ Dekko said when we’d all ordered lobster bisque and entrecôte béarnaise. ‘Poor old sausage.’

You could see that the little waitress, a new girl this year, was bubbling over with excitement; but Kitty, serving the other half of the dining-room, was grim, which was most unusual. Everyone was talking in hushed tones and when Dekko said, ‘Poor old Cynth!’ a couple of heads were turned in our direction because he can never keep his voice down. The little vases of roses with which Mrs Malseed must have decorated each table before the fracas had occurred seemed strangely out of place in the atmosphere which had developed.

The waitress had just taken away our soup plates when Mr Malseed hurried into the dining-room and came straight to our table. The lobster bisque surprisingly hadn’t been quite up to scratch, and in passing I couldn’t help wondering if the fuss had caused the kitchen to go to pieces also.

‘I wonder if I might have a word, Major Strafe,’ Mr Malseed said, and Strafe rose at once and accompanied him from the dining-room. A total silence had fallen, everyone in the dining-room pretending to be intent on eating. I had an odd feeling that we had perhaps got it all wrong, that because we’d been out for our walk when it had happened all the other guests knew more of the details than Strafe and Dekko and I did. I began to wonder if poor Cynthia had been raped.

Afterwards Strafe told us what occurred in the Malseeds’ office, how Mrs Malseed had been sitting there, slumped, as he put it, and how two policemen had questioned him. ‘Look, what on earth’s all this about?’ he had demanded rather sharply.

‘It concerns this incident that’s taken place, sir,’ one of the policemen explained in an unhurried voice, ‘On account of your wife –’

‘My wife’s lying down. She must not be questioned or in any way disturbed.’

‘Ach, we’d never do that, sir.’

Strafe does a good Co. Antrim brogue and in relating all this to us he couldn’t resist making full use of it. The two policemen were in uniform and their natural slowness of intellect was rendered more noticeable by the lugubrious air the tragedy had inspired in the hotel. For tragedy was what it was: after talking to Cynthia for nearly two hours the lone man had walked down to the rocks and been drowned.

When Strafe finished speaking I placed my knife and fork together on my plate, unable to eat another mouthful. The facts appeared to be that the man, having left Cynthia by the magnolias, had clambered down the cliff to a place no one ever went to, on the other side of the hotel from the sands we had walked along to Ardbeag. No one had seen him except Cynthia, who from the cliff-top had apparently witnessed his battering by the treacherous waves. The tide had been coming in, but by the time old Arthur and Mr Malseed reached the rocks it had begun to turn, leaving behind it the fully dressed corpse. Mr Malseed’s impression was that the man had lost his footing on the seaweed and accidentally stumbled into the depths, for the rocks were so slippery it was difficult to carry the corpse more than a matter of yards. But at least it had been placed out of view, while Mr Malseed hurried back to the hotel to telephone for assistance. He told Strafe that Cynthia had been most confused, insisting that the man had walked out among the rocks and then into the sea, knowing what he was doing.

Listening to it all, I no longer felt sorry for Cynthia. It was typical of her that she should so sillily have involved us in all this. Why on earth had she sat in the garden with a man of that kind instead of standing up and making a fuss the moment he’d begun to paw her? If she’d acted intelligently the whole unfortunate episode could clearly have been avoided. Since it hadn’t, there was no point whatsoever in insisting that the man had committed suicide when at that distance no one could possibly be sure.

‘It really does astonish me,’ I said at the lunch table, unable to prevent myself from breaking our unwritten rule. ‘Whatever came over her?’

‘It can’t be good for the hotel,’ Dekko commented, and I as glad to see Strafe giving him a little glance of irritation.

‘It’s hardly the point,’ I said coolly.

‘What I meant was, hotels occasionally hush things like this up.’

‘Well, they haven’t this time.’ It seemed an age since I had waited for them in Ardbeag, since we had been so happily laughing over the effect of Dekko’s telegram. He’d included his address in it so that the girl could send a message back, and as we’d returned to the hotel along the seashore there’d been much speculation between the two men about the form this would take.

‘I suppose what Cynthia’s thinking,’ Strafe said, ‘is that after he’d tried something on with her he became depressed.’

‘Oh, but he could just as easily have lost his footing. He’d have been on edge anyway, worried in case she reported him.’

‘Dreadful kind of death,’ Dekko said. His tone suggested that that was that, that the subject should now be closed, and so it was.

After lunch we went to our rooms, as we always do at Glencorn Lodge, to rest for an hour. I took my slacks and blouse off, hoping that Strafe would knock on my door, but he didn’t and of course that was understandable. Oddly enough I found myself thinking of Dekko, picturing his long form stretched out in the room called Hydrangea, his beaky face in profile on his pillow. The precise nature of Dekko’s relationship with these girls he picks up has always privately intrigued me: was it really possible that somewhere in London there was a girl called Juliet who was prepared to marry him for his not inconsiderable money?

I slept and briefly dreamed. Thrive Major and Warrington P.J. were running the post office in Ardbeag, sending telegrams to everyone they could think of, including Dekko’s friend Juliet. Cynthia had been found dead beside the magnolias and people were waiting for Hercule Poirot to arrive. ‘Promise me you didn’t do it,’ I whispered to Strafe, but when Strafe replied it was to say that Cynthia’s body reminded him of a bag of old chicken bones.

Strafe and Dekko and I met for tea in the tea-lounge. Strafe had looked in to see if Cynthia had woken, but apparently she hadn’t. The police officers had left the hotel, Dekko said, because he’d noticed their car wasn’t parked at the front any more. None of the three of us said, but I think we presumed, that the man’s body had been removed from the rocks during the quietness of the afternoon. From where we sat I caught a glimpse of Mrs Malseed passing quite briskly through the Seeming almost herself again. Certainly our holiday would be affected, but it might not be totally ruined. All that remained to hope for was Cynthia’s recovery, and then everyone could set about forgetting the unpleasantness. The nicest thing would be if a jolly young couple turned up and occupied the man’s room, exorcising the incident, as newcomers would.

The family from France – the two little girls and their parents – were chattering away in the tea-lounge, and an elderly trio who’d arrived that morning were speaking in American accents. The honeymoon couple appeared, looking rather shy, and began to whisper and giggle in a corner. People who occupied the table next to ours in the dining-room, a Wing-Commander Orfell and his wife, from Guildford, nodded and smiled as they passed. Everyone was making an effort, and I knew it would help matters further if Cynthia felt up to a rubber or two before dinner. That life should continue as normally as possible was essential for Glencorn Lodge, the example already set by Mrs Malseed.

Because of our interrupted lunch I felt quite hungry, and the Malseeds pride themselves on their teas. The chef, Mr McBride, whom of course we’ve met, has the lightest touch I know with sponge-cakes and little curranty scones. I was, in fact, buttering a scone when Strafe said:

‘Here she is.’

And there indeed she was. By the look of her she had simply pushed herself off her bed and come straight down. Her pink dress was even more crumpled than it had been. She hadn’t so much as run a comb through her hair, her face was puffy and unpowdered. For a moment I really thought she was walking in her sleep.

Strafe and Dekko stood up. ‘Feeling better, dear?’ Strafe said, but she didn’t answer.

‘Sit down, Cynth,’ Dekko urged, pushing back a chair to make room for her.

‘He told me a story I can never forget. I’ve dreamed about it all over again.’ Cynthia swayed in front of us, not even attempting to sit down. To tell the truth, she sounded inane.

‘Story, dear?’ Strafe inquired, humouring her.

She said it was the story of two children who had apparently ridden bicycles through the streets of Belfast, out into Co. Antrim. The bicycles were dilapidated, she said; she didn’t know if they were stolen or not. She didn’t know about the children’s homes because the man hadn’t spoken of them, but she claimed to know instinctively that they had ridden away from poverty and unhappiness. ‘From the clatter and the quarrelling,’ Cynthia said. ‘Two children who later fell in love.’

‘Horrid old dream,’ Strafe said. ‘Horrid for you, dear.’

She shook her head, and then sat down. I poured another cup of tea. ‘I had the oddest dream myself,’ I said. ‘Thrive Major was running the post office in Ardbeag.’

Strafe smiled and Dekko gave his laugh, but Cynthia didn’t in any way acknowledge what I’d said.

‘A fragile thing the girl was, with depths of mystery in her wide brown eyes. Red-haired of course he was himself, thin as a rake in those days. Glencorn Lodge was derelict then.’

‘You’ve had a bit of a shock, old thing,’ Dekko said.

Strafe agreed, kindly adding, ‘Look, dear, if the chap actually interfered with you –’

‘Why on earth should he do that?’ Her voice was shrill in the tea-lounge, edged with a note of hysteria. I glanced at Strafe, who was frowning into his teacup. Dekko began to say something, but broke off before his meaning emerged. Rather more calmly Cynthia said:

‘It was summer when they came here. Honeysuckle he described. And mother of thyme. He didn’t know the name of either.’

No one attempted any kind of reply, not that it was necessary, for Cynthia just continued.

‘At school there were the facts of geography and arithmetic. And the legends of scholars and of heroes, of Queen Maeve and Finn MacCool. There was the coming of St Patrick to a heathen people. History was full of kings and high-kings, and Silken Thomas and Wolfe Tone, the Flight of the Earls, the Siege of Limerick.’

When Cynthia said that, it was impossible not to believe that the unfortunate events of the morning had touched her with some kind of madness. It seemed astonishing that she had walked into the tea-lounge without having combed her hair, and that she’d stood there swaying before sitting down, that out of the blue she had started on about two children. None of it made an iota of sense, and surely she could see that the nasty experience she’d suffered should not be dwelt upon? I offered her the plate of scones, hoping that if she began to eat she would stop talking, but she took no notice of my gesture.

‘Look, dear,’ Strafe said, ‘there’s not one of us who knows what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m talking about a children’s story, I’m talking about a girl and a boy who visited this place we visit also. He hadn’t been here for years, but he returned last night, making one final effort to understand. And then he walked out into the sea.’

She had taken a piece of her dress and was agitatedly crumpling it between the finger and thumb of her left hand. It was dreadful really, having her so grubby-looking. For some odd reason I suddenly thought of her cooking, how she wasn’t in the least interested in it or in anything about the house. She certainly hadn’t succeeded in making a home for Strafe.

‘They rode those worn-out bicycles through a hot afternoon. Can you feel all that? A newly surfaced road, the snap of chippings beneath their tyres, the smell of tar? Dust from a passing car, the city they left behind?’

‘Cynthia dear,’ I said, ‘drink your tea, and why not have a scone?’

‘They swam and sunbathed on the beach you walked along today. They went to a spring for water. There were no magnolias then. There was no garden, no neat little cliff paths to the beach. Surely you can see it clearly?’

‘No,’ Strafe said. ‘No, we really cannot, dear.’

‘This place that is an idyll for us was an idyll for them too: the trees, the ferns, the wild roses near the water spring, the very sea and sun they shared. There was a cottage lost in the middle of the woods: they sometimes looked for that. They played a game, a kind of hide-and-seek. People in a white farmhouse gave them milk.’

For the second time I offered Cynthia the plate of scones and for the second time she pointedly ignored me. Her cup of tea hadn’t been touched. Dekko took a scone and cheerfully said:

‘All’s well that’s over.’

But Cynthia appeared to have drifted back into a daze, and I wondered again if it could really be possible that the experience had unhinged her. Unable to help myself, I saw her being led away from the hotel, helped into the back of a blue van, something like an ambulance. She was talking about the children again, how they had planned to marry and keep a sweetshop.

‘Take it easy, dear,’ Strafe said, which I followed up by suggesting for the second time that she should make an effort to drink her tea.

‘Has it to do with the streets they came from? Or the history they learnt, he from his Christian Brothers, she from her nuns? History is unfinished in this island; long since it has come to a stop in Surrey.’

Dekko said, and I really had to hand it to him:

‘Cynth, we have to put it behind us.’

It didn’t do any good. Cynthia just went rambling on, speaking again of the girl being taught by nuns, and the boy by Christian Brothers. She began to recite the history they might have learnt, the way she sometimes did when we were driving through an area that had historical connections. ‘Can you imagine,’ she embarrassingly asked, Our very favourite places bitter with disaffection, with plotting and revenge? Can you imagine the treacherous murder of Shane O’Neill the Proud?’

Dekko made a little sideways gesture of his head, politely marvelling. Strafe seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. Confusion ran through Irish history, Cynthia said, like convolvulus in a hedgerow. On 24 May 1487, a boy of ten called Lambert Simnel, brought to Dublin by a priest from Oxford, was declared Edward VI of all England and Ireland, crowned with a golden circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary. On 24 May 1798, here in Antrim, Presbyterian farmers fought for a common cause with their Catholic labourers. She paused and looked at Strafe. Chaos and contradiction, she informed him, were hidden everywhere beneath nice-sounding names. ‘The Battle of the Yellow Ford,’ she suddenly chanted in a singsong way that sounded thoroughly, peculiar, ‘the Statutes of Kilkenny. The Battle of Glenmama, the Convention of Drumceat. The Act of Settlement, the Renunciation Act. The Act of Union, the Toleration Act. Just so much history it sounds like now, yet people starved or died while other people watched. A language was lost, a faith forbidden. Famine followed revolt, plantation followed that. But it was people who were struck into the soil of other people’s land, not forests of new trees; and it was greed and treachery that spread as a disease among them all. No wonder unease clings to these shreds of history and shots ring out in answer to the mockery of drums. No wonder the air is nervy with suspicion.’