The Collected Stories

There was an extremely awkward silence when she ceased to speak. Dekko nodded, doing his best to be companionable. Strafe nodded also. I simply examined the pattern of roses on our teatime china, not knowing what else to do. Eventually Dekko said: ‘What an awful lot you know, Cynth!’

‘Cynthia’s always been interested,’ Strafe said. ‘Always ‘had a first-rate memory.’

‘Those children of the streets are part of the battles and the Acts,’ she went on, seeming quite unaware that her talk was literally almost crazy. ‘They’re part of the blood that flowed around those nice-sounding names.’ She paused, and for a moment seemed disinclined to continue. Then she said:

‘The second time they came here the house was being rebuilt. There were concrete-mixers, and lorries drawn up on the grass, noise and scaffolding everywhere. They watched all through another afternoon and then they went their different ways: their childhood was over, lost with their idyll. He became a dockyard clerk. She went to London, to work in a betting shop.’

‘My dear,’ Strafe said very gently, ‘it’s interesting, everything you say, but it really hardly concerns us.’

‘No, of course not.’ Quite emphatically Cynthia shook her head, appearing wholly to agree. ‘They were degenerate, awful creatures. They must have been.’

‘No one’s saying that, my dear.’

‘Their story should have ended there, he in the docklands of Belfast, she recording bets. Their complicated childhood love should just have dissipated, as such love often does. But somehow nothing was as neat as that.’

Dekko, in an effort to lighten the conversation, mentioned a boy called Gollsol who’d been at school with Strafe and himself, who’d formed a romantic attachment for the daughter of one of the groundsmen and had later actually married her. There was a silence for a moment, then Cynthia, without emotion, said:

‘You none of you care. You sit there not caring that two people are dead.’

‘Two people, Cynthia?’ I said.

‘For God’s sake, I’m telling you!’ she cried. ‘That girl was murdered in a room in Maida Vale.’

Although there is something between Strafe and myself, I do try my best to be at peace about it. I go to church and take communion, and I know Strafe occasionally does too, though not as often as perhaps he might. Cynthia has no interest in that side of life, and it rankled with me now to hear her blaspheming so casually, and so casually speaking about death in Maida Vale on top of all this stuff about history and children. Strafe was shaking his head, clearly believing that Cynthia didn’t know what she was talking about.

‘Cynthia dear,’ I began, ‘are you sure you’re not muddling something up here? You’ve been upset, you’ve had a nightmare: don’t you think your imagination, or something you’ve been reading –’

‘Bombs don’t go off on their own. Death doesn’t just happen to occur in Deny and Belfast, in London and Amsterdam and Dublin, in Berlin and Jerusalem. There are people who are murderers: that is what this children’s story is about.’

A silence fell, no one knowing what to say. It didn’t matter of course because without any prompting Cynthia continued.

‘We drink our gin with Angostura bitters, there’s lamb or chicken Kiev. Old Kitty’s kind to us in the dining-room and old Arthur in the hall. Flowers are everywhere, we have our special table.’

‘Please let us take you to your room now,’ Strafe begged, and as he spoke I reached out a hand in friendship and placed it on her arm. ‘Come on, old thing,’ Dekko said.

‘The limbless are left on the streets, blood spatters the car-parks. Brits Out it says on a rockface, but we know it doesn’t mean us.’

I spoke quietly then, measuring my words, measuring the pause between each so that its effect might be registered. I felt the statement had to be made, whether it was my place to make it or not. I said:

‘You are very confused, Cynthia.’

The French family left the tea-lounge. The two Dalmatians, Charger and Snooze, ambled in and sniffed and went away again. Kitty came to clear the French family’s tea. things. I could hear her speaking to the honeymoon couple, saying the weather forecast was good.

‘Cynthia,’ Strafe said, standing up, ‘we’ve been very patient with you but this is now becoming silly.’

I nodded just a little. ‘I really think,’ I softly said, but Cynthia didn’t permit me to go on.

‘Someone told him about her. Someone mentioned her name, and he couldn’t believe it. She sat alone in Maida Vale, putting together the mechanisms of her bombs: this girl who had laughed on the seashore, whom he had loved.’

‘Cynthia,’ Strafe began, but he wasn’t permitted to continue either. Hopelessly, he just sat down again.

‘Whenever he heard of bombs exploding he thought of her, and couldn’t understand. He wept when he said that; her violence haunted him, he said. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t sleep at night. His mind filled up with images of her, their awkward childhood kisses, her fingers working neatly now. He saw her with a carrier-bag, hurrying it through a crowd, leaving it where it could cause most death. In front of the mouldering old house that had once been Glencorn Lodge they’d made a fire and cooked their food. They’d lain for ages on the grass. They’d cycled home to their city streets.’

It suddenly dawned on me that Cynthia was knitting this whole fantasy out of nothing. It all worked backwards from the moment when she’d had the misfortune to witness the man’s death in the sea. A few minutes before he’d been chatting quite normally to her, he’d probably even mentioned a holiday in his childhood and some girl there’d been: all of it would have been natural in the circumstances, possibly even the holiday had taken place at Glencorn. He’d said goodbye and then unfortunately he’d had his accident. Watching from the cliff edge, something had cracked in poor Cynthia’s brain, she having always been a prey to melancholy. I suppose it must be hard having two sons who don’t think much of you, and a marriage not offering you a great deal, bridge and holidays probably the best part of it. For some odd reason of her own she’d created her fantasy about a child turning into a terrorist. The violence of the man’s death had clearly filled her imagination with Irish violence, so regularly seen on television. If we’d been on holiday in Suffolk I wondered how it would have seemed to the poor creature.

I could feel Strafe and Dekko beginning to put all that together also, beginning to realize that the whole story of the red-haired man and the girl was clearly Cynthia’s invention. ‘Poor creature,’ I wanted to say, but did not do so.

‘For months he searched for her, pushing his way among the people of London, the people who were her victims. When he found her she just looked at him, as if the past hadn’t even existed. She didn’t smile, as if incapable of smiling. He wanted to take her away, back to where they came from, but she didn’t reply when he suggested that. Bitterness was like a disease in her, and when he left her he felt the bitterness in himself.’

Again Strafe and Dekko nodded, and I could feel Strafe thinking that there really was no point in protesting further. All we could hope for was that the end of the saga was in sight.

‘He remained in London, working on the railways. But in the same way as before he was haunted by the person she’d become, and the haunting was more awful now. He bought a gun from a man he’d been told about and kept it hidden in a shoe-box in his rented room. Now and again he took it out and looked at it, then put it back. He hated the violence that possessed her, yet he was full of it himself: he knew he couldn’t betray her with anything but death. Humanity had left both of them when he visited her again in Maida Vale.’

To my enormous relief and, I could feel, to Strafe’s and Dekko’s too, Mr and Mrs Malseed appeared beside us. Like his wife, Mr Malseed had considerably recovered. He spoke in an even voice, clearly wishing to dispose of the matter. It was just the diversion we needed.

‘I must apologize, Mrs Strafe,’ he said. ‘I cannot say how sorry we are that you were bothered by that man.’

‘My wife is still a little dicky,’ Strafe explained, ‘but after a decent night’s rest I think we can say she’ll be as right as rain again.’

‘I only wish, Mrs Strafe, you had made contact with my wife or myself when he first approached you.’ There was a spark of irritation in Mr Malseed’s eyes, but his voice was still controlled. ‘I mean, the unpleasantness you suffered might just have been averted.’

‘Nothing would have been averted, Mr Malseed, and Certainly not the horror we are left with. Can you see her as the girl she became, seated at a chipped white table, her wires and fuses spread around her? What were, her thoughts in that room, Mr Malseed? What happens in the mind of anyone who wishes to destroy? In a back street he bought his gun for too much money. When did it first occur to him to kill her?’

‘We really are a bit at sea,’ Mr Malseed replied without the slightest hesitation. He humoured Cynthia by displaying no surprise, by speaking very quietly.

‘All I am saying, Mr Malseed, is that we should root our heads out of the sand and wonder about two people who are beyond the pale.’

‘My dear,’ Strafe said, ‘Mr Malseed is a busy man.’

Still quietly, still perfectly in control of every intonation, without a single glance around the tea-lounge to ascertain where his guests’ attention was, Mr Malseed said:

‘There is unrest here, Mrs Strafe, but we do our best to live with it.’

‘All I am saying is that perhaps there can be regret when two children end like this.’

Mr Malseed did not reply. His wife did her best to smile away the awkwardness. Strafe murmured privately to Cynthia, no doubt beseeching her to come to her senses. Again I imagined a blue van drawn up in front of Glencorn Lodge, for it was quite understandable now that an imaginative woman should go mad, affected by the ugliness of death. The garbled speculation about the man and the girl, the jumble in the poor thing’s mind – a children’s story as she called it— all somehow hung together when you realized they didn’t have to make any sense whatsoever.

‘Murderers are beyond the pale, Mr Malseed, and England has always had its pales. The one in Ireland began in 1395.’

‘Dear,’ I said, ‘what has happened has nothing whatsoever to do with calling people murderers and placing them beyond some pale or other. You witnessed a most unpleasant accident, dear, and it’s only to be expected that you’ve become just a little lost. The man had a chat with you when you were sitting by the magnolias and then the shock of seeing him slip on the seaweed –’

‘He didn’t slip on the seaweed,’ she suddenly screamed. ‘My God, he didn’t slip on the seaweed.’

Strafe closed his eyes. The other guests in the tea-lounge had fallen silent ages ago, openly listening. Arthur was standing near the door and was listening also. Kitty was waiting to, clear away our tea things, but didn’t like to because of what was happening.

‘I must request you to take Mrs Strafe to her room, Major,’ Mr Malseed said. ‘And I must make it clear that we cannot tolerate further upset in Glencorn Lodge.’

Strafe reached for her arm, but Cynthia took no notice.

‘An Irish joke,’ she said, and then she stared at Mr and Mrs Malseed, her eyes passing over each feature of their faces. She stared at Dekko and Strafe, and last of all at me. She said eventually:

‘An Irish joke, an unbecoming tale: of course it can’t be true. Ridiculous, that a man returned here. Ridiculous, that he walked again by the seashore and through the woods, hoping to understand where a woman’s cruelty had come from.’

‘This talk is most offensive,’ Mr Malseed protested, his calmness slipping just a little. The ashen look that had earlier been in his face returned. I could see he was beside himself with rage. ‘You are trying to bring something to our doorstep which most certainly does not belong there.’

‘On your doorstep they talked about a sweetshop: Cadbury’s bars and different-flavoured creams, nut-milk toffee, Aero and Crunchie.’

‘For God’s sake pull yourself together,’ I clearly heard Strafe whispering, and Mrs Malseed attempted to smile. ‘Come along now, Mrs Strafe,’ she said, making a gesture. ‘Just to please us, dear. Kitty wants to clear away the dishes. Kitty!’ she called out, endeavouring to bring matters down to earth.

Kitty crossed the lounge with her tray and gathered up the cups and saucers. The Malseeds, naturally still anxious, hovered. No one was surprised when Cynthia began all over again, by crazily asking Kitty what she thought of us.

‘I think, dear,’ Mrs Malseed began, ‘Kitty’s quite busy really.’

‘Stop this at once,’ Strafe quietly ordered.

‘For fourteen years, Kitty, you’ve served us with food and cleared away the teacups we’ve drunk from. For fourteen years we’ve played our bridge and walked about the garden. We’ve gone for drives, we’ve bought our tweed, we’ve bathed as those children did.’

‘Stop it,’ Strafe said again, a little louder. Bewildered and getting red in the face, Kitty hastily bundled china on to her. tray. I made a sign at Strafe because for some reason I felt that the end was really in sight. I wanted him to retain his patience, but what Cynthia said next was almost unbelievable.

‘In Surrey we while away the time, we clip our hedges. On a bridge night there’s coffee at nine o’clock, with macaroons or petits fours. Last thing of all we watch the late-night News, packing away our cards and scoring-pads, our sharpened pencils. There’s been an incident in Armagh, one soldier’s had his head shot off, another’s run amok. Our lovely Glens of Antrim, we all four think, our coastal drives: we hope that nothing disturbs the peace. We think of Mr Malseed, still busy in Glencorn Lodge, and Mrs Malseed finishing her flower-plaques for the rooms of the completed annexe.’

‘Will you for God’s sake shut up?’ Strafe suddenly shouted. I could see him struggling with himself, but it didn’t do any good., He called Cynthia a bloody spectacle, sitting there talking rubbish. I don’t believe she even heard him.

‘Through honey-tinted glasses we love you and we love your island, Kitty. We love the lilt of your racy history, we love your earls and heroes. Yet we made a sensible pale here once, as civilized people create a garden, pretty as a picture.’

Strafe’s outburst had been quite noisy and I could sense him being ashamed of it. He muttered that he was sorry, but Cynthia simply took advantage of his generosity, continuing about a pale.

‘Beyond it lie the bleak untouchables, best kept as dots on the horizon, too terrible to contemplate. How can we be blamed if we make neither head nor tail of anything, Kitty, your past and your present, those battles and Acts of Parliament? We people of Surrey: how can we know? Yet I stupidly thought, you see, that the tragedy of two children could at least be understood. He didn’t discover where her cruelty had come from because perhaps you never can: evil breeds evil in a mysterious way. That’s the story the red-haired stranger passed on to me, the story you huddle away from.’

Poor Strafe was pulling at Cynthia, pleading with her, still saying he was sorry.

‘Mrs Strafe,’ Mr Malseed tried to say, but got no further. To my horror Cynthia abruptly pointed at me.

‘That woman,’ she said, ‘is my husband’s mistress, a fact I am supposed to be unaware of, Kitty.’

‘My God!’ strafe said.

‘My husband is perverted in his sexual desires. His friend, who shared his schooldays, has never quite recovered from that time. I myself am a pathetic creature who has closed her eyes to a husband’s infidelity and his mistress’s viciousness. I am dragged into the days of Thrive Major and A.D, Cowley-Stubbs: mechanically I smile. I hardly exist, Kitty.’

There was a most unpleasant silence, and then Strafe said:

‘None of that’s true. For God’s sake, Cynthia,’ he suddenly shouted, ‘go and lie down.’

Cynthia shook her head and continued to address the waitress. She’d had a rest, she told her. ‘But it didn’t do any good, Kitty, because hell has invaded the paradise of Glencorn, as so often it has invaded your island. And we, who have so often brought it, pretend it isn’t there. Who cares about children made into murderers?’

Strafe shouted again. ‘You fleshless ugly bitch!’ he cried. ‘You bloody old fool!’ He was on his feet, trying to get her on to hers. The blood was thumping in his bronzed face, his eyes had a fury in them I’d never seen before. ‘Fleshless!’ he shouted at her, not caring that so many people were listening. He closed his eyes in misery and in shame again, and I wanted to reach out and take his hand but of course I could not. You could see the Malseeds didn’t blame him, you could see them thinking that everything was ruined for us. I wanted to shout at Cynthia too, to batter the silliness out of her, but of course I could not do that. I could feel the tears behind my eyes, and I couldn’t help noticing that Dekko’s hands were shaking. He’s quite sensitive behind his joky manner, and had quite obviously taken to heart her statement that he had never recovered from his schooldays. Nor had it been pleasant, hearing myself described as vicious.

‘No one cares,’ Cynthia said in the same unbalanced way, as if she hadn’t just been called ugly and a bitch. ‘No one cares, and on our journey home we shall all four be silent. Yet is the truth about ourselves at least a beginning? Will we wonder in the end about the hell that frightens us?’

Strafe still looked wretched, his face deliberately turned away from us. Mrs Malseed gave a little sigh and raised the fingers of her left hand to her cheek, as if something tickled it. Her husband breathed heavily. Dekko seemed on the point of tears.

Cynthia stumbled off, leaving a silence behind her. Before it was broken I knew she was right when she said we would just go home, away from this country we had come to love. And I knew as well that neither here nor at home would she be led to a blue van that was not quite an ambulance. Strafe would stay with her because Strafe is made like that, honourable in his own particular way. I felt a pain where perhaps my heart is, and again I wanted to cry. Why couldn’t it have been she who had gone down to the rocks and slipped on the seaweed or just walked into the sea, it didn’t matter which? Her awful rigmarole hung about us as the last of the tea things were gathered up – the earls who’d fled, the famine and the people planted. The children were there too, grown up into murdering riff-raff.

The Blue Dress

My cinder-grey room has a window, but I have never in all my time here looked out of it. It’s easier to remember, to conjure up this scene or that, to eavesdrop. Americans give arms away, Russians promise tanks. In Brussels an English politician breakfasts with his mistress; a pornographer pretends he’s selling Christmas cards. Carefully I listen, as in childhood I listened to the hushed conversation of my parents.

I stand in the cathedral at Vézelay, whose bishops once claimed it possessed the mortal remains of Mary Magdalene, a falseness which was exposed by Pope Boniface VIII. I wonder about that Pope, and then the scene is different.

I sit in the Piazza San Marco on the day when I discovered a sea of corruption among the local Communists. The music plays, visitors remark upon the pigeons.

Scenes coalesce: Miss Batchelor passes along the promenade, Major Trubstall lies, the blue dress flutters and is still. In Rotterdam I have a nameless woman. ‘Feest wezen vieren?’ she says. ‘Gedronken?’ In Corniglia the wine is purple, the path by the coast is marked as a lover’s lane. I am silly, Dorothea says, the dress is just a dress. She laughs, like water running over pebbles.

I must try, they tell me; it will help to write it down. I do not argue, I do precisely as they say. Carefully, I remember. Carefully, I write it down.

It was Bath, not Corniglia, not Rotterdam or Venice, not Vézelay: it was in Bath where Dorothea and I first met, by chance in the Pump Room. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, actually bumping into her.

She shook her head, saying that of course I hadn’t hurt her. She blamed the crowds, tourists pushing like mad things, always in a hurry. But nothing could keep her out of the Pump Room because of its Jane Austen associations.

‘I’ve never been here before.’

‘Goodness! You poor thing!’

‘I was on the way to have some coffee. Would you like some?’

‘I always have coffee when I come.’

She was small and very young – twenty-one or -two, I guessed – in a plain white dress without sleeves. She carried a basket, and had very fair hair, quite straight and cut quite short. Her oval face was perfect, her eyes intense, the blue of a washed-out sky. She smiled when she told me about herself, as though she found the subject a little absurd. She was studying the history of art but when she finished that she didn’t know what on earth she was going to do next. I said I was in Bath because my ex-wife’s mother, who’d only come to live there six months ago, had died. The funeral had taken place that morning and my ex-wife, Felicity, had been furious that I’d attended it. But I’d always been fond of her mother, fonder in fact than Felicity had ever been. I’d known of course that I would have to meet her at the funeral. She’d married again, a man who ran a wine business: he had been there too.

‘Is it horrible, a divorce?’ the girl asked me while we drank our weak, cool coffee. ‘I can never think of my parents divorcing.’

‘It’s nice you can’t. Yes, it’s horrible.’

‘Did you have children?’

‘No.’

‘There’s that at least. But isn’t it odd, to make such a very rudimentary mistake?’

‘Extraordinary.’

I don’t know what it was about her manner that first morning, but something seemed to tell me that this beautiful creature would not be outraged if I said – which I did – that we might go somewhere else in search of a better cup of coffee. And when I said, ‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said it confidently. She telephoned her parents’ house. We had lunch together in the Francis Hotel.

‘I went to a boarding-school I didn’t like,’ she told me. ‘Called after St Catherine but without her charity. I was bad at maths and French and geography. I didn’t like a girl called Angela Tate and I didn’t like the breakfasts. I missed my brothers. What about you? What was your wife like?’

‘Fond of clothes. Very fine tweed, a certain shade of scarlet, scarves of every possible variation. She hated being abroad, trailing after me.’ I didn’t add that Felicity had been unfaithful with anyone she had a fancy for; I didn’t even want to think about that.

The waiter brought Dorothea veal escalope and steak au poivre for me. It was very like being in a dream. The funeral of my ex-mother-in-law had taken place at ten o’clock, there had been Felicity’s furious glances and her husband’s disdain, my walking away when the ceremony was over without a word to anyone. I’d felt wound up, like a watch-spring, seeing vividly in my mind’s eye an old, grey woman who’d always entertained me with her gossip, who’d written to me when Felicity went to say how sorry she was, adding in a postscript that Felicity had always been a handful. She and I had shared the truth about her daughter, and it was that I’d honoured by making the journey to her funeral.

‘They say I am compulsively naughty,’ Dorothea said, as if guessing that I wondered what she had said to her parents on the telephone. I suspected she had not confessed the truth. There’d been some excuse to account for her delay, and already that fitted in with what I knew of her. Certainly she would not have said that she’d been picked up by a middle-aged journalist who had come to Bath to attend a funeral. She spoke again of Jane Austen, of Elizabeth Bennet, and Emma and Elinor. She spoke as though these fictional characters were real. She almost loved them, she said, but that of course could not have been quite true.

‘Who were encumbered with low connections and gave themselves airs? Who bestowed their consent with a most joyful alacrity?’

I laughed, and waited for her to tell me. I walked with her to a parked car, a white Mini that had collected a traffic warden’s ticket. Formally we shook hands and all the way to London on the train I thought of her. I sat in the bar drinking one after another of those miniature bottles of whisky that trains go in for, while her face jumped about in my imagination, unnerving me. Again and again her white, even teeth smiled at me.

Within a day or two I was in Belfast, sending reports to a Washington newspaper and to a syndicate in Australia. As always, I posted photocopies of everything I wrote to Stoyckov, who operates a news bureau in Prague., Stoyckov used to pay me when he saw me, quite handsomely in a sense, but it was never the money that mattered: it was simply that I saw no reason why the truth about Northern Ireland should not be told behind the Iron Curtain as well as in Washington and Adelaide.

I had agreed to do a two-months stint – no longer, because from experience I knew that Belfast becomes depressing. Immediately afterwards I was to spend three days in Madrid, trying to discover if there was truth in the persistent rumour that the Pope was to visit Spain next year. ‘Great Christ alive,’ Felicity used to scream at me, ‘call this a marriage?’

In Belfast the army was doing its best to hush up a rape case. I interviewed a man called Ruairi O Baoill, whom I’d last seen drilling a gang of terrorists in the Syrian desert. ‘My dear fellow, you can hardly call this rape,’ a Major Trubstall insisted. ‘The girl was yelling her head off for it.’ But the girl had been doing no such thing; the girl was whey-faced, unable to stop crying; the girl was still in pain, she’d been rushed to hospital to have stitches. ‘Listen,’ Major Trubstall said, pushing a great crimson face into mine, ‘if a girl goes out drinking with four soldiers, d’you think she isn’t after something?’ The Red Hand of Ulster meant what it said, O Baoill told me: the hand was waiting to grasp the hammer and the sickle. He didn’t say it to his followers, and later he denied that he had said it at all.

Ruairi O Baoill is a sham, I wrote. And so, it would appear, is a man called Major TrubstalL Fantasy rules, I wrote, knowing it was the truth.

All the time in Northern Ireland and for three days in Spain Dorothea’s voice continued about Emma and Elinor and Elizabeth Bennet, and Mrs Elton and Mr Woodhouse. I kept imagining us together in a clean, empty house that appeared to be our home. Like smoke evaporating, my failed marriage wasn’t there any more. And my unhappy childhood slipped away also, as though by magic.

‘Dorothea?’

‘No, this is her mother. Please hold on. I’ll fetch her.’

I waited for so long I began to fear that this was Mrs Lysarth’s way of dealing with unwelcome telephone callers. I felt that perhaps the single word I’d spoken had been enough to convey an image of my unsuitableness, and my presumption.

‘Yes?’ Dorothea’s voice said,

‘It’s Terris. Do you remember?’

‘Of course I remember. Are you in Bath again?’

‘No. But at least I’ve returned from Northern Ireland. I’m in London. How are you, Dorothea?’

‘I’m very well. Are you well?’

‘Yes.’ I paused, not knowing how to put it.

‘It’s kind of you to ring, Terris.’

‘D’you think we might meet?’

‘Meet?’

‘It would be. nice to see you.’

She didn’t answer. I felt I had proposed marriage already, that it was that she was considering. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I began to say.

‘Of course we must meet. Would Thursday do? I have to be in London then.’

‘We could have lunch again.’

‘That would be lovely.’

And so it was. We sat in the bow window of an Italian restaurant in Romilly Street, and when anyone glanced in I felt inordinately proud. It was early September, a warm, clear day without a hint of autumn. Afterwards we strolled through Leicester Square and along Piccadilly. We were still in Green Park at six o’clock. ‘I love you, Terris,’ Dorothea said.

*

Her mother smiled a slanting smile at me, head a little on one side. She laid down an embroidery on a round, cane frame. She held a hand out.

‘We’ve heard so much,’ she said, still smiling, and then she introduced her sons. While we were drinking sherry Dorothea’s father appeared, a thin, tall man, with spectacles on a length of leather, dancing on a tweed waistcoat.

‘My dear fellow.’ Vaguely he smiled and held a hand out: an amateur archaeologist, though by profession a medical doctor. That I was the divorced middle-aged man whom his young daughter wished to marry was not a fact that registered in his face. Dorothea had shown me a photograph of him, dusty in a crumpled linen suit, holding between finger and thumb a piece of glazed terracotta. ‘A pleasure,’ he continued as vaguely as before. ‘A real pleasure.’

‘A pleasure to meet you, Dr Lysarth.’

‘Oh, not at all.’

‘More sherry?’ Dorothea suggested, pouring me whisky because she knew I probably needed it.

‘That’s whisky in that decanter, Dorothea,’ her brother Adam pointed out and while I was saying it didn’t matter, that whisky actually was what I preferred, her other brother, Jonathan, laughed.

‘I’m sure Mr Terris knows what he wants,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, and Dorothea said:

‘Terris is his Christian name.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’

‘You must call him Terris, Mother. You cannot address a prospective son-in-law as Mister.’

‘Please do,’ I urged, feeling a word from me was necessary.

‘Terris?’ Adam said.

‘Yes, it is an odd name.’

The brothers stood on either side of Dorothea’s chair in that flowery drawing-room. There were pale blue delphiniums in two vases on the mantelpiece, and roses and sweet-peas in little vases everywhere. The mingled scent was delicious, and the room and the flowers seemed part of the family the Lysarths were, as did the way in which Adam and Jonathan stood, protectively, by their sister.

They were twins, both still at Cambridge. They had their mother’s oval face, the pale blue eyes their parents shared, their father’s languid tallness. I was aware that however protective they might seem they were not protecting Dorothea from me: I was not an interloper, they did not resent me. But their youth made me feel even older than I was, more knocked about and less suitable than ever for the role I wished to play.

‘You’ve travelled a great deal,’ Mrs Lysarth said. ‘So Dorothea says.’

‘Yes, I have.’

I didn’t say I’d been an only child. I didn’t mention the seaside town where I’d spent my childhood, or reveal that we’d lived in a kind of disgrace really, that my father worked ignominiously in the offices of the trawling business which the family had once owned. Our name remained on the warehouses and the fish-boxes, a daily reminder that we’d slipped down in the world. I’d told Dorothea, but I didn’t really think all that would interest the other Lysarths.

‘Fascinating, to travel so,’ Mrs Lysarth remarked, politely smiling.

After dinner Dr Lysarth and I were left alone in the dining-room. We drank port in a manner which suggested that had I not been present Dr Lysarth would have sat there drinking it alone. He talked about a Roman pavement, twenty feet below the surface somewhere. Quite suddenly he said:

‘Dorothea wants to marry you.’

‘We both actually –’

‘Yes, so she’s told us.’

I hesitated. I said:

‘I’m – I’m closer to your age, in a way, than to hers.’

‘Yes, you probably are. I’m glad you like her.’

‘I love her.’

‘Of course.’

‘I hope,’ I began.

‘My dear fellow, we’re delighted.’

‘I’m a correspondent, Dr Lysarth, as Dorothea, I think, has told you. I move about a bit, but for the next two years I’ll be in Scandinavia.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He pushed the decanter towards me. ‘She’s a special girl, you know.’

‘Yes, I do know, Dr Lysarth.’

‘We’re awfully fond of her. We’re a tightly bound family – well, you may have noticed. We’re very much a family.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘But of course we’ve always known that Dorothea would one day wish to marry.’

‘I know I’m not what you must have imagined, Dr Lysarth, when you thought of Dorothea’s husband. I assure you I’m aware of that.’

‘It’s just that she’s more vulnerable than she seems to be: I just want to say that. She’s really a very vulnerable girl.’

The decanter was again moved in my direction. The tone of voice closed the subject of Dr Lysarth’s daughter. We returned to archaeological matters.

I spent that night at Wistaria Lodge and noticed at breakfast-time how right Dr Lysarth had been when he’d said that the family was a tightly bound one. Conversation drifted from one Lysarth to the next in a way that was almost artificial, as though the domestic scenes I witnessed belonged in the theatre. I formed the impression that the Lysarths invariably knew what was coming next, as though their lines had been learnt. My presence was accommodated through a telepathy that was certainly as impressive, another piece of practised theatre.

‘Yes, we’re like that,’ Dorothea said in the garden after breakfast. ‘We never seem to quarrel.’

She taught me how to play croquet and when we’d finished one game we were joined by her brothers. Adam was the best of the three and he, partnering Dorothea, easily beat Jonathan and myself. Mrs Lysarth brought a tray of drinks to a white table beside the lawn and we sat and sipped in the sunshine, while I was told of other games of croquet there had been, famous occasions when the tempers of visitors had become a little ragged.

‘It’s a perfect training for life,’ Mrs Lysarth said, ‘the game of croquet.’

‘Cunning pays,’ Adam continued. ‘Generosity must know its place.’

‘Not that we are against generosity, Terris,’ Adam said. ‘Not that we’re on the side of cunning.’

‘What a family poor Terris is marrying into!’ Dorothea cried, and on cue her mother smiled and added:

‘Terris is a natural croquet-player. He will one day put you all to shame.’

‘I doubt that very much.’ And as I spoke I felt I said precisely what was expected of me.

‘You must teach the Scandinavians, Dorothea,’ Adam said. ‘Whatever else, you must flatten out a lawn in your little Scandinavian garden.’

‘Oh yes, of course we shall. So there.’

After lunch Dorothea and I went for a walk. We had to say goodbye because the next day I was to go away; when I returned it would almost be the day we’d set for our wedding. We walked slowly through the village and out into the country. We left the road and passed along a track by the side of a cornfield. We rested by a stream which Dorothea had often told me about, a place she’d come to with her brothers as a child. We sat there, our backs against the same ivy-covered tree-stump. We talked about being married, of beginning our life together in Copenhagen. I made love to Dorothea by her stream, and it was afterwards that she told me the story of Agnes Kemp. She began it as we lay there, and continued while we washed and tidied ourselves and began the journey back to Wistaria Lodge.

‘She was twelve at the time, staying with us while her parents were abroad. She fell from the beech tree. Her neck was broken.’

I only nodded because there isn’t much anyone can say when a fact like that is related.

‘I had always wanted to climb that tree, I had been told I never must. “I dare you,” she said. “I dare you, Dorothea.” I was frightened, but when no one was looking we climbed it together, racing one another to the top.’

She spoke of the funeral of Agnes Kemp, how the dead child’s parents had not been present because it had been impossible to contact them in time. ‘We don’t much hear of them now,’ Dorothea said. ‘A card at Christmas. Agnes was an only child.’

We walked a little in silence. Then I said:

‘What was she like?’

‘Oh, she was really awfully spoilt. The kind of person who made you furious.’

I suppose it was that last remark that started everything off, that and the feeling that Wistaria Lodge was a kind of theatre. The remark passed unnoticed at the time, for even as she made it Dorothea turned round, and smiled and kissed me. ‘It’s all forgotten now,’ she said when that was over, ‘but of course I had to tell you.’

It was certainly forgotten, for when we arrived in the garden the white table had been moved beneath the beech tree out of the glare of the sun, and tea with scones and sandwiches and cake was spread all over it. I felt a dryness in my mouth that was not dispelled when I drank. I found it hard to eat, or even to smile in unison with the smiling faces around me. I kept seeing the spoilt child on the grass and Dr Lysarth bending over her, saying she was dead, as no doubt he must have. I kept thinking that the beech tree should have been cut down years ago, no matter how beautiful it was.

‘You’re mad,’ Felicity shouted at me more than once. ‘You’re actually mad.’ Her voice in its endless repetition is always a reminder of my parents’ faces, that worry in their eyes. All I had wanted to know was the truth about ourselves: why did the offices and the warehouses still bear our name, what had my grandfather done? ‘Best just left,’ my mother said. ‘Best not bothered with.’ But in the end they told me because naturally I persisted – at eight and twelve and eighteen: naturally I persisted. My grandfather had been a criminal and that was that: a drunkard and an embezzler, a gambler who had run through a fortune in a handful of years: I’d guessed, of course, by the time they told me. I didn’t know why they’d been so reluctant, or why they’d displayed concern when I persisted about Miss Batchelor: why did she weep when she walked along the promenade? I had to guess again, because all my childhood Miss Batchelor’s tears possessed me so: she wept for the music teacher, who was married arid had a family, and I did not forgive my parents for wishing to keep that covered up. Passionately I did not forgive them, although my mother begged me, saying I made myself unhappy. ‘You sound so noble,’ Felicity snapped at me. ‘Yet what’s so marvellous about exposing a brothel-keeper for peddling drugs? Or a grimy pederast and a government minister?’ Felicity’s mother called her ‘a tricky kind of customer’. Arid tricky was just the word. Tricky, no doubt, with bank tellers and men met idly in bars. Tricky in beds all over the place, when I was so often away, having to be away.

I crossed the bedroom to the window. The beech tree was lit by moonlight now. Gazing at it, I heard the voices that had haunted me ever since Dorothea told me the story.

‘Then I dare you to,’ Dorothea angrily shouts, stopping suddenly and confronting the other girl.

‘You’re frightened of it, Dorothea. You’re frightened of a tree.’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘Then I dare you to.’

In the garden the boys, delighted, listen. Their sister’s cheeks have reddened. Agnes Kemp is standing on one foot and then the other, balancing in a way she has, a way that infuriates Dorothea.

‘You’re a horrid person,’ Dorothea says. ‘You aren’t even pretty. You’re stupid and spoilt arid greedy. You always have two helpings. There’s something the matter with your eyes.’

‘There isn’t, Dorothea Lysarth. You’re jealous, that’s all.’

‘They’re pig’s eyes.’

‘You’re just afraid of a tree, Dorothea.’

They climb it, both at the same time, from different sides. There’s a forked branch near the top, a sprawling knobbly crutch, easily distinguishable from the ground: they race to that.

The boys watch, expecting any moment that an adult voice will cry out in horror from the house, but no voice does. The blue dress of Agnes Kemp and the white one of Dorothea disappear into a mass of leaves, the boys stand further back, the dresses reappear. Agnes Kemp is in front, but their sister has chosen a different route to the top, a shorter one it seems. The boys long for their sister to win because if she does Agnes Kemp will at least be quiet for a day or two. They don’t call out, although they want to: they want to advise Dorothea that in a moment she will have overtaken her challenger; they don’t because their voices might attract attention from the house. From where they stand they can hear the grandfather clock in the hall striking ten. Most of the windows are open.

Dorothea slips and almost falls. Her shoes aren’t right for climbing and when she glances to her left she can see that Agnes’s are: Agnes has put on tennis shoes, knowing she will succeed that morning in goading Dorothea. This is typical of her, and when it is all over Dorothea will be blamed because of course Agnes will blurt it out, in triumph if she wins, in revenge if she doesn’t.

The blue dress reaches the fork and then advances along one of its prongs, further than is necessary. Dorothea is a yard behind. She waits, crouched at the knobbly juncture, for Agnes Kemp’s return. The boys don’t understand that. They stare, wondering why their sister doesn’t climb down again so that they can all three run away from Agnes Kemp, since it is running away from her that has been in their minds since breakfast-time. They watch while Agnes Kemp reaches a point at which to pose triumphantly. They watch while slowly she creeps backwards along the branch. Their sister’s hand reaches out, pulling at the blue dress, at the child who has been such a nuisance all summer, who’ll be worse than ever after her victory. There is a clattering among the leaves and branches. Like a stone, the body strikes the ground.

‘Now what did anyone dream?’ Mrs Lysarth inquired at breakfast. Knives rattled on plates, toast crackled, Dr Lysarth read The Times. It was a family thing to talk about dreams. I had been told that there were dreaming seasons, a period when dreams could be remembered easily and a time when they could not be. It was all another Lysarth game.

‘I’ been skipping French classes again,’ Adam said. ‘For a year or even longer I’d been keeping so low a profile that Monsieur Bertain didn’t even know I existed. And then some examination or other loomed.’

‘Adam often has that dream,’ Dorothea confided to me.

‘I was in Istanbul,’ Jonathan said, ‘Or at least it seemed like Istanbul. A man was selling me a stolen picture. A kind of goat, by Marc Chagall.’

‘I had only a wisp of a thing,’ Mrs Lysarth contributed. ‘A bit out of Dorothea’s birth.’

‘I dreamed that Terris’s wife was picking scallions in the garden,’ Dorothea said. ‘ “You’re wrong to think there’s been a divorce,” she said.’

‘Did you dream, Terris?’ Mrs Lysarth asked, buttering toast, but I was so confused about the night that had passed that I thought it better to say I hadn’t.

‘What’s the criterion for As You Like It, ten letters, beginning with “T”?’ Dr Lysarth asked.

‘Touchstone,’ Dorothea said, and another Lysarth game began. ‘Lord of Eden End’ was ‘North’, ‘poet’s black tie ruined by vulcanized rubber’ was ‘ebonite’. Within ten minutes the crossword puzzle was complete.

The faces laughed and smiled around the breakfast table, the conversation ran about. Especially for my benefit a description of Monsieur Bertain, Adam’s French master, was engaged upon. His accent was imitated, his war wound designated as the cause of his short temper. Dr Lysarth looked forward to a dig in Derbyshire in the autumn; his wife was to accompany him and would, as always on archaeological occasions, spend her time walking and reading. Jonathan said he intended to visit us in Scandinavia. Dorothea pressed him and I found myself doing the same.

In the sunny room, while marmalade was passed and the flowered china had all the prettiness of a cottage garden, the horror was nonsensical. Mrs Lysarth’s elegance, her perfect features and her burnished hair, would surely not be as they were. No wrinkles creased her face; the doctor’s eyes were honestly untroubled, forget-me-not blue, a darker shade than Dorothea’s. And Dorothea’s hands would surely be less beautiful? The fingers clawing at the blue dress would have acquired some sign, a joint arthritic, a single bitten nail. The faces of the boys could not have shed all traces of the awful ugliness. ‘Dear, it isn’t our affair, why Miss Batchelor is troubled,’ my mother agitatedly protested. ‘senseless,’ Felicity shouted. ‘You frighten me with your senseless talk.’

On Tuesday afternoon, three days away, we would marry and the car would take us to the station at Bath after the champagne on the lawn. Our flight to Paris was at five past seven, we would have dinner in the Chez les Anges. We would visit Versailles and Rouen, and the Jeu de Paume because Dorothea had never been there. I may for a moment have closed my eyes at the breakfast table, so lost was I in speculation and imaginings.

‘Well, I have a surgery,’ Dr Lysarth announced, folding the newspaper as he rose from the table.

‘And I have Castlereagh to wonder about,’ Adam said. ‘That fascinating figure.’

For a moment in the sunny room the brothers again stood by Dorothea, an accidental conjunction or perhaps telepathy came into play: perhaps they guessed the contents of my mind. There was defiance in their stance, or so I thought, a reason for it now.

‘When I was little I used to ride here on my ponies. On Jess first. Later on Adonis.’

We walked as we had on the day we’d made love, through a spinney, along the track by the cornfield. Poppies, not in bloom before, were everywhere now, cow-parsley whitened the hedges.

‘The first thing I remember,’ Dorothea said, ‘is that bits of grass had got into my pram.’

I told myself that I should mention Agnes Kemp, but I did not do so. And when we reached the stream I did not embrace the girl who was to be my bride in a few days’ time. We sat with our backs against the tree-trunk, watching the ripple of the water.

‘I was lifted up,’ Dorothea said, ‘and there was a great tutting while the grass cuttings were removed. Years went by before I can remember anything else.’

Murder was not like stealing a pencil-sharpener at school, or spilling something. Agnes Kemp had been detested, a secret had afterwards become a way of life. Few words had perhaps been spoken within the family, Dr Lysarth’s giving the cause of death as a broken neck being perhaps the only announcement as to how the future was to be. The faces of the boys on the lawn returned to me, and Dorothea’s face as she looked down at the still body. Had she afterwards ridden her pony, Jess or Adonis, whichever it happened to be, by the cornfield and the poppies? ‘I dreamed of Agnes,’ was what she didn’t say at breakfast any more, because the family had exorcised the ghost.

Alone, Miss Batchelor walks; the winter waves tumble about. ‘Sea-spray,’ my mother lies. ‘Sea-spray on her cheeks, dear.’ How can my father, morning after morning, leave our gaunt house in order to perform his ignominious work, pretending it is work like any other? How can he hope that I will not scratch away the falsehoods they tell? My father is caught like a creature in a trap, for ever paying back the debts his own father has incurred. It isn’t nice, Miss Batchelor and a music teacher; it isn’t nice, the truth in Northern Ireland. None of it is nice. ‘No, no,’ they tell me, ‘you must be quiet, Terris.’ But I am always quiet. I make no noise in the small grey room where I have to be alone because, so they say, it is better so. The room is full of falseness: then I must write it down, they tell me, quite triumphantly; it will be easier if I write it down.

Americans give arms away, Russians promise tanks. I stand again in the cathedral at Vézelay, pleased that Pope Boniface exposed the pretence about Mary Magdalene. Felicity passes me a drink, smiling with ersatz affection. Our fingers touch, I know how she has spent that afternoon. ‘Poor Dorothea,’ Mrs Lysarth comforts, and the boys are angry because Dorothea has always needed looking after, ever since the day of the accident, the wretched death of a nuisance. I know I am right, as that Pope knew also. They hold me and buckle the thing on to me, but still I know I am right. Flowers are arranged in vases, croquet played beneath the beech tree. Ruairi O Baoill adopts a hero’s voice to proclaim his pretence of a cause, Major Trubstall’s smile is loaded with hypocrisy. The blue dress flutters and is still, telling me again that I am right.

The Teddy-bears’ Picnic

‘I simply don’t believe it,’ Edwin said. ‘Grown-up people?’

‘Well, grown-up now, darling. We weren’t always grown-up.’

‘But teddy-bears, Deborah?’

‘I’m sure I’ve told you dozens of times before.’

Edwin shook his head, frowning and staring at his wife. They’d been married six months: he was twenty-nine, swiftly making his way in a stockbroker’s office, Deborah was twenty-six and intended to continue being Mr Harridance’s secretary until a family began to come along. They lived in Wimbledon, in a block of flats called The Zodiac. 23 The Zodiac their address was and friends thought the title amusing and lively, making jokes about Gemini and Taurus and Capricorn when they came to drinks. A Dane had designed The Zodiac in 1968.

‘I’ll absolutely tell you this,’ Edwin said, ‘I’m not attending this thing.’

‘But darling –’

‘Oh, don’t be bloody silly, Deborah.’

Edwin’s mother had called Deborah ‘a pretty little thing’, implying for those who cared to be perceptive a certain reservation. She’d been more direct with Edwin himself, in a private conversation they’d had after Edwin had said he and Deborah wanted to get married. ‘Remember, dear,’ was how Mrs Chalm had put it then, ‘she’s not always going to be a pretty little thing. This really isn’t a very sensible marriage, Edwin.’ Mrs Chalm was known to be a woman who didn’t go in for cant when dealing with the lives of the children she had borne and brought up; she made no bones about it and often said so. Her husband, on the other hand, kept out of things.

Yet in the end Edwin and Deborah had married, one Tuesday afternoon in December, and Mrs Chalm resolved to make the best of it. She advised Deborah about this and that, she gave her potted plants for 23 The Zodiac, and in fact was kind. If Deborah had known about her mother-in-law’s doubts she’d have been surprised.

‘But we’ve always done it, Edwin. All of us.’

‘All of who, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Well, Angela for one. And Holly and Jeremy of course.’

‘Jeremy? My God!’

‘And Peter. And Enid and Pansy and Harriet.’

‘You’ve never told me a word about this, Deborah.’

‘I’m really sure I have.’

The sitting-room where this argument took place had a single huge window with a distant view of Wimbledon Common. The walls were covered with plum-coloured hessian, the floor with a plum-coloured carpet. The Chalms were still acquiring furniture: what there was, reflecting the style of The Zodiac’s architecture, was in bent steel and glass. There was a single picture, of a field of thistles, revealed to be a photograph on closer examination. Bottles of alcohol stood on a glass-topped table, their colourful labels cheering that corner up. Had the Chalms lived in a Victorian flat, or a cottage in a mews, their sitting-room would have been different, fussier and more ornate, dictated by the architectural environment. Their choice of decor and furniture was the choice of newlyweds who hadn’t yet discovered a confidence of their own.

‘You mean you all sit round with your teddies,’ Edwin said, ‘having a picnic? And you’ll still be doing that at eighty?’

‘What d’you mean, eighty?’

‘When you’re eighty years of age, for God’s sake. You’re trying to tell me you’ll still be going to this garden when you’re stumbling about and hard of hearing, a gang of O.A.P.s squatting out on the grass with teddy-bears?’

‘I didn’t say anything about when we’re old.’

‘You said it’s a tradition, for God’s sake.’

He poured some whisky into a glass and added a squirt of soda from a Sparklets syphon. Normally he would have poured a gin and dry vermouth for his wife, but this evening he felt too cross to bother. He hadn’t had the easiest of days. There’d been an error in the office about the B.A.T. shares a client had wished to buy, and he hadn’t managed to have any lunch because as soon as the B.A.T. thing was sorted out a crisis had blown up over sugar speculation. It was almost eight o’clock when he’d got back to The Zodiac and instead of preparing a meal Deborah had been on the telephone to her friend Angela, talking about teddy-bears.

Edwin was an agile young man with shortish black hair and a face that had a very slight look of an alligator about it. He was vigorous and athletic, sound on the tennis court, fond of squash and recently of golf. His mother had once stated that Edwin could not bear to lose and would go to ruthless lengths to ensure that he never did. She had even remarked to her husband that she hoped this quality would not one day cause trouble, but her husband replied it was probably just what a stockbroker needed. Mrs Chalm had been thinking more of personal relationships, where losing couldn’t be avoided. It was that she’d had on her mind when she’d had doubts about the marriage, for the doubts were not there simply because Deborah was a pretty little thing: it was the conjunction Mrs Chalm was alarmed about.

‘I didn’t happen to get any lunch,’ Edwin snappishly said now. ‘I’ve had a long unpleasant day and when I get back here –’

‘I’m sorry, dear.’

Deborah immediately rose from among the plum-coloured cushions of the sofa and went to the kitchen, where she took two pork chops from a Marks and Spencer’s carrier-bag and placed them under the grill of the electric cooker. She took a packet of frozen broccoli spears from the carrier-bag as well, and two Marks and Spencer’s trifles. While typing letters that afternoon she’d planned to have fried noodles with the chops and broccoli spears, just for a change. A week ago they’d had fried noodles in the new Mexican place they’d found and Edwin said they were lovely. Deborah had kicked off her shoes as soon as she’d come into the flat and hadn’t put them on since. She was wearing a dress with scarlet petunias on it. Dark-haired, with a heart-shaped face and blue eyes that occasionally acquired a bewildered look, she seemed several years younger than twenty-six, more like eighteen.

She put on water to boil for the broccoli spears even though the chops would not be ready for some time. She prepared a saucepan of oil for the noodles, hoping that this was the way to go about frying them. She couldn’t understand why Edwin was making such a fuss just because Angela had telephoned, and put it down to his not having managed to get any lunch.

In the sitting-room Edwin stood by the huge window, surveying the tops of trees and, in the distance, Wimbledon Common. She must have been on the phone to Angela for an hour and a half, probably longer. He’d tried to ring himself to say he’d be late but each time the line had been engaged. He searched his mind carefully, going back through the three years he’d known Deborah, but no reference to a teddy-bears’ picnic came to him. He’d said very positively that she had never mentioned it, but he’d said that in anger, just to make his point: reviewing their many conversations now, he saw he had been right and felt triumphant. Of course he’d have remembered such a thing, any man would.

Far down below, a car turned into the wide courtyard of The Zodiac, a Rover it looked like, a discreet shade of green. It wouldn’t be all that long before they had a Rover themselves, even allowing for the fact that the children they hoped for would be arriving any time now. Edwin had not objected to Deborah continuing her work after their marriage, but family life would naturally be much tidier when she no longer could, when the children were born. Eventually they’d have to move into a house with a garden because it was natural that Deborah would want that, and he had no intention of disagreeing with her.

‘Another thing is,’ he said, moving from the window to the open doorway of the kitchen, ‘how come you haven’t had a reunion all the years I’ve known you? If it’s an annual thing –’

‘It isn’t an annual thing, Edwin. We haven’t had a picnic since 1975 and before that 1971. It’s just when someone feels like it, I suppose. It’s just a bit of fun, darling.’

‘You call sitting down with teddy-bears a bit of fun? Grown-up people?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on about grown-ups. I know we’re grownups. That’s the whole point. When we were little we all vowed –’

‘Jesus Christ!’

He turned and went to pour himself another drink. She’d never mentioned it because she knew it was silly. She was ashamed of it, which was something she would discover when she grew up a bit.

‘You know I’ve got Binky,’ she said, following him to where the drinks were and pouring herself some gin. ‘I’ve told you hundreds of times how I took him everywhere. If you don’t like him in the bedroom I’ll put him away. I didn’t know you didn’t like him.’

‘I didn’t say that, Deborah. It’s completely different, what you’re saying. It’s private for a start. I mean, it’s your teddy-bear and you’ve told me how fond you were of it. That’s completely different from sitting down with a crowd of idiots –’

‘They’re not idiots, Edwin, actually.’

‘Well, they certainly don’t sound like anything else. D’you mean Jeremy and Peter are going to arrive clutching teddy-bears and then sit down on the grass pretending to feed them biscuit crumbs? For God’s sake, Jeremy’s a medical doctor!’

‘Actually, nobody’ll sit on the grass because the grass will probably be damp. Everyone brought rugs last time. It’s really because of the garden, you know. It’s probably the nicest garden in South Bucks, and then there’re the Ainley-Foxletons. I mean, they do so love it all.’

He’d actually been in the garden, and he’d once actually met the Ainley-Foxletons. One Saturday afternoon during his engagement to Deborah there had been tea on a raised lawn. Laburnum and broom were out, a mass of yellow everywhere. Quite pleasant old sticks the Ainley-Foxletons had been, but neither of them had mentioned a teddy-bears’ picnic.

‘I think she did as a matter of fact,’ Deborah mildly insisted. ‘I remember because I said it hadn’t really been so long since the last one – eighteen months ago would it be when I took you to see them? Well, 1975 wasn’t all that long before that, and she said it seemed like aeons. I remember her saying that, I remember “aeons” and thinking it just like her to come out with a word people don’t use any more.’

‘And you never thought to point out the famous picnic site? For hours we walked round and round that garden and yet it never occurred to you –’

‘We didn’t walk round and round. I’m sorry you were bored, Edwin.’

‘I didn’t say I was bored.’

‘I know the Ainley-Foxletons can’t hear properly and it’s a strain, but you said you wanted to meet them-’

‘I didn’t say anything of the kind. You kept telling me about these people and their house and garden, but I can assure you I wasn’t crying out to meet them in any way whatsoever. In fact, I rather wanted to play tennis that afternoon.’

‘You didn’t say so at the time.’

‘Of course I didn’t say so.’

‘Well, then.’

‘What I’m trying to get through to you is that we walked round and round that garden even though it had begun to rain. And not once did you say, “That’s where we used to have our famous teddy-bears’ picnic.”’

‘As a matter of fact I think I did. And it isn’t famous. I wish you wouldn’t keep on about it being famous.’

Deborah poured herself more gin and added the same amount of dry vermouth to the glass. She considered it rude of Edwin to stalk about the room just because he’d had a bad day, drinking himself and not bothering about her. If he hadn’t liked the poor old Ainley-Foxletons he should have said so. If he’d wanted to play tennis that afternoon he should have said so too.

‘Well, be all that as it may,’ he was saying now, rather pompously in Deborah’s opinion, ‘I do not intend to take part in any of this nonsense.’

‘But everybody’s husband will, and the wives too. It’s only fun, darling.’

‘Oh, do stop saying it’s fun. You sound like a half-wit. And something’s smelling in the kitchen.’

‘I don’t think that’s very nice, Edwin. I don’t see why you should call me a half-wit.’

‘Listen, I’ve had an extremely unpleasant day –’

‘Oh, do stop about your stupid old day.’

She carried her glass to the kitchen with her and removed the chops from beneath the grill. They were fairly black, and serve him right for upsetting her. Why on earth did he have to make such a fuss, why couldn’t he be like everyone else? It was something to giggle over, not take so seriously, a single Sunday afternoon when they wouldn’t be doing anything anyway. She dropped a handful of noodles into the hot oil, and then a second handful.

In the sitting-room the telephone rang just as Edwin was squirting soda into another drink. ‘Yes?’ he said, and Angela’s voice came lilting over the line, saying she didn’t want to bother Debbie but the date had just been fixed: June 17th. ‘Honestly, you’ll split your sides, Edwin.’

‘Yes, all right, I’ll tell her,’ he said as coldly as he could. He replaced the receiver without saying goodbye. He’d never cared for Angela, patronizing kind of creature.

Deborah knew it had been Angela on the telephone and she knew she would have given Edwin the date she had arranged with Pansy and Peter, who’d been the doubtful ones about the first date, suggested by Jeremy. Angela had said she was going to ring back with this information, but when the Chalms sat down to their chops and broccoli spears and noodles Edwin hadn’t yet passed the information on.

‘Christ, what are these?’ he said, poking at a brown noodle with his fork and then poking at the burnt chop.

‘The little things are fried noodles, which you enjoyed so much the other night. The larger thing is a pork chop, which wouldn’t have got overcooked if you hadn’t started an argument.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

He pushed his chair back and stood up. He returned to the sitting-room and Deborah heard the squirting of the soda syphon. She stood up herself, followed him to the sitting-room and poured herself another gin and vermouth. Neither of them spoke. Deborah returned to the kitchen and ate her share of the broccoli spears. The sound of television came from the sitting-room. ‘Listen, buster, you give this bread to the hit or don’t you?’ a voice demanded. ‘OΚ, I give the bread,’ a second voice replied.

They’d had quarrels before. They’d quarrelled on their honeymoon in Greece for no reason whatsoever. They’d quarrelled because she’d once left the ignition of the car turned on, causing a flat battery. They’d quarrelled because of Enid’s boring party just before Christmas. The present quarrel was just the same kind of thing, Deborah knew: Edwin would sit and sulk, she’d wash the dishes up feeling miserable, and he’d probably eat the chop and the broccoli when they were cold. She couldn’t blame him for not wanting the noodles because she didn’t seem to have cooked them correctly. Then she thought: what if he doesn’t come to the picnic, what if he just goes on being stubborn, which he could be when he wanted to? Everyone would know. ‘Where’s Edwin?’ they would ask, and she’d tell some lie and everyone would know it was a lie, and everyone would know they weren’t getting on. Only six months had passed, everyone would say, and he wouldn’t join in a bit of fun.

But to Deborah’s relief that didn’t happen. Later that night Edwin ate the cold pork chop, eating it from his fingers because he couldn’t manage to stick a fork into it. He ate the cold broccoli spears as well, but he left the noodles. She made him tea and gave him a Danish pastry and in the morning he said he was sorry.

‘So if we could it would be lovely,’ Deborah said on her office telephone. She’d told her mother there was to be another teddy-bears’ picnic, Angela and Jeremy had arranged it mainly, and the Ainley-Foxletons would love it of course, possibly the last they’d see.

‘My dear, you’re always welcome, as you know.’ The voice of Deborah’s mother came all the way from South Bucks, from the village where the Ainley-Foxletons’ house and garden were, where Deborah and Angela, Jeremy, Pansy, Harriet, Enid, Peter and Holly had been children together. The plan was that Edwin and Deborah should spend the weekend of June 17th with Deborah’s parents, and Deborah’s mother had even promised to lay on some tennis for Edwin on the Saturday. Deborah herself wasn’t much good at tennis.

‘Thanks, Mummy,’ she managed to say just as Mr Harridance returned from lunch.

‘No, spending the whole weekend actually,’ Edwin informed his mother. ‘There’s this teddy-bear thing Deborah has to go to.’

‘What teddy-bear thing?’

Edwin went into details, explaining how the children who’d been friends in a South Bucks village nearly twenty years ago met from time to time to have a teddy-bears’ picnic because that was what they’d done then.

‘But they’re adults surely now,’ Mrs Chalm pointed out.

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Well, I hope you have a lovely time, dear.’

‘Delightful, I’m sure.’

‘It’s odd when they’re adults, I’d have thought.’

Between themselves, Edwin and Deborah did not again discuss the subject of the teddy-bears’ picnic. During the quarrel Edwin had felt bewildered, never quite knowing how to proceed, and he hoped that on some future occasion he would be better able to cope. It made him angry when he wasn’t able to cope, and the anger still hung about him. On the other hand, six months wasn’t long in a marriage which he hoped would go on for ever: the marriage hadn’t had a chance to settle into the shape that suited it, any more than he and Deborah had had time to develop their own taste in furniture and decoration. It was only to be expected that there should be problems and uncertainty.

As for Deborah, she knew nothing about marriages settling into shape: she wasn’t aware that rules and tacit understandings, arrangements of give and take, were what made marriage possible when the first gloss had worn off. Marriage for Deborah was the continuation of a love affair, and as yet she had few complaints. She knew that of course they had to have quarrels.

They had met at a party. Edwin had left a group of people he was listening to and had crossed to the corner where, she was being bored by a man in computers. ‘Hullo,’ Edwin just said. All three of them were eating plates of paella.

Finding a consideration of the past pleasanter than speculation about the future, Deborah often recalled that moment: Edwin’s eager face smiling at her, the computer man discomfited, a sour taste in the paella. ‘You’re not Fiona’s sister?’ Edwin said, and when ages afterwards she’d asked him who Fiona was he confessed he’d made her up. ‘I shouldn’t eat much more of this stuff,’ he said, taking the paella away from her. Deborah had been impressed by that: she and the computer man had been fiddling at the paella with their forks, both of them too polite to say that there was something the matter with it, ‘What do you do?’ Edwin said a few minutes later, which was more than the computer man had asked.

In the weeks that followed they told one another all about themselves, about their parents and the houses they’d lived in as children, the schools they’d gone to, the friends they’d made. Edwin was a daring person, he was successful, he liked to be in charge of things. Without in any way sounding boastful, he told her of episodes in his childhood, of risks taken at school. Once he’d dismantled the elderly music master’s bed, causing it to collapse when the music master later lay down on it. He’d removed the carburettor from some other master’s car, he’d stolen an egg-beater from an ironmonger’s shop. All of them were dares, and by the end of his schooldays he had acquired the reputation of being fearless: there was nothing, people said, he wouldn’t do.

It was easy for Deborah to love him, and everything he told her, self-deprecatingly couched, was clearly the truth. But Deborah in love naturally didn’t wonder how this side of Edwin would seem in marriage, nor how it might develop as Edwin moved into middle age. She couldn’t think of anything nicer than having him there every day, and in no way did she feel let down on their honeymoon in Greece or by the couple of false starts they made with flats before they eventually ended up in 23 The Zodiac. Edwin went to his office every day and Deborah went to hers. That he told her more about share prices than she told him about the letters she typed for Mr Harridance was because share prices were more important. It was true that she would often have quite liked to pass on details of this or that, for instance of the correspondence with Flitts, Hay and Co. concerning nearly eighteen thousand defective chair castors. The correspondence was interesting because it had continued for two years and had become vituperative. But when she mentioned it Edwin just agreeably nodded. There was also the business about Miss Royal’s scratches, which everyone in the office had been conjecturing about: how on earth had a woman like Miss Royal acquired four long scratches on her face and neck between five-thirty one Monday evening and nine-thirty the following morning? ‘Oh yes?’ Edwin had said, and gone on to talk about the Mercantile Investment Trust.

Deborah did not recognize these telltale signs. She did not remember that when first she and Edwin exchanged information about one another’s childhoods Edwin had sometimes just smiled, as if his mind had drifted away. It was only a slight disappointment that he didn’t wish to hear about Flitts, Hay and Co., and Miss Royal’s scratches: no one could possibly get into a state about things like that. Deborah saw little significance in the silly quarrel they’d had about the teddy-bears’ picnic, which was silly itself of course. She didn’t see that it had had to do with friends who were hers and not Edwin’s; nor did it occur to her that when they really began to think about the decoration of 23 The Zodiac it would be Edwin who would make the decisions. They shared things, Deborah would have said: after all, in spite of the quarrel they were going to go to the teddy-bears’ picnic. Edwin loved her and was kind and really rather marvellous. It was purely for her sake that he’d agreed to give up a whole weekend.

So on a warm Friday afternoon, as they drove from London in their Saab, Deborah was feeling happy. She listened while Edwin talked about a killing a man called Dupree had made by selling out his International Asphalt holding. ‘James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree,’ she said.

‘What on earth’s that?’

‘It’s by A.A. Milne, the man who wrote about Pooh Bear. Poor Pooh!’

Edwin didn’t say anything.

‘Jeremy’s is called Pooh.’

‘I see.’

In the back of the car, propped up in a corner, was the blue teddy-bear called Binky which Deborah had had since she was one.

The rhododendrons were in bloom in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden, late that year because of the bad winter. So was the laburnum Edwin remembered, and the broom, and some yellow azaleas. ‘My dear, we’re so awfully glad,’ old Mrs Ainley-Foxleton said, kissing him because she imagined he must be one of the children in her past. Her husband, tottering about on the raised lawn which Edwin also remembered from his previous visit, had developed the shakes. ‘Darlings, Mrs Bright has ironed our tablecloth for us!’ Mrs Ainley-Foxleton announced with a flourish.

She imparted this fact because Mrs Bright, the Ainley-Foxletons’ charwoman, was emerging at that moment from the house, with the ironed tablecloth over one arm. She carried a tray on which there were glass jugs of orange squash and lemon squash, a jug of milk, mugs with Beatrix Potter characters on them, and two plates of sandwiches that weren’t much larger than postage stamps. She made her way down stone steps from the raised lawn, crossed a more extensive lawn and disappeared into a shrubbery. While everyone remained chatting to the Ainley-Foxletons – nobody helping to lay the picnic out because that had never been part of the proceedings – Mrs Bright reappeared from the shrubbery, returned to the house and then made a second journey, her tray laden this time with cake and biscuits.

Before lunch Edwin had sat for a long time with Deborah’s father in the summer-house, drinking. This was something Deborah’s father enjoyed on Sunday mornings, permitting himself a degree of dozy inebriation which only became noticeable when two bottles of claret were consumed at lunch. Today Edwin had followed his example, twice getting to his feet to refill their glasses and during the course of lunch managing to slip out to the summer house for a fairly heavy tot of whisky, which mixed nicely with the claret. He could think of no other condition in which to present himself – with a teddy-bear Deborah’s mother had pressed upon him – in the Ainley-Foxletons’ garden. ‘Rather you than me, old chap,’ Deborah’s father had said after lunch, subsiding into an armchair with a gurgle. At the last moment Edwin had quickly returned to the summer-house and had helped himself to a further intake of whisky, drinking from the cap of the Teacher’s bottle because the glasses had been collected up. He reckoned that when Mrs Ainley-Foxleton had kissed him he must have smelt like a distillery, and he was glad of that.

‘Well, here we are,’ Jeremy said in the glade where the picnic had first taken place in 1957. He sat at the head of the tablecloth, cross-legged on a tartan rug. He had glasses and was stout. Peter at the other end of the tablecloth didn’t seem to have grown much in the intervening years, but Angela had shot up like a hollyhock and in fact resembled one. Enid was dumpy, Pansy almost beautiful; Harriet had protruding teeth, Holly was bouncy. Jeremy’s wife and Peter’s wife, and Pansy’s husband – a man in Shell – all entered into the spirit of the occasion. So did Angela’s husband, who came from Czechoslovakia and must have found the proceedings peculiar, everyone sitting there with a teddy-bear that had a name. Angela put a record on Mrs Ainley-Foxleton’s old wind-up gramophone. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ a voice screeched, ‘without consulting me.’ Mr and Mrs Ainley-Foxleton were due to arrive at the scene later, as was the tradition. They came with chocolates apparently, and bunches of buttercups for the teddy-bears.

‘Thank you, Edwin,’ Deborah whispered while the music and the song continued. She wanted him to remember the quarrel they’d had about the picnic; she wanted him to know that she now truly forgave him, and appreciated that in the end he’d seen the fun of it all.

‘Listen, I have to go to the lav,’ Edwin said. ‘Excuse me for a minute.’ Nobody except Deborah seemed to notice when he ambled off because everyone was talking so, exchanging news.

The anger which had hung about Edwin after the quarrel had never evaporated. It was in anger that he had telephoned his mother, and further anger had smacked at him when she’d said she hoped he would have a lovely time. What she had meant was that she’d told him so: marry a pretty little thing and before you can blink you’re sitting down to tea with teddy-bears. You’re a fool to put up with rubbish like this was what Deborah’s father had meant when he’d said rather you than me.

Edwin did not lack brains and he had always been aware of it. It was his cleverness that was still offended by what he considered to be an embarrassment, a kind of gooey awfulness in an elderly couple’s garden. At school he had always hated anything to do with dressing up, he’d even felt awkward when he’d had to read poetry aloud. What Edwin admired was solidity: he liked Westminster and the City, he liked trains moving smoothly, suits and clean shirts. When he’d married Deborah he’d known-without having to be told by his mother – that she was not a clever person, but in Edwin’s view a clever wife was far from necessary. He had seen a future in which children were born and educated, in which Deborah developed various cooking and housekeeping skills, in which together they gave small dinner-parties. Yet instead of that, after only six months, there was this grotesque absurdity. Getting drunk wasn’t a regular occurrence with Edwin: he drank when he was angry, as he had on the night of the quarrel.

Mr Ainley-Foxleton was pottering about with his stick on the raised lawn, but Edwin took no notice of him. The old man appeared to be looking for something, his head poked forward on his scrawny neck, bespectacled eyes examining the grass. Edwin passed into the house. From behind a closed door he could hear the voices of Mrs Ainley-Foxleton and Mrs Bright, talking about buttercups. He opened another door and entered the Ainley-Foxletons’ dining-room. On the sideboard there was a row of decanters.

Edwin discovered that it wasn’t easy to drink from a decanter, but he managed it none the less. Anger spurted in him all over again. It seemed incredible that he had married a girl who hadn’t properly grown up. None of them had grown up, none of them desired to belong in the adult world, not even the husbands and wives who hadn’t been involved in the first place. If Deborah had told him about any of it on that Sunday afternoon when they’d visited this house he wondered, even, if he would have married her.

Yet replacing the stopper of the decanter between mouthfuls in case anyone came in, Edwin found it impossible to admit that he had made a mistake in marrying Deborah: he loved her, he had never loved anyone else, and he doubted if he would ever love anyone else in the future. Often in an idle moment, between selling and buying in the office, he thought of her, seeing her in her different clothes and sometimes without any clothes at all. When he returned to 23 The Zodiac he sometimes put his arms around her and would not let her go until he had laid her gently down on their bed. Deborah thought the world of him, which was something she often said.

In spite of all that it was extremely annoying that the quarrel had caused him to feel out of his depth. He should have been able to sort out such nonsense within a few minutes; he deserved his mother’s gibe and his father-in-law’s as well. Even though they’d only been married six months, it was absurd that since Deborah loved him so he hadn’t been able to make her see how foolish she was being. It was absurd to be standing here drunk.

The Ainley-Foxletons’ dining-room, full of silver and polished furniture and dim oil paintings, shifted out of focus. The row of decanters became two rows and then one again. The heavily carpeted floor tilted beneath him, falling away to the left and then to the right. Deborah had let him down. She had brought him here so that he could be displayed in front of Angela and Jeremy and Pansy, Harriet, Holly, Enid, Peter, and the husbands and the wives. She was making the point that she had only to lift her little finger, that his cleverness was nothing compared with his love for her. The anger hammered at him now, hurting him almost. He wanted to walk away, to drive the Saab back to London and when Deborah followed him to state quite categorically that if she intended to be a fool there would have to be a divorce. But some part of Edwin’s anger insisted that such a course of action would be an admission of failure and defeat. It was absurd that the marriage he had chosen to make should end before it had properly begun, due to silliness.

Edwin took a last mouthful of whisky and replaced the glass stopper. He remembered another social occasion, years ago, and he was struck by certain similarities with the present one. People had given a garden party in aid of some charity or other which his mother liked to support, to which he and his brother and sister, and his father, had been dragged along. It had been an excruciatingly boring afternoon, in the middle of a heatwave. He’d had to wear his floppy cotton hat, which he hated, and an awful tan-coloured summer suit, made of cotton also. There had been hours and hours of just standing while his mother talked to people, sometimes slowly giving them recipes, which they wrote down. Edwin’s brother and sister didn’t seem to mind that; his father did as he was told. So Edwin had wandered off, into a house that was larger and more handsome than the Ainley-Foxletons’. He’d strolled about in the downstairs rooms, eaten some jam he found in the kitchen, and then gone upstairs to the bedrooms. He’d rooted around for a while, opening drawers and wardrobes, and then he’d climbed a flight of uncarpeted stairs to a loft. From here he’d made his way out on to the roof. Edwin had almost forgotten this incident and certainly never dwelt on it, but with a vividness that surprised him it now returned.

He left the dining-room. In the hall he could still hear the voices of Mrs Ainley-Foxleton and Mrs Bright. Nobody had bothered with him that day; his mother, whose favourite he had always been, was even impatient when he said he had a toothache. Nobody had noticed when he’d slipped away. But from the parapet of the roof everything had been different. The faces of the people were pale, similar dots, all gazing up at him. The colours of the women’s dresses were confused among the flowers. Arms waved frantically at him; someone shouted, ordering him to come down.

On the raised lawn the old man was still examining the grass, his head still poked down towards it, his stick prodding at it. From the glade where the picnic was taking place came a brief burst of applause, as if someone had just made a speech. ‘… today’s the day the teddy-bears have their picnic,’ sang the screeching voice, faintly.

A breeze had cooled Edwin’s sunburnt arms as he crept along the parapet. He’d sensed his mother’s first realization that it was he, and noticed his brother’s and his sister’s weeping. He had seen his father summoned from the car where he’d been dozing. Edwin had stretched his arms out, balancing like a tightrope performer. All the boredom, the tiresome heat, the cotton hat and suit, were easily made up for. Within minutes it had become his day.

‘Well, it’s certainly the weather for it,’ Edwin said to the old man.

‘Eh?’

‘The weather’s nice,’ he shouted. ‘It’s a fine day.’

‘There’s fungus in this lawn, you know. Eaten up with it.’ Mr Ainley-Foxleton investigated small black patches with his stick. ‘Never knew there was fungus here,’ he said.

They were close to the edge of the lawn. Below them there was a rockery full of veronica and sea-pinks and saponaria. The rockery was arranged in a semicircle, around a sundial.

‘Looks like fungus there too,’ Edwin said, pointing at the larger lawn that stretched away beyond this rockery.

‘Eh?’ The old man peered over the edge, not knowing what he was looking for because he hadn’t properly heard. ‘Eh?’ he said again, and Edwin nudged him with his elbow. The stick went flying off at an angle, the old man’s head struck the edge of the sundial with a sharp, clean crack. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ the voice began again, drifting through the sunshine over the scented garden. Edwin glanced quickly over the windows of the house in case there should be a face at one of them. Not that it would matter: at that distance no one could see such a slight movement of an elbow.

They ate banana sandwiches and egg sandwiches, and biscuits with icing on them, chocolate cake and coffee cake. The teddy-bears’ snouts were pressed over the Beatrix Potter mugs, each teddy-bear addressed by name. Edwin’s was called Tomkin.

‘Remember the day of the thunderstorm?’ Enid said, screwing up her features in a way she had – like a twitch really, Edwin considered. The day he had walked along the parapet might even have been the day of the thunderstorm, and he smiled because somehow that was amusing. Angela was smiling too, and so were Jeremy and Enid, Pansy, Harriet and Holly, Peter and the husbands and the wives. Deborah in particular was smiling. When Edwin glanced from face to face he was reminded of the faces that had gazed up at him from so far below, except that there’d been panic instead of smiles.

‘Remember the syrup?’ Angela said. ‘Poor Algernon had to be given a horrid bath.’

‘Wasn’t it Horatio, surely?’ Deborah said.

‘Yes, it was Horatio,’ Enid confirmed, amusingly balancing Horatio on her shoulder.

‘Today’s the day the teddy-bears have their picnic,’ suddenly sang everyone, taking a lead from the voice on the gramophone. Edwin smiled and even began to sing himself. When they returned to Deborah’s parents’ house the atmosphere would be sombre. ‘Poor old chap was overlooked,’ he’d probably be the one to explain, ‘due to all that fuss.’ And in 23 The Zodiac the atmosphere would be sombre also. ‘I’m afraid you should get rid of it,’ he’d suggest, arguing that the blue teddy-bear would be for ever a reminder. Grown up a bit because of what had happened, Deborah would of course agree. Like everything else, marriage had to settle into shape.

Pansy told a story of an adventure her Mikey had had when she’d taken him back to boarding-school, how a repulsive girl called Leonora Thorpe had stuck a skewer in him. Holly told of how she’d had to rescue her Percival from drowning when he’d toppled out of a motor-boat. Jeremy wound up the gramophone and the chatter jollily continued, the husbands and wives appearing to be as delighted as anyone. Harriet said how she’d only wanted to marry Peter and Peter how he’d determined to marry Deborah. ‘Oh, don’t go down to the woods today,’ the voice began again, and then came Mrs Ainley-Foxleton’s scream.

Everyone rushed, leaving the teddy-bears just anywhere and the gramophone still playing. Edwin was the first to bend over the splayed figure of the old man. He declared that Mr Ainley-Foxleton was dead, and then took charge of the proceedings.

The Time of Year

All that autumn, when they were both fourteen, they had talked about their Christmas swim. She’d had the idea: that on Christmas morning when everyone was still asleep they would meet by the boats on the strand at Ballyquin and afterwards quite casually say that they had been for a swim on Christmas Day. Whenever they met during that stormy October and November they wondered how fine the day might be, how cold or wet, and if the sea could possibly be frozen. They walked together on the cliffs, looking down at the breaking waves of the Atlantic, shivering in anticipation. They walked through the misty dusk of the town, lingering over the first signs of Christmas in the shops: coloured lights strung up, holly and Christmas trees and tinsel. They wondered if people guessed about them. They didn’t want them to, they wanted it to be a secret. People would laugh because they were children. They were in love that autumn.

Six years later Valerie still remembered, poignantly, in November. Dublin, so different from Ballyquin, stirred up the past as autumn drifted into winter and winds bustled around the grey buildings of Trinity College, where she was now a student. The city’s trees were bleakly bare, it seemed to Valerie; there was sadness, even, on the lawns of her hall of residence, scattered with finished leaves. In her small room, preparing herself one Friday evening for the Skullys’ end-of-term party, she sensed quite easily the Christmas chill of the sea, the chilliness creeping slowly over her calves and knees. She paused with the memory, gazing at herself in the looking-glass attached to the inside of her cupboard door. She was a tall girl, standing now in a white silk petticoat, with a thin face and thin long fingers and an almost classical nose. Her black hair was straight, falling to her shoulders. She was pretty when she smiled and she did so at her reflection, endeavouring to overcome the melancholy that visited her at this time of year. She turned away and picked up a green corduroy dress which she had laid out on her bed. She was going to be late if she dawdled like this.

The parties given by Professor and Mrs Skully were renowned neither for the entertainment they provided nor for their elegance. They were, unfortunately, difficult to avoid, the Professor being persistent in the face of repeated excuses – a persistence it was deemed unwise to strain.

Bidden for half past seven, his history students came on bicycles, a few in Kilroy’s Mini, Ruth Cusper on her motor-cycle, Bewley Joal on foot. Woodward, Whipp and Woolmer-Mills came cheerfully, being kindred spirits of the Professor’s and in no way dismayed by the immediate prospect. Others were apprehensive or cross, trying not to let it show as smilingly they entered the Skullys’ house in Rathgar.

‘How very nice!’ Mrs Skully murmured in a familiar manner in the hall. ‘How jolly good of you to come.’

The hall was not yet decorated for Christmas, but the Professor had found the remains of last year’s crackers and had stuck half a dozen behind the heavily framed scenes of Hanover that had been established in the hall since the early days of the Skullys’ marriage. The gaudy crêpe paper protruded above the pictures in splurges of green, red and yellow, and cheered up the hall to a small extent. The coloured scarves and overcoats of the history students, already accumulating on the hall-stand, did so more effectively.

In the Skullys’ sitting-room the Professor’s record-player, old and in some way special, was in its usual place: on a mahogany table in front of the french windows, which were now obscured by brown curtains. Four identical rugs, their colour approximately matching that of the curtains, were precisely arranged on darker brown linoleum. Crimson-seated dining-chairs lined brownish walls.

The Professor’s history students lent temporary character to this room, as their coats and scarves did to the hall. Kilroy was plump in a royal-blue suit. The O’Neill sisters’ cluster of followers, jostling even now for promises of favours, wore carefully pressed denim or tweed. The O’Neill sisters themselves exuded a raffish, cocktail-time air. They were twins, from Lurgan, both of them blonde and both favouring an excess of eye-shadow, with lipstick that wetly gleamed, the same shade of pink as the trouser-suits that nudgingly hugged the protuberances of their bodies. Not far from where they now held court, the rimless spectacles of Bewley Joal had a busy look in the room’s harsh light; the complexion of Yvonne Smith was displayed to disadvantage. So was the troublesome fair hair of Honor Hitchcock, who was engaged to a student known as the Reverend because of his declared intention one day to claim the title. Cosily in a corner she linked her arm with his, both of them seeming middle-aged before their time, inmates already of a draughty rectory in Co. Cork or Clare. ‘I’ll be the first,’ Ruth Cusper vowed, ‘to visit you in your parish. Wherever it is.’ Ruth Cusper was a statuesque English girl, not yet divested of her motor-cycling gear.

The colours worn by the girls, and the denim and tweed, and the royal blue of Kilroy, contrasted sharply with the uncared-for garb of Woodward, Whipp and Woolmer-Mills, all of whom were expected to take Firsts. Stained and frayed, these three hung together without speaking, Woodward very tall, giving the impression of an etiolated newt, Whipp small, his glasses repaired with Sellotape, Woolmer-Mills for ever launching himself back and forth on the balls of his feet.

In a pocket of Kilroy’s suit there was a miniature bottle of vodka, for only tea and what the Professor described as ‘cup’ were served in the course of the evening. Kilroy fingered it, smiling across the room at the Professor, endeavouring to give the impression that he was delighted to be present. He was a student who was fearful of academic failure, his terror being that he would not get a Third: he had set his sights on a Third, well aware that to have set them higher would not be wise. He brought his little bottles of vodka to the Professor’s parties as an act of bravado, a gesture designed to display jauntiness, to show that he could take a chance. But the chances he took with his vodka were not great.

Bewley Joal, who would end up with a respectable Second, was laying down the law to Yvonne Smith, who would be grateful to end up with anything at all. Her natural urge to chatter was stifled, for no one could get a word in when the clanking voice of Bewley Joal was in full flow. ‘Oh, it’s far more than just a solution, dear girl,’ he breezily pronounced, speaking of Moral Rearmament. Yvonne Smith nodded and agreed, trying to say that an aunt of hers thought most highly of Moral Rearmament, that she herself had always been meaning to look into it. But the voice of Bewley Joal cut all her sentences in half.

‘I thought we’d start,’ the Professor announced, having coughed and cleared his throat, ‘with the “Pathétique”.’ He fiddled with the record-player while everyone sat down, Ruth Cusper on the floor. He was a biggish man in a grey suit that faintly recalled the clothes of Woodward, Whipp and Woolmer-Mills. On a large head hair was still in plentiful supply even though the Professor was fifty-eight. The hair was grey also, bushing out around his head in a manner that suggested professorial vagueness rather than a gesture in the direction óf current fashion. His wife, who stood by his side while he placed a record on the turntable, wore a magenta skirt and twin-set, and a string of jade beads. In almost every way – including this lively choice of dress – she seemed naturally to complement her husband, to fill the gaps his personality couldn’t be bothered with. Her nervous manner was the opposite of his confident one. He gave his parties out of duty, and having done so found it hard to take an interest in any studeńts except those who had already proved themselves academically sound. Mrs Skully preferred to strike a lighter note. Now and again she made efforts to entice a few of the girls to join her on Saturday evenings, offering the suggestion that they might listen together to Saturday Night Theatre and afterwards sit around and discuss it. Because the Professor saw no point in television there was none in the Skullys’ house.

Tchaikovsky filled the sitting-room. The Professor sat down and then Mrs Skully did. The doorbell rang.

‘Ah, of course,’ Mrs Skully said.

‘Valerie Upcott,’ Valerie said. ‘Good evening, Mrs Skully.’

‘Come in, come in, dear. The “Pathétique’s” just started.’ She remarked in the hall on the green corduroy dress that was revealed when Valerie took off her coat. The green was of so dark a shade that it might almost have been black. It had large green buttons all down the front. ‘Oh, how really nice!’ Mrs Skully said.

The crackers that decorated the scenes of Hanover looked sinister, Valerie thought: Christmas was on the way, soon there’d be the coloured lights and imitation snow. She smiled at Mrs Skully. She wondered about saying that her magenta outfit was nice also, but decided against it. ‘We’ll slip in quietly,’ Mrs Skully said.

Valerie tried to forget the crackers as she entered the sitting-room and took her place on a chair, but in her mind the brash images remained. They did so while she acknowledged Kilroy’s winking smile and while she glanced towards the Professor in case he chose to greet her. But the Professor, his head bent over clasped hands, did not look up.

Among the history students Valerie was an unknown quantity. During the two years they’d all known one another she’d established herself as a person who was particularly quiet. She had a private look even when she smiled, when the thin features of her face were startled out of tranquillity, as if an electric light had suddenly been turned on. Kilroy still tried to take her out, Ruth Cusper was pally. But Valerie’s privacy, softened by her sudden smile, unfussily repelled these attentions.

For her part she was aware of the students’ curiosity, and yet she could not have said to any one of them that a tragedy which had occurred was not properly in the past yet. She could not mention the tragedy to people who didn’t know about it already. She couldn’t tell it as a story because to her it didn’t seem in the least like that. It was a fact you had to live with, half wanting to forget it, half feeling you could not. This time of year and the first faint signs of Christmas were enough to tease it brightly into life.

The second movement of the ‘Pathétique’ came to an end, the Professor rose to turn the record over, the students murmured. Mrs Skully slipped away, as she always did at this point, to attend to matters in the kitchen. While the Professor was bent over the record-player Kilroy waved his bottle of vodka about and then raised it to his lips. ‘Hallo, Valerie,’ Yvonne Smith whispered across the distance that separated them. She endeavoured to continue her communication by shaping words with her lips. Valerie smiled at her and at Ruth Cusper, who had turned her head when she’d heard Yvonne Smith’s greeting. ‘Hi,’ Ruth Cusper said.

The music began again. The mouthing of Yvonne Smith continued for a moment and then ceased. Valerie didn’t notice that, because in the room the students and the Professor were shadows of a kind, the music a distant piping. The swish of wind was in the room, and the shingle, cold on her bare feet; so were the two flat stones they’d placed on their clothes to keep them from blowing away. White flecks in the air were snow, she said: Christmas snow, what everyone wanted. But he said the flecks were flecks of foam.

He took her hand, dragging her a bit because the shingle hurt the soles of her feet and slowed her down. He hurried on the sand, calling back to her, reminding her that it was her idea, laughing at her hesitation. He called out something else as he ran into the breakers, but she couldn’t hear because of the roar of the sea. She stood in the icy shallows and when she heard him shouting again she imagined he was still mocking her. She didn’t even know he was struggling, she wasn’t in the least aware of his death. It was his not being there she noticed, the feeling of being alone on the strand at Ballyquin.

‘Cup, Miss Upcott?’ the Professor offered in the dining-room. Poised above a glass, a jug contained a yellowish liquid. She said she’d rather have tea.

There were egg sandwiches and cakes, plates of crisps, biscuits and Twiglets. Mrs Skully poured tea, Ruth Cusper handed round the cups and saucers. The O’Neill sisters and their followers shared an obscene joke, which was a game that had grown up at the Skullys’ parties: one student doing his best to make the others giggle too noisily. A point was gained if the Professor demanded to share the fun.

‘Oh, but of course there isn’t any argument,’ Bewley Joal was insisting, still talking to Yvonne Smith about Moral Rearmament. Words had ceased to dribble from her lips. Instead she kept nodding her head. ‘We live in times of decadence,’ Bewley Joal pronounced.

Woodward, Whipp and Woolmer-Mills were still together, Woolmer-Mills launching himself endlessly on to the balls of his feet, Whipp sucking at his cheeks. No conversation was taking place among them: when the Professor finished going round with his jug of cup, talk of some kind would begin, probably about a mediaeval document Woodward had earlier mentioned. Or about a reference to panni streit sine grano which had puzzled Woolmer-Mills.

‘Soon be Christmas,’ Honor Hitchcock remarked to Valerie.

‘Yes, it will.’

‘I love it. I love the way you can imagine everyone doing just the same things on Christmas Eve, tying up presents, running around with holly, listening to the carols. And Christmas Day: that same meal in millions of houses, and the same prayers. All over the world.’

‘Yes, there’s that.’

‘Oh, I think it’s marvellous.’

‘Christmas?’ Kilroy said, suddenly beside them. He laughed, the fat on his face shaking a bit. ‘Much overrated in my small view.’ He glanced as he spoke at the Professor’s profile, preparing himself in case the Professor should look in his direction. His expression changed, becoming solemn.

There were specks of what seemed like paint on a sleeve of the Professor’s grey suit. She thought it odd that Mrs Skully hadn’t drawn his attention to them. Valerie thought it odd that Kilroy was so determined about his Third. And that Yvonne Smith didn’t just walk away from the clanking voice of Bewley Joal.

‘Orange or coffee?’ Ruth Cusper proffered two cakes that had been cut into slices. The fillings in Mrs Skully’s cakes were famous, made with Trex and castor sugar. The cakes themselves had a flat appearance, like large biscuits.

‘I wouldn’t touch any of that stuff,’ Kilroy advised, jocular again. ‘I was up all night after it last year.’

‘Oh, nonsense!’ Ruth Cusper placed a slice of orange-cake on Valerie’s plate, making a noise that indicated she found Kilroy’s attempt at wit a failure. She passed on, and Kilroy without reason began to laugh.

Valerie looked at them, her eyes pausing on each face in the room. She was different from these people of her own age because of her autumn melancholy and the bitterness of Christmas. A solitude had been made for her, while they belonged to each other, separate yet part of a whole.

She thought about them, envying them their ordinary normality, the good fortune they accepted as their due. They trailed no horror, no ghosts or images that wouldn’t go away: you could tell that by looking at them. Had she herself already been made peculiar by all of it, eccentric and strange and edgy? And would it never slip away, into the past where it belonged? Each year it was the same, no different from the year before, intent on hanging on to her. Each year she smiled and made an effort. She was brisk with it, she did her best. She told herself she had to live with it, agreeing with herself that of course she had to, as if wishing to be overheard. And yet to die so young, so pointlessly and so casually, seemed to be something you had to feel unhappy about. It dragged out tears from you; it made you hesitate again, standing in the icy water. Your idea it had been.

‘Tea, you people?’ Mrs Skully offered.

‘Awfully kind of you, Mrs Skully,’ Kilroy said. ‘Splendid tea this is.’

‘I should have thought you’d be keener on the Professor’s cup, Mr Kilroy.’

‘No, I’m not a cup man, Mrs Skully.’

Valerie wondered what it would be like to be Kilroy. She wondered about his private thoughts, even what he was thinking now as he said he wasn’t a cup man. She imagined him in his bedroom, removing his royal-blue suit and meticulously placing it on a hanger, talking to himself about the party, wondering if he had done himself any damage in the Professor’s eyes. She imagined him as a child, plump in bathing-trunks, building a sandcastle. She saw him in a kitchen, standing on a chair by an open cupboard, nibbling the corner of a crystallized orange.

She saw Ruth Cusper too, bossy at a children’s party, friendlily bossy, towering over other children. She made them play a game and wasn’t disappointed when they didn’t like it. You couldn’t hurt Ruth Cusper; she’d grown an extra skin beneath her motor-cycling gear. At night, she often said, she fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

You couldn’t hurt Bewley Joal, either: a grasping child Valerie saw him as, watchful and charmless. Once he’d been hurt, she speculated: another child had told him that no one enjoyed playing with him, and he’d resolved from that moment not to care about stuff like that, to push his way through other people’s opinion of him, not wishing to know it.

As children, the O’Neill sisters teased; their faithful tormentors pulled their hair. Woodward, Whipp and Woolmer-Mills read the Children’s Encyclopaedia. Honor Hitchcock and the Reverend played mummies and daddies. ‘Oh, listen to that chatterbox!’ Yvonne Smith’s father dotihgly cried, affection that Yvonne Smith had missed ever since.

In the room the clanking of Bewley Joal punctuated the giggling in the corner where the O’Neill sisters were. More tea was poured and more of the Professor’s cup, more cake was handed round. ‘Ah, yes,’ the Professor began. ‘Panni streit sine grano.’ Woodward, Whipp and Woolmer-Mills bent their heads to listen.

*

The Professor, while waiting on his upstairs landing for Woolmer-Mills to use the lavatory, spoke of the tomatoes he grew. Similarly delayed downstairs, Mrs Skully suggested to the O’Neill sisters that they might like, one Saturday night next term, to listen to Saturday Night Theatre with her. It was something she enjoyed, she said, especially the discussion afterwards. ‘Or you, Miss Upcott,’ she said. ‘You’ve never been to one of my evenings either.’

Valerie smiled politely, moving with Mrs Skully towards the sitting-room, where Tchaikovsky once more resounded powerfully. Again she examined the arrayed faces. Some eyes were closed in sleep, others were weary beneath a weight of tedium. Woodward’s newt-like countenance had not altered, nor had Kilroy’s fear dissipated. Frustration still tugged at Yvonne Smith. Nothing much was happening in the face of Mrs Skully.

Valerie continued to regard Mrs Skully’s face and suddenly she found herself shivering. How could that mouth open and close, issuing invitations without knowing they were the subject of derision? How could this woman, in her late middle age, officiate at student parties in magenta and jade, or bake inedible cakes without knowing it? How could she daily permit herself to be taken for granted by a man who cared only for students with academic success behind them? How could she have married his pomposity in the first place? There was something wrong with Mrs Skully, there was something missing, as if some part of her had never come to life. The more Valerie examined her the more extraordinary Mrs Skully seemed, and then it seemed extraordinary that the Professor should be unaware that no one liked his parties. It was as if some part of him hadn’t come to life either, as if they lived together in the dead wood of a relationship, together in this house because it was convenient.

She wondered if the other students had ever thought that, or if they’d be bothered to survey in any way whatsoever the Professor and his wife. She wondered if they saw a reflection of the Skullys’ marriage in the brownness of the room they all sat in, or in the crunchy fillings of Mrs Skully’s cakes, or in the upholstered dining-chairs that were not comfortable. You couldn’t blame them for not wanting to think about the Skullys’ marriage: what good could come of it? The other students were busy and more organized than she. They had aims in life. They had futures she could sense, as she had sensed their pasts. Honor Hitchcock and the Reverend would settle down as right as rain in a provincial rectory, the followers of the O’Neill sisters would enter various business worlds. Woodward, Whipp and Woolmer-Mills would be the same as the Professor, dandruff on the shoulders of three grey suits. Bewley Joal would rise to heights, Kilroy would not. Ruth Cusper would run a hall of residence, the O’Neill sisters would give two husbands hell in Lurgan. Yvonne Smith would live in hopes.

The music of Tchaikovsky gushed over these reflections, as if to soften some harshness in them. But to Valerie there was no harshness in her contemplation of these people’s lives, only fact and a lacing of speculation. The Skullys would go on ageing and he might never turn to his wife and say he was sorry. The O’Neill sisters would lose their beauty and Bewley Joal his vigour. One day Woolmer-Mills would find that he could no longer launch himself on to the balls of his feet. Kilroy would enter a home for the senile. Death would shatter the cotton-wool cosiness of Honor Hitchcock and the Reverend.

She wondered what would happen if she revealed what she had thought, if she told them that in order to keep her melancholy in control she had played about with their lives, seeing them in childhood, visiting them with old age and death. Which of them would seek to stop her while she cited the arrogance of the Professor and the pusillanimity of his wife? She heard her own voice echoing in a silence, telling them finally, in explanation, of the tragedy in her own life.

‘Please all have a jolly Christmas,’ Mrs Skully urged in the hall as scarves and coats were lifted from the hall-stand. ‘Please now.’

‘We shall endeavour,’ Kilroy promised, and the others made similar remarks, wishing Mrs Skully a happy Christmas herself, thanking her and the Professor for the party, Kilroy adding that it had been most enjoyable. There’d be another, the Professor promised, in May.

There was the roar of Ruth Cusper’s motor-cycle, and the overloading of Kilroy’s Mini, and the striding into the night of Bewley Joal, and others making off on bicycles. Valerie walked with Yvonne Smith through the suburban roads. ‘I quite like Joal,’ Yvonne Smith confided, releasing the first burst of her pent-up chatter. ‘He’s all right, isn’t he? Quite nice, really, quite clever. I mean, if you care for a clever kind of person. I mean, I wouldn’t mind going out with him if he asked me.’

Valerie agreed that Bewley Joal was all right if you cared for that kind of person. It was pleasant in the cold night air. It was good that the party was over.

Yvonne Smith said good-night, still chattering about Bewley Joal as she turned into the house where her lodgings were. Valerie walked on alone, a thin shadow in the gloom. Compulsively now, she thought about the party, seeing again the face of Mrs Skully and the Professor’s face and the faces of the others. They formed, like a backdrop in her mind, an assembly as vivid as the tragedy that more grimly visited it. They seemed like the other side of the tragedy, as if she had for the first time managed to peer round a corner. The feeling puzzled her. It was odd to be left with it after the Skullys’ end-of-term party.

In the garden of the hall of residence the fallen leaves were sodden beneath her feet as she crossed a lawn to shorten her journey. The bewilderment she felt lifted a little. She had been wrong to imagine she envied other people their normality and good fortune. She was as she wished to be. She paused in faint moonlight, repeating that to herself and then repeating it again. She did not quite add that the tragedy had made her what she was, that without it she would not possess her reflective introspection, or be sensitive to more than just the time of year. But the thought hovered with her as she moved towards the lights of the house, offering what appeared to be a hint of comfort.

Being Stolen From

‘I mean I’m not like I used to be.’

She had married, Norma continued, she had settled down. A young man, sitting beside her on the sofa, agreed that this was so. He was soberly dressed, jolly of manner, not quite fat. His smiling blue eyes suggested that if Norma had ever been flighty and irresponsible she no longer was, due to the influence he had brought into her life.

‘I mean in a way,’ Norma said, ‘things have changed for you too, Mrs Lacy.’

Bridget became flustered. Ever since childhood she had been embarrassed when she found herself the centre of attention, and even though she was forty-nine now none of that had improved. She was plump and black-haired, her manner affected by her dislike of being in the limelight. It was true that things had changed for her also in the last six years, but how had Norma discovered it? Had neighbours been questioned?

‘Yes, things have changed,’ she said, quite cheerfully because she’d become used to the change.

Norma nodded, and so did her husband. Bridget could tell from their faces that although they might not know the details they certainly knew the truth of the matter. And the details weren’t important because strangers wouldn’t be interested in the countryside of Co. Cork where she and Liam had come from, or in the disappointment of their childless marriage. London had become their home, a small house in a terrace, with the Cork Weekly Examiner to keep them in touch. Liam had found a job in a newsagent’s, the same shop he and the woman now owned between them.

‘Your husband didn’t seem the kind,’ Norma began. ‘I mean, not that I knew him.’

‘No, he didn’t seem like that.’

‘I know what it feels like to be left, Mrs Lacy.’

‘It feels like nothing now.’

She smiled again, but her cheeks had become hot because the conversation was about her. When Norma had phoned a week ago, to ask if they could have a chat, she hadn’t known what to say. It would have been unpleasant simply to say no, nor was there any reason why she should take that attitude, but even so she’d been dreading their visit ever since. She’d felt cross with herself for not managing to explain that Betty could easily be upset, which was why Betty wasn’t in the house that afternoon. It was the first thing she’d said to them when she’d opened the hall door, not knowing if they were expecting to see the child or not. She’d sounded apologetic and was cross with herself for that, too.

All three of them drank tea while they talked. Bridget, who didn’t make cakes because Liam hadn’t liked them and she’d never since got into the way of it, had bought two kinds of biscuits and a Battenburg in Victor Value’s. Alarmed at the last moment in case there wouldn’t be enough and she’d be thought inhospitable, she had buttered some bread and put out a jar of apricot jam. She was glad she had because Norma’s husband made quite a meal of it, taking most of the ginger-snaps and folding the sliced bread into sandwiches. Norma didn’t eat anything.

‘I can’t have another baby, Mrs Lacy. That’s the point, if you get what I mean? Like after Betty I had to have an abortion and then two more, horrible they were, the last one a bit of trouble really. I mean, it left my insides like this.’

‘Oh dear, I’m sorry.’

Nodding, as if in gratitude for this sympathy, Norma’s husband reached for a ginger-snap. He said they had a nice flat, and there were other children living near by for Betty to play with. He glanced around the small living-room, which was choked with pieces of furniture and ornaments which Bridget was always resolving to weed out. In what he said, and in the way he looked, there was the implication that this room in a cramped house was an unsuitable habitat for a spirited four-year-old. There was also the implication that Bridget at forty-nine, and without a husband, belonged more naturally among the sacred pictures on the walls than she possibly could in a world of toys and children. It was Betty they had to think of, the young man’s concerned expression insisted; it was Betty’s well-being.

‘We signed the papers at the time.’ Bridget endeavoured, not successfully, to make her protest sound different from an apology. ‘When a baby’s adopted that’s meant to be that.’

Norma’s husband nodded, as if agreeing that that was a reasonable point of view also. Norma said:

‘You were kindness itself to me, Mrs Lacy, you and your husband. Didn’t I say so?’ she added, turning to her companion, who nodded again.

The baby had been born when Norma was nineteen. There’d been an effort on her part to look after it, but within a month she’d found the task impossible. She’d been living at the time in the house across the road from the Lacys’, in a bed-sitting-room. She’d had a bad reputation in the neighbourhood, even reputed to be a prostitute, which wasn’t in fact true. Bridget had always nodded to her in the street, and she’d always smiled back. Remembering all that when Norma had telephoned a day or two ago, Bridget found she had retained an impression of chipped red varnish on the girl’s fingernails and her shrunken whey-white face. There’d been a prettiness about her too, though, and there still was. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she’d said four years ago. ‘I don’t know why I’ve had this kid.’ She’d said it quite out of the blue, crossing the street to where Bridget had paused for a moment on the pavement to change the shopping she was carrying from one hand to the other. ‘I often see you,’ Norma had added, and Bridget, who noticed that she had recently been weeping and indeed looked quite ill, had invited her in for a cup of tea. Once or twice the sound of the baby’s crying had drifted across the street, and of course she’d been quite interested to watch the progress of the pregnancy. Local opinion decreed that the pregnancy was what you’d expect of this girl, but Bridget didn’t easily pass judgement. As Irish people in London, there was a politeness about the Lacys, a reluctance to condemn anyone who was English since they themselves were not. ‘I’ve been a fool about this kid,’ the girl had said: the father had let her down, as simple as that. He’d seemed as steady as a rock, but one night he hadn’t been in the Queen’s Arms and he hadn’t been there the next night either, in fact not ever again.

‘I couldn’t let Betty go,’ Bridget said, her face becoming hot again. ‘I couldn’t possibly. That’s quite out of the question.’

A silence hung in the living-room for a moment. The air seemed heavier and stuffier, and Bridget wanted to open a window but did not. Betty was spending the afternoon with Mrs Haste, who was always good about having her on the rare occasions when it was necessary.

‘No, it’s not a question of letting her go,’ the young man said. ‘No one would think of it like that, Mrs Lacy.’

‘We’d always like her to see you,’ Norma explained. ‘I mean, it stands to reason she’ll have got fond of you.’

The young man again nodded, his features good-humouredly crinkled. There was no question, he repeated, of the relationship between the child and her adoptive mother being broken off. An arrangement that was suitable all round could easily be made, and any offer of babysitting would always be more than welcome. ‘What’s needed, Mrs Lacy, is for mother and child to be together. Now that the circumstances have altered.’

‘It’s two years since my husband left me.’

‘I’m thinking of Norma’s circumstances, Mrs Lacy.’

‘I can’t help wanting her,’ Norma said, her lean cheeks working beneath her make-up. Her legs were crossed, the right one over the left. Her shoes, in soft pale leather, were a lot smarter than the shoes Bridget remembered from the past. So was her navy-blue shirt and her navy-blue corduroy jacket that zipped up the front. Her fingers were marked with nicotine, and Bridget knew she wanted to light a cigarette now, the way she had repeatedly done the first day she’d come to the sitting-room, six years ago.

‘We made it all legal,’ Bridget said, putting into different words what she had stated already. ‘Everything was legal, Norma.’

‘Yes, we do know that,’ the young man replied, still patiently smiling, making her feel foolish. ‘But there’s the human side too, you see. Perhaps more important than legalities.’

He was better educated than Norma, Bridget noticed; and there was an honest decency in his eyes when he referred to the human side. There was justice above the ordinary justice of solicitors’ documents and law courts, his decency insisted: Norma had been the victim of an unfair society and all they could do now was to see that the unfairness should not be perpetuated.

‘I’m sorry,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m sorry I can’t see it like that.’

Soon after that the visitors left, leaving behind them the feeling that they and Bridget would naturally be meeting again. She went to collect Betty from Mrs Haste and after tea they settled down to a familiar routine: Betty’s bath and then bed, a few minutes of The Tailor of Gloucester. The rest of the evening stretched emptily ahead, with Dallas on the television, and a cardigan she was knitting. She quite liked Dallas, J.R. in particular, the most villainous TV figure she could think of, but while she watched his villainy now the conversation she’d had with her afternoon visitors kept recurring. Betty’s round face, and the black hair that curved in smoothly on either side of it, appeared in her mind, and there was also the leanness of Norma and the sincerity of the man who wanted to become Betty’s stepfather. The three faces went together as if they belonged, for though Betty’s was differently shaped from the face of the woman who had given birth to her she had the same wide mouth and the same brown eyes.

At half past nine Miss Custle came into the house. She was an oldish woman who worked on the Underground and often had to keep odd hours, some days leaving the house shortly after dawn and on other days not until the late afternoon. ‘Cup of tea, Miss Custle?’ Bridget called out above the noise of the television.

‘Well, thanks, Mrs Lacy,’ Miss Custle replied, as she always did when this invitation came. She had a gas-stove and a sink in her room and did all her cooking there, but whenever Bridget heard her coming in as late as this she offered her a cup of tea. She’d been a lodger in the house ever since the break-up of the marriage, a help in making ends meet.

‘Those people came,’ Bridget said, offering Miss Custle what remained of the ginger-snaps. ‘You know: Norma.’

‘I told you to beware of them. Upset you, did they?’

‘Well, talking about Betty like that. You know, Betty didn’t even have a name when we adopted her. It was we thought of Betty.’

‘You told me.’

Miss Custle was a powerful, grey-haired woman in a London Transport uniform which smelt of other people’s cigarettes. Earlier in her life there’d been a romance with someone else on the Underground, but without warning the man had died. Shocked by the unexpectedness of it, Miss Custle had remained on her own for the next thirty years, and was given to gloom when she recalled the time of her loss. Among her colleagues on the Underground she was known for her gruffness and her devotion to the tasks she had performed for so much of her life. The London Under-ground, she occasionally stated in Bridget’s living-room, had become her life, a substitute for what might have been. But tonight her mood was brisk.

‘When a child’s adopted, Mrs Lacy, there’s no way it can be reversed. As I told you last evening, dear.’

‘Yes, I do know that. I said it to them.’

‘Trying it on, they was.’

With that, Miss Custle rose to her feet and said good-night. She never stayed long when she looked in for a cup of tea and a biscuit because she was usually tired. Her face took on a crumpled look, matching her crumpled uniform. She would iron her uniform before her next turn of duty, taking ages over it.

‘Good-night, Miss Custle,’ Bridget said, observing the weary passage of her lodger across the living-room and wondering just for a moment what the man who’d died had been like. One night, a year or so ago, she had told Miss Custle all about her own loss, not of course that it could be compared with death, although it had felt like it at the time. ‘Horrible type of woman, that is,’ Miss Custle had said.

Bridget cleared up the tea things and unplugged the television lead. She knew she wouldn’t sleep properly: the visit of Norma and her husband had stirred everything up again, forcing her to travel backwards in time, to survey again all she had come to terms with. It was extraordinary that they’d thought she’d even consider handing Betty over to them.

In her bedroom she undressed and tidily arranged her clothes on a chair. She could hear Miss Custle moving about in her room next door, undressing also. Betty had murmured in her sleep when she’d kissed her good-night, and Bridget tried to imagine what life would be like not having Betty there to tuck up last thing, not haying Betty’s belongings about the house, her clothes to wash, toys to pick up. Sometimes Betty made her cross, but that was part of it too.

She lay in the darkness, her mind going back again. In the countryside of Co. Cork she had been one of a family of ten, and Liam had come from a large family also. It had astonished them when years later they had failed to have children of their own, but in no way had the disappointment impaired their marriage; and then Betty’s presence had drawn them even closer together. ‘I’m sorry,’ Liam had said in the end, though, the greatest shock she’d ever had. ‘I’m sorry, dear.’

Bridget had never seen the woman, but had imagined her: younger than she was, a Londoner, black hair like silk, predatory lips, and eyes that looked away from you. This woman and her mother had bought the newsagent’s where Liam had worked for all his years in London, the manager more or less, under old Mr Vanish. The woman had been married before, an unhappy marriage according to Liam, a relationship that had left her wounded. ‘Dear, it’s serious,’ he had said, trying to keep out of his voice a lightness that was natural in it, not realizing that he was opening a wound himself. In everything he said there was the implication that the love he’d felt for Bridget, though in no way false, hadn’t been touched by the same kind of excitement.

The newsagent’s shop was in another neighbourhood, miles across London, but in the days of old Mr Vanish, Bridget would just occasionally take Betty on a number 9 bus. When the woman and her mother took over the business some kind of shyness prevented the continuation of this habit, and after that some kind of fear. She had been ready to forgive Liam, to live in the hope that his infatuation would be washed away by time. She pleaded, but did not make scenes. She didn’t scream at him or parade his treachery, or call the woman names. None of that came easily to Bridget, and all she could wonder was what life would be like if Liam stayed with her and went on loving the woman. It wasn’t hard to imagine the bitterness that would develop in him, the hatred there would be in the end, yet she had continued to plead. Six weeks later he was gone.

For a moment in the darkness she wept. It was true what she’d said to her visitors that afternoon: that she felt nothing now. It was true, yet sometimes she wept when she remembered how together they had weathered the strangeness of their emigration or when she thought of Liam now, living in mortal sin with the woman and her mother above the newsagent’s, not going to Confession or Mass any more. Every month money arrived from him, which with Miss Custle’s rent and what she earned herself from cleaning the Winnards’ flat three times a week was enough to manage on. But Liam never came back, to see her or to see Betty, which implied the greatest change of all in him.

Memories were always difficult for her. Alone now, she too easily remembered the countryside she had grown up in, and the face of the Reverend Mother at the convent, and Mrs Barry’s squat public house and grocery at a crossroads. Emir Ryall had stolen her Phillips’ atlas, putting ink blots over her name and substituting her own. Madge Foley had curled her hair for her. Liam had always been in the neighbouring farm, but until after they’d both left school she’d hardly noticed him. He’d asked her to go for a walk with him, and in a field that was yellow with buttercups he had taken her hand and kissed her, causing her to blush. He’d laughed at her, saying the pink in her cheeks was lovely. He was the first person she’d ever danced with, in a nameless roadside dance-hall, ten miles away.

It was then, while she was still a round-faced girl, that Bridget had first become aware of fate. It was what you had to accept, what you couldn’t kick against: God’s will, the Reverend Mother or Father Keogh would have said, but for Bridget it began with the kind of person you were. Out of that, the circumstances of your life emerged: Bridget’s shyness and her tendency to blush, her prettiness and her modesty, were the fate which had been waiting for her before she was born, and often she felt that Liam had been waiting for her also, that they were fated to fall in love because they complemented each other so well, he so bouncy and amusing, she so fond of the shadows. In those days it would have been impossible to imagine that he would ever go off with a woman in a newsagent’s.

They were married on a Saturday in June, in a year when the foxgloves were profuse. She wore a veil of Limerick lace, borrowed from her grandmother. She carried scarlet roses. Liam was handsome, dark as a Spaniard in the Church of the Holy Virgin, his blue eyes jokily darting about. She had been glad when all of it was over, the reception in Kelly’s Hotel, the car bedecked with ribbons. They’d gone away for three days, and soon after they’d returned they had had to emigrate to England because the sawmills where Líam had a job closed down. They’d been in London for more than twenty years when the woman came into his life.

Eventually Bridget slept, and dreamed of the countryside of her childhood. She sat on a cart beside her father, permitted to hold the reins of the horse while empty milk churns were rattled back from the creamery at the crossroads. Liam was suddenly there, trudging along in the dust, and her father drew up the reins in order to give him a lift. Liam was ten or eleven, a patch of sunburn on the back of his neck where his hair had been cut very short. It wasn’t really a dream, because all of it had happened in the days when Liam hadn’t been important.

Norma’s husband came on his own. ‘I hope you’ve no objection, Mrs Lacy,’ he said, smiling in his wide-eyed way. There was a wave in his fairish hair, she noticed, a couple of curls hanging over his forehead. Everything about him was agreeable.

‘Well, really I don’t know.’ She faltered, immediately feeling hot. ‘I really think it’s better if we don’t go on about it.’

‘I won’t keep you ten minutes, Mrs Lacy. I promise.’

She held the hall door open and he walked into the hall. He stepped over a Weetabix packet which Betty had thrown down and strode away from. In the kitchen Betty was unpacking the rest of the shopping, making a kind of singing noise, which she often did.

‘Sit down,’ Bridget said in the living-room, as she would to any visitor.

‘Thanks, Mrs Lacy,’ he said politely.

‘I won’t be a minute.’

She had to see to Betty in the kitchen. There was flour among the shopping, and eggs, and other items in bags that might become perforated or would break when dropped from the kitchen table to the floor. Betty wasn’t naughtier than any other child, but only a week ago, left on her own, she’d tried to make a cake.

‘You go and get the Weetabix,’ Bridget said, and Betty obediently marched into the hall to do so. Bridget hastily put the rest of the shopping out of reach. She took coloured pencils and a new colouring-book from a drawer and laid them out on the table. Betty didn’t much care for filling already-drawn outlines with colour and generally just scrawled her name all over them: Betty Lacy in red, and again in blue and orange and green.

‘Be a good big girl now,’ Bridget said.

‘Big,’ Betty repeated.

In the sitting-room Norma’s husband had picked up the Cork Weekly Examiner. As she entered, he replaced iron the pile of magazines near his armchair, saying that it appeared to be interesting.

‘It’s hard to know how to put this to you, Mrs Lacy.’ He paused, his smile beginning to fade. Seriousness invaded his face as his eyes passed over the contents of the living-room, over the sacred pictures and the odds and ends that Bridget had been meaning to throw out. He said:

‘Norma was in a bad way when I met up with her, Mrs Lacy. She’d been to the Samaritans; it was from them I heard about her. I’m employed by the council, actually. Social Services, counselling. That’s my job, see.’

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘Norma was suffering from depression. Unhappiness, Mrs Lacy. She got in touch with the Samaritans and later she came round to us. I was able to help her. I won her confidence through the counselling I could give her. I love Norma now, Mrs Lacy.’

‘Of course.’

‘It doesn’t often happen that way. A counsellor and a client.’

‘No, I’m sure not.’ She interrupted because she knew he was going to continue with that theme, to tell her more about a relationship that wasn’t her business. She said that to herself. She said to herself that six years ago Norma had drifted into her life, leaving behind a child. She said to herself that the adoption of Betty had been at Norma’s request. ‘You’re a lovely person, Mrs Lacy,’ Norma had said at the time.

‘I can’t get to her at the moment,’ Norma’s husband explained. ‘Ever since the other day she’s hiding within herself. All the good that’s been done, Mrs Lacy, all the care of our own relationship: it’s going for nothing, you see.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘She went to the Samaritans because she was suicidal. There was nothing left of the poor thing, Mrs Lacy. She was hardly a human person.’

‘But Betty, you see – Betty has become my child.’

‘I know, I know, Mrs Lacy.’ He nodded earnestly, understandingly. ‘The Samaritans gave Norma back her humanity, and then the council housed her. When she was making the recovery we fell in love. You understand, Mrs Lacy? Norma and I fell in love.’

‘Yes, I do understand that.’

‘We painted the flat out together. Saturdays we spent buying bits of furniture, month by month, what we could afford. We made a home because a home was what Norma had never had. She never knew her parents: I don’t know if you were aware of that? Norma comes of a deprived background, she had no education, not to speak of. When I first met her, I had to help her read a newspaper.’ Suddenly he smiled. ‘She’s much better now, of course.’

Bridget felt a silence gathering, the kind there’d been several of the other afternoon. She broke it herself speaking as calmly as she could, trying to hold her visitor’s eye but not succeeding because he was glancing round the living-room again.

‘I’m sorry for Norma,’ she said. ‘I was sorry for her at the time, that is why I took in Betty. Only my husband and I insisted that it had to be legal and through the proper channels. We were advised about that, in case there was trouble later.’

‘Trouble? Who advised you, Mrs Lacy?’ He blinked and frowned. His voice sounded almost dense.

‘We went to a solicitor,’ she said, remembering that solicitor, small and moustached, recommended by Father Gogarty. He’d been very helpful; he’d explained everything.

‘Mrs Lacy, I don’t want to sound rude but there are two angles we can examine this case from. There is Norma’s and there is your own. You’ve seen the change in Norma; you must take my word for it that she could easily revert. Then consider yourself, Mrs Lacy, as another person might see you, a person like myself for instance, a case-worker if you like, an outsider.’

‘I don’t think of it as a case, with angles or anything else. I really don’t want to go on like this. Please.’

‘I know it’s difficult, and I’m sorry. But when the baby has become an adolescent you could find it hard to cope, Mrs Lacy. I see a lot of that in my work, a woman on her own, no father figure in the home. I know you have a caring relationship with Betty, Mrs Lacy, but the fact can’t be altered that you’re alone in this house with her, day in day out. All I’m saying is that another case-worker might comment on that.’

‘There’s Miss Custle too.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mrs Lacy?’

‘There’s a lodger, Miss Custle.’

‘You have a lodger? Another woman on her own?’

‘Yes.’

‘Young, is she?’

‘No, Miss Custle isn’t young.’

‘An elderly woman, Mrs Lacy?’

‘Miss Custle still works on the Underground.’

‘The Underground?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see, Mrs Lacy, what might be commented upon is the lack of playmates. Just yourself, and a woman who is employed on the Underground. Again, Mrs Lacy, I’m not saying there isn’t caring. I’m not saying that for an instant.’

‘Betty is happy. Look, I’m afraid I’d rather you didn’t come here again. I have things to do now –’

‘I’m sorry to offend you, Mrs Lacy.’

She had stood up, making him stand up also. He nodded and smiled at her in his patient manner, which she now realized was professional, he being a counsellor. He said again he was sorry he’d offended her.

‘I just thought you’d want to hear about Norma,’ he said before he left, and on the doorstep he suddenly became awkward. The smile and the niceness vanished: solemnity replaced them. ‘It’s like putting a person together again. If you know what I mean, Mrs Lacy.’

In the kitchen Betty printed her name across the stomach of a whale. She heard voices in the hall, but paid them no attention. A moment later the door banged and then her mother came into the kitchen.

‘Look,’ Betty said, but to her surprise her mother didn’t. Her mother hugged her, whispering her name. ‘You’ve been washing your face,’ Betty said. ‘It’s all cold.’

That afternoon Bridget cleaned the Winnards’ flat, taking Betty with her, as she always did. She wondered about mentioning the trouble she was having with Norma and her husband to Mrs Winnard, who might suggest something for her to say so that the matter could be ended. Mrs Winnard was pretty and bespectacled, a kind young woman, full of sympathy, but that afternoon her two obstreperous boys, twins of two and a half, were giving her quite a time so Bridget didn’t say anything. She hoovered the hallway and the bathroom and the four bedrooms, looking into the kitchen from time to time, where Betty was playing with the Winnard boys’ bricks. She still hadn’t said anything when the time came to pack up to go, and suddenly she was glad she hadn’t because quite out of the blue she found herself imagining a look on Mrs Winnard’s sympathetic face which suggested that the argument of Norma and her husband could not in all humanity be just dismissed. Bridget couldn’t imagine Mrs Winnard actually saying so, but her intuition about the reaction remained.

In the park, watching Betty on a slide, she worried about that. Would the same thing happen if she talked to Father Gogarty? Would an instant of hesitation be reflected in his grey features as he, too, considered that Norma should not be passed by? Not everyone had experienced as awful a life as Norma had. On top of that, the regret of giving away the only child you had been able to have was probably a million times worse than simply being childless.

Not really wishing to, Bridget remembered how fate had seemed to her when she was a girl: that it began with the kind of person you were. ‘We’re greedy,’ Liam had confessed, speaking of himself and the woman. ‘I suppose we’re made like that, we can’t help it.’ The woman was greedy, he had meant, making it cosier by saying he was too.

She watched Betty on the slide. She waved at her and Betty waved back. You couldn’t call Norma greedy, not in the same way. Norma made a mess of things and then looked around for other people: someone to look after a child that had been carelessly born, the Samaritans, the man she’d married. In the end Norma was lucky because she’d survived, because all the good in her had been allowed to surface. It was the man’s love that had done that, his gentleness and his sincerity. You couldn’t begrudge her anything. Like Liam and the woman, fate had come up trumps for her because of the person she was.

‘Watch, Mummy,’ Betty shouted from the top ot the slide, and again Bridget watched her sliding down it.

Eventually Bridget did speak to Mrs Winnard and to Father Gogarty because it was hard to keep the upset to herself, and because it worried her even more when she kept telling herself that she was being imaginative about what their reaction would be. Mrs Winnard said the couple’s presumption was almost a matter for the police; Father Gogarty offered to go and see them, if they could easily be found. But before either Mrs Winnard or the priest spoke Bridget was certain that the brief flicker she’d been dreading had come into their faces. There had been the hesitation and the doubt and – far quicker than thought – the feeling that a child belonged more suitably with a young married couple than with a lone middle-aged woman and an ageing employee of the London Underground. In continuing to talk about it to Miss Custle herself, Bridget could swear she experienced the same intuition: beneath all Miss Custle’s outrage and fury there was the same reasonable doubt.

The telephone rang one evening and the young man’s voice said:

‘Norma hasn’t done anything silly. I just thought you’d like to know that, Mrs Lacy.’

‘Yes, of course. I’m glad she’s all right.’

‘Well, she’s not really all right of course. But she does take heart from your caring in the past.’

‘I did what a lot of people would have done.’

‘You did what was necessary, Mrs Lacy. You understood a cry for help. It’s an unpleasant fact, but neither she nor Betty might be alive today if it hadn’t been for you.’

‘Oh, I can’t believe that for an instant.’

‘I think you have to, you know. There’s only one small point, Mrs Lacy, if you could bear with me. I spoke to a colleague about this case – well, having a personal interest, I thought I better. You may remember I mentioned an outsider? Well, strangely enough my colleague raised an interesting question.’

‘Look, I don’t want to go on talking about any of this. I’ve told you I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what you’re suggesting.’

‘My colleague pointed out that it isn’t just Norma’s circumstances which have changed, nor indeed your own. There’s a third factor in all this, my colleague pointed out: this child is being brought up as the child of Irish parents. Well, fair enough you may say, Mrs Lacy, until you remember that the Irish are a different kettle of fish today from what they were ten years ago. How easy is it, you have to ask yourself, to be a child of Irish parents today, to bear an Irish name, to be a member of the Roman Catholic Church? That child will have to attend a London school, for instance, where there could easily be hostility. Increasingly we come across this in our work, Mrs Lacy.’

‘Betty is my child-’

‘Of course. That’s quite understood, Mrs Lacy. But what my colleague pointed out is that sooner or later Norma is going to worry about the Irish thing as well. What will go through her mind is that it’s not just a question of her baby being affected by a broken marriage, but of her baby being brought up in an atmosphere that isn’t always pleasant. I’m sorry to mention it, Mrs Lacy, but, as my colleague says, no mother on earth would care to lie awake at night and worry about that.’

Her hand felt hot and damp on the telephone receiver. She imagined the young man sitting in an office, concerned and serious, and then smiling as he tried to find a bright side. She imagined Norma in their newly decorated flat, needing her child because everything was different now, hoping.

‘I can’t go on talking to you. I’m sorry.’

She replaced the receiver, and immediately found herself thinking about Liam. It was Liam’s fault as well as hers that Betty had been adopted and was now to be regarded as the child of Irish parents. Liam had always firmly regarded himself as Betty’s father, even if he never came near her now.

She didn’t want to go and see him. She didn’t want to make the journey on a number 9 bus, she didn’t want to have to see the woman’s predatory lips. But even as she thought that, she could hear herself asking Mrs Haste to have Betty for a couple of hours one afternoon. ‘Hullo, Liam,’ she said a few days later in the newsagent’s.

She’d waited until there were no customers, and to her relief the woman wasn’t there. The woman’s old mother, very fat and dressed all in brown, was resting in an armchair in a little room behind the shop itself, a kind of store-room it seemed to be, with stacks of magazines tied with string, just as they’d come off the van.

‘Heavens above!’ Liam said.

‘Liam, could I have a word?’

The old woman appeared to be asleep. She hadn’t moved when Bridget had spoken. She was wearing a hat, and seemed a bit eccentric, sleeping there among the bundles of magazines.

‘Of course you could, dear. How are you, Bridget?’

‘I’m fine, Liam. And yourself?’

‘I’m fine too, dear.’

She told him quickly. Customers hurried in for the Evening Standard or Dalton’s Weekly, children paused on their way home from school. Liam looked for rubbers and ink cartridges, Yorkie bars and tubes of fruit pastilles. Twice he said that the New Musical Express didn’t come out till Thursday. ‘Extraordinary, how some of them forget that,’ he said.

He listened to her carefully, picking up the thread of what she told him after each interruption. Because once they’d known one another so well, she mentioned the intuition she felt where Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle were concerned. She watched the expressions changing on his face, and she could feel him nodding inwardly: she felt him thinking that she was the same as she’d always been, nervous where other people were concerned, too modest and unsure of herself.

‘I’ll never forget how pretty you looked,’ he said suddenly, and for no reason that Bridget could see. ‘Wasn’t everything great long ago, Bridie?’

‘It’s Betty we have to think of, Liam. The old days are over and done with.’

‘I often go back to them. I’ll never forget them, dear.’

He was trying to be nice, but it seemed to Bridget that he was saying she still belonged to the time he spoke of, that she had not managed to come to terms with life as it had been since. You had to be tougher to come to terms with a world that was tough itself, you had to get over being embarrassed when you were pulled out of the background. All that hadn’t mattered long ago; when Emir Ryall had stolen her atlas she hadn’t even complained. Being stolen from, she suddenly thought.

‘I don’t know what to say to them,’ she said. ‘The man keeps telephoning me.’

‘Tell him to leave you alone, Bridget. Tell him he has no business bothering you.’

‘I’ve tried saying that.’

‘Tell him the thing was legally done and he hasn’t a foot to stand on. Tell him he can be up for harassment.’

A child came into the shop and Liam had to look for drawing-pins. ‘I’m afraid I have to shut up now,’ he said when the child had gone, and as he spoke the old woman in the armchair stirred. She spoke his name. She said she’d fancy peaches for tea. ‘There’s a tin set aside for you, dear,’ Liam said, winking at Bridget. He had raised his voice to address the old woman. He lowered it again to say goodbye. ‘The best of luck with it,’ he said, and Bridget knew he meant it.

‘Thanks, Liam.’ She tried to smile, and realized that she hadn’t repeated the young man’s remarks about Betty being brought up in a hostile atmosphere. She almost did so, standing at the door of the shop, imagining Liam angrily saying that the man needed putting in his place and offering to meet him. But as she walked away she knew all that was make-believe. Liam had his own life to live, peaches and a sort of mother-in-law. He couldn’t be blamed for only wishing her luck.

She collected Betty from Mrs Haste and later in the evening, when she was watching television, the telephone rang. The young man said:

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lacy, I didn’t mean to bring up that thing about your nationality. It’s not your fault, Mrs Lacy, and please forget I mentioned it. I’m sorry.’

‘Please don’t telephone me again. That’s all I ask. I’ve given you the only answer I can.’

‘I know you have, Mrs Lacy. You’ve been kind to listen to me, and I know you’re concerned for Norma, don’t think I’m not aware of that. I love Norma, Mrs Lacy, which has made me a little unprofessional in my conversations with you, but I promise we’ll neither of us bother you again. It was just that she felt she’d made a terrible mistake and all the poor thing wanted was to rectify it. But as my work so often shows me, Mrs Lacy, that is hardly ever possible. Are you there, Mrs Lacy?’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘I’ll never stop loving Norma, Mrs Lacy. I promise you that also. No matter what happens to her now.’

She sat alone in her living-room watching the ten o’clock news, and when she heard Miss Custle in the hall she didn’t offer her a cup of tea. Instead of Betty’s rattling feet on the stairs there would be Miss Custle’s aged panting as she propelled her bulk to her upstairs room. Instead of Betty’s wondering questions there would be Miss Custle’s gloom as still she mourned her long departed lover.

The television news came to an end, an advertisement for Australian margarine began. Soon after that the programmes ceased altogether, but Bridget continued to sit in her living-room, weeping without making a noise. Several times she went upstairs and stood with the light on by Betty’s bed, gazing at the child, not wiping away her tears. For Betty’s well-being, and for Norma’s too, in all humanity the law would be reversed. No longer would she search the faces of Father Gogarty and Mrs Winnard and Miss Custle for the signs of what they really believed. They would put that into words by saying she was good and had courage.

In the countryside of long ago her failure in marriage and motherhood might be easier to bear, but she would be a stranger there now. She belonged among her accumulated odds and ends, as Betty belonged with her mother, and Liam with the woman he loved. She would look after Miss Custle when Miss Custle retired from the Underground, as fate dictated.

Mr Tennyson

He had, romantically, a bad reputation. He had a wife and several children. His carry-on with Sarah Spence was a legend among a generation of girls, and the story was that none of it had stopped with Sarah Spence. His old red Ford Escort had been reported drawn up in quiet lay-bys; often he spent weekends away from home; Annie Green had come across him going somewhere on a train once, alone and morose in the buffet car. Nobody’s parents were aware of the facts about him, nor were the other staff, nor even the boys at the school. His carry-on with Sarah Spence, and coming across him or his car, made a little tapestry of secrets that suddenly was yours when you became fifteen and a senior, a member of 2A. For the rest of your time at Foxton Comprehensive – for the rest of your life, preferably – you didn’t breathe a word to people whose business it wasn’t.

It was understandable when you looked at him that parents and staff didn’t guess. It was also understandable that his activities were protected by the senior girls. He was forty years old. He had dark hair with a little grey in it, and a face that was boyish – like a French boy’s, someone had once said, and the description had stuck, often to be repeated. There was a kind of ragamuffin innocence about his eyes. The cast of his lips suggested a melancholy nature and his smile, when it came, had sadness in it too. His name was Mr Tennyson. His subject was English.

Jenny, arriving one September in 2A, learnt all about him. She remembered Sarah Spence, a girl at the top of the school when she had been at the bottom, tall and beautiful. He carried on because he was unhappily married, she was informed. Consider where he lived even: trapped in a tiny gate-lodge on the Ilminster road because he couldn’t afford anything better, trapped with a wife and children when he deserved freedom. Would he one day publish poetry as profound as his famous namesake’s, though of course more up-to-date? Or was his talent lost for ever? One way or the other he was made for love.

It seemed to Jenny that the girls of 2A eyed one another, wondering which among them would become a successor to Sarah Spence. They eyed the older girls, of Class 1, 1A and 1B, wondering which of them was already her successor, discreetly taking her place in the red Ford Escort on dusky afternoons. He would never be coarse, you couldn’t imagine coarseness in him. He’d never try anything unpleasant, he’d never in a million years fumble at you. He’d just be there, being himself, smelling faintly of fresh tobacco, the fingers of a hand perhaps brushing your arm by accident.

‘Within the play,’ he suggested in his soft voice, almost a whisper, ‘order is represented by the royal house of Scotland. We must try and remember Shakespeare’s point of view, how Shakespeare saw these things.’

They were studying Macbeth and Huckleberry Finn with him, but when he talked about Shakespeare it seemed more natural and suited to him than when he talked about Mark Twain.

‘On Duncan’s death,’ he said, ‘should the natural order continue, his son Malcolm would become king. Already Duncan has indicated – by making Malcolm Prince of Cumberland – that he considers him capable of ruling.’

Jenny had pale fair hair, the colour of ripened wheat. It fell from a divide at the centre of her head, two straight lines on either side of a thin face. Her eyes were large and of a faded blue. She was lanky, with legs she considered to be too long but which her mother said she’d be thankful for one day.

‘Disruption is everywhere, remember,’ he said. ‘Disruption in nature as well as in the royal house. Shakespeare insinuates a comparison between what is happening in human terms and in terms of nature. On the night of Duncan’s death there is a sudden storm in which chimneys are blown off and houses shaken. Mysterious screams are heard. Horses go wild. A falcon is killed by a mousing owl.’

Listening to him, it seemed to Jenny that she could listen for ever, no matter what he said. At night, lying in bed with her eyes closed, she delighted in leisurely fantasies, of having breakfast with him and ironing his clothes, of walking beside him on a seashore or sitting beside him in his old Ford Escort. There was a particular story she repeated to herself: that she was on the promenade at Lyme Regis and that he came up to her and asked her if she’d like to go for a walk. They walked up to the cliffs and then along the cliff-path, and everything was different from Foxton Comprehensive because they were alone together. His wife and he had been divorced, he told her, having agreed between themselves that they were incompatible. He was leaving Foxton Comprehensive because a play he’d written was going to be done on the radio and another one on the London stage. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, daring to say it. ‘Oh, Jenny,’ he said.

Terms and holidays went by. Once, just before the Easter of that year, she met him with his wife, shopping in the International Stores in Ilminster. They had two of their four children with them, little boys with freckles. His wife had freckles also. She was a woman like a sack of something, Jenny considered, with thick, unhealthy-looking legs. He was pushing a trolley full of breakfast cereals and wrapped bread, and tins. Although he didn’t speak to her or even appear to see her, it was a stroke of luck to come across him in the town because he didn’t often come into the village. Foxton had only half a dozen shops and the Bow and Arrow public house even though it was enormous, a sprawling dormitory village that had had the new Comprehensive added to all the other new building in 1969. Because of the position of the Tennysons’ gate-lodge it was clearly more convenient for them to shop in Ilminster.

‘Hullo, Mr Tennyson,’ she said in the International Stores, and he turned and looked at her. He nodded and smiled.

Jenny moved into 1A at the end of that school year. She wondered if he’d noticed how her breasts had become bigger during the time she’d been in 2A, and how her complexion had definitely improved. Her breasts were quite presentable now, which was a relief because she’d had a fear that they weren’t going to develop at all. She wondered if he’d noticed her Green Magic eye-shadow. Everyone said it suited her, except her father, who always blew up over things like that. Once she heard one of the new kids saying she was the prettiest girl in the school. Adam Swann and Chinny Martin from 1B kept hanging about, trying to chat her up. Chinny Martin even wrote her notes.

‘You’re mooning,’ her father said. ‘You don’t take a pick of notice these days.’

‘Exams,’ her mother hastily interjected and afterwards, when Jenny was out of the room, quite sharply reminded her husband that adolescence was a difficult time for girls. It was best not to remark on things.

‘I didn’t mean a criticism, Ellie,’ Jenny’s father protested, aggrieved.

‘They take it as a criticism. Every word. They’re edgy, see.’

He sighed. He was a painter and decorator, with his own business. Jenny was their only child. There’d been four miscarriages, all of which might have been boys, which naturally were what he’d wanted, with the business. He’d have to sell it one day, but it didn’t matter all that much when you thought about it. Having miscarriages was worse than selling a business, more depressing really. A woman’s lot was harder than a man’s, he’d decided long ago.

‘Broody,’ his wife diagnosed. ‘Just normal broody. She’ll see her way through it.’

Every evening her parents sat in their clean, neat sitting-room watching television. Her mother made tea at nine o’clock because it was nice to have a cup with the news. She always called upstairs to Jenny, but Jenny never wanted to have tea or see the news. She did her homework in her bedroom, a small room that was clean and neat also, with a pebbly cream wallpaper expertly hung by her father. At half past ten she usually went down to the kitchen and made herself some Ovaltine. She drank it at the table with the cat, Tinkle, on her lap. Her mother usually came in with the tea things to wash up, and they might chat, the conversation consisting mainly of gossip from Foxton Comprehensive, although never of course containing a reference to Mr Tennyson. Sometimes Jenny didn’t feel like chatting and wouldn’t, feigning sleepiness. If she sat there long enough her father would come in to fetch himself a cup of water because he always liked to have one near him in the night. He couldn’t help glancing at her eye-shadow when he said good-night and she could see him making an effort not to mention it, having doubtless been told not to by her mother. They did their best. She liked them very much. She loved them, she supposed.

But not in the way she loved Mr Tennyson. ‘Robert Tennyson,’ she murmured to herself in bed. ‘Oh, Robert dear.’ Softly his lips were there, and the smell of fresh tobacco made her swoon, forcing her to close her eyes. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, yes.’ He lifted the dress over her head. His hands were taut, charged with their shared passion. ‘My love,’ he said in his soft voice, almost a whisper. Every night before she went to sleep his was the face that entirely filled her mind. Had it once not been there she would have thought herself faithless. And every morning, in a ceremonial way, she conjured it up again, first thing, pride of place.

Coming out of Harper’s the newsagent’s one Saturday afternoon, she found waiting for her, not Mr Tennyson, but Chinny Martin, with his motor-cycle on its pedestal in the street. He asked her if she’d like to go for a spin into the country and offered to supply her with a crash helmet. He was wearing a crash helmet himself, a bulbous red object with a peak and a windshield that fitted over his eyes. He was also wearing heavy plastic gloves, red also, and a red windcheater. He was smiling at her, the spots on his pronounced chin more noticeable after exposure to the weather on his motor-cycle. His eyes were serious, closely fixed on hers.

She shook her head at him. There was hardly anything she’d have disliked more than a ride into the country with Chinny Martin, her arms half round his waist, a borrowed crash helmet making her feel silly. He’d stop the motor-cycle in a suitable place and he’d suggest something like a walk to the river or to some old ruin or into a wood. He’d suggest sitting down and then he’d begin to fumble at her, and his chin would be sticking into her face, cold and unpleasant. His fingernails would be ingrained, as the fingernails of boys who owned motor-cycles always were.

‘Thanks all the same,’ she said.

‘Come on, Jenny.’

‘No, I’m busy. Honestly. I’m working at home.’

It couldn’t have been pleasant, being called Chinny just because you had a jutting chin. Nicknames were horrible: there was a boy called Nut Adams and another called Wet Small and a girl called Kisses. Chinny Martin’s name was Clive, but she’d never heard anyone calling him that. She felt sorry for him, standing there in his crash helmet and his special clothes. He’d probably planned it all, working it out that she’d be impressed by his gear and his motor-cycle. But of course she wasn’t. Yamaha it said on the petrol tank of the motor-cycle, and there was a girl in a swimsuit which he had presumably stuck on to the tank himself. The girl’s swimsuit was yellow and so was her hair, which was streaming out behind her, as if caught in a wind. The petrol tank was black.

‘Jenny,’ he said, lowering his voice so that it became almost croaky. ‘Listen, Jenny –’

‘Sorry.’

She began to walk away, up the village street, but he walked beside her, pushing the Yamaha.

‘I love you, Jenny,’ he said.

She laughed because she felt embarrassed.

‘I can’t bear not seeing you, Jenny.’

‘Oh, well-’

‘Jenny.’

They were passing the petrol-pumps, the Orchard Garage. Mr Batten was on the pavement, wiping oil from his hands with a rag. ‘How’s he running?’ he called out to Chinny Martin, referring to the Yamaha, but Chinny Martin ignored the question.

‘I think of you all the time, Jenny.’

‘Oh, Clive, don’t be silly.’ She felt silly herself, calling him by his proper name.

‘D’you like me, Jenny?’

‘Of course I like you.’ She smiled at him, trying to cover up the lie: she didn’t particularly like him, she didn’t particularly not. She just felt sorry for him, with his noticeable chin and the nickname it had given him. His father worked in the powdered-milk factory. He’d do the same: you could guess that all too easily.

‘Come for a ride with me, Jenny.’

‘No, honestly.’

‘Why not then?’

‘It’s better not to start anything, Clive. Look, don’t write me notes.’

‘Don’t you like my notes?’

‘I don’t want to start anything.’

‘There’s someone else is there, Jenny? Adam Swann? Rick Hayes?’

He sounded like a character in a television serial; he sounded sloppy and stupid.

‘If you knew how I feel about you,’ he said, lowering his voice even more. ‘I love you like anything. It’s the real thing.’

‘I like you too, Clive. Only not in that way,’ she hastily added.

‘Wouldn’t you ever? Wouldn’t you even try?’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘Rick Hayes’s only after sex.’

‘I don’t like Rick Hayes.’

‘Any girl with legs on her is all he wants.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I can’t concentrate on things, Jenny. I think of you the entire time.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Oh God, Jenny.’

She turned into the Mace shop just to escape. She picked up a wire basket and pretended to be looking at tins of cat food. She heard the roar of the Yamaha as her admirer rode away, and it seemed all wrong that he should have gone like that, so noisily when he was so upset.

At home she thought about the incident. It didn’t in the least displease her that a boy had passionately proclaimed love for her. It even made her feel quite elated. She felt pleasantly warm when she thought about it, and the feeling bewildered her. That she, so much in love with someone else, should be moved in the very least by the immature protestations of a youth from 1B was a mystery. She even considered telling her mother about the incident, but in the end decided not to. ‘Quite sprightly, she seems,’ she heard her father murmuring.

‘In every line of that sonnet,’ Mr Tennyson said the following Monday afternoon, ‘there is evidence of the richness that makes Shakespeare not just our own greatest writer but the world’s as well.’

She listened, enthralled, physically pleasured by the utterance of each syllable. There was a tiredness about his boyish eyes, as if he hadn’t slept. His wife had probably been bothering him, wanting him to do jobs around the house when he should have been writing sonnets of his own. She imagined him unable to sleep, lying there worrying about things, about his life. She imagined his wife like a grampus beside him, her mouth open, her upper lip as coarse as a man’s.

‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,’ he said, ‘And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field.’

Dear Jenny, a note that morning from Chinny Martin had protested. I just want to be with you. I just want to talk to you. Please come out with me.

‘Jenny, stay a minute,’ Mr Tennyson said when the bell went. ‘Your essay.’

Immediately there was tension among the girls of 1A, as if the English master had caused threads all over the classroom to become taut. Unaware, the boys proceeded as they always did, throwing books into their briefcases and sauntering into the corridor. The girls lingered over anything they could think of. Jenny approached Mr Tennyson’s desk.

‘It’s very good,’ he said, opening her essay book. ‘But you’re getting too fond of using three little dots at the end of a sentence. The sentence should imply the dots. It’s like underlining to suggest emphasis, a bad habit also.’

One by one the girls dribbled from the classroom, leaving behind them the shreds of their reluctance. Out of all of them he had chosen her: was she to be another Sarah Spence, or just some kind of stop-gap, like other girls since Sarah Spence were rumoured to have been? But as he continued to talk about her essay – called ‘Belief in Ghosts’ – she wondered if she’d even be a stop-gap. His fingers didn’t once brush the back of her hand. His French boy’s eyes didn’t linger once on hers.

‘I’ve kept you late,’ he said in the end.

‘That’s all right, sir.’

‘You will try to keep your sentences short? Your descriptions have a way of becoming too complicated.’

‘I’ll try, sir.’

‘I really enjoyed that essay.’

He handed her the exercise book and then, without any doubt whatsoever, he smiled meaningfully into her eyes. She felt herself going hot. Her hands became clammy. She just stood there while his glance passed over her eye-shadow, over her nose and cheeks, over her mouth.

‘You’re very pretty,’ he said.

‘Thank you, sir.’

Her voice reminded her of the croak in Chinny Martin’s when he’d been telling her he loved her. She tried to smile, but could not. She wanted his hand to reach out and push her gently away from him so that he could see her properly. But it didn’t. He stared into her eyes again, as if endeavouring to ascertain their precise shade of blue.

‘You look like a girl we had here once,’ he said. ‘Called Sarah Spence.’

‘I remember Sarah Spence.’

‘She was good at English too.’

She wanted something to happen, thunder to begin, or a torrent of rain, anything that would keep them in the classroom. She couldn’t even bear the thought of walking to her desk and putting her essay book in her briefcase.

‘Sarah went to Warwick University,’ he said.

She nodded. She tried to smile again and this time the smile came. She said to herself that it was a brazen smile and she didn’t care. She hoped it made her seem more than ever like Sarah Spence, sophisticated and able for anything. She wondered if he said to all the girls who were stop-gaps that they looked like Sarah Spence. She didn’t care. His carry-on with Sarah Spence was over and done with, he didn’t even see her any more. By all accounts Sarah Spence had let him down, but never in a million years would she. She would wait for him for ever, or until the divorce came through. When he was old she would look after him.

‘You’d better be getting home, Jenny.’

‘I don’t want to, sir.’

She continued to stand there, the exercise book in her left hand. She watched while some kind of shadow passed over his face. For a moment his eyes closed.

‘Why don’t you want to go?’ he said.

‘Because I’m in love with you, sir.’

‘You mustn’t be, Jenny.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why not.’

‘What about Sarah Spence?’

‘Sarah was different.’

‘I don’t care how many stop-gaps you’ve had. I don’t care. I don’t love you any less.’

‘Stop-gaps, Jenny?’

‘The ones you made do with.’

‘Made do?’ He was suddenly frowning at her, his face screwed up a little. ‘Made do?’ he said again.

‘The other girls. The ones who reminded you of her.’

‘There weren’t any other girls.’

‘You were seen, sir –’

‘Only Sarah and I were seen.’

‘Your car –’

‘Give a dog a bad name, Jenny. There weren’t any others.’

She felt iciness inside her, somewhere in her stomach. Other girls had formed an attachment for him, as she had. Other girls had probably stood on this very spot, telling him. It was that, and the reality of Sarah Spence, that had turned him into a schoolgirls’ legend. Only Sarah Spence had gone with him in his old Ford Escort to quiet lay-bys, only Sarah Spence had felt his arms around her. Why shouldn’t he be seen in the buffet car of a train, alone? The weekends he’d spent away from home were probably with a sick mother.

‘I’m no Casanova, Jenny.’

‘I had to tell you I’m in love with you, sir. I couldn’t not.’

‘It’s no good loving me, I’m afraid.’

‘You’re the nicest person I’ll ever know.’

‘No, I’m not, Jenny. I’m just an English teacher who took advantage of a young girl’s infatuation. Shabby, people would say.’

‘You’re not shabby. Oh God, you’re not shabby!’ She heard her own voice crying out shrilly, close to tears. It astonished her. It was unbelievable that she should be so violently protesting. It was unbelievable that he should have called himself shabby.

‘She had an abortion in Warwick,’ he said, ‘after a weekend we spent in an hotel. I let that happen, Jenny.’

‘You couldn’t help it.’

‘Of course I could have helped it.’

Without wanting to, she imagined them in the hotel he spoke of. She imagined them having a meal, sitting opposite each other at a table, and a waiter placing plates in front of them. She imagined them in their bedroom, a grimy room with a lace curtain drawn across the lower part of the single window and a wash-basin in a corner. The bedroom had featured in a film she’d seen, and Sarah Spence was even like the actress who had played the part of a shopgirl. She stood there in her underclothes just as the shopgirl had, awkwardly waiting while he smiled his love at her. ‘Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface,’ he whispered, ‘In thee thy summer, ere thou be distilled. Oh Sarah, love.’ He took the underclothes from her body, as the actor in the film had, all the time whispering sonnets.

‘It was messy and horrible,’ he said. ‘That’s how it ended, Jenny.’

‘I don’t care how it ended. I’d go with you anywhere. I’d go to a thousand hotels.’

‘No, no, Jenny.’

‘I love you terribly.’

She wept, still standing there. He got down from the stool in front of his desk and came and put his arms about her, telling her to cry. He said that tears were good, not bad. He made her sit down at a desk and then he sat down beside her. His love affair with Sarah Spence sounded romantic, he said, and because of its romantic sheen girls fell in love with him. They fell in love with the unhappiness they sensed in him. He found it hard to stop them.

‘I should move away from here,’ he said, ‘but I can’t bring myself to do it. Because she’ll always come back to see her family and whenever she does I can catch a glimpse of her.’

It was the same as she felt about him, like the glimpse that day in the International Stores. It was the same as Chinny Martin hanging about outside Harper’s. And yet of course it wasn’t the same as Chinny Martin. How could it possibly be? Chinny Martin was stupid and unprepossessing and ordinary.

‘I’d be better to you,’ she cried out in sudden desperation, unable to prevent herself. Clumsily she put a hand on his shoulder, and clumsily took it away again. ‘I would wait for ever,’ she said, sobbing, knowing she looked ugly.

He waited for her to calm down. He stood up and after a moment so did she. She walked with him from the classroom, down the corridor and out of the door that led to the. car park.

‘You can’t just leave,’ he said, ‘a wife and four children. It was hard to explain that to Sarah. She hates me now.’

He unlocked the driver’s door of the Ford Escort. He smiled at her. He said:

‘There’s no one else I can talk to about her. Except girls like you. You mustn’t feel embarrassed in class, Jenny.’

He drove away, not offering her a lift, which he might have done, for their direction was the same. She didn’t in the least look like Sarah Spence: he’d probably said the same thing to all the others, the infatuated girls he could talk to about the girl he loved. The little scenes in the classroom, the tears, the talk: all that brought him closer to Sarah Spence. The love of a girl he didn’t care about warmed him, as Chinny Martin’s love had warmed her too, even though Chinny Martin was ridiculous.

She walked across the car park, imagining him driving back to his gate-lodge with Sarah Spence alive again in his mind, loving her more than ever. ‘Jenny,’ the voice of Chinny Martin called out, coming from nowhere.

He was there, standing by his Yamaha, beside a car. She shook her head at him, and began to run. At home she would sit and eat in the kitchen with her parents, who wouldn’t be any different. She would escape and lie on her bed in her small neat bedroom, longing to be where she’d never be now, beside him in his car, or on a train, or anywhere. ‘Jenny,’ the voice of Chinny Martin called out again, silly with his silly love.

Autumn Sunshine

The rectory was in County Wexford, eight miles from Enniscorthy. It was a handsome eighteenth-century house, with Virginia creeper covering three sides and a tangled garden full of buddleia and struggling japonica which had always been too much for its incumbents. It stood alone, seeming lonely even, approximately at the centre of the country parish it served. Its church – St Michael’s Church of Ireland – was two miles away, in the village of Boharbawn.

For twenty-six years the Morans had lived there, not wishing to live anywhere else. Canon Moran had never been an ambitious man; his wife, Frances, had found contentment easy to attain in her lifetime. Their four girls had been born in the rectory, and had become a happy family there. They were grown up now, Frances’s death was still recent: like the rectory itself, its remaining occupant was alone in the countryside. The death had occurred in the spring of the year, and the summer had somehow been bearable. The clergyman’s eldest daughter had spent May and part of June at the rectory with her children. Another one had brought her family for most of August, and a third was to bring her newly married husband in the winter. At Christmas nearly all of them would gather at the rectory and some would come at Easter. But that September, as the days drew in, the season was melancholy.

Then, one Tuesday morning, Slattery brought a letter from Canon Moran’s youngest daughter. There were two other letters as well, in unsealed buff envelopes which meant that they were either bills or receipts. Frail and grey-haired in his elderliness, Canon Moran had been wondering if he should give the lawn in front of the house a last cut when he heard the approach of Slattery’s van. The lawn-mower was the kind that had to be pushed, and in the spring the job was always easier if the grass had been cropped close at the end of the previous summer.

‘Isn’t that a great bit of weather, Canon?’ Slattery remarked, winding down the window of the van and passing out the three envelopes. ‘We’re set for a while, would you say?’

‘I hope so, certainly.’

‘Ah, we surely are, sir.’

The conversation continued for a few moments longer, as it did whenever Slattery came to the rectory. The postman was young and easy-going, not long the successor to old Mr O’Brien, who’d been making the round on a bicycle when the Morans first came to the rectory in 1952. Mr O’Brien used to talk about his garden; Slattery talked about fishing, and often brought a share of his catch to the rectory.

‘It’s a great time of year for it,’ he said now, ‘except for the darkness coming in.’

Canon Moran smiled and nodded; the van turned round on the gravel, dust rising behind it as it moved swiftly down the avenue to the road. Everyone said Slattery drove too fast.

He carried the letters to a wooden seat on the edge of the lawn he’d been wondering about cutting. Deirdre’s handwriting hadn’t changed since she’d been a child; it was round and neat, not at all a reflection of the girl she was. The blue English stamp, the Queen in profile blotched a bit by the London postmark, wasn’t on its side or half upside down, as you might possibly expect with Deirdre. Of all the Moran children, she’d grown up to be the only difficult one. She hadn’t come to the funeral and hadn’t written about her mother’s death. She hadn’t been to the rectory for three years.

I’m sorry, she wrote now. I couldn’t stop crying actually. I’ve never known anyone as nice or as generous as she was. For ages I didn’t even want to believe she was dead. I went on imagining her in the rectory and doing the flowers in church and shopping in Enniscorthy.

Deirdre was twenty-one now. He and Frances had hoped she’d go to Trinity and settle down, but although at school she’d seemed to be the cleverest of their children she’d had no desire to become a student. She’d taken the Rosslare boat to Fishguard one night, having said she was going to spend a week with her friend Maeve Coles in Cork. They hadn’t known she’d gone to England until they received a picture postcard from London telling them not to worry, saying she’d found work in an egg-packing factory.

Well, I’m coming back for a little while now, she wrote, if you could put up with me and if you wouldn’t find it too much. I’ll cross over to Rosslare on the 29th, the morning crossing, and then I’ll come on to Enniscorthy on the bus. I don’t know what time it will be but there’s a pub just by where the bus drops you so could we meet in the small bar there at six o’clock and then I won’t have to lug my cases too far? I hope you wont mind going into such a place. If you can’t make it, or don’t want to see me, it’s understandable, so if you don’t turn up by half six I’ll see if I can get a bus on up to Dublin. Only I need to get back to Ireland for a while.

It was, as he and Slattery had agreed, a lovely autumn. Gentle sunshine mellowed the old garden, casting an extra sheen of gold on leaves that were gold already. Roses that had been ebullient in June and July bloomed modestly now. Michaelmas daisies were just beginning to bud. Already the crab-apples were falling, hydrangeas had a forgotten look. Canon Moran carried the letter from his daughter into the walled vegetable garden and leaned against the side of the greenhouse, half sitting on a protruding ledge, reading the letter again. Panes of glass were broken in the greenhouse, white paint and putty needed to be renewed, but inside a vine still thrived, and was heavy now with black ripe fruit. Later that morning he would pick some and drive into Enniscorthy, to sell the grapes to Mrs Neary in Slaney Street.

Love, Deirdre: the letter was marvellous. Beyond the rectory the fields of wheat had been harvested, and the remaining stubble had the same tinge of gold in the autumn light; the beech trees and the chestnuts were triumphantly magnificent. But decay and rotting were only weeks away, and the letter from Deirdre was full of life. ‘Love, Deirdre’ were words more beautiful than all the season’s glories. He prayed as he leaned against the sunny greenhouse, thanking God for this salvation.

For all the years of their marriage Frances had been a help. As a younger man, Canon Moran hadn’t known quite what to do. He’d been at a loss among his parishioners, hesitating in the face of this weakness or that: the pregnancy of Alice Pratt in 1954, the argument about grazing rights between Mr Willoughby and Eugene Dunlevy in 1960, the theft of an altar cloth from St Michael’s and reports that Mrs Tobin had been seen wearing it as a skirt. Alice Pratt had been going out with a Catholic boy, one of Father Gowan’s flock, which made the matter more difficult than ever. Eugene Dunlevy was one of Father Gowan’s also, and so was Mrs Tobin.

‘Father Gowan and I had a chat,’ Frances had said, and she’d had a chat as well with Alice Pratt’s mother. A month later Alice Pratt married the Catholic boy, but to this day attended St Michael’s every Sunday, the children going to Father Gowan. Mrs Tobin was given Hail Marys to say by the priest; Mr Willoughby agreed that his father had years ago granted Eugene Dunlevy the grazing rights. Everything, in these cases and in many others, had come out all right in the end: order emerged from the confusion that Canon Moran so disliked, and it was Frances who had always begun the process, though no one ever said in the rectory that she understood the mystery of people as well as he understood the teachings of the New Testament. She’d been a freckle-faced girl when he’d married her, pretty in her way. He was the one with the brains.

Frances had seen human frailty everywhere: it was weakness in people, she said, that made them what they were as much as strength did. And she herself had her own share of such frailty, falling short in all sorts of ways of the God’s image her husband preached about. With the small amount of housekeeping money she could be allowed she was a spendthrift, and she said she was lazy. She loved clothes and often overreached herself on visits to Dublin; she sat in the sun while the rectory gathered dust and the garden became rank; it was only where people were concerned that she was practical. But for what she was her husband had loved her with unobtrusive passion for fifty years, appreciating her conversation and the help she’d given him because she could so easily sense the truth. When he’d found her dead in the garden one morning he’d felt he had lost some part of himself.

Though many months had passed since then, the trouble was that Frances hadn’t yet become a ghost. Her being alive was still too recent, the shock of her death too raw. He couldn’t distance himself; the past refused to be the past. Often he thought that her fingerprints were still in the rectory, and when he picked the grapes or cut the grass of the lawn it was impossible not to pause and remember other years. Autumn had been her favourite time.

‘Of course I’d come,’ he said. ‘Of course, dear. Of course.’

‘I haven’t treated you very well.’

‘It’s over and done with, Deirdre.’

She smiled, and it was nice to see her smile again, although it was strange to be sitting in the back bar of a public house in Enniscorthy. He saw her looking at him, her eyes passing over his clerical collar and black clothes, and his quiet face. He could feel her thinking that he had aged, and putting it down to the death of the wife he’d been so fond of.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t write,’ she said.

‘You explained in your letter, Deirdre.’

‘It was ages before I knew about it. That was an old address you wrote to.’

‘I guessed.’

In turn he examined her. Years ago she’d had her long hair cut. It was short now, like a black cap on her head. And her face had lost its chubbiness; hollows where her cheeks had been made her eyes more dominant, pools of seaweed green. He remembered her child’s stocky body, and the uneasy adolescence that had spoilt the family’s serenity. Her voice had lost its Irish intonation.

‘I’d have met you off the boat, you know.’

‘I didn’t want to bother you with that.’

‘Oh, now, it isn’t far, Deirdre.’

She drank Irish whiskey, and smoked a brand of cigarettes called Three Castles. He’d asked for a mineral himself, and the woman serving them had brought him a bottle of something that looked like water but which fizzed up when she’d poured it. A kind of lemonade he imagined it was, and didn’t much care for it.

‘I have grapes for Mrs Neary,’ he said.

‘Who’s that?’

‘She has a shop in Slaney Street. We always sold her the grapes. You remember?’

She didn’t, and he reminded her of the vine in the greenhouse. A shop surely wouldn’t be open at this hour of the evening, she said, forgetting that in a country town of course it would be. She asked if the cinema was still the same in Enniscorthy, a cement building halfway up a hill. She said she remembered bicycling home from it at night with her sisters, not being able to keep up with them. She asked after her sisters and he told her about the two marriages that had taken place since she’d left: she had in-laws she’d never met, and nephews and a niece.

They left the bar, and he drove his dusty black Vauxhall straight to the small shop he’d spoken of. She remained in the car while he carried into the shop two large chip-baskets full of grapes. Afterwards Mrs Neary came to the door with him.

‘Well, is that Deirdre?’ she said as Deirdre wound down the window of the car. ‘I’d never know you, Deirdre.’

‘She’s come back for a little while,’ Canon Moran explained, raising his voice a little because he was walking round the car to the driver’s seat as he spoke.

‘Well, isn’t that grand?’ said Mrs Neary.

Everyone in Enniscorthy knew Deirdre had just gone off, but it didn’t matter now. Mrs Neary’s husband, who was a red-cheeked man with a cap, much smaller than his wife, appeared beside her in the shop doorway. He inclined his head in greeting, and Deirdre smiled and waved at both of them. Canon Moran thought it was pleasant when she went on waving while he drove off.

In the rectory he lay wakeful that night, his mind excited by Deirdre’s presence. He would have loved Frances to know, and guessed that she probably did. He fell asleep at half past two and dreamed that he and Frances were young again, that Deirdre was still a baby. The freckles on Frances’s face were out in profusion, for they were sitting in the sunshine in the garden, tea things spread about them, the children playing some game among the shrubs. It was autumn then also, the last of the September heat. But because he was younger in his dream he didn’t feel part of the season himself, or sense its melancholy.

A week went by. The time passed slowly because a lot was happening, or so it seemed. Deirdre insisted on cooking all the meals and on doing the shopping in Boharbawn’s single shop or in Enniscorthy. She still smoked her endless cigarettes, but the peakiness there had been in her face when she’d first arrived wasn’t quite so pronounced – or perhaps, he thought, he’d become used to it. She told him about the different jobs she’d had in London and the different places she’d lived in, because on the postcards she’d occasionally sent there hadn’t been room to go into detail. In the rectory they had always hoped she’d managed to get a training of some sort, though guessing she hadn’t. In fact, her jobs had been of the most rudimentary kind: as well as her spell in the egg-packing factory, there’d been a factory that made plastic earphones, a cleaning job in a hotel near Euston, and a year working for the Use-Us Office Cleansing Service. ‘But you can’t have liked any of that work, Deirdre?’ he suggested, and she agreed she hadn’t.

From the way she spoke he felt that that period of her life Was over: adolescence was done with, she had steadied and taken stock. He didn’t suggest to her that any of this might be so, not wishing to seem either too anxious or too pleased, but he felt she had returned to the rectory in a very different frame of mind from the one in which she’d left it. He imagined she would remain for quite a while, still taking stock, and in a sense occupying her mother’s place. He thought he recognized in her a loneliness that matched his own, and he wondered if it was a feeling that their loneliness might be shared which had brought her back at this particular time. Sitting in the drawing-room while she cooked or washed up, or gathering grapes in the greenhouse while she did the shopping, he warmed delightedly to this theme. It seemed like an act of God that their circumstances should interlace this autumn. By Christmas she would know what she wanted to do with her life, and in the spring that followed she would perhaps be ready to set forth again. A year would have passed since the death of Frances.

‘I have a friend,’ Deirdre said when they were having a cup of coffee together in the middle of one morning. ‘Someone who’s been good to me.’

She had carried a tray to where he was composing next week’s sermon, sitting on the wooden seat by the lawn at the front of the house. He laid aside his exercise book, and a pencil and a rubber. ‘Who’s that?’ he inquired.