The Collected Stories

‘Someone called Harold.’

He nodded, stirring sugar into his coffee.

‘I want to tell you about Harold, Father. I want you to meet him.’

‘Yes, of course.’

She lit a cigarette. She said, ‘We have a lot in common. I mean, he’s the only person…’

She faltered and then hesitated. She lifted her cigarette to her lips and drew on it.

He said, ‘Are you fond of him, Deirdre?’

‘Yes, I am.’

Another silence gathered. She smoked and drank her coffee. He added more sugar to his.

‘Of course I’d like to meet him,’ he said.

‘Could he come to stay with us, Father? Would you mind? Would it be all right?’

‘Of course I wouldn’t mind. I’d be delighted.’

Harold was summoned, and arrived at Rosslare a few days later. In the meantime Deirdre had explained to her father that her friend was an electrician by trade and had let it fall that he was an intellectual kind of person. She borrowed the old Vauxhall and drove it to Rosslare to meet him, returning to the rectory in the early evening.

‘How d’you do?’ Canon Moran said, stretching out a hand in the direction of an angular youth with a birthmark on his face. His dark hair was cut very short, cropped almost. He was wearing a black leather jacket.

‘I’m fine,’ Harold said.

‘You’ve had a good journey?’

‘Lousy,’ smatter of fact, Mr Moran.’

Harold’s voice was strongly Cockney, and Canon Moran wondered if Deirdre had perhaps picked up some of her English vowel sounds from it. But then he realized that most people in London would speak like that, as people did on the television and the wireless. It was just a little surprising that Harold and Deirdre should have so much in common, as they clearly had from the affectionate way they held one another’s hand. None of the other Moran girls had gone in so much for holding hands in front of the family.

He was to sit in the drawing-room, they insisted, while they made supper in the kitchen, so he picked up the Irish Times and did as he was bidden. Half an hour later Harold appeared and said that the meal was ready: fried eggs and sausages and bacon, and some tinned beans. Canon Moran said grace.

Having stated that County Wexford looked great, Harold didn’t say much else. He didn’t smile much, either. His afflicted face bore an edgy look, as if he’d never become wholly reconciled to his birthmark. It was like a scarlet map on his left cheek, a shape that reminded Canon Moran of the toe of Italy. Poor fellow, he thought. And yet a birthmark was so much less to bear than other afflictions there could be.

‘Harold’s fascinated actually,’ Deirdre said, ‘by Ireland.’

Her friend didn’t add anything to that remark for a moment, even though Canon Moran smiled and nodded interestedly. Eventually Harold said, ‘The struggle of the Irish people.’

‘I didn’t know a thing about Irish history,’ Deirdre said. ‘I mean, not anything that made sense.’

The conversation lapsed at this point, leaving Canon Moran greatly puzzled. He began to say that Irish history had always been of considerable interest to him also, that it had a good story to it, its tragedy uncomplicated. But the other two didn’t appear to understand what he was talking about and so he changed the subject. It was a particularly splendid autumn, he pointed out.

‘Harold doesn’t go in for anything like that,’ Deirdre replied.

During the days that followed Harold began to talk more, surprising Canon Moran with almost everything he said. Deirdre had been right to say he was fascinated by Ireland, and it wasn’t just a tourist’s fascination. Harold had read widely: he spoke of ancient battles, and of the plantations of James I and Elizabeth, of Robert Emmet and the Mitchelstown martyrs, of Pearse and de Valera. ‘The struggle of the Irish people’ was the expression he most regularly employed. It seemed to Canon Moran that the relationship between Harold and Deirdre had a lot to do with Harold’s fascination, as though his interest in Deirdre’s native land had somehow caused him to become interested in Deirdre herself.

There was something else as well. Fascinated by Ireland, Harold hated his own country. A sneer whispered through his voice when he spoke of England: a degenerate place, he called it, destroyed by class-consciousness and the unjust distribution of wealth. He described in detail the city of Nottingham, to which he appeared to have a particular aversion. He spoke of unnecessary motorways and the stupidity of bureaucracy, the stifling presence of a Royal family. ‘You could keep an Indian village,’ he claimed, ‘on what those corgis eat. You could house five hundred homeless in Buckingham Palace.’ There was brainwashing by television and the newspaper barons. No ordinary person had a chance because pap was fed to the ordinary person, a deliberate policy going back into Victorian times when education and religion had been geared to the enslavement of minds. The English people had brought it on themselves, having lost their spunk, settling instead for consumer durables. ‘What better can you expect,’ Harold demanded, ‘after the hypocrisy of that empire the bosses ran?’

Deirdre didn’t appear to find anything specious in this line of talk, which surprised her father. ‘Oh, I wonder about that,’ he said himself from time to time, but he said it mildly, not wishing to cause an argument, and in any case his interjections were not acknowledged. Quite a few of the criticisms Harold levelled at his own country could be levelled at Ireland also and, Canon Moran guessed, at many countries throughout the world. It was strange that the two neighbouring islands had been so picked out, although once Germany was mentioned and the point made that developments beneath the surface there were a hopeful sign, that a big upset was on the way.

‘We’re taking a walk,’ Harold said one afternoon. ‘She’s going to show me Kinsella’s Barn.’

Canon Moran nodded, saying to himself that he disliked Harold. It was the first time he had admitted it, but the feeling was familiar. The less generous side of his nature had always emerged when his daughters brought to the rectory the men they’d become friendly with or even proposed to marry. Emma, the eldest girl, had brought several before settling in the end for Thomas. Linda had brought only John, already engaged to him. Una had married Carley not long after the death, and Carley had not yet visited the rectory: Canon Moran had met him in Dublin, where the wedding had taken place, for in the circumstances Una had not been married from home. Carley was an older man, an importer of tea and wine, stout and flushed, certainly not someone Canon Moran would have chosen for his second-youngest daughter. But, then, he had thought the same about Emma’s Thomas and about Linda’s John.

Thomas was a farmer, sharing a sizeable acreage with his father in Co. Meath. He always brought to mind the sarcasm of an old schoolmaster who in Canon Moran’s distant schooldays used to refer to a gang of boys at the back of the classroom as ‘farmers’ sons’, meaning that not much could be expected of them. It was an inaccurate assumption but even now, whenever Canon Moran found himself in the company of Thomas, he couldn’t help recalling it. Thomas was mostly silent, with a good-natured smile that came slowly and lingered too long. According to his father, and there was no reason to doubt the claim, he was a good judge of beef cattle.

Linda’s John was the opposite. Wiry and suave, he was making his way in the Bank of Ireland, at present stationed in Waterford. He had a tiny orange-coloured moustache and was good at golf. Linda’s ambition for him was that he should become the Bank of Ireland’s manager in Limerick or Galway, where the insurances that went with the position were particularly lucrative. Unlike Thomas, John talked all the time, telling jokes and stories about the Bank of Ireland’s customers.

‘Nothing is perfect,’ Frances used to say, chiding her husband for an uncharitableness he did his best to combat. He disliked being so particular about the men his daughters chose, and he was aware that other people saw them differently: Thomas would do anything for you, John was fun, the middle-aged Carley laid his success at Una’s feet. But whoever the husbands of his daughters had been, Canon Moran knew he’d have felt the same. He was jealous of the husbands because ever since his daughters had been born he had loved them unstintingly. When he had prayed after Frances’s death he’d felt jealous of God, who had taken her from him.

‘There’s nothing much to see,’ he pointed out when Harold announced that Deirdre was going to show him Kinsella’s Barn. ‘Just the ruin of a wall is all that’s left.’

‘Harold’s interested, Father.’

They set off on their walk, leaving the old clergyman ashamed that he could not like Harold more. It wasn’t just his griminess: there was something sinister about Harold, something furtive about the way he looked at you, peering at you cruelly out of his afflicted face, not meeting your eye. Why was he so fascinated about a country that wasn’t his own? Why did he refer so often to ‘Ireland’s struggle’ as if that struggle particularly concerned him? He hated walking, he had said, yet he’d just set out to walk six miles through woods and fields to examine a ruined wall.

Canon Moran had wondered as suspiciously about Thomas and John and Carley, privately questioning every statement they made, finding hidden motives everywhere. He’d hated the thought of his daughters being embraced or even touched, and had forced himself not to think about that. He’d prayed, ashamed of himself then, too. ‘It’s just a frailty in you,’ Frances had said, her favourite way of cutting things down to size.

He sat for a while in the afternoon sunshine, letting all of it hang in his mind. It would be nice if they quarrelled on their walk. It would be nice if they didn’t speak when they returned, if Harold simply went away. But that wouldn’t happen, because they had come to the rectory with a purpose. He didn’t know why he thought that, but he knew it was true: they had come for a reason, something that was all tied up with Harold’s fascination and with the kind of person Harold was, with his cold eyes and his afflicted face.

In March 1798 an incident had taken place in Kinsella’s Barn, which at that time had just been a barn. Twelve men and women, accused of harbouring insurgents, had been tied together with ropes at the command of a Sergeant James. They had been led through the village of Boharbawn, the Sergeant’s soldiers on horseback on either side of the procession, the Sergeant himself bringing up the rear. Designed as an act of education, an example to the inhabitants of Boharbawn and the country people around, the twelve had been herded into a barn owned by a farmer called Kinsella and there burned to death. Kinsella, who had played no part either in the harbouring of insurgents or in the execution of the twelve, was afterwards murdered by his own farm labourers.

‘Sergeant James was a Nottingham man,’ Harold said that evening at supper. ‘A soldier of fortune who didn’t care what he did. Did you know he acquired great wealth, Mr Moran?’

‘No, I wasn’t at all aware of that,’ Canon Moran replied.

‘Harold found out about him,’ Deirdre said.

‘He used to boast he was responsible for the death of a thousand Irish people. It was in Boharbawn he reached the thousand. They rewarded him well for that.’

‘Not much is known about Sergeant James locally. Just the legend of Kinsella’s Barn.’

‘No way it’s a legend.’

Deirdre nodded; Canon Moran did not say anything. They were eating cooked ham and salad. On the table there was a cake which Deirdre had bought in McGovern’s in Enniscorthy, and a pot of tea. There were several bunches of grapes from the greenhouse, and a plate of wafer biscuits. Harold was fond of salad cream, Canon Moran had noticed; he had a way of hitting the base of the jar with his hand, causing large dollops to spurt all over his ham. He didn’t place his knife and fork together on the plate when he’d finished, but just left them anyhow. His fingernails were edged with black.

‘You’d feel sick,’ he was saying now, working the salad cream again. ‘You’d stand there looking at that wall and you’d feel a revulsion in your stomach.’

‘What I meant,’ Canon Moran said, ‘is that it has passed into local legend. No one doubts it took place; there’s no question about that. But two centuries have almost passed.’

‘And nothing has changed,’ Harold interjected. ‘The Irish people still share their bondage with the twelve in Kinsella’s Barn.’

‘Round here of course –’

‘It’s not round here that matters, Mr Moran. The struggle’s world-wide; the sickness is everywhere actually.’

Again Deirdre nodded. She was like a zombie, her father thought. She was being used because she was an Irish girl; she was Harold’s Irish connection, and in some almost frightening way she believed herself in love with him. Frances had once said they’d made a mistake with her. She had wondered if Deirdre had perhaps found all the love they’d offered her too much to bear. They were quite old when Deirdre was a child, the last expression of their own love. She was special because of that.

‘At least Kinsella got his chips,’ Harold pursued, his voice relentless. ‘At least that’s something.’

Canon Moran protested. The owner of the barn had been an innocent man, he pointed out. The barn had simply been a convenient one, large enough for the purpose, with heavy stones near it that could be piled up against the door before the conflagration. Kinsella, that day, had been miles away, ditching a field.

‘It’s too long ago to say where he was,’ Harold retorted swiftly. ‘And if he was keeping a low profile in a ditch it would have been by arrangement with the imperial forces.’

When Harold said that, there occurred in Canon Moran’s mind a flash of what appeared to be the simple truth. Harold was an Englishman who had espoused a cause because it was one through which the status quo in his own country might be damaged. Similar such Englishmen, read about in newspapers, stirred in the clergyman’s mind: men from Ealing and Liverpool and Wolverhampton who had changed their names to Irish names, who had even learned the Irish language, in order to ingratiate themselves with the new Irish revolutionaries. Such men dealt out death and chaos, announcing that their conscience insisted on it.

‘Well, we’d better wash the dishes,’ Deirdre said, and Harold rose obediently to help her.

The walk to Kinsella’s Barn had taken place on a Saturday afternoon. The following morning Canon Moran conducted his services in St Michael’s, addressing his small Protestant congregation, twelve at Holy Communion, eighteen at morning service. He had prepared a sermon about repentance, taking as his text St Luke, 15:32:… for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. But at the last moment he changed his mind and spoke instead of the incident in Kinsella’s Barn nearly two centuries ago. He tried to make the point that one horror should not fuel another, that passing time contained its own forgiveness. Deirdre and Harold were naturally not in the church, but they’d been present at breakfast, Harold frying eggs on the kitchen stove, Deirdre pouring tea. He had looked at them and tried to think of them as two young people on holiday. He had tried to tell himself they’d come to the rectory for a rest and for his blessing, that he should be grateful instead of fanciful. It was for his blessing that Emma had brought Thomas to the rectory, that Linda had brought John. Una would bring Carley in November. ‘Now, don’t be silly,’ Frances would have said.

‘The man Kinsella was innocent of everything,’ he heard his voice insisting in his church. ‘He should never have been murdered also.’

Harold would have delighted in the vengeance exacted on an innocent man. Harold wanted to inflict pain, to cause suffering and destruction. The end justified the means for Harold, even if the end was an artificial one, a pettiness grandly dressed up. In his sermon Canon Moran spoke of such matters without mentioning Harold’s name. He spoke of how evil drained people of their humour and compassion, how people pretended even to themselves. It was worse than Frances’s death, he thought as his voice Continued in the church: it was worse that Deirdre should be part of wickedness.

He could tell that his parishioners found his sermon odd, and he didn’t blame them. He was confused, and naturally distressed. In the rectory Deirdre and Harold would be waiting for him. They would all sit down to Sunday lunch while plans for atrocities filled Harold’s mind, while Deirdre loved him.

‘Are you well again, Mrs Davis?’ he inquired at the church door of a woman who suffered from asthma.

‘Not too bad, Canon. Not too bad, thank you.’

He spoke to all the others, inquiring about health, remarking on the beautiful autumn. They were farmers mostly and displayed a farmer’s gratitude for the satisfactory season. He wondered suddenly who’d replace him among them when he retired or died. Father Gowan had had to give up a year ago. The young man, Father White, was always in a hurry.

‘Goodbye so, Canon,’ Mr Willoughby said, shaking hands as he always did, every Sunday. It was a long time since there’d been the trouble about Eugene Dunlevy’s grazing rights; three years ago Mr Willoughby had been left a widower himself. ‘You’re managing all right, Canon?’ he asked, as he also always did.

‘Yes, I’m all right, thank you, Mr Willoughby.’

Someone else inquired if Deirdre was still at the rectory, and he said she was. Heads nodded, the unspoken thought being that that was nice for him, his youngest daughter at home again after all these years. There was forgiveness in several faces, forgiveness of Deirdre, who had been thoughtless to go off to an egg-packing factory. There was the feeling, also unexpressed, that the young were a bit like that.

‘Goodbye,’ he said in a general way. Car doors banged, engines started. In the vestry he removed his surplice and his cassock and hung them in a cupboard.

‘We’ll probably go tomorrow,’ Deirdre said during lunch.

‘Go?’

‘We’ll probably take the Dublin bus.’

‘I’d like to see Dublin,’ Harold said.

‘And then you’re returning to London?’

‘We’re easy about that,’ Harold interjected before Deirdre could reply. ‘I’m a tradesman, Mr Moran, an electrician.’

‘I know you’re an electrician, Harold.’

‘What I mean is, I’m on my own; I’m not answerable to the bosses. There’s always a bob or two waiting in London.’

For some reason Canon Moran felt that Harold was lying. There was a quickness about the way he’d said they were easy about their plans, and it didn’t seem quite to make sense, the logic of not being answerable to bosses and a bob or two always waiting for him. Harold was being evasive about their movements, hiding the fact that they would probably remain in Dublin for longer than he implied, meeting other people like himself.

‘It was good of you to have us,’ Deirdre said that evening, all three of them sitting around the fire in the drawing-room because the evenings had just begun to get chilly. Harold was reading a book about Che Guevara and hadn’t spoken for several hours. ‘We’ve enjoyed it, Father.’

‘It’s been nice having you, Deirdre.’

‘I’ll write to you from London.’

It was safe to say that: he knew she wouldn’t because she hadn’t before, until she’d wanted something. She wouldn’t write to thank him for the rectory’s hospitality, and that would be quite in keeping. Harold was the same kind of man as Sergeant James had been: it didn’t matter that they were on different sides. Sergeant James had maybe borne an affliction also, a humped back or a withered arm. He had ravaged a country that existed then for its spoils, and his most celebrated crime was neatly at hand so that another Englishman could make matters worse by attempting to make amends. In Harold’s view the trouble had always been that these acts of war and murder died beneath the weight of print in history books, and were forgotten. But history could be rewritten, and for that Kinsella’s Barn was an inspiration: Harold had journeyed to it as people make journeys to holy places.

‘Yes?’ Deirdre said, for while these reflections had passed through his mind he had spoken her name, wanting to ask her to tell him the truth about her friend.

He shook his head. ‘I wish you could have seen your mother again,’ he said instead. ‘I wish she were here now.’

The faces of his three sons-in-law irrelevantly appeared in his mind: Carley’s flushed cheeks, Thomas’s slow good-natured smile, John’s little moustache. It astonished him that he’d ever felt suspicious of their natures, for they would never let his daughters down. But Deirdre had turned her back on the rectory, and what could be expected when she came back with a man? She had never been like Emma or Linda or Una, none of whom smoked Three Castles cigarettes and wore clothes that didn’t seem quite clean. It was impossible to imagine any of them becoming involved with a revolutionary, a man who wanted to commit atrocities.

‘He was just a farmer, you know,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Kinsella.’

Surprise showed in Deirdre’s face. ‘It was Mother we were talking about,’ she reminded him, and he could see her trying to connect her mother with a farmer who had died two hundred years ago, and not beirig able to. Elderliness, he could see her thinking. ‘Only time he wandered,’ she would probably say to her friend.

‘It was good of you to come, Deirdre.’

He looked at her, far into her eyes, admitting to himself that she had always been his favourite. When the other girls were busily growing up she had still wanted to sit on his knee. She’d had a way of interrupting him no matter what he was doing, arriving beside him with a book she wanted him to read to her.

‘Goodbye, Father,’ she said the next morning while they waited in Enniscorthy for the Dublin bus. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘Yeah, thanks a ton, Mr Moran,’ Harold said.

‘Goodbye, Harold. Goodbye, my dear.’

He watched them finding their seats when the bus arrived and then he drove the old Vauxhall back to Boharbawn, meeting Slattery in his postman’s van and returning his salute. There was shopping he should have done, meat and potatoes, and tins of things to keep him going. But his mind was full of Harold’s afflicted face and his black-rimmed fingernails, and Deirdre’s hand in his. And then flames burst from the straw that had been packed around living people in Kinsella’s Barn. They burned through the wood of the barn itself, revealing the writhing bodies. On his horse the man called Sergeant James laughed.

Canon Moran drove the car into the rectory’s ramshackle garage, and walked around the house to the wooden seat on the front lawn. Frances should come now with two cups of coffee, appearing at the front door with the tray and then crossing the gravel and the lawn. He saw her as she had been when first they came to the rectory, when only Emma had been born; but the grey-haired Frances was somehow there as well, shadowing her youth. ‘Funny little Deirdre,’ she said, placing the tray on the seat between them.

It seemed to him that everything that had just happened in the rectory had to do with Frances, with meeting her for the first time when she was eighteen, with loving her and marrying her. He knew it was a trick of the autumn sunshine that again she crossed the gravel and the lawn, no more than pretence that she handed him a cup and saucer. ‘Harold’s just a talker,’ she said. ‘Not at all like Sergeant James.’

He sat for a while longer on the wooden seat, clinging to these words, knowing they were true. Of course it was cowardice that ran through Harold, inspiring the whisper of his sneer when he spoke of the England he hated so. In the presence of a befuddled girl and an old Irish clergyman England was an easy target, and Ireland’s troubles a kind of target also.

Frances laughed, and for the first time her death seemed far away, as her life did too. In the rectory the visitors had blurred her fingerprints to nothing, and had made of her a ghost that could come back. The sunshine warmed him as he sat there, the garden was less melancholy than it had been.

Sunday Drinks

There was no one else about, not even a cat on the whole extent of the common. The early morning air hadn’t yet been infected by the smell of London, houses were as silent as the houses of the dead. It was half past seven, a Sunday morning in June: on a weekday at this time voices would be calling out, figures already hurrying across the common to Barnes station; the buses would have started. On a weekday Malcolm would be lying for a last five minutes in bed, conserving his energy.

Not yet shaven, a fawn dressing-gown over striped red-and-blue pyjamas, he strolled on the cricket pitch, past the sight-screens and a small pavilion. He was middle-aged and balding, with glasses. Though no eccentric in other ways, he often walked on fine Sunday mornings across the common in his dressing-gown, as far as the poplars that grew in a line along one boundary.

Reaching them now, he turned and slowly made his way back to the house where he lived with Jessica, who was his wife. They’d lived there since he’d begun to be prosperous as a solicitor: an Edwardian house of pleasant brown brick, with some Virginia creeper on it, and bay trees in tubs on either side of the front door. They were a small family: quietly occupying an upstairs room, in many ways no trouble to anyone, there was Malcolm and Jessica’s son.

In the kitchen Malcolm finished Chapter Eight of Edwin Drood and eventually heard the Sunday papers arrive. He went to fetch them, glanced through them, and then made coffee and toast. He took a tray and the newspapers up to his wife.

‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ Jessica said later that morning, in their son’s room. Sometimes he drank it, but often it was still there on the bedside table when she returned at lunchtime. He never carried the cup and saucer down to the kitchen himself and would apologize for that, wagging his head in irritation at his shortcomings.

He didn’t reply when she spoke about the tea. He stared at her and smiled. One hand was clenched close to his bearded face, the fingernails bitten, the fingers gnawed here and there. The room smelt of his sweat because he couldn’t bear to have the window open, nor indeed to have the blind up. He made his models with the electric light on, preferring that to daylight. In the room the models were everywhere: Hurricanes and Spitfires, sea-planes and Heinkel 178s, none of them finished. A month ago, on 25th May, they’d made an attempt to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday.

She closed the door behind her. On the landing walls there was a wallpaper splashed with poppies and cornflowers, which ran down through the house. People often remarked on its pastoral freshness when Jessica opened the hall door to them, though others sometimes blinked. The hall had had a gloomy look before, the paintwork a shade of gravy. Doors and skirting-boards were brightly white now.

‘Let’s not go to the Morrishes’,’ Malcolm suggested in the kitchen, even though he’d put on his Sunday-morning-drinks clothes.

‘Of course we must,’ she said, not wanting to go to the Morrishes’ either. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

In the downstairs lavatory she applied eye-shadow. Her thin face had a shallow look if she didn’t make an effort with make-up; a bit of colour suited her, she reckoned, as it did the hall. She smeared on lipstick and pressed a tissue between her lips to clear away the surplus, continuing to examine her application of eye-shadow in the mirror above the washbasin. Dark hair, greying now, curved around her face. Her deep blue eyes still managed a sparkle that spread beauty into her features, transforming her: nondescript little thing, someone once had said, catching her in a tired moment.

In the kitchen she turned on the extractor tan above the electric cooker; pork chops were cooking slowly in the oven. ‘All right?’ she said, and Malcolm, idling over an advertisement for photochromic lenses, nodded and stood up.

Their son was dreaming now: he was there, on the bank of the river. Birds with blue plumage swooped over the water; through the foliage came the strum of a guitar. All the friends there’d been were there, in different coloured sleeping-bags, lying as he was. They were happy by the river because India was where the truth was, wrapped up in gentleness and beauty. Someone said that, and everyone else agreed.

Anthea Chalmers was at the Morrishes’, tall and elegant in green, long since divorced. She had a look of Bette Davis, eyes like soup-plates, that kind of mouth. The Livingstons were there also, and Susanna and David Maidstone, and the Unwins. So was Mr Fulmer, a sandy-complexioned man whom people were sorry for because his wife was a stick-in-the-mud and wouldn’t go to parties. June and Tom Highband were there, and the Taylor-Deeths, and Marcus Stire and his friend. There was a handful of faces that were unfamiliar to Jessica and Malcolm.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ their host called out, welcoming them with party joviality. The guests were passing from the sitting-room, through the french windows to the garden, all of them with glasses in their hands. The Morrishes – he pink and bluff, she pretty in a faded way – were busily making certain that these glasses contained precisely what people wanted. In the garden their French au pair boy was handing round bowls of nuts and shiny little biscuits from Japan. Children – the Morrishes’ and others’ – had congregated in a distant corner, by a tool-shed.

Jessica and Malcolm both asked for white wine, since chilled bottles of it stood there, inviting on a warm morning. They didn’t say much to the Morrishes, who clearly wanted to get things going before indulging in chat. They stepped out into the garden, where a mass of flowers spectacularly bloomed and the lawns were closely shorn.

‘Hi, Jessica,’ Marcus Stire’s friend said, a short, stout young man in a blue blazer. He’d made her black-bottom pie, he reported. He shook his head, implying disappointment with his version of the dish.

‘Hullo, stranger,’ Anthea Chalmers said to Malcolm.

She always seemed to pick him out. Ages ago he’d rejected the idea that a balding solicitor with glasses might possibly have some sensual attraction for her, even though all she ever talked to him about were sensual matters. She liked to get him into a corner, as she had done now, and had a way of turning interlopers away with a snakelike shift of her shoulders. She’d placed him with his back to the wall of the house, along which a creamy honeysuckle had been trained. A trellis to his right continued to support it; to his left, two old water-butts were swathed with purple clematis.

‘A pig,’ she said, referring to the man she’d once been married to. ‘And I told him, Malcolm. I’d sooner share a bed with a farmyard pig was precisely what I said. Needless to say, he became violent.’

Jessica, having discussed the preparation of black-bottom pie with Marcus Stire’s friend, smiled at the stout young man and passed on. The au pair boy offered her a Japanese biscuit and then a man she didn’t know remarked upon the weather. Could anything be nicer, he asked her, than a drink or two on a Sunday morning in a sunny London garden? He was a man in brown suede, expensively cut to disguise a certain paunchiness. He had damp eyes and a damp-looking moustache. He had well-packed jowls, and a sun-browned head that matched the shade of his clothes. A businessman, Jessica speculated, excessively rich, a tough performer in his business world. He began to talk about a house he owned near Estepona.

*

On the surface of the tea which Jessica had earlier brought her son a skin had formed, in which a small fly now struggled. Nothing else was happening in the room. The sound of breathing could hardly be heard, the dream about birds with blue plumage had abruptly ceased. Then – in that same abrupt manner, a repetition of the suddenness that in different ways affected this boy’s life – his eyes snapped open.

Through the gloom, and seeming larger than reality, the Spitfires and the Heinkels greeted his consciousness. He was in a room with aeroplanes, he told himself, and while he lay there nothing more impinged on his mind. Eventually he rose and began to dress, his youthful beard scanty and soft, quite like a bearded lady’s. Tears ran into it while slowly he pulled his clothes over his white flesh.

His T-shirt was pale blue, the paler message it bore almost washed away. Wham! it had said, the word noisily proclaimed against lightning flashes and the hooded figures of Batman and Robin. A joke all of it had been: those years had been full of jokes, with no one wanting to grow up, with that longing to be children for ever. Tears dripped from his beard to the T-shirt now; some fell on to his jeans. He turned the electric light on and then noticed the cup of tea by his bed. He drank it, swallowing the skin and the fly that had died in it. His tears did not distress him.

‘Well, that was it, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said. ‘I mean, no one enjoys a bedroom more than I do, but for God’s sake!’

Her soup-plate eyes rapidly blinked, her lips were held for a moment in a little knot. The man she’d married, she yet again revealed, had not been able to give her what she’d wanted and needed. Instead, intoxicated, he would return to their house at night and roar about from room to room. Often he armed himself with a bamboo cane. ‘Which he bought,’ she reminded Malcolm, ‘quite openly in a garden shop.’

In the honeysuckle, suburban bees paused between moments of buzzing. A white butterfly fluttered beside Malcolm’s face. ‘You must be awfully glad to be rid of him,’ he politely said.

‘One’s alone, Malcolm. It isn’t easy, being alone.’

She went into details about how difficult it was, and how various frustrations could be eased. She lowered her voice, she said she spoke in confidence. Sexual fantasy flooded from her, tired arid seeming soiled in the bright sunshine, with the scent of the honeysuckle so close to both of them. Malcolm listened, not moving away, not trying to think of other things. It was nearly two years since Anthea Chalmers had discovered that he would always listen at a party.

In the garden the voices had become louder as more alcohol was consumed. Laughter was shriller, cigarette smoke hung about. By the tool-shed in the far distance the children, organized by a girl who was a little older than the others, played a variation of Grandmother’s Footsteps.

Tom Highband, who wrote under another name a column for the Daily Telegraph, told a joke that caused a burst of laughter. Sandy Mr Fulmer, whom nobody knew very well, listened to the Unwins exchanging gossip with Susanna Maidstone about the school their children all attended. ‘Just a little slower,’ Marcus Stire’s friend pleaded, writing down a recipe for prune jelly on the back of a cheque-book. Taylor-Deeth was getting drunk.

‘It has its own little beach of course,’ the man with the damp-looking moustache informed Jessica. You went down a flight of steps and there you were. They adored the Spaniards, he added, Joan especially did.

And then Joan, who was his wife, was there beside them, in shades of pink. She was bulky, like her husband, with a smile so widely beaming that it seemed to run off her face into her greying hair. She had always had a thing about the Spanish, she agreed, the quality of Spanish life, their little churches. ‘We have a maid of course,’ her husband said, ‘who keeps an eye on things. Old Violetta.’

Glasses were again refilled, the Morrishes together attending to that, as was their way at their parties. She did so quietly, he with more dash. People often remarked that they were like good servants, the way they complemented one another in this way. As well, they were said to be happily married.

Glancing between the couple who were talking to her, Jessica could see that Malcolm was still trapped. The Livingstons tried to cut in on the tête-à-tête but Anthea Chalmers’s shoulder sharply edged them away. Togethei: again after their separation, the Livingstons looked miserable.

‘Violetta mothers us,’ the man with the damp moustache said. ‘We could never manage without old Violetta.’

‘Another thing is Spanish dignity,’ his wife continued, and the man added that old Violetta certainly had her share of that.

‘Oh yes, indeed,’ his wife agreed.

Marcus Stire arrived then, lanky and malicious. The couple with the house in Spain immediately moved away, as if they didn’t like the look of him. He laughed. They were embarrassed, he explained, because at another party recently they’d all of a sudden quarrelled most violently in his presence. The man had even raised an arm to strike his wife, and Marcus Stire had had to restrain him.

‘You’d never think it, would you, Jessica? All that guff about cosiness in Spain when more likely that smile of hers covers a multitude of sins.

What awful frauds people are!’ He laughed again and then continued, his soft voice drawling, a cigarette between the rings on his fingers.

He ran through all the people in the garden. Susanna Maidstone had been seen with Taylor-Deeth in the Trat-West. The Livingstons’ patched-up arrangement wouldn’t of course last. The Unwins were edgy, frigidity was Anthea Chalmers’s problem. ‘Suburban middle age,’ he said in his drawl. ‘It’s like a minefield.’ The Morrishes had had a ghastly upset a month ago when a girl from his office had pursued him home one night, messily spilling the beans.

Jessica looked at the Morrishes, so neatly together as they saw to people’s drinks, attending now to Mr Fulmer. It seemed astonishing that they, too, weren’t quite as they appeared to be. ‘Oh, heavens, yes,’ Marcus Stire said, guessing at this doubt in her mind.

His malice was perceptive, and he didn’t much exaggerate. He had a way of detecting trouble, and of accurately piecing together the fragments that came his way. Caught off her guard, she wondered what he said to other people about Malcolm and herself. She wondered just how he saw them and then immediately struggled to regain her concentration, knowing she should not wonder that.

He was commenting now on the girl who had persuaded the other children to play her version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, a bossy handful he called her. How dreadful she’d be at forty-eight, her looks three-quarters gone, famous in some other suburb as a nagging wife. Jessica smiled, as if he had related a pleasant joke. Again she made the effort to concentrate.

You had to do that: to concentrate and to listen properly, as Malcolm was listening, as she had listened herself to the talk about a house in Spain. You had to have a bouncy wallpaper all over the house, and fresh white paint instead of gravy-brown. You mustn’t forget your plan to get the garden as colourful as this one; you mustn’t let your mind wander. Busily you must note the damp appearance of a man’s moustache and the grey in a woman’s hair, and the malevolence in the eyes that were piercing into you now.

‘I’ve written off those years, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said, and across the garden Malcolm saw that his wife had collapsed. He could tell at once, as if she’d fallen to the grass and lay there in a heap. Occasionally one or the other of them went under; impossible to anticipate which, or how it would happen.

He watched her face and saw that she was back in 1954, her pains developing a rhythm, a sweltering summer afternoon. A message had come to him in court, and when he’d returned to the house the midwife was smoking a cigarette in the hall. The midwife and the nurse had been up all night with a difficult delivery in Sheen. Afterwards, when the child had been born and everything tidied up, he’d given them a glass of whisky each.

Like an infection, all of it slipped across the garden, through the cigarette smoke and the people and the smartly casual Sunday clothes, from Jessica to Malcolm. Down their treacherous Memory Lane it dragged them, one after the other. The first day at the primary school, tears at the gate, the kindly dinner lady. The gang of four, their child and three others, at daggers drawn with other gangs. The winning of the high jump.

‘Excuse me,’ Malcolm said. It was worse for Jessica, he thought in a familiar way as he made his way to her. It was worse because after the birth she’d been told she must not have other babies: she blamed herself now for being obedient.

They left the party suddenly, while the children still played a version of Grandmother’s Footsteps by the tool-shed, and the adults drank and went on talking to one another. People who knew them guessed that their abrupt departure might somehow have to do with their son, whom no one much mentioned these days, he being a registered drug addict. The couple who had spoken to Jessica about their Spanish house spoke of it now to their hosts, who did not listen as well as she had. Anthea Chalmers tried to explain to Marcus Stire’s friend, but that was hopeless. Marcus Stire again surveyed the people in the garden.

Anger possessed Malcolm as they walked across the common that had been peaceful in the early morning. It was less so now. Cricket would be played that afternoon and preparations were being made, the square marked, the sight-screens wheeled into position. An ice-cream van was already trading briskly. People lay on the grass, youths kicked a football.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said. Her voice was nervous; she felt ashamed of herself.

‘It isn’t you, Jessica.’

‘Let’s have a drink on our own, shall we?’

Neither of them wishing to return immediately to their house, they went to the Red Rover and sat outside. She guessed his thoughts, as earlier he had seen hers in her face. When people wondered where all of it had gone, all that love and all those flowers, he would have liked to have shown them their darkened upstairs room. The jolly sixties and those trips to wonderland were there, he’d once cried out, with half-made aeroplanes gathering a dust. Their son had a name, which was used when they addressed him; but when they thought of him he was nameless in their minds. Years ago they’d discovered that that was the same for both of them.

‘Maybe,’ she said, referring to the future, trying to cheer him up.

He made a gesture, half a nod: the speculation was impossible. And the consolation that families had always had children who were locked away and looked after wasn’t a consolation in the least. They didn’t have to live with a monstrous fact of nature, but with a form of accidental suicide, and that was worse.

They sat a little longer in the sunshine, both of them thinking about the house they’d left an hour or so ago. It would be as silent as if they’d never had a child, and then little noises would begin, like the noises of a ghost. The quiet descent of the stairs, the shuffling through the hall. He would be there in the kitchen, patiently sitting, when they returned. He would smile at them and during lunch a kind of conversation might develop, or it might not. A week ago he’d said, quite suddenly, that soon he intended to work in a garden somewhere, or a park. Occasionally he said things like that.

They didn’t mention him as they sat there; they never did now. And it was easier for both of them to keep away from Memory Lane when they were together and alone. Instead of all that there was the gossip of Marcus Stire: Susanna Maidstone in the Trat-West, the girl from the office arriving in the Morrishes’ house, the quarrel between the smiling woman and her suede-clad husband, Anthea Chalmers, lone Mr Fulmer, the Livingstons endeavouring to make a go of it. Easily, Malcolm imagined Marcus Stire’s drawling tones and the sharpness of his eye, like a splinter of glass. He knew now how Jessica had been upset: a pair of shadows Marcus Stire would have called them, clinging to the periphery of life because that was where they felt safe, both of them a little destroyed.

They went on discussing the people they’d just left, wondering if some fresh drama had broken out, another explosion in the landscape of marriage that Marcus Stire had likened to a minefield. Finishing their drinks, they agreed that he’d certainly tell them if it had. They talked about him for a moment, and then the subject of the party drifted away from them and they talked of other things. Malcolm told her what was happening in Edwin Drood, because it was a book she would never read. His voice continued while they left the Red Rover and walked across the common, back to their house. It was odd, she reflected as she listened to it, that companionship had developed in their middle age, when luckier people made of their marriages such tales of woe.

The Paradise Lounge

On her high stool by the bar the old woman was as still as a statue. Perhaps her face is expressionless, Beatrice thought, because in repose it does not betray the extent of her years. The face itself was lavishly made up, eyes and mouth, rouge softening the wrinkles, a dusting of perfumed powder. The chin was held more than a little high, at an angle that tightened the loops of flesh beneath it. Grey hair was short beneath a black cloche hat that suggested a fashion of the past, as did the tight black skirt and black velvet coat. Eighty she’d be, Beatrice deduced, or eighty-two or -three.

‘We can surely enjoy ourselves,’ Beatrice’s friend said, interrupting her scrutiny of the old woman. ‘Surely we can, Bea?’

She turned her head. The closeness of his brick-coloured flesh and of the smile in his eyes caused her lips to tremble. She appeared to smile also, but what might have been taken for pleasure was a checking of her tears.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

They were married, though not to one another. Beatrice’s friend, casually dressed for a summer weekend, was in early middle age, no longer slim yet far from bulky. Beatrice was thirty-two, petite and black-haired in a blue denim dress. Sunglasses disguised her deep-rust eyes, which was how - a long time ago now – her father had described them. She had wanted to be an actress then.

‘It’s best,’ her friend said, repeating the brief statement for what might have been the hundredth time since they had settled into his car earlier that afternoon. The affair was over, the threat to their families averted. They had come away to say goodbye.

‘Yes, I know it’s best,’ she said, a repetition also.

At the bar the old woman slowly raised a hand to her hat and touched it delicately with her fingers. Slowly the hand descended, and then lifted her cocktail glass. Her scarlet mouth was not quite misshapen, but age had harshly scored what once had been a perfect outline, lips pressed together like a rosebud on its side. Failure, Beatrice thought as casually she observed all this: in the end the affair was a failure. She didn’t even love him any more, and long ago he’d ceased to love her. It was euphemism to call it saying goodbye: they were having a dirty weekend, there was nothing left to lift it higher than that.

‘I’m sorry we couldn’t manage longer,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about Glen-garriff.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Even so.’

She ceased to watch the old woman at the bar. She smiled at him, again disguising tears but also wanting him to know that there were no hard feelings, for why on earth should there be?

‘After all, we’ve been to Glengarriff,’ she said, a joke because on the one occasion they’d visited the place they had nearly been discovered in their deceptions. She’d used her sister as an excuse for her absences from home: for a long time now her sister had been genuinely unwell in a farmhouse in Go. Meath, a house that fortunately for Beatrice’s purpose didn’t have a telephone.

‘I’ll never forget you,’ he said, his large tanned hand suddenly on one of hers, the vein throbbing in his forehead. A line of freckles ran down beside the vein, five smudges on the redbrick skin. In winter you hardly noticed them.

‘Nor I you.’

‘Darling old Bea,’ he said, as if they were back at the beginning.

The bar was a dim, square lounge with a scattering of small tables, one of which they occupied. Ashtrays advertised Guinness, beer-mats Heineken. Sunlight touched the darkened glass in one of two windows, drawing from it a glow that was not unlike the amber gleam of whiskey. Behind the bar itself the rows of bottles, spirits upside down above their global measures, glittered pleasantly as a centrepiece, their reflections gaudy in a cluttered mirror. The floor had a patterned carpet, further patterned with cigarette burns and a diversity of stains. The Paradise Lounge the bar had been titled in a moment of hyperbole by the grandfather of the present proprietor, a sign still proclaiming as much on the door that opened from the hotel’s mahogany hall. Beatrice’s friend had hesitated, for the place seemed hardly promising: Keegan’s Railway Hotel in a town neither of them knew. They might have driven on, but he was tired and the sun had been in his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ she had reassured him.

He took their glasses to the bar and had to ring a bell because the man in charge had disappeared ten minutes ago. ‘Nice evening,’ he said to the old woman on the bar-stool, and she managed to indicate agreement without moving a muscle of her carefully held head. ‘We’ll have the same again,’ he said to the barman, who apologized for his absence, saying he’d been mending a tap.

Left on her own, Beatrice sighed a little and took off her sunglasses. There was no need for this farewell, no need to see him for the last time in his pyjamas or to sit across a table from him at dinner and at breakfast, making conversation that once had come naturally. ‘A final fling’, he’d put it, and she’d thought of someone beating a cracked drum, trying to extract a sound that wasn’t there any more. How could it have come to this? The Paradise Lounge of Keegan’s Railway Hotel, Saturday night in a hilly provincial town, litter caught in the railings of the Christian Brothers’: how could this be the end of what they once had had? Saying goodbye to her, he was just somebody else’s husband: the lover had slipped away.

‘Well, it’s a terrible bloody tap we have,’ the barman was saying. ‘Come hell or high water, I can’t get a washer into it.’

‘It can be a difficult job.’

‘You could come in and say that to the wife for me, sir.’

The drinks were paid for, the transaction terminated. Further gin and Martini were poured into the old woman’s glass, and Beatrice watched again while like a zombie the old woman lit a cigarette.

Miss Doheny her name was: though beautiful once, she had never married. Every Saturday evening she met the Meldrums in the Paradise Lounge, where they spent a few hours going through the week that had passed, exchanging gossip and commenting on the world. Miss Doheny was always early and would sit up at the bar for twenty minutes on her own, having the extra couple of drinks that, for her, were always necessary. Before the Meldrums arrived she would make her way to a table in a corner, for that was where Mrs Meldrum liked to be.

It wasn’t usual that other people were in the bar then. Occasionally it filled up later but at six o’clock, before her friends arrived, she nearly always had it to herself. Francis Keegan – the hotel’s inheritor, who also acted as barman – spent a lot of time out in the back somewhere, attending to this or that. It didn’t matter because after their initial greeting of one another, and a few remarks about the weather, there wasn’t much conversation that Miss Doheny and he had to exchange. She enjoyed sitting up at the bar on her own, glancing at the reflections in the long mirror behind the bottles, provided the reflections were never of herself. On the other hand it was a pleasant enough diversion, having visitors.

Miss Doheny, who had looked twice at Beatrice and once at her companion, guessed at their wrong-doing. Tail-ends of conversation had drifted across the lounge, no effort being made to lower voices since more often than not the old turn out to be deaf. They were people from Dublin whose relationship was not that recorded in Francis Keegan’s register in the hall. Without much comment, modern life permitted their sin; the light-brown motor-car parked in front of the hotel made their self-indulgence a simple matter.

How different it had been, Miss Doheny reflected, in 1933! Correctly she estimated that that would have been the year when she herself was the age the dark-haired girl was now. In 1933 adultery and divorce and light-brown motor-cars had belonged more in America and England, read about and alien to what already was being called the Irish way of life. ‘Catholic Ireland,’ Father Cully used to say. ‘Decent Catholic Ireland.’ The term was vague and yet had meaning: the emergent nation, seeking pillars on which to build itself, had plumped for holiness and the Irish language – natural choices in the circumstances. ‘A certain class of woman,’ old Father Cully used to say, ‘constitutes an abhorrence.’ The painted women of Clancy’s Picture House – sound introduced in 1936 – were creatures who carried a terrible warning. Jezebel women, Father Cully called them, adding that the picture house should never have been permitted to exist. In his grave for a quarter of a century, he would hardly have believed his senses if he’d walked into the Paradise Lounge in Keegan’s Railway Hotel to discover two adulterers, and one of his flock who had failed to heed his castigation of painted women. Yet for thirty-five years Miss Doheny had strolled through the town on Saturday evenings to this same lounge, past the statue of the 1798 rebel, down the sharp incline of Castle Street. On Sundays she covered the same ground again, on the way to and from Mass. Neither rain nor cold prevented her from making the journey to the Church of the Resurrection or to the hotel, and illness did not often afflict her. That she had become more painted as the years piled up seemed to Miss Doheny to be natural in the circumstances.

In the Paradise Lounge she felt particularly at home. In spring and summer the Meldrums brought plants for her, or bunches of chives or parsley, sometimes flowers. Not because she wished to balance the gesture with one of her own but because it simply pleased her to do so she brought for them a pot of jam if she had just made some, or pieces of shortbread. At Christmas, more formally, they exchanged gifts of a different kind. At Christmas the lounge was decorated by Francis Keegan, as was the hall of the hotel and the dining-room. Once a year, in April, a dance was held in the dining-room, in connection with a local point-to-point, and it was said in the town that Francis Keegan made enough in the bar during the course of that long night to last him for the next twelve months. The hotel ticked over from April to April, the Paradise Lounge becoming quite brisk with business when an occasional function was held in the dining-room, though never achieving the abandoned spending that distinguished the night of the point-to-point. Commercial travellers sometimes stayed briefly, taking pot-luck with Mrs Keegan’s cooking, which at the best of times was modest in ambition and achievement. After dinner these men would sit on one of the high stools in the Paradise Lounge, conversing with Francis Keegan and drinking bottles of stout. Mrs Keegan would sometimes put in a late appearance and sip a glass of gin and water. She was a woman of slatternly appearance, with loose grey hair and slippers. Her husband complemented her in style and manner, his purplish complexion reflecting a dedication to the wares he traded in across his bar. They were an undemanding couple, charitable in their opinions, regarded as unfortunate in the town since their union had not produced children. Because of that, Keegan’s Railway Hotel was nearing the end of its days as a family concern and in a sense it was fitting that that should be so, for the railway that gave it its title had been closed in 1951.

How I envy her! Miss Doheny thought. How fortunate she is to find herself in these easy times, not condemned because she loves a man! It seemed right to Miss Doheny that a real love affair was taking place in the Paradise Lounge and that no one questioned it. Francis Keegan knew perfectly well that the couple were not man and wife: the strictures of old Father Cully were as fusty by now as neglected mice droppings. The holiness that had accompanied the birth of a nation had at last begun to shed its first tight skirt: liberation, Miss Doheny said to herself, marvelling over the word.

They walked about the town because it was too soon for dinner. Many shops were still open, greengrocers anxious to rid themselves of cabbage that had been limp for days and could not yet again be offered for sale after the weekend, chemists and sweetshops. Kevin Croady, Your Best for Hi-Fi, had arranged a loudspeaker in a window above his premises: Saturday-night music blared forth, punk harmonies and a tenor rendering of ‘Kelly the Boy from Killann’. All tastes were catered for.

The streets were narrow, the traffic congested. Women picked over the greengrocers’ offerings, having waited until this hour because prices would be reduced. Newly shaved men slipped into the public houses, youths and girls loitered outside Redmond’s Café and on the steps of the 1798 statue. Two dogs half-heartedly fought outside the Bank of Ireland.

The visitors to the town inquired where the castle was, and then made their way up Castle Hill. ‘Opposite Castle Motors,’ the child they’d asked had said, and there it was: an ivy-covered ruin, more like the remains of a cowshed. Corrugated iron sealed off an archway, its torn bill-posters advertising Calor Gas and a rock group, Duffy’s Circus and Fine Gael, and the annual point-to-point that kept Keegan’s Railway Hotel going. Houses had been demolished in this deserted area, concrete replacements only just begun. The graveyard of the Protestant church was unkempt; New Premises in Wolfe Tone Street, said a placard in the window of Castle Motors. Litter was everywhere.

‘Not exactly camera fodder,’ he said with his easy laugh. ‘A bloody disgrace, some of these towns are.’

‘The people don’t notice, I suppose.’

‘They should maybe wake themselves up.’

The first time he’d seen her, he’d afterwards said, he had heard himself whispering that it was she he should have married. They’d sat together, talking over after-dinner coffee in someone else’s house. He’d told her, lightly, that he was in the Irish rope business, almost making a joke of it because that was his way. A week later his car had drawn up beside her in Rathgar Road, where she’d lived since her marriage. ‘I thought I recognized you,’ he said, afterwards confessing that he’d looked up her husband’s name in the telephone directory. ‘Come in for a drink,’ she invited, and of course he had. Her two children had been there, her husband had come in.

They made their way back to the town, she taking his arm as they descended the steep hill they’d climbed. A wind had gathered, cooling the evening air.

‘It feels so long ago,’ she said. ‘The greater part of my life appears to have occurred since that day when you first came to the house.’

‘I know, Bea.’

He’d seemed extraordinary and nice, and once when he’d smiled at her she’d found herself looking away. She wasn’t unhappy in her marriage, only bored by the monotony of preparing food and seeing to the house and the children. She had, as well, a reluctant feeling that she wasn’t appreciated, that she hadn’t been properly loved for years.

‘You don’t regret it happened?’ he said, stepping out into the street because the pavement was still crowded outside Redmond’s Café.

She pitched her voice low so that he wouldn’t hear her saying she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to tell a lie, she wasn’t certain of the truth.

He nodded, assuming her reassurance. Once, of course, he would never have let a mumbled reply slip by.

Miss Doheny had moved from the bar and was sitting at a table with the Meldrums when Beatrice and her friend returned to the Paradise Lounge after dinner. Mrs Meldrum was telling all about the visit last Sunday afternoon of her niece, Kathleen. ‘Stones she’s put on,’ she reported, and then recalled that Kathleen’s newly acquired husband had sat there for three hours hardly saying a word. Making a fortune he was, in the dry-goods business, dull but good-hearted.

Miss Doheny listened. Strangely, her mind was still on the visitors who had returned to the lounge. She’d heard the girl saying that a walk about the town would be nice, and as the Meldrums had entered the lounge an hour or so ago she’d heard the man’s voice in the hall and had guessed they were then on their way to the dining-room. The dinner would not have been good, for Miss Doheny had often heard complaints about the nature of Mrs Keegan’s cooking. And yet the dinner, naturally, would not have mattered in the least.

Mrs Meldrum’s voice continued: Kathleen’s four children by her first marriage were all grown up and off her hands, she was lucky to have married so late in life into a prosperous dry-goods business. Mr Meldrum inclined his head or nodded, but from time to time he would also issue a mild contradiction, setting the facts straight, regulating his wife’s memory. He was a grey-haired man in a tweed jacket, very spare and stooped, his face as sharp as a blade, his grey moustache well cared-for. He smoked while he drank, allowing a precise ten minutes to elapse between the end of one cigarette and the lighting of the next. Mrs Meldrum was smaller than her companions by quite some inches, round and plump, with glasses and a black hat.

The strangers were drinking Drambuie now, Miss Doheny noticed. The man made a joke, probably about the food they’d eaten; the girl smiled. It was difficult to understand why it was that they were so clearly not man and wife. There was a wistfulness in the girl’s face, but the wistfulness said nothing very much. In a surprising way Miss Doheny imagined herself crossing the lounge to where they were. ‘You’re lucky, you know,’ she heard herself saying. ‘Honestly, you’re lucky, child.’ She glanced again in the girl’s direction and for a moment caught her eye. She almost mouthed the words, but changed her mind because as much as possible she liked to keep her face in repose.

Beatrice listened to her companion’s efforts to cheer the occasion up. The town and the hotel – especially the meal they’d just consumed – combined to reflect the mood that the end of the affair had already generated. They were here, Beatrice informed herself again, not really to say goodbye to one another but to commit adultery for the last time. They would enjoy it as they always had, but the enjoyment would not be the same as that inspired by the love there had been. They might not have come, they might more elegantly have said goodbye, yet their presence in a bar ridiculously named the Paradise Lounge seemed suddenly apt. The bedroom where acts of mechanical passion would take place had a dingy wallpaper, its flattened pink soap already used by someone else. Dirty weekend, Beatrice thought again, for stripped of love all that was left was the mess of deception and lies there had been, of theft and this remaining, too ordinary desire. Her sister, slowly dying in the farmhouse, had been a bitter confidante and would never forgive her now. Tonight in a provincial bedroom a manufacturer of rope would have his way with her and she would have her way with him. There would be their nakedness and their mingled sweat.

‘I thought that, steak would walk away,’ he spiritedly was continuing now. ‘Being somebody’s shoe-leather.’

She suddenly felt drunk, and wanted to be drunker. She held her glass toward him. ‘Let’s just drink,’ she said.

She caught the eye of the old woman at the other table and for a moment sensed Miss Doheny’s desire to communicate with her. It puzzled her that an elderly woman whom she did not know should wish to say something, yet she strongly felt that this was so. Then Miss Doheny returned her attention to what the other old woman was saying.

When they’d finished the drinks that Beatrice’s companion had just fetched they moved from the table they were at and sat on two bar-stools, listening to Francis Keegan telling them about the annual liveliness in the hotel on the night of the April point-to-point. Mrs Keegan appeared at his side and recalled an occasion when Willie Kincart had ridden the horse he’d won the last race on into the hall of the hotel and how old Packy Briscoe had imagined he’d caught the d.t.’s when he looked down from the top of the stairs. And there was the story – before Mrs Keegan’s time, as she was swift to point out – when Jack Doyle and Movita had stayed in Keegan’s, when just for the hell of it Jack Doyle had chased a honeymoon couple up Castle Hill, half naked from their bed. After several further drinks, Beatrice began to laugh. She felt much less forlorn now that the faces of Francis Keegan and his wife were beginning to float agreeably in her vision. When she looked at the elderly trio in the corner, the only other people in the lounge, their faces floated also.

The thin old man came to the bar for more drinks and cigarettes. He nodded and smiled at Beatrice; he remarked upon the weather. ‘Mr Meldrum,’ said Francis Keegan by way of introduction. ‘How d’you do,’ Beatrice said.

Her companion yawned and appeared to be suggesting that they should go to bed. Beatrice took no notice. She pushed her glass at Francis Keegan, reaching for her handbag and announcing that it was her round. ‘A drink for everyone,’ she said, aware that when she gestured towards the Keegans and the elderly trio she almost lost her balance. She giggled. ‘Definitely my round,’ she slurred, giggling again.

Mrs Keegan told another story, about a commercial traveller called Artie Logan who had become drunk in his room and had sent down for so many trays of tea and buttered bread that every cup and saucer in the hotel had been carried up to him. ‘They said to thank you,’ her husband passed on, returning from the elderly trio’s table. Beatrice turned her head. All three of them were looking at her, their faces still slipping about a bit. Their glasses were raised in her direction. ‘Good luck,’ the old man called out.

It was then that Beatrice realized. She looked from face to face, making herself smile to acknowledge the good wishes she was being offered, the truth she sensed seeming to emerge from a blur of features and clothes and three raised glasses. She nodded, and saw the heads turn away again. It had remained unstated: the love that was there had never in any way been exposed. In this claustrophobic town, in this very lounge, there had been the endless lingering of a silent passion, startlingly different from the instant requiring of her own.

Through the muzziness of inebriation Beatrice glanced again across the bar. Behind her the Keegans were laughing, and the man she’d once so intensely loved was loudly laughing also. She heard the sound of the laughter strangely, as if it echoed from a distance, and she thought for a moment that it did not belong in the Paradise Lounge, that only the two old women and the old man belonged there. He was loved, and in silence he returned that love. His plump, bespectacled wife had never had reason to feel betrayed; no shame nor guilt attached. In all the years a sister’s dying had never been made use of. Nor had there been hasty afternoons in Rathgar Road, blinds drawn against neighbours who might guess, a bedroom set to rights before children came in from school. There hadn’t been a single embrace.

Yet the love that had continued for so long would go on now until the grave: without even thinking, Beatrice knew that that was so. The old woman paraded for a purpose the remnants of her beauty, the man was elegant in his tweed. How lovely that was! Beatrice thought, still muzzily surveying the people at the table, the wife who had not been deceived quite contentedly chatting, the two who belonged together occupying their magic worlds.

How lovely that nothing had been destroyed: Beatrice wanted to tell someone that, but there was no one to tell. In Rathgar Road her children would be watching the television, their father sitting with them. Her sister would die before the year was finished. What cruelty there seemed to be, and more sharply now she recalled the afternoon bedroom set to rights and her sister’s wasted face. She wanted to run away, to go backwards into time so that she might shake her head at her lover on the night they’d first met.

Miss Doheny passed through the darkened town, a familiar figure on a Saturday night. It had been the same as always, sitting there, close to him, the smoke drifting from the cigarette that lolled between his fingers. The girl by now would be close in a different way to the man who was somebody else’s husband also. As in a film, their clothes would be scattered about the room that had been hired for love, their murmurs would break a silence. Tears ran through Miss Doheny’s meticulous make-up, as often they did when she walked away from the Paradise Lounge on a Saturday night. It was difficult sometimes not to weep when she thought about the easy times that had come about in her lifetime, mocking the agony of her stifled love.

Mags

Neither Julia nor James could remember a time when Mags had not been there. She was part of the family, although neither a relation nor a connection. Long before either of them had been born she’d been, at school, their mother’s best friend.

They were grown up now and had children of their own; the Memory Lane they travelled down at Mags’s funeral was long; it was impossible not to recall the past there’d been with her. ‘Our dear sister,’ the clergyman in the crematorium murmured, and quite abruptly Julia’s most vivid memory was of being on the beach at Rustington playing ‘Mags’s Game’, a kind of Grandmother’s Footsteps; and James remembered how Mags had interceded when his crime of taking unripe grapes from the greenhouse had been discovered. Imposing no character of its own upon the mourners, the crematorium filled easily with such moments, with summer jaunts and treats in teashops, with talk and stories and dressing up for nursery plays, with Mags’s voice for ever reading the adventures of the Swallows and the Amazons.

Cicily, whose friend at school she’d been, remembered Miss Harper being harsh, accusing Mags of sloth and untidiness, and making Mags cry. There’d been a day when everyone had been made to learn ‘The Voice and the Peak’ and Miss Harper, because of her down on Mags, had made it seem that Mags had brought this communal punishment about by being the final straw in her ignorance of the verb craindre. There’d been, quite a few years later, Mags’s ill-judged love affair with Robert Blakley, the callousness of Robert’s eventual rejection of her, and Mags’s scar as a result: her lifelong fear of ever again getting her fingers burnt in the same way. In 1948, when Cicily was having James, Mags had come to stay, to help and in particular to look after Julia, who was just beginning to toddle. That had been the beginning of helping with the children; in 1955 she’d moved in after a series of au pair girls had proved in various ways to be less than satisfactory. She’d taken over the garden; her coffee cake became a family favourite.

Cosmo, Cicily’s husband, father of James and Julia, recalled at Mags’s funeral his first meeting with her. He’d heard about her – rather a lot about her – ever since he’d known Cicily. The unfairness that had been meted out to Mags at school was something he had nodded sympathetically over; as well as over her ill-treatment at the hands of Robert Blakley, and the sudden and unexpected death of her mother, to whom she’d always been so devoted, and with whom, after the Robert Blakley affair, she had determined to make her life, her father having died when she was three. This is Mags,’ Cicily had said one day in the Trocadero, where they were all about to lunch together, celebrating Cicily’s and Cosmo’s engagement. ‘Hullo, Cosmo,’ Mags had said, holding out a hand for him to shake. She did not much care for men he’d thought, gripping the hand and moving it slightly in a handshake. She was tall and rather angular, with black untidy hair and unplucked eyebrows. Her lips were a little chapped; she wore no make-up. It was because of Robert Blakley, he’d thought, that she did not take to men. ‘I’ve heard an awful lot about you, Mags,’ he said, laughing. She declined a drink, falling instead into excited chat with Cicily, whose cheeks had pinkened with pleasure at the reunion. They talked about girls they’d known, and the dreadful Miss Harper, and Miss Roforth the headmistress. At Mags’s funeral he remembered that surreptitiously he had asked the waiter to bring him another gin and tonic.

They were a noticeably good-looking family. Cosmo and Cicily, in their middle fifties, were grey-haired but stylishly so, and both of them retained the spare figures of their youth. Cosmo’s noticeably blue eyes and his chiselled face had been bequeathed to his son; and Cicily’s smile, her slightly slanting mouth and perfect nose had come to Julia. They all looked a little similar, the men of a certain height, the two women complementing it, the same fair colouring in all four. There was a lack of awkwardness in their movements, a natural easiness that had often caused strangers to wonder where Mags came in.

The coffin began to move, sliding towards beige curtains, which obediently parted. Flames would devour it, they all four thought simultaneously, Mags would become a handful of dust; a part of the family had been torn away. How, Julia wondered, would her parents manage now? To be on their own after so long would surely be a little strange.

They returned to Tudors, the house near Maidenhead where the family had always lived. It was a pleasant house, half-timbered, black and white, more or less in the country. Cosmo had been left it by an aunt at just the right moment, when he’d been at the beginning of his career in the rare-books world; Julia and James had been born there. Seeing Tudors for the first time, Mags had said she’d fallen in love with it.

After the funeral service they stood around in the long low-ceilinged sitting-room, glad that it was over. They didn’t say much, and soon moved off in two directions, the men to the garden, Cicily and Julia to the room that had been Mags’s bedroom. In an efficiently drawn-up will some of her jewellery had been left to Julia and an eighteenth-century clock to James. There’d been bequests for Cicily and Cosmo too, and some clothes and money for Mrs Forde, the daily woman at Tudors.

‘Her mother had that,’ Cicily said, picking up an amber brooch, a dragon with a gold setting. ‘I think it’s rather valuable.’

Julia held it in the palm of her hand, gazing at it. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. It had been Mags’s favourite piece, worn only on special occasions. Julia could remember it on a blue blouse, polka-dotted with white. It seemed unfair that Mags, the same age as her mother, should have died; Mags who had done no harm to anyone. Having never been married or known children of her own, it seemed that the least she deserved was a longer life.

‘Poor old Mags,’ her mother said, as if divining these thoughts.

‘You’ll miss her terribly.’

‘Yes, we shall.’

In the garden Cosmo walked with his son, who happened in that moment to be saying the same thing.

‘Yes, Cicily’ll miss her,’ Cosmo replied. ‘Dreadfully.’

‘So’ll you, Father.’

‘Yes, I shall too.’

The garden was as pleasant as the house, running down to the river, with japonica and escallonia now in bloom on a meadow bank. It was without herbaceous borders, sheltered by high stone walls. Magnolias and acers added colour to the slope of grass that stretched from wall to wall. Later there’d be roses and broom. It was Mags who had planned the arrangement of all these shrubs, who had organized the removal of some cherry trees that weren’t to her liking, and had every week in summer cut the grass with her Flymo. It was generally agreed that her good taste had given the garden character.

‘There’d been some man, hadn’t there?’ James asked his father as they stood on the bank of the river, watching pleasure boats go by.

‘Robert Blakley. Oh, a long time ago.’

‘But it left a mark?’

‘Yes, it left a mark.’

In the room that had been Mags’s bedroom Cicily said:

‘Misfortune came easily to her. It somehow seemed quite expected that Robert Blakley should let her down.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Just said he’d made a mistake and walked away.’

‘Perhaps it was as well if he was like that.’

‘I never liked him.’

It seemed to Cicily, and always had, that though misfortune had come easily to her friend it had never been deserved. The world had sinned against her without allowing her the joy of sinning. Ready-made a victim, she’d been supplied with no weapons that Cicily could see as useful in her own defence. The best thing that had happened in Mags’s life might well have been their long friendship and Mags’s involvement with the family.

Before lunch they all had a glass or two of sherry because they felt they needed it. It cheered them up, as the lunch itself did. But even so, as Julia said goodbye to her parents, she wondered again how well they’d manage now. She said as much to James as they drove away together in his car, the French clock carefully propped on the back seat, the jewellery in Julia’s handbag. When all these years there’d been a triangular quality about conversation in Tudors, how would conversation now continue?

It would not continue, Cosmo thought. There would be silences in Tudors, for already he could feel them gathering. On summer weekends he would start the Flymo for Cicily; they would go as usual to the Borders in July. But as they perused the menu in the bar of the Glenview Hotel they’d dread the moment when the waiter took it from them, when they could put off no longer the conversation that eluded them. At Christmas it would be all right because, as usual, Julia and James and the children would come to Tudors, but in the bleak hours after they’d left the emptiness would have an awful edge. Mags had chattered so.

Changing out of the sober clothes she’d worn for the funeral, Cicily recalled a visit with Mags to Fenwick’s. It was she who had suggested it, 1969 it must have been, ‘I insist,’ she’d said. ‘Absolutely no arguments.’ The fact was, Mags hadn’t bought herself so much as a new scarf for years. As a girl, she’d always done her best, but living in Tudors, spending most of her day in the garden, she’d stopped bothering. ‘And if Fenwick’s haven’t anything then we go to Jaeger’s,’ Cicily had insisted. ‘We’re going to spend the whole day sorting you out.’ Mags of course had protested, but in the end had agreed. She was quite well off, having inherited a useful income from her mother; she could easily afford to splash out.

But in the event she didn’t. In Fenwick’s the saleswoman was rude. She shook her head repeatedly when Mags stood in front of a looking-glass, first in yellow and then in blue. ‘Not entirely madam’s style,’ she decreed. ‘More yours, madam,’ she suggested to Cicily. In the end they’d left the shop without anything and instead of going on to Jaeger’s went to Dickins and Jones for coffee. Mags wept, not noisily, not making a fuss. She cried with her head bent forward so that people wouldn’t see. She apologized and then confessed that she hated shopping for clothes: it was always the same, it always went wrong. Saleswomen sighed when they saw her coming. Almost before she could open her mouth she became the victim of their tired feet.

They went to D. H. Evans that day and bought a dreary wool dress in a shade of granite. It made Mags look like an old-age pensioner. ‘Really nice,’ the saleswoman assured them. ‘Really suits the lady.’

That was the trouble, Cicily reflected as she hung up the coat she’d worn for the funeral: Mags had never had the confidence to fight back. She should have pointed out to the saleswoman in Fenwick’s that the choice was hers, that she didn’t need to be told what her style was. She should have protested that Miss Harper was being unfair. She should have told Robert Blakley to go to hell. Mags had been far better-looking than she’d ever known. With decent make-up and decent clothes she could have been quite striking in her way.

Cicily brushed her hair, glancing at her own face in her dressing-table looking-glass. No saleswoman had ever dared to patronize her; her beauty saw to that. It was all so wretchedly unfair.

Later that day Cosmo sat in the small room he called his study, its walls lined with old books. He had drawn the curtains and turned on the green-shaded desk light. In the kitchen Cicily was preparing their supper, cold ham and salad, and a vegetable soup to cheer it up. He’d passed the kitchen door and seen her at it, ‘Any Questions’ on the wireless. It was his fault; he knew it was; for twenty-seven years, ever since Mags had become part of the family, it had been his fault. He should have had the wisdom to know: he should have said over his dead body or something strong like that. ‘I don’t care who she is or how she’s suffered,’ he should have insisted, ‘she’s not going to come and live with us.’ But of course it hadn’t been like that, because Mags had just drifted into the family. Anyone would have thought him mad if he’d suggested that with the passing years she’d consume his marriage.

‘Cosmo. Supper.’

He called back, saying he was coming, already putting the moment off. He turned the desk light out but when he left his study he didn’t go directly to the kitchen. ‘I’m making up the fire,’ he announced from the sitting-room, pouring himself a glass of whisky and quickly drinking it.

‘Julia seemed well,’ Cicily said, pushing the wooden bowl of salad across the kitchen table at him.

‘Yes, she did.’ It was singular in a way, he thought, that he and Cicily should have taken to their hearts a person who was, physically, so very much the opposite of them. Mags had been like a cuckoo in the midst of the handsome family, and he wondered if she’d ever noticed it, if she’d ever said to herself that it was typical of her tendency to misfortune to find herself so dramatically shown up. He wanted to talk to Cicily about that. They had to talk about everything. They had to clear the air; certainly they had to agree that they were at a beginning, that they could not just go on.

‘I suppose it was her looks,’ he said, aware that he was putting it clumsily, ‘that in the end didn’t appeal to Robert Blakley. I mean, not as much as he’d imagined.’

‘Oh, he was a horrid man.’

‘No, but I mean, Cicily –’

‘I don’t want to talk about Robert Blakley.’

Neatly she arranged ham and salad on her fork. Any time she wanted to, he thought, she could pick up an affair. Men still found her as worth a second look as they always had: you could see it at cocktail parties and on trains, or even walking with her on the street. He felt proud of her, and glad that she hadn’t let herself go.

‘No, I meant she wasn’t much to look at ever,’ he said.

‘Poor Mags had far more than looks. Let’s not dwell on this, Cosmo.’

‘I think we have to, dear.’

‘She’s dead. Nothing we can say will bring her back.’

‘It’s not that kind of thing we have to talk about.’

‘She wanted her clothes to go to Oxfam. Except what she left to Mrs Forde. I’ll see to that tonight.’

When, seven years ago, Cosmo had had an affair with a girl in his office the guilt he might have felt had failed to come about. His unfaithfulness –the only occasion of it in his marriage – had not caused him remorse and heart-searching, as he’d expected it would. He did not return to Tudors after an afternoon with the girl to find himself wanting at once to confess to Cicily. Nor did he walk into a room and find Cicily seeming to be forlorn because she was being wronged and did not know it. He did not think of her, alone and even lonely, while he was with the girl. Such thoughts were unnecessary because Cicily was always all right, because there was always Mags. It had even occasionally seemed to him that she had Mags and he the girl.

Cosmo had never in any way objected to the presence of Mags in his house. She had made things easier all round, it was a mutually satisfactory arrangement. Even at the time of his office affair it had not occurred to him that her presence could possibly be designated as an error; and in all honesty she had never been a source of irritation to him. It was her death, her absence, that had brought the facts to light.

‘We have to talk, you know,’ he said, still eating ham and salad. ‘There are all sorts of things to come to terms with.’

‘Talk, Cosmo? What things? What do you mean?’

‘We could have made a mistake, you know, having Mags here all these years.’

She frowned. She shook her head, more in bewilderment than denial. He said, ‘I think we need to talk about it now.’

But Cicily wanted to be quiet. Immediately after supper she’d go through the clothes, arranging them for Oxfam, keeping back the things for Mrs Forde. She wanted to get it done as soon as possible. She remembered being in the sanatorium one time with Mags, both of them with measles. They’d talked for hours about what they’d like to do with their lives. She herself had at that time wanted to be a nurse. ‘I want to have babies,’ Mags had said. ‘I want to marry a decent kind of man and have a house in the country somewhere and bring up children.’

‘You see,’ Cosmo was saying, ‘there’ll be a certain adjustment.’

She nodded, not really listening. Half of Mags’s desire had come about: at least she’d lived in a house in the country and at least she’d brought up children, even if the children weren’t her own. There still was a school photograph, she and Mags and a girl called Evie Hopegood sitting in the sun outside the library. Just after it had been taken Miss Harper had come along and given Mags a row for sprawling in her chair.

‘Incidentally,’ Cicily said, ‘the man’s coming to mend that window-sash tomorrow.’

Cosmo didn’t reply. Perhaps this wasn’t the right moment to pursue the matter. Perhaps in a day or two, when she’d become more used to the empty house, he should try again.

They finished their meal. He helped her to wash up, something that hadn’t been necessary in the past. She went upstairs, he watched the television in the sitting-room.

Young men and girls were playing a game with tractor tyres. They were dressed in running shorts and singlets, one team’s red, the other’s yellow. Points were scored, a man with a pork-pie hat grimaced into the camera and announced the score. Another man breezed up, trailing a microphone. He placed an arm around the first man’s shoulders and said that things were really hotting up. Huge inflated ducks appeared, the beginning of another game. Cosmo turned the television off.

He poured himself another drink. He was aware that he wanted to be drunk, which was, in other circumstances, a condition he avoided. He knew that in a day or two the conversation he wished to have would be equally difficult. He’d go on trying to have it and every effort would fail. He drank steadily, walking up and down the long, low-ceiling sitting-room, glancing out into the garden, where dusk was already gathering. He turned the television on again and found the young men and girls playing a game with buckets of coloured water. He changed the channel. ‘I can’t help being a lotus-eater,’ a man was saying, while an elderly woman wept. Elsewhere Shipham’s paste was being promoted.

‘It’s no good putting it off,’ Cosmo said, standing in the doorway of the room that had been Mags’s. He had filled his glass almost to the brim and then had added a spurt of soda water. ‘We have to talk about our marriage, Cicily.’

She dropped a tweed skirt on to Mrs Forde’s pile on the floor. She frowned, thinking she must have misheard. It was unlike him to drink after supper, or indeed before. He’d brought a strong smell of alcohol into the room, which for some reason offended her.

‘Our marriage,’ he repeated.

‘What about it?’

‘I’ve been trying to say, Cicily. I want to talk about it. Now that Mags is dead.’

‘Whatever had poor Mags to do with it? And now that she is dead, how on earth –?’

‘Actually she consumed it.’

He knew he was not sober, but he knew as well that he was telling the truth. He had a feeling that had been trying to surface for days, which finally had succeeded in doing so while he was watching the athletes with the tractor tyres: deprived of a marriage herself, Mags had lived off theirs. Had she also, he wondered, avenged herself without knowing it?

These feelings about Mags had intensified since he’d been watching the television show, and it now seemed to Cosmo that everything had been turned inside out by her death. He wondered if James and Julia, looking back one day on their parents’ marriage, would agree that the presence of Mags in the house had been a mistake; he wondered if Cicily ever would.

‘Consumed?’ Cicily said. ‘I wasn’t aware –’

‘We were neither of us aware.’

‘I don’t know why you’re drinking whisky.’

‘Cicily, I want to tell you: I had an affair with a girl seven years ago.’

She stared at him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes unblinking. Then she puckered up her forehead, frowning again.

‘You never told me,’ she said, feeling the protest to be absurd as soon as she’d made it.

‘I have to tell you now, Cicily.’

She sat down on the bed that had been her friend’s. His voice went on speaking, saying something about Mags always being there, mentioning the Glenview Hotel for some reason, mentioning Robert Blakley and saying that Mags had probably intended no ill-will.

‘But you liked her,’ she whispered. ‘You liked her and what on earth had poor Mags –’

‘I’m trying to say I’m sorry, Cicily.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’m sorry for being unfaithful.’

‘But how could I not know? How could you go off with someone else and I not notice anything?’

‘I think because Mags was here.’

She closed her eyes, not wanting to see him, in the doorway with his whisky. It didn’t make sense what he was saying. Mags was their friend; Mags had never in her life said a thing against him. It was unfair to bring Mags into it. It was ludicrous and silly, like trying to find an excuse.

‘The whole thing,’ he said, ‘from start to finish is all my fault. I shouldn’t have allowed Mags to be here, I should have known.’

She opened her eyes and looked across the room at him. He was standing exactly as he had been before, wretchedness in his face. ‘You’re making this up,’ she said, believing that he must be, believing that for some reason he’d been jealous of Mags all these years and now was trying to revenge himself by inventing a relationship with some girl. He was not the kind to go after girls; he wasn’t the kind to hurt people.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m making nothing up.’ The girl had wept when, in the end, he’d decreed that for her there was too little in it to justify their continuing the association. He’d felt about the girl the way he’d wanted to feel about being unfaithful to Cicily: guilty and ashamed and miserable.

‘I can’t believe it of you,’ Cicily whispered, weeping as the girl had wept. ‘I feel I’m in an awful nightmare.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘My God, what use is saying you’re sorry? We had a perfectly good marriage, we were a happy family –’

‘My dear, I’m not denying that. All I’m saying –’

‘All you’re saying,’ she cried out bitterly, ‘is that none of it meant anything to you. Did you hate me? Did I repel you? Was she marvellous, this girl? Did she make you feel young again? My God, you hypocrite!’

She picked up from the bed a summer dress that had been Mags’s, a pattern of checks in several shades of blue. She twisted it between her hands, but Cosmo knew that the action was involuntary, that she was venting her misery on the first thing that came to hand.

‘It’s the usual thing,’ she said more quietly, ‘for men in middle age.’

‘Cicily –’

‘Girls are like prizes at a fun-fair. You shoot a row of ducks and there’s your girl with her child’s complexion still, and her rosebud lips and eager breasts –’

‘Please, Cicily –’

‘Why shouldn’t she have eager breasts, for God’s sake? At least don’t deny her her breasts or her milky throat, or her eyes that melted with love. Like a creature in a Sunday supplement, was she? Advertising vodka or tipped cigarettes, discovering herself with an older man. You fell in love with all that and you manage to blame a woman who’s dead. Why not blame yourself, Cosmo? Why not simply say you wanted a change?’

‘I do blame myself. I’ve told you I do.’

‘Why didn’t you marry your girl? Because James and Julia would have despised you? Because she wouldn’t have you?’

He didn’t reply, and a reply wasn’t really expected. She was right when she mentioned their children. He’d known at the time of the affair that they would have despised him for making what they’d have considered to be a fool of himself, going off with a girl who was young enough to be his daughter.

‘I want you to understand about Mags,’ he said. ‘There’s something we have to talk about, it’s all connected, Cicily. I should have felt sorry for you, but there was always you and Mags, chatting. I kept saying you were all right because you had Mags. I couldn’t help it, Cicily.’

‘Mags has nothing to do with it. Mags was always blamed by people, ill-used behind her back –’

‘I know. I’m sorry. It simply appears to be true, it’s hard to understand.’

She sobbed, seeming not to have heard him, still twisting the dress between her fingers. She whispered something but he couldn’t hear what it was. He said:

‘I’m telling you because I love you, Cicily. Because it can’t be between us.’

But even as he spoke he wasn’t certain that he still loved Cicily. There was something stale in their relationship, even a whiff of tedium. A happy ending would be that Cicily would find another man and he a girl as different from Cicily as the girl in his office had been. Why should they sit for the rest of their days in Tudors or the bar of the Glenview Hotel trying to make bricks without straw? What was the point, in middle age, of such a dreary effort?

In the room that had been Mags’s the weeping of Cicily grew louder and eventually she flung her head on to the pillow and pressed her face into its softness in an effort to stifle her sobs. He looked around at the familiar clothes – dresses and hats and skirts and blouses, pairs of shoes lined up on the floor. At this age happy endings with other people weren’t two a penny, and for a moment he wondered if perhaps they had the strength and the patience to blow life into a marriage with which they had lost touch. He shook his head, still standing by the door while Cicily wept. It was asking too much of her; how could she suddenly look back at every cut knee Mags had bandaged, every cake she’d baked, every word she’d spoken, and see them differently? How could she come to consider that Mags, an innocent predator, had got her own back simply by being in their house? Yet Cosmo knew that that was the truth. He and Cicily would try for a bit because they had no option, but the disruption that Mags’s modest presence had so meticulously denied would creep all through their marriage now, a victim’s legacy from her victim’s world.

The News from Ireland

Poor Irish Protestants is what the Fogartys are: butler and cook. They have church connections, and conversing with Miss Fogarty people are occasionally left with the impression that their father was a rural dean who suffered some misfortune: in fact he was a sexton. Fogarty is the younger and the smaller of the pair, brought up by Miss Fogarty, their mother dying young. His life was saved by his sister’s nursing the time he caught scarlatina, when he was only eight.

Dapper in his butler’s clothes, a slight and unimposing man with a hazelnut face, Fogarty is at present fascinated by the newly arrived governess: Anna Maria Heddoe, from somewhere in England, a young woman of principle and sensibility, stranger and visitor to Ireland. Fogarty is an educated man, and thinks of other visitors there have been: the Celts, whose ramshackle gypsy empire expired in this same landscape, St Patrick with his holy shamrock, the outrageous Vikings preceding the wily Normans, the adventurers of the Virgin Queen. His present employers arrived here also, eight years ago, in 1839. The Pulvertafts of Ipswich, as Fogarty thinks of them, and wishes they had not bothered to make the journey after old Hugh Pulvertaft died. House and estate fell away under the old man, and in Fogarty’s opinion it is a pity the process didn’t continue until everything was driven back into the clay it came from. Instead of which along had come the Pulvertafts of Ipswich, taking on more staff, clearing the brambles from the garden in their endeavour to make the place what it had been in the past, long before the old man’s time. The Pulvertafts of Ipswich belong here now. They make allowances for the natives, they come to terms, they learn to live with things. Fogarty has watched surprise and dismay fade from their faces. He has watched these people becoming important locally, and calling the place they have come to ‘home’. Serving them in the dining-room, holding for them a plate of chops or hurrying to them a gravy dish, he wishes he might speak the truth as it appears to him: that their fresh, decent blood is the blood of the invader though they are not themselves invaders, that they perpetrate theft without being thieves. He does not dislike the Pulvertafts of Ipswich, he has nothing against them beyond the fact that they did not stay where they were. He and his sister might alone have attended the mouldering of the place, urging it back to the clay.

The governess is interesting to Fogarty because she is another of the strangers whom the new Pulvertafts have gathered around them in their advent. Such visitors, in the present and in the past, obsess the butler. He observes Miss Heddoe daily; he studies her closely and from a distance, but he does not reveal his obsession to his sister, who would consider it peculiar. He carries Miss Heddoe’s meals to her room when normally this duty would be Cready’s or Brigid’s; he reads the letters she receives, and the diary she intermittently keeps.

October 15th, 1847. I look out of the window of my attic room, and in the early morning the men are already labouring on the road that is to encircle the estate. The estate manager, the one-armed Mr Erskine, oversees them from his horse. Mr Pulvertaft rides up, gesturing about some immediate necessity – how a particular shrub must be avoided, so his gestures suggest, or where best to construct a bridge. The estate manager listens and assents, his men do not cease in their work. Beyond the trees, beyond the high stone walls of the estate, women and children die of the hunger that God has seen fit to visit upon them. In my prayers I ask for mercy.

October 17th, 1847. Fogarty came in with my dinner on a tray and said that the marks of the stigmata had been discovered on a child.

‘Is the child alive?’ I demanded when he returned a half-hour later for the tray.

‘Oh yes, miss. No doubt on that. The living child was brought to Father Horan.’

I was amazed but he seemed hardly surprised. I questioned him but he was vague; and the conversation continuing because he lingered, I told him the Legend of the True Cross, with which he was unfamiliar. He was delighted to hear of its elaborations, and said he would recount these in the kitchen. The stigmata on the child have been revealed on feet and hands only, but the priest has said that other parts of the body must be watched. The priest has cautiously given an opinion: that so clearly marked a stigma has never before been known in Ireland. The people consider it a miracle, a sign from God in these distressful times.

October 20th, 1847. I am not happy here. I do not understand this household, neither the family nor the servants. This is the middle of my third week, yet I am still in all ways at a loss. Yesterday, in the afternoon, I was for the first time summoned to the drawing-room to hear Adelaide play her pieces, and George Arthur’s lessons being over for the day he sat by me, as naturally he should. Charlotte and her mother occupied the sofa, Emily a chair in a recess. Mr Pulvertaft stood toasting his back at the fire, his riding-crop tapping time on the side of his polished boot. They made a handsome family picture – Emily beautiful, Charlotte petite and pretty, the plump motherliness of Mrs Pulvertaft, her husband’s ruddy presence. I could not see George Arthur’s features, for he was a little in front of me, but I knew them well from the hours I have surveyed them across our lessons-table. He is bright-faced, and dark like all the family except Mrs Pulvertaft, whose hair I would guess was red before becoming grey. Only Adelaide, bespectacled and seeming heavy for her age, does not share the family’s gift of grace. Poor Adelaide is cumbersome; her movements are awkward at the piano and she really plays it most inelegantly.

Yet in the drawing-room no frown or wince betrayed the listeners’ ennui. As though engrossed in a performance given by a fine musician, Mr Pulvertaft slightly raised and dropped his riding-crop, as he might a baton; similarly expressing absorption, his wife’s lips were parted, the hurry and worry of her nature laid aside, her little eyes delighted. And Emily and Charlotte sat as girls more graciously endowed than a plain sister should, neither pouting nor otherwise recoiling from the halting cacophony. I too-I hope successfully – forced delight into an expression that constantly sought to betray me, while surreptitiously examining my surroundings. (I cannot be certain of what passed, or did not pass, over George Arthur’s features: in the nursery, certainly, he is not slow to display displeasure.)

The drawing-room is lofty and more than usually spacious, with pleasant recesses, and french windows curving along a single wall. Two smaller windows flank the fireplace, which is of white marble that reflects, both in colour and in the pattern of its carving, the white plasterwork of the ceiling. Walls are of an apricot shade, crowded with landscape scenes and portraits of the Pulvertafts who belong to the past. Silks and velvets are mainly green; escritoires and occasional tables are cluttered with ornaments and porcelain pieces – too many for my own taste, but these are family heirlooms which it would be impolite to hide away. So Mrs Pulvertaft has explained, for the same degree of overcrowding obtains in the hall and dining-room, and on the day of my arrival she remarked upon it.

‘Most charmingly rendered,’ her husband pronounced when the music ceased. ‘What fingers Adelaide is blessed with!’

Hands in the drawing-room were delicately clapped. Mr Pulvertaft applauded with his riding-crop. I pursed my lips at the back of George Arthur’s head, for he was perhaps a little rumbustious in his response.

‘Is not Adelaide talented, Miss Heddoe?’ Mrs Pulvertaft suggested.

‘Indeed, ma’am.’

Two maids, Cready and Brigid, brought in tea. I rose to go, imagining my visit to the drawing-room must surely now be concluded. But Mrs Pulvertaft begged me to remain.

‘We must get to know you, Miss Heddoe,’ she insisted in her bustling manner. (It is from his mother, I believe, that George Arthur inherits his occasional boisterousness.) ‘And you,’ she added, ‘us.’

I felt, to tell the truth, that I knew the Pulvertafts fairly well already. I was not long here before I observed that families and events are often seen historically in Ireland – more so, for some reason, than in England. It surprised me when Mrs Pulvertaft went into details soon after I arrived, informing me that on the death of a distant relative Mr Pulvertaft had found himself the inheritor of this overseas estate. Though at first he had apparently resisted the move to another country, he ended by feeling it his bounden duty to accept the responsibility. ‘It was a change of circumstances for us, I can tell you that,’ Mrs Pulvertaft confessed. ‘But had we remained in Ipswich these many acres would have continued to lose heart. There have been Pulvertafts here, you know, since Queen Elizabeth granted them the land.’ I thought, but did not remark, that when Mr Pulvertaft first looked upon drawings of the house and gardens his unexpected inheritance must have seemed like a gift from heaven, which in a sense it was, for the distant relative had been by all accounts a good man.

‘Much undergrowth has yet to be cleared and burnt,’ Mr Pulvertaft was saying now, with reference to the estate road that was being built. ‘The merry fires along the route will continue for a while to come. Next, stones must be chipped and laid, and by the lakeside the ground raised and strengthened. Here and there we must have ornamental seats.’

Cake was offered to us by Cready and by Brigid. It was not my place in the drawing-room to check the manners of George Arthur, but they do leave much to he desired. Old Miss Larvey, who was my predecessor and governess to all four children, had clearly become slack before her death. I smiled a little at George Arthur, and was unable to resist moving my fingers slightly in his direction, a gesture to indicate that a more delicate consuming of the cake would not be amiss. He pretended, mischievously, not to notice.

‘Will the road go round Bright Purple Hill?’ Emily inquired. ‘It would be beautiful if it did.’

It could be made to do so, her father agreed. Yes, certainly it could go round the northern slopes at least. He would speak to Erskine.

‘Now, what could be nicer,’ he resumed, ‘than a picnic of lunch by the lake, then a drive through the silver birches, another pause by the abbey, continuing by the river for a mile, and home by Bright Purple Hill? This road, Miss Heddoe, has become my pride.’

I smiled and nodded, acknowledging this attention in silence. I knew that there was more to the road than that: its construction was an act of charity, a way of employing the men for miles around, since the failure of their potato crops had again reduced them to poverty and idleness. In years to come the road would stand as a memorial to this awful time, and Mr Pulvertaft’s magnanimity would be recalled with gratitude.

‘Might copper beech trees mark the route?’ suggested Adelaide, her dumpling countenance freshened by the excitement this thought induced. Her eyes bulged behind her spectacles and I noticed that her mother, in glancing at her, resisted the impulse to sigh.

‘Beech trees indeed! Quite splendid!’ enthused Mr Pulvertaft. ‘And in future Pulvertaft generations they shall arch a roof, shading our road when need be. Yes, indeed there must be copper beech trees.’

The maids had left the drawing-room and returned now with lamps. They fastened the shutters and drew the curtains over. The velvets and silks changed colour in the lamplight, the faces of the portraits became as they truly were, the faces of ghosts.

A silence gathered after the talk of beech trees, and I found myself surprised at no one mentioning the wonder Fogarty had told me of, the marks of Christ on a peasant child. It seemed so strange and so remarkable, an occurrence of such import and magnitude, that I would hardly have believed it possible that any conversation could take place in the house without some astonished reference to it. Yet none had been made, and the faces and the voices in the drawing-room seemed as untouched by this visitation of the miraculous as they had been by Adelaide’s labouring on the piano. In the silence I excused myself and left, taking George Arthur with me, for my time to do so had come.

October 23rd, 1847. I am homesick, I make no bones about it. I cannot help dwelling on all that I have left behind, on familiar sounds and places. First thing when I awake I still imagine I am in England: reality comes most harshly then.

While I write, Emily and George Arthur are conversing in a corner of the nursery. She has come here, as she does from time to time, to persuade him against a military career. I wish she would not do so in this manner, wandering in and standing by the window to await the end of a lesson. It is distracting for George Arthur, and after all this is my domain.

‘What I mean, George Arthur, is that it is an uncomfortable life in a general sort of way.’

‘Captain Coleborne does not seem uncomfortable. When you look at him he doesn’t give that impression in the least.’

‘Captain Coleborne hasn’t lived in a barracks in India. That leaves a mark, so people say.’

‘I should not mind a barracks. And India I should love.’

‘I doubt it, actually. Flies carry disease in India, the water you drink is putrid. And you would mind a barracks because they’re rough and ready places.’

‘You’d drink something else if the water was putrid. You’d keep well away from the flies.’

‘You cannot in India. No, George Arthur, I assure you you enjoy your creature comforts. You’d find the uniform rough on your skin and the food unappetizing. Besides, you have a family duty here.’

The nursery is a long, low-ceilinged room, with a fire at one end, close to which I sit as I write, for the weather has turned bitter. The big, square lessons-table occupies the centre of the room, and when Fogarty brings my tray he places it on the smaller table at which I’m writing now. There are pictures on the walls which I must say I find drab: one, in shades of brown, of St George and the Dragon; another of a tower; others of farmyard scenes. The nursery’s two armchairs, occupied now by George Arthur and Emily, are at the other end with a rug between them. The floor is otherwise of polished board.

‘Well, the truth is, George Arthur, I cannot bear the thought of your being killed.’

With that, Emily left the nursery. She smiled in her graceful manner at me, her head a little to one side, her dark, coiled hair gleaming for a moment in a shaft of afternoon sun. I had not thought a governess’s position was difficult in a household, but somehow I am finding it so. I belong neither with the family nor the servants. Fogarty, in spite of calling me ‘miss’, addresses me more casually than he does the Pulvertafts; his sister is scarcely civil.

‘Do they eat their babies, like in the South Seas?’ George Arthur startled me by asking. He had crossed to where I sat and in a manner reminiscent of his father stood with his back to the fire, thereby blocking its warmth from me.

‘Do who eat their babies, George Arthur?’

‘The poor people.’

‘Of course they don’t.’

‘But they are hungry. They have been hungry for ever so long. My mother and sisters give out soup at the back gate-lodge.’

‘Hungry people do not eat their babies. And I think, you know, it’s enemies, not babies, who are eaten in the South Seas.’

‘But suppose a family’s baby did die and suppose the family was hungry–’

‘No, George Arthur, you must not talk like that.’

‘Fogarty says he would not be surprised.’

‘Well, she has settled down, I think,’ Mrs Pulvertaft remarks to her husband in their bedroom, and when he asks her whom she refers to she says the governess.

‘Pleasant enough, she seems,’ he replies. ‘I do prefer, you know, an English governess.’

‘Oh yes, indeed.’

George Arthur’s sisters have developed no thoughts about Miss Heddoe. They neither like nor dislike her; they do not know her; their days of assessing governesses are over.

But George Arthur’s aren’t. She is not as pretty as Emily or Charlotte, George Arthur considers, and she is very serious. When she smiles her smile is serious. The way she eats her food is serious, carefully cutting everything, carefully and slowly chewing. Often he comes into the nursery to find her eating from the tray that Fogarty carries up the back staircase for her, sitting all alone on one side of the fireplace, seeming very serious indeed. Miss Larvey had been different somehow, although she’d eaten her meals in much the same position, seated at the very same table, by the fire. Miss Larvey was untidy, her grey hair often working loose from its coils, her whole face untidy sometimes, her tray untidily left.

‘Now it is transcription time,’ Miss Heddoe says, interrupting these reflections. ‘Carefully and slowly, please.’

Fogarty thinks about the governess, but hides such thoughts from his sister. Miss Heddoe will surely make a scene, exclaiming and protesting, saying to the Pulvertafts all the things a butler cannot. She will stand in the drawing-room or the hall, smacking out the truth at them, putting in a nutshell all that must be said. She will bring up the matter of the stigmata found on the child, and the useless folly of the road, and the wisdom of old Hugh Pulvertaft. She will be the voice of reason. Fogarty dwells upon these thoughts while conversing with his sister, adept at dividing his mind. His faith is in the governess.

‘Declare to God,’ remarks Miss Fogarty, ‘Brigid’ll be the death of me. Did you ever know a stupider girl?’

‘There was a girl we had once who was stupider,’ Fogarty replies. ‘Fidelma was she called?’

They sit at the wide wooden table that is the pivot of kitchen activities. The preparation of food, the polishing of brass and silver, the stacking of dishes, the disposal of remains, the eating and drinking, all card-playing and ironing, all cutting out of patterns and cloth, the trimming of lamps: the table has as many uses as the people of the kitchen can devise. Tears have soaked into its grain, and blood from meat and accidents; the grease of generations polishes it, not quite scrubbed out by the efforts made, twice every day, With soap and water.

The Fogartys sit with their chairs turned a little away from the table, so that they partly face the range and in anticipation of the benefit they will shortly receive from the glow of dampened slack. It is their early evening pose, daily the same from October to May. In summer the sunlight penetrates to the kitchen in a way that at first seems alien but later is welcomed. It spreads over the surface of the table, drying it out. It warms the Fogartys, who move their chairs to catch its rays when they rest in the early evening.

‘You would not credit,’ remarks Miss Fogarty, ‘that Brigid has been three years in this kitchen. More like three seconds.’

‘There are some that are untrainable.’ His teeth are less well preserved than his sister’s. She is the thinner of the two, razorlike in face and figure.

‘I said at the time I would prefer a man. A man is more trainable in my opinion. A man would be more use to yourself.’

‘Ah, Cready knows the dining-room by now. I wouldn’t want a change made there.’

‘It’s Cready we have to thank for Brigid. Wasn’t it Cready who had you blackguarded until you took her on?’

‘We had to take someone. To give Cready her due she said we’d find her slow.’

‘I’ll tell you this: Cready’s no racehorse herself.’

‘The slowness is in that family.’

‘Whatever He did He forgot to put brains in them.’

‘We live with His mistakes.’

Miss Fogarty frowns. She does not care for that remark. Her brother is sometimes indiscreet in his speech. It is his nature, it is part of his cleverness; but whenever she feels uneasy she draws his attention to the source of her uneasiness, as she does now. It is a dangerous remark, she says, better it had not been made.

Fogarty nods, knowing the nod will soothe her. He has no wish to have her flurried.

‘The road is going great guns,’ he says, deeming a change of subject wise. ‘They were on about it in the dining-room.’

‘Did they mention the ground rice pudding?’

‘They ate it. Isn’t it extraordinary, a road that goes round in a circle, not leading anywhere?’

‘Heddoe left her ground rice. A pudding’s good enough for the dining-room but not for Madam.’

‘Was there an egg in it? Her stomach can’t accept eggs.’

‘Don’t I know the woman can’t take eggs? Isn’t she on about it the entire time? There were four good turkey eggs in that pudding, and what harm did a turkey egg do anyone? Did eggs harm Larvey?’

‘Oh true enough, Larvey ate anything. If you’d took a gate off its hinges she’d have ate it while you’d wink.’

‘Larvey was a saint from heaven.’

Again Fogarty nods. In his wish not to cause flurry in his sister he refrains from saying that once upon a time Miss Larvey had been condemned as roundly as Miss Heddoe is now. When she’d been cold in her room she’d sent down to the kitchen for hot-water jars, a request that had not been popular. But when she died, as if to compensate for all this troublesomeness, Miss Larvey left the Fogarty s a remembrance in her will.

‘A while back I told Heddoe about that child. To see what she’d say for herself.’

Miss Fogarty’s peaked face registers interest. Her eyes have narrowed into the slits that all his life have reminded Fogarty of cracks in a plate or a teacup.

‘And what did the woman say?’

‘She was struck silent, then she asked me questions. After that she told me an extraordinary thing: the Legend of the True Gross.’

As Fogarty speaks, the two maids enter the kitchen. Miss Fogarty regards them with asperity, telling Brigid she looks disgraceful and Cready that her cap is dirty. ‘Get down to your work,’ she snappishly commands. ‘Brigid, push that kettle over the heat and stir a saucepan of milk for me.’

She is badly out of sorts because of Heddoe and the ground rice, Fogarty says to himself, and thinks to ease the atmosphere by relating the legend the governess has told him.

‘Listen to me, girls,’ he says, ‘while I tell you the Legend of the True Cross.’

Cready, who is not a girl, appreciates the euphemism and displays appropriate pleasure as she sets to at the sink, washing parsnips. She is a woman of sixty-one, carelessly stout. Brigid, distantly related to her and thirty or so years younger, is of the same proportions.

‘The Legend of the True Cross,’ says Fogarty, ‘has to do with a seed falling into Adam’s mouth, some say his ear. It lay there until he died, and when the body decomposed a tree grew from the seed, which in time was felled to give timber for the beams of a bridge.’

‘Well, I never heard that,’ exclaims Cready in a loud, shrill voice, so fascinated by the revelation that she cannot continue with the parsnips.

‘The Queen of Sheba crossed that bridge in her majesty. Later – well, you can guess – the Cross to which Our Lord was fastened was constructed from those very beams.’

‘Is it true, Mr Fogarty?’ cries Cready, her voice becoming still shriller in her excitement, her mouth hanging open.

‘Control yourself, Cready,’ Miss Fogarty admonishes her. ‘You look ridiculous.’

‘It’s only I was never told it before, miss. I never knew the Cross grew out of Adam’s ear. Did ever you hear it, Brigid?’

‘I did not.’

‘It’s a legend,’ Fogarty explains. ‘It illustrates the truth. It does not tell it, Miss Fogarty and myself would say. Your own religion might take it differently.’

‘Don’t you live and learn?’ says Cready.

There is a silence for some moments in the kitchen. Then Brigid, stirring the saucepan of milk on the range as Miss Fogarty has instructed her, says:

‘I wonder does Father Horan know that?’

‘God, I’d say he would all right.’ Cready wags her head, lending emphasis to this opinion. There isn’t much relating to theological matters that eludes Father Horan, she says.

‘Oh, right enough,’ agrees Fogarty. ‘The priests will run this country yet. If it’s not one crowd it’s another.’ He explains to the maids that the Legend of the True Cross has come into the house by way of the governess. It is a typical thing, he says, that a Protestant Englishwoman would pass the like of that on. Old Hugh wouldn’t have considered it suitable; and the present Pulvertafts have been long enough away from England to consider it unsuitable also. He’d guess they have anyway; he’d consider that true.

Miss Fogarty, still idle in her chair by the range, nods her agreement. She states that, legend or not, she does not care for stuff like that. In lower tones, and privately to her brother, she says she is surprised that he repeated it.

‘It’s of interest to the girls,’ he apologizes. ‘To tell the truth, you could have knocked me down when she told me in the nursery.’

*

‘The boulders from the ridge maybe used for walls and chipping?’ inquires Mr Pulvertaft of his estate manager.

‘It is a distance to carry boulders, sir.’

‘So it is, but we must continue to occupy these men, Erskine. Time is standing still for them.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The two men pace together on a lawn in front of the house, walking from one circular rose-bed to the next, then turning and reversing the procedure. It is here that Mr Pulvertaft likes to discuss the estate with Erskine, strolling on the short grass in the mid-morning. When it rains or is too bitterly cold they converse instead in the great open porch of the house, both of them gazing out into the garden. The eyes of Mr Pulvertaft and Erksine never meet, as if by unspoken agreement. Mr Pulvertaft, though speaking warmly of Erskine’s virtues, fears him; and Erskine does not trust his eye to meet his master’s in case that conjunction, however brief, should reveal too much. Mr Pulvertaft has been a painless inheritor, in Erskine’s view; his life has been without hardship, he takes too easily for granted the good fortune that came his way.

‘The road,’ he is saying now, seeming to Erskine to make his point for him, ‘is our generation’s contribution to the estate. You understand me, Erskine? A Pulvertaft planted Abbey Wood, another laid out these gardens. Swift came here, did you know that, Erskine? The Mad Dean assisted in the planning of all these lawns and shrubberies.’

‘So you told me, sir.’

It is Erskine’s left arm that is missing but he considers the loss as serious as if it had been his right. He is an Englishman, stoutly made and once of renowned strength, still in his middle age. His temper is short, his disposition unsentimental, his soldier’s manner abrupt; nor is there, beneath that vigorous exterior, a gentler core. Leading nowhere, without a real purpose, the estate road is unnecessary and absurd, but he accepts his part in its creation. It is ill fortune that people have starved because a law of nature has failed them, it is ill fortune that he has lost a limb and seen a military career destroyed: all that must be accepted also. To be the manager of an estate of such size and importance is hardly recompense for the glories that might have been. He has ended up in a country that is not his own, employing men whose speech he at first found difficult to understand, collecting rents from tenants he does not trust, as he feels he might trust the people of Worcestershire or Durham. The Pulvertaft family – with the exception of Mr Pulvertaft himself – rarely seek to hold with him any kind of conversation beyond the formalities of greeting and leave-taking. Stoically he occupies his position, ashamed because he is a one-armed man, yet never indulging in melancholy, for this he would condemn as weakness.

‘There is something concerning the men, sir.’

‘Poor fellows, there is indeed.’

‘Something other, sir. They have turned ungrateful, sir.’

‘Ungrateful?’

‘As well to keep an eye open for disaffection, sir.’

‘Good God, those men are hardly fit for that.’

‘They bite the hand that feeds them, sir. They’re reared on it.’

He speaks in a matter-of-fact voice. It is the truth as he recognizes it; he sees no point in dissembling for politeness’ sake. He watches while Mr Pulvertaft nods his reluctant agreement. He does not need to remind himself that this is a landowner who would have his estate a realm of heaven, who would have his family and his servants, his tenants and all who work for him, angels of goodness. This is a landowner who expects his own generosity of spirit to beget such generosity in others, his unstinted patronage to find a reflection in unstinted gratitude. But reality, as Erskine daily experiences, keeps shattering the dream, and may shatter it irrevocably in the end.

They speak of other matters, of immediate practicalities. Expert and informed on all the subjects raised, Erskine gives the conversation only part of his attention, devoting the greater part to the recently arrived governess. He has examined her in church on the four occasions there have been since she joined the household. Twenty-five or –six years old, he reckons, not pretty yet not as plain as the plain one among the Pulvertaft girls. Hair too severely done, features too nervous, clothes too dowdy; but all that might be altered. The hands that hold the hymn book open before her are pale as marble, the fingers slender; the lips that open and close have a hint of voluptuousness kept in check; the breast that rises and falls has caused him, once or twice, briefly to close his eyes. He would marry her if she would have him, and why should she not, despite the absence of an arm? As the estate manager’s wife she would have a more significant life than as a governess for ever.

‘Well, I must not detain you longer,’ Mr Pulvertaft says. ‘The men are simple people, remember, rough in their ways. They may find gratitude difficult and, you know, I do not expect it. I only wish to do what can be done.’

Erskine, who intends to permit no nonsense, does not say so. He strides off to where his horse is tethered in the paddocks, wondering again about the governess.

*

Stout and round, Mrs Pulvertaft lies on her bed with her eyes closed. She feels a familiar discomfort low down in her stomach, on the left side, a touch of indigestion. It is very slight, something she has become used to, arriving as it does every day in the afternoon and then going away.

Charlotte will accept Captain Coleborne; Adelaide will not marry; Emily wishes to travel. Perhaps if she travels she will meet someone suitable; she is most particular. Mrs Pulvertaft cannot understand her eldest daughter’s desire to visit France and Austria and Italy. They are dangerous places, where war is waged when offence is taken. Only England is not like that: dear, safe, uncomplicated England, thinks Mrs Pulvertaft, and for a moment is nostalgic.

The afternoon discomfort departs from her stomach, but she does not notice because gradually it has become scarcely anything at all. George Arthur must learn the ways of the estate so that he can sensibly inherit when his own time comes. Emily is right: it would be far better if he did not seek a commission. After all, except to satisfy his romantic inclination, there is no need.

Mrs Pulvertaft sighs. She hopes Charlotte will be sensible. An officer’s wife commands a considerable position when allied with means, and she has been assured that Captain Coleborne’s family, established for generations in Meath, leave nothing whatsoever to be desired socially. It is most unlikely that Charlotte will be silly since everything between her and Captain Coleborne appears to be going swimmingly, but then you never know: girls, being girls, are naturally inexperienced.

Mrs Pulvertaft dozes, and wakes a moment later. The faces of the women who beg on Sundays have haunted a brief dream. She has heard the chiming of the church bell and in some confused way the Reverend Poole’s cherub face was among the women’s, his surplice flapping in the wind. She stepped from the carriage and went towards the church. ‘Give something to the beggars,’ her husband’s voice commanded, as it does every Sunday while the bell still rings. The bell ceases only when the family are in their pew, with Mr Erskine in the Pulvertaft pew behind them and the Fogartys and Miss Heddoe in the estate pew in the south transept.

It is nobody’s fault, Mrs Pulvertaft reflects, that for the second season the potatoes have rotted in the ground. No one can be blamed. It is a horror that so many families have died, that so many bloated, poisoned bodies are piled into the shared graves. But what more can be done than is already being done? Soup is given away in the yard of the gate-lodge; the estate road gives work; the Distress Board is greatly pleased. Just and sensible laws prevent the wholesale distribution of corn, for to flood the country with corn would have consequences as disastrous as the hunger itself: that has been explained to her. Every Sunday, led by the Reverend Poole, they repeat the prayer that takes precedence over all other prayers: that God’s love should extend to the hungry at this time, that His wrath may be lifted.

Again Mrs Pulvertaft drifts into a doze. She dreams that she runs through unfamiliar landscape, although she has not run anywhere for many years. There are sand dunes and a flat expanse which is empty, except for tiny white shells, crackling beneath her feet. She seems to be naked, which is alarming, and worries her in her dream. Then everything changes and she is in the drawing-room, listening to Adelaide playing her pieces. Tea is brought in, and there is ordinary conversation.

Emily, alone, walks among the abbey ruins on the lake-shore. It is her favourite place. She imagines the chanting of the monks once upon a time and the simple life they led, transcribing Latin and worshipping God. They built where the landscape was beautiful; their view of Bright Purple Hill had been perfect.

There is a stillness among the ruins, the air is mild for late October. The monks would have fished from the shore, they would have cultivated a garden and induced bees to make honey for them. For many generations they would have buried their dead here, but their graveyards have been lost in the time that has passed.

Evening sun bronzes the heathery purple of the hill. In the spring, Emily reflects, she will begin her journeys. She will stay with her Aunt Margaret in Bath and her Aunt Tabby in Ipswich. Already she has persuaded her Aunt Margaret that it would be beneficial to both of them to visit Florence, and Vienna and Paris. She has persuaded her father that the expense of all the journeys would be money profitably spent, an education that would extend the education he has expended money on already. Emily believes this to be true; she is not prevaricating. She believes that after she has seen again the architecture of England – which she can scarcely remember – and visited the great cities of Europe, some anxious spirit within her will be assuaged. She will return to Ireland and accept a husband, as Charlotte is about to do; or not accept a husband and be content to live her life in her brother’s house, as Adelaide’s fate seems certainly to be. She will bear children; or walk among the abbey ruins a spinster, composing verse about the ancient times and the monks who fished in the lake.

A bird swoops over the water and comes to rest on the pebbled shore, not far from where Emily stands. It rises on spindly legs, stretches out its wings and pecks at itself. Then it staggers uncomfortably on the pebbles before settling into an attitude that pleases it, head drawn into its body, wings wrapped around like a cloak. Such creatures would not have changed since the time of the monks, and Emily imagines a cowled and roughly bearded figure admiring the bird from a window of the once gracious abbey. He whispers as he does so and Emily remembers enough from her lessons with Miss Larvey to know that the language he speaks is not known to her.

It is a pleasant fancy, one for verse or drawing, to be stored away and one day in the future dwelt upon, and in one way or the other transcribed to paper. She turns her back on the lake and walks slowly through the ruins, past the posts which mark the route of the estate road, by the birchwood and over the stone bridge where Jonathan Swift is said to have stood and ordered the felling of three elms that obscured the panorama which has the great house as its centre. In the far distance she can see the line of men labouring on the road, and the figure of Erskine on his horse. She passes on, following a track that is familiar to her, which skirts the estate beneath its high boundary wall. Beyond the wall lie the Pulvertaft acres of farmland, but they have no interest for Emily, being for the most part flat, a territory that is tediously passed over every Sunday on the journey to and from church.

She reaches the yard of a gate-lodge and speaks to the woman who lives there, reminding her that soup and bread will be brought again tomorrow, that the utensils left last week must be ready by eleven o’clock on the trestle tables. Everything will be waiting, the woman promises, and a high fire alight in the kitchen.

October 31st, 1847. Fogarty told me. He stood beside me while I ate my dinner by the fire: stew and rice, with cabbage; a baked apple, and sago pudding. The child with the stigmata has died and been buried.

‘And who will know now,’ he questioned, himself, as much as me, ‘exactly what was what?’

There is a kind of cunning in Fogarty’s nutlike face. The eyes narrow, and the lips narrow, and he then looks like his sister. But he is more intelligent, I would say.

‘And what is what, Mr Fogarty?’ I inquired.

‘The people are edgy, miss. At the soup canteen they are edgy, I’m to understand. And likewise on the road. There is a feeling among them that the child should not have died. It is unpleasant superstition, of course, but there is a feeling that Our Lord has been crucified again.’

‘But that’s ridiculous!’

‘I am saying so, miss. Coolly ridiculous, everything back to front. The trouble is that starvation causes a lightness in the head.’

‘Do the Pulvertafts know of this? No one but you has mentioned this child to me.’

‘I heard the matter mentioned at the dinner table. Mr Pulvertaft said that Mr Erskine had passed on to him the news that there was some superstition about. “D’you know its nature, Fogarty?” Mr Pulvertaft said, and I replied that it was to do with the marks of Our Lord’s stigmata being noticed on the feet and hands of a child.’

‘And what did anyone say then?’

‘ “Well, what’s the secret of it, Fogarty?” Mr Pulvertaft said, and I passed on to him the opinion of Miss Fogarty and myself: that the markings were inflicted at the time of birth. They had all of them reached that conclusion also: Mrs Pulvertaft and Miss Emily and Miss Charlotte and Miss Adelaide, even Master George Arthur, no doubt, although he was not present then. As soon as ever they heard the news they had come to that assumption. Same with Mr Erskine.’

I stared, astonished, at the butler. I could not believe what he was telling me: that all these people had independently dismissed, so calmly and so finally, what the people who were closer to the event took to be a miracle. I had known, from the manner in which Fogarty spoke after his introduction of the subject, that he was in some way dubious. But I had concluded that he doubted the existence of the marks, that he doubted the reliability of the priest. I had never seen Father Horan, so did not know what kind of man he was even in appearance, or what age. Fogarty had told me he’d never seen him either, but from what he gathered through the maids the priest was of advanced years. Fogarty said now:

‘My sister and I only decided that that was the truth of it after Cready and Brigid had gone on about the thing for a long time, how the priest was giving out sermons on it, how the bishop had come on a special journey and how a letter had been sent to Rome. Our first view was that the old priest had been presented with the child after he’d had a good couple of glasses. And then oiled up again and shown the child a second time. He’s half blind, I’ve heard it said, and if enough people raved over marks that didn’t exist, sure wouldn’t he agree instead of admitting he was drunk and couldn’t see properly? But as soon as Miss Fogarty and myself heard that the bishop had stirred his stumps and a letter had gone to Rome we realized the affair was wearing a different pair of shoes. They’re as wily as cockroaches, these old priests, and there isn’t one among them who’d run a chance of showing himself up by giving out sermons and summoning his bishop. He’d have let the matter rest, he’d have kept it local if he was flummoxed. “No doubt at all,” Miss Fogarty said. “They’ve put marks on the baby.” ’

I couldn’t eat. I shivered even though I was warm from the fire. I found it difficult to speak, but in the end I said:

‘But why on earth would this cruel and blasphemous thing be done? Surely it could have been real, truly there, as stigmata have occurred in the past?’

‘I would doubt that, miss. And hunger would give cruelty and blasphemy a different look. That’s all I’d say. Seven other children have been buried in that family, and the two sets of grandparents. There was only the father and the mother with the baby left. “Sure didn’t they see the way things was turning?” was how Miss Fogarty put it. “Didn’t they see an RIP all ready for them, and wouldn’t they be a holy family with the baby the way they’d made it, and wouldn’t they be sure of preservation because of it?’ ”

In his dark butler’s clothes, the excitement that enlivened his small face lending him a faintly sinister look, Fogarty smiled at me. The smile was grisly; I did not forgive it, and from that moment I liked the butler as little as I liked his sister. His smile, revealing sharp, discoloured teeth, was related to the tragedy of a peasant family that had been almost extinguished, as, one by one, lamps are in a house at night. It was related to the desperation of survival, to an act so barbarous that one could not pass it by.

‘A nine days’ wonder,’ Fogarty said. ‘I’d say it wasn’t a bad thing the child was buried. Imagine walking round with a lie like that on you for all your mortal days.’

He took the tray and went away. I heard him in the lavatory off the nursery landing, depositing the food I hadn’t eaten down the WC so that he wouldn’t have to listen to his sister’s abuse of me. I sat until the fire sank low, without the heart to put more coal on it even though the coal was there. I kept seeing that faceless couple and their just-born child, the woman exhausted, in pain, tormented by hunger, with no milk to give her baby. Had they touched the tiny feet and hands with a hot coal? Had they torn the skin open, as Christ’s had been on the Cross? Had either of them in that moment been even faintly sane? I saw the old priest, gazing in wonder at what they later showed him. I saw the Pulvertafts in their dining-room, accepting what had occurred as part of their existence in this house. Must not life go on lest all life cease? A confusion ran wildly in my head, a jumble without a pattern, all sense befogged. In a civilized manner nobody protested at the cacophony in the drawing-room when the piano was played, and nobody spoke to me of the stigmata because the subject was too terrible for conversation.

I wept before I went to bed. I wept again when I lay there, hating more than ever the place I am in, where people are driven back to savagery.

*

‘The men have not arrived this morning,’ Erskine reports. ‘I suspected they might not from their demeanour last evening. They attach some omen to this death.’

‘But surely to heavens they see the whole thing was a fraud?’

‘They do not think so, sir. Any more than they believe that the worship of the Virgin Mary is a fraud perpetrated by the priests. Or that the Body and the Blood is. Fraud is grist to their mill.’

Mr Pulvertaft thanks Erskine for reporting the development to him. The men will return to their senses in time, the estate manager assures him. What has happened is only a little thing. Hunger is the master.

Emily packs for her travels, and vows she will not forget the lake, or the shadows and echoes of the monks. In Bath and Florence, in Vienna and Paris she will keep faith with her special corner, where the spirit of a gentler age lingers.

Mrs Pulvertaft dreams that the Reverend Poole ascends to the pulpit with a bath towel over his shoulder. From this day forth we must all carry bath towels wherever we go, and the feet of Jesus must be dried as well as washed. ‘And the woman anointed the feet,’ proclaims the Reverend Poole, ‘and Jesus thanked her and blessed her and went upon his way.’ But Mrs Pulvertaft is unhappy because she does not know which of the men is Jesus. They work with shovels on the estate road, and when she asks them they tell her, in a most unlikely manner, to go away.

Alone in front of the drawing-room piano, Adelaide sits stiffly upright, not wishing to play because she is not in the mood. Again, only minutes ago, Captain Coleborne has not noticed her. He did not notice her at lunch; he did not address a single word to her, he evaded her glance as if he could not bear to catch it. Charlotte thinks him dull; she has said so, yet she never spurns his attentions. And he isn’t dull. His handsome face, surmounting his sturdily handsome body, twinkles with vigour and with life. He has done so much and when he talks about the places he has been he is so interesting she could listen to him for ages.

Adelaide’s spectacles have misted. She takes them off and wipes them with her handkerchief. She must not go red when he comes again, or when his name is mentioned. Going red will give away her secret and Emily and Charlotte will guess and feel sorry for her, which she could not bear.

‘Very well,’ Charlotte says by the sundial in the fuchsia garden.

Captain Coleborne blinks his eyes in an ecstasy of delight, and Charlotte thinks that yes, it probably will be nice, knowing devotion like this for ever.

‘Heddoe’s gone broody,’ Fogarty reports in the kitchen.

‘Not sickness in the house! One thing you could say about Larvey, she was never sick for an hour.’

‘I think Heddoe’ll maybe leave.’ Fogarty speaks with satisfaction. The governess might leave because she finds it too much that such a thing should happen to a baby, and that her employers do not remark on it because they expect no better of these people. Erskine might be knocked from his horse by the men in a fit of anger because the death has not been honoured in the house or by the family. Erskine might lie dead himself on the day of the governess’s departure, and the two events, combining, would cause these Pulvertafts of Ipswich to see the error of their ways and return to their native land.

The china rattles on the tea-trays which the maids carry to the draining boards, and Fogarty lights the lamps which he has arrayed on the table, as he does every afternoon at this time in winter. He inspects each flame before satisfying himself that the trimming of the wick is precisely right, then one after another places the glasses in their brass supports and finally adjusts each light.

The maids unburden the trays at the sink, Miss Fogarty places a damp cloth around a fruitcake and lays aside sandwiches and scones, later to be eaten in the kitchen. Then the maids take the lamps that are ready and begin another journey through the house.

In the nursery Miss Heddoe reads from the history book Miss Larvey has used before her: ‘In this manner the monasteries were lawfully dissolved, for the King believed they harboured vile and treacherous plots and were the breeding grounds for future disaffection. The King was privy, through counsellors and advisers, of the vengeance that was daily planned, but was wise and bade his time.’

George Arthur does not listen. He is thinking about the savages of the South Sea islands who eat their enemies. He has always thought it was their babies they ate, and wonders if he has misunderstood something Miss Larvey said on the subject. He wonders then if Emily could possibly be right in what she says about the discomfort of the regimental life. It is true that he enjoys being close to the fire, and likes the cosiness of the nursery in the evenings; and it is true that he doesn’t much care for rough material next to his skin. He knows that in spite of what Emily says officers like Captain Coleborne would not be made to drink putrid water, and that flies can’t kill you, but the real thing is that he is expected to stay here because he is the only son, because somebody will have to look after the place when his father isn’t able to any more. ‘Duty’, Emily says, and it is that in the end that will steal from him his dream of military glory. Itchy and uneasy, like the bite of an insect, this duty already nags him.

January 12th, 1848. Today it snowed. The fall began after breakfast and continued until it was almost dark. Great drifts have piled up in the garden, and from my window the scene is beautiful. George Arthur has a cold and so remained in bed; he is too feverish for lessons.

January 18th, 1848. The snow is high on the ground. In the garden we break the ice on pools and urns so that the birds may drink. Scraps are thrown out of the scullery doors for them.

February 4th, 1848. It is five months since I arrived here, and all that I have learnt is distressing. There is nothing that is not so. Last night I could not sleep again. I lay there thinking of the starvation, of the faces of the silent women when they come to the gate-lodge for food. There is a yellow-greyness in the flesh of their faces, they are themselves like obedient animals. Their babies die when they feed them grass and roots; in their arms at the gate-lodge the babies who survive are silent also, too weak to cry until the sustenance they receive revives them. Last night I lay thinking of the men who are turned away from the work on the road because they have not the strength that is necessary. I thought of the darkness in the cottages, of dawn bringing with it the glaring eyes of death. I thought of the graves again clawed open, the earth still loose, another carcass pushed on to the rotting heap. I thought of an infant tortured with Our Saviour’s wounds.

The famine-fever descends like a rain of further retribution, and I wonder – for I cannot help it – what in His name these people have done to displease God so? It is true they have not been an easy people to govern; they have not abided by the laws which the rest of us must observe; their superstitious worship is a sin. But God is a forgiving God. I pray to understand His will.

February 5th, 1848. Charlotte Pulvertaft is not to be married until her sister’s return. ‘Will you still be with us for the wedding?’ Fogarty impertinently inquired last night, for he knows the age of George Arthur and unless I am dismissed I must of course still be here. The work continues on the road, it having been abandoned during the period of snow.

March 6th, 1848. A singular thing has happened. Walking alone in the grounds, I was hailed by Mr Erskine from his horse. I paused, and watched while he dismounted. I thought he had some message for me from the house, but in this I was wrong. Mr Erskine walked beside me, his horse ambling obediently behind. He spoke of the sunshine we were enjoying, and of the estate road. Beyond saluting me at church on Sundays he has never before paid me any attention whatsoever. My surprise must have shown in my face, for he laughed at something that was displayed there. ‘I have always liked you, Miss Heddoe,’ he said to my astonishment.

I reddened, as any girl would, and felt extremely awkward. I made no attempt at a reply.

‘And have you settled, Miss Heddoe?’ he next inquired. ‘Do you care for it here?’

No one has asked me that before: why should they? My inclination was to smile and with vague politeness to nod. I did so, for to have said that I did not care for this place would have seemed ill-mannered and offensive. Mr Erskine, after all, is part of it.

‘Well, that is good.’ He paused and then resumed: ‘If ever on your walks, Miss Heddoe, you pass near my house you would be welcome to stroll about the garden.’

I thanked him.

‘It is the house at the southernmost point of the estate. The only large house there is, nearly hidden in summer by sycamore trees.’

‘That is very kind of you, Mr Erskine.’

‘I reclaimed the little garden, as the estate was reclaimed.’

‘I see.’

The subject of conversation changed. We spoke again of the time of year and the progress that was being achieved on the estate road. Mr Erskine told me something of his history, how a military career had been cut short before it had properly begun. In return, and because the subjects seemed related, I passed on the ambition George Arthur had had in this direction.

‘He is reconciled now,’ I said, and soon after that the estate manager and I parted company, he riding back along the way we’d walked, I turning toward the house.

The estate road is completed on June 9th,1848. Soon after that a letter arrives for Mr Pulvertaft from the Distress Board, thanking him for supplying so many months of work for the impoverished men. Since the beginning of the year the families of the area – some of them tenants of Mr Pulvertaft, some not – have been moving away to the harbour towns, to fill the exile ships bound for America. At least, Fogarty overhears Mr Pulvertaft remark in the dining-room, there is somewhere for them to go.

*

In August of that year there is champagne at Charlotte’s wedding. Guests arrive from miles around. Emily, returned from her travels, is a bridesmaid.

At the celebrations, which take place in the hall and the drawing-room and the dining-room, and spill over into the garden, Fogarty watches Miss Heddoe, even though he is constantly busy. She wears a dress he has not seen before, in light-blue material, with lace at the collar and the wrists, and little pearl buttons. Wherever she is, she is in the company of George Arthur in his sailor suit. They whisper together and seem, as always nowadays, to be the best of friends. Occasionally Miss Heddoe chides him because an observation he has made oversteps the mark or is delivered indiscreetly. When Mr Erskine arrives he goes straight to where they are.

September 24th, 1848. I have been here a year. The potatoes are not good this year but at least the crop has not failed as completely as hitherto. I have not given Mr Erskine his answer, but he is kind and displays no impatience. I am very silly in the matter, I know I am, but sometimes I lie awake at night and pretend I am already his wife. I repeat the name and title; I say it aloud. I think of the house, hidden among the sycamores. I think of sitting with him in church, in the pew behind the Pulvertafts, not at the side with the Fogartys.

September 25th, 1848. A Mr Ogilvie comes regularly to take tea, and often strolls with Emily to the ruined abbey. Emily has made some drawings of it, which show it as it used to be. ‘Well?’ Mr Erskine said quietly this afternoon, riding up when I was out on my walk. But I begged, again, for more time to consider.

November 1st, 1848. All Saints’ Day. Fogarty frightened me tonight. He leaned against the mantelpiece and said:

‘I would advise you not to take the step you are considering, miss.’

‘What step, Fogarty?’

‘To marry or not to marry Mr Erskine.’

I was flabbergasted at this. I felt myself colouring and stammered when I spoke, asking him what he meant.

‘I mean only what I say, miss. I would say to you not to marry him.’

‘Are you drunk, Fogarty?’

‘No, miss. I am not drunk. Or if I am it is only slight. You have been going through in your mind whether or not to marry Mr Erskine. A while ago you said you could never settle in this troubled place. You said that to yourself, miss. You could not become, as the saying goes, more Irish than the Irish.’

‘Fogarty –’

‘I thought you would go. When I told you about the child I thought you would pack your bags. There is wickedness here: I thought you sensed it, miss.’

‘I cannot have you speaking to me like this, Fogarty.’

‘Because I am a servant? Well, you are right, of course. In the evenings, miss, I have always indulged myself with port: that has always been my way. I have enjoyed our conversations, but I am disappointed now.’

‘You have been reading my diary.’

‘I have, miss. I have been reading your diary and your letters, and I have been observing you. Since they came here I have observed the Pulvertafts of Ipswich also, and Mr Erskine, who has done such wonders all around. I have watched his big square head going about its business; I have listened when I could.’

‘You had no right to read what was private. If I mentioned this to Mr Pulvertaft –’

‘If you did, miss, my sister and I would be sent packing. Mr Pulvertaft is a fair and decent man and it is only just that disloyal servants should be dismissed. But you would have it on your conscience. I had hoped we might keep a secret between us.’

‘I have no wish to share secrets with you, Fogarty,’

‘A blind eye was turned, miss, you know that. The hunger was a plague: what use a few spoonfuls of soup, and a road that leads nowhere and only insults the pride of the men who built it? The hunger might have been halted, miss, you know that. The people were allowed to die: you said that to yourself. A man and his wife were driven to commit a barbarous act of cruelty: blasphemy you called it, miss.’

‘What I called it is my own affair. I should be grateful, Fogarty, if you left me now.’

‘If the estate had continued in its honest decline, if these Pulvertafts had not arrived, the people outside the walls would have travelled here from miles around. They would have eaten the wild raspberries and the apples from the trees, the peaches that still thrived on the brick-lined walls, the grapes and plums and greengages, the blackberries and mulberries. They would have fished the lake and snared the rabbits on Bright Purple Hill. There is pheasant and woodcock grown tame in the old man’s time. There was his little herd of cows they might have had. I am not putting forth an argument, miss; I am not a humanitarian; I am only telling you.’

‘You are taking liberties, Fogarty. If you do not go now I will most certainly mention this.’

‘That was the picture, miss, that might have been. Instead we had to hear of Charlotte’s marrying and of Emily’s travelling, and of George Arthur’s brave decision to follow in the footsteps of his father. Adelaide sulks in the drawing-room and is jealous of her sisters. Mrs Pulvertaft, good soul, lies harmlessly down in the afternoon, and you have put it well in calling her husband a fair and decent man.’

‘I did not call him that.’

‘You thought it long before I said it.’

‘You are drunker than you think, Fogarty.’

‘No, miss, I am not. The wickedness here is not intentional, miss. Well, you know about the wickedness, for you have acutely sensed it. So did Mr Pulvertaft at first, so did his wife. Charlotte did not, nor Adelaide, nor did the boy. Emily sensed it until a while ago. Emily would linger down by the old abbey, knowing that the men who lie dead there have never been dispossessed by all the visitors and the strangers there have been since. But now the old abbey is a lady’s folly, a pretty ruin that pleases and amuses. Well, of course you know all this.’

‘I know nothing of the sort. I would ask you to leave me now.’

‘You have thought it would be better for the boy to have his military life, to perish for Queen and empire, and so extinguish this line. Listening to talk of the boy’s romance, you have thought that would not be bad. So many perish anyway, all about us.’

‘That is a wicked thing to say,’ I cried, made furious by this. ‘And it is quite untrue.’

‘It is wicked, miss, but not untrue. It is wicked because it comes from wickedness, you know that. Your sharp fresh eye has needled all that out.’

‘I do not know these things.’ My voice was quieter now, even, and empty of emotion. ‘I would ask you to leave this room at once.’

But Fogarty went on talking until I thought in the end he must surely be insane. He spoke again of Charlotte’s marriage to Captain Coleborne, of Emily and Adelaide, of George Arthur taking the place of his father. He spoke again of the hungry passing without hindrance through the gates of the estate, to feed off what its trees and bushes offered. He spoke of his sister and himself left after the old man’s death, he glad to see the decay continue, his sister persuaded that they must always remain.

‘The past would have withered away, miss. Instead of which it is the future that’s withering now.’

Did he mean the hunger and the endless death, the exile ships of those who had survived? I did not ask him. He frightened me more than ever, standing there, his eyes as dead as ice. He was no humanitarian, he repeated, he was no scholar. All he said came from a feeling he had, a servant’s feeling which he’d always had in this house during the years the old man had let everything decline. Poor Protestants as they were, he and his sister belonged neither outside the estate gates with the people who had starved nor with a family as renowned as the Pulvertafts. They were servants in their very bones.

‘You have felt you have no place either, miss. You can see more clearly for that.’

‘Please go, Fogarty.’

He told me of a dream he’d had the night before or last week, I was too upset to note which. The descendants of the people who had been hungry were in the dream, and the son of George Arthur Pulvertaft was shot in the hall of the house, and no Pulvertaft lived in the place again. The road that had been laid in charity was overgrown through neglect, and the gardens were as they had been at the time of old Hugh Pulvertaft, their beauty strangled as they returned to wildness. Fogarty’s voice quivered as his rigmarole ridiculously rambled on; an institution for corrected girls the house became, without carpets on the floors. The bones of the dogs that generations of Pulvertafts had buried in the grounds were dug up by the corrected girls when they were ordered by a Mother Superior to make vegetable beds. They threw the bones about, pretending to be frightened by them, pretending they were the bones of people.

‘I don’t wish to hear your dreams, Fogarty.’

‘I have told you only the one, miss. It is a single dream I had. The house of the estate manager was burnt to the ground, and people burnt with it. The stone walls of the estate were broken down, pulled apart in places by the ivy that was let grow. In a continuation of the dream I was standing here talking to you like I’m talking now. I said to you not to perpetuate what has troubled you.’

He took my tray from me and went away. A moment later I heard him in the lavatory, depositing the food I had not eaten.

‘Not a bad soul,’ Miss Fogarty remarks, ‘when you come to know her.’

‘Her father was a solicitor’s clerk.’

‘Oh granted, there’s not a pennyworth of background to the creature. But I’d hardly say she wasn’t good enough for Erskine.’

Fogarty does not comment. His sister resumes:

‘I would expect to be invited to the house for late tea. I would expect her to say: “Why not walk over on Wednesday, Miss Fogarty, if you have a fancy for it?” I would expect the both of us to walk over for cards with the Erskines of an evening.’

‘She has pulled herself up by marrying him. She is hardly going to drop down again by playing cards with servants.’

‘Friends,’ corrects Miss Fogarty. ‘I would prefer to say friends.’

‘When a bit of time goes by they’ll dine with the Pulvertafts, she and Erskine. You’ll cook the food at the range, I’ll serve it at the table.’

‘Oh, I hardly believe that’ll be the order of it.’

Fogarty considers it unwise to pursue his argument and so is silent. Anna Maria Heddoe, he thinks, who was outraged when two guileful peasants tried on a trick. Well, he did his best. It is she, not he, who is the scholar and humanitarian. It is she, not he, who came from England and was distressed. She has wept into her pillow, she has been sick at heart. Stranger and visitor, she has written in her diary the news from Ireland. Stranger and visitor, she has learnt to live with things.

On the Zattere

Without meaning to, Verity had taken her mother’s place. Six months after her mother’s death she had given up her flat and moved back to the house where she and her two brothers – both of them now married – had grown up. She had pretended, even to herself at times, that she was concerned about her father’s loneliness, but the true reason was that she wished to make a change on her own account, to break a pattern in her life. She became, as her mother had been, her father’s chief companion and was in time exposed to traits in his nature she had not known existed. Preserving within the family the exterior of a bluff and genial man, good-hearted, knowledgeable and wise, her father had successfully disguised the worst of himself; and had been assisted by his wife’s loyalty. It was different for a daughter, and Verity found herself watching the old man in a way she would once not have believed possible, impatient with his weaknesses, judging him.

Mr Unwill, unaware of this development in his daughter, was greatly pleased with the turn events had taken. He was touched when Verity gave up her flat and returned to the family home, and he was proud to be seen in her company, believing that strangers might not take her for his daughter but assume instead that he was an older man to whom this beautiful woman was sentimentally attached. He dressed the part when they went on their first holiday together – to Venice, which every autumn in her lifetime he had visited with his wife. In swirls of green and red, a paisley scarf was knotted at his throat and matched the handkerchief that spilt from the top pocket of his navy-blue blazer. There was no reason why they should be taken as father and daughter, he argued to himself, since they were so very different in appearance. Verity, who was neither small nor tall, gave an impression of slightness because she was slim and was delicately made. The nearly perfect features of her face were set on the suspicion of a slant, turning ordinary beauty into the unusual and causing people who saw it for the first time to glance again. Her hair, clinging smoothly around the contours of classically high cheekbones, was the brown of chestnuts; her eyes, almost strangely, matched it. She dressed and made up with care, as if believing that beauty should be honoured.

In contrast, Mr Unwill was a large man in his advanced sixties, with a ruddy complexion and a bald head. People who knew him quite well had difficulty remembering, when no longer in his presence, if he had a moustache or not. The lingering impression of his face – the ruddiness, the tortoiseshell spectacles – seemed somehow to suggest another, taken-for-granted characteristic, and in fact there was one: a grey growth of bristle on his upper lip, unnoticeable because it so easily became one with the similar greyness that flanked the naked dome.

‘Well, what shall you do today?’ he asked in the pensione dining-room when they had finished breakfast on their third day. ‘I’ll be all right, you know. Don’t spare a worry for me.’

‘I thought I’d go to the Church of San Zaccaria.’

‘Why not? You trot along, my dear. I’ll sit and watch the boats go by.’

They were alone in the dining-room: in early November the pensione was not full. The American family had not come in to breakfast, presumably having it in their rooms. The German girls had been and gone; so had the French threesome and the lone Italian lady in her purple hat.

‘Nice, those German girls,’ Mr Unwill said. ‘The pretty one made a most interesting observation last night.’ He paused, tobacco-stained teeth bared, his eyes ruminative behind his spectacles. ‘She said she wondered where waiters go between meals. Most unGermanic, I thought.’

Verity, who was thirty-eight and had recently come to believe that life was going to pass her by, reached across the table and took one of her father’s cigarettes from the packet that was open beside his coffee cup. She acknowledged the observation of the German girl by briefly nodding. She lit her cigarette from the flame of a small, gold lighter, given to her by the man she’d been in Venice with before.

‘The pretty one’s from Munich,’ her father said. ‘The other – now, where on earth did they tell me the fat one came from?’ Furrows of thought appeared on his forehead, then he gave up. Slowly he removed his spectacles and in the same unhurried manner proceeded to wipe them with his paisley handkerchief. It was a way of his, a hobby almost. The frames were polished first, then each lens; sometimes he went to work with his Swiss penknife, tightening the screws of the hinges with the screwdriver that was incorporated in one of the blades. ‘The pretty one’s a laboratory assistant,’ he said, ‘the other one works in a shop or something.’

The penknife had not, this morning, been taken from his blazer pocket. He held the spectacles up to the light. ‘I’ll probably sit outside at the Cucciolo,’ he said.

‘The coffee’s better at Nico’s. And cheaper.’

It was he – years ago, so he said – who had established that, and yesterday it had been confirmed. She’d sat outside the Cucciolo by mistake, forgetting what he’d told her, obliging him to join her when he emerged from the pensione after his afternoon sleep. He’d later pointed out that a cappuccino at the Cucciolo was fifteen hundred but only eleven at Nico’s or Aldo’s. Her father was mean about spending small sums of money, Verity had discovered since becoming his companion. He didn’t like it when she reached out and helped herself to one of his cigarettes, but he hadn’t yet learnt to put the packet away quickly.

‘Oh, I don’t know that I’m up to the walk to Nico’s this morning,’ he said.

It took less than a minute to stroll along the Zattere to Nico’s, and he was never not up to things. She had discovered also that whenever he felt like it he told petty, unimportant lies, and as they left the dining-room she wondered what this latest one was all about.

Straining a white jacket, beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead, the pensione’s bearded waiter used a battery-powered gadget to sweep the crumbs from the tablecloths in the dining-room. His colleague, similarly attired and resembling Fred Astaire, laid two tables for the guests who had chosen to have lunch rather than dinner.

The dining-room was low-ceilinged, with mirrors and sideboards set against the fawn silk on the walls, and windows of round green panes. The breathing of the bearded waiter and the slurping of the canal just outside these windows were the only sounds after the crumbs had been cleared and the tables laid. The waiters glanced over their domain and went away to spend their time mysteriously, justifying the German girl’s curiosity.

In the hall of the pensione guests who were never seen in the dining-room, choosing to take no meals, awaited the attention of the smart receptionist, this morning all in red. A kitten played on her desk while patiently she gave directions to the Church of the Frari. She told the Italian lady with the purple hat that there was a dry cleaner’s less than a minute away. ‘Pronto?’ she said, picking up her telephone. The hall, which was not large, featured in the glass door of the telephone-box and the doors that led outside the same round green panes as the dining-room. There were faded prints on the walls, and by the reception desk a map of Venice and a list of the pensione’s credit-card facilities. A second cat, grey and gross and bearing the marks of a lifetime’s disputes, lay sleeping on the stairs.

‘Enjoy yourself, my dear,’ Mr Unwill said to his daughter, stepping over this animal. She didn’t appear to hear so he said it again when they had passed through the round-paned doors and stood together for a moment on the quayside.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll probably wander a bit after I’ve been to San Zaccaria.’

‘Why not, old girl? I’ll be as happy as a sandboy, you know.’

The fog that had earlier obscured the houses of the Giudecca on the other side of the canal was lifting; already the sun evaporated the dankness in the air. Verity wore a flecked suit of pinkish-orange, with a scarf that matched it loosely tied over a cream blouse. In one lapel there was a tiny pearl brooch, another gift from the man she’d been in Venice with before.

She turned into the fondamenta that ran along one side of the pensione. It was cold there, untouched by the November sunshine. She shivered, but felt it was not from this chilliness. She wished she was not alone, for an irony in her present circumstance was that she found the company of other people both tiresome and of use. She walked more quickly, endeavouring to keep certain insistent thoughts out of her mind. At the Accademia she bought her ticket for the vaporetto and waited on the landing-stage. Other people, no matter who they were, disrupted such thoughts, which was something she welcomed. The attention other people demanded, the conversations they began, their faces and their voices, clogged her communication with herself; and yet, so much of the time while in the company of other people, she wished she was not.

Odd, to have taken her mother’s place in this old-fashioned way: on the vaporetto she saw again the tortoiseshell spectacles in her father’s hands, his square, wide fingers working the paisley silk over the lens. Repetition had etched this image in some corner of her mind: she heard his early-morning cough, and then the lowered tone he used when talking to himself. Had it been panic that had caused her to use his loneliness as an excuse, to break the pattern she found so merciless? Love-making had been easy in the convenient flat, too much had been taken for granted. But even so, giving up the flat might have struck some people as extreme.

On the vaporetto the Italians glanced at her, women assessing her in some Italian way, the men desirous. Venice was different in November, less of a bauble than the summer city she remembered. The tourist crowds had gone, with the mosquitoes and the cruel Italian heat. The orchestras had ceased to play in the Piazza San Marco, the Riva degli Schiavoni was again the property of the Venetians. She imagined her parents walking arm in arm on the Riva, or going to Torcello and Burano. Had the warmth of their companionship been a pretence on his part? For if he’d loved his wife how could he so easily come back to the city he and she had discovered together and had affectionately made their own? Eleven months had passed since her death and already in the pensione they had come to know so well he was striking up acquaintanceships as though nothing of importance had occurred since last he’d been there. There had been a moment in the hall when he mumblingly spoke to the smartly dressed receptionist, who said that everyone at the pensione sympathized. The elderly maid who welcomed him upstairs had murmured in Italian, and in the dining-room the waiters’ voices had been low at first. It was he himself who subsequently set the mood, his matter-of-fact manner brushing sentiment aside, summarily dismissing death. Had her mother loved him or had their companionship in this city been, on her part also, a pretence? Marriage was riddled with such falsity, Verity reflected, dressed up as loyalty or keeping faith.

Palaces loomed majestically on either side of her, the lion of St Mark disdainful on his column, St Theodore modest on his. Carpaccio would still have recognized his city in the tranquillity of November, the Virgins of Cima still crossed the city’s bridges. It was her mother who had said all that to her, translating emotions she had felt. Verity went on thinking about her parents, not wishing to think about herself, not wishing to catch a glimpse of herself in the summer dresses she had worn when she’d been in Venice before. There had been many weekends spent faithfully with the same companion in many beautiful cities, but Venice that July had left behind a special meaning because hope had died there.

Mr Unwill settled himself on one of the Cucciolo Bar’s orange plastic seats. Verity was right: the Cucciolo wasn’t a patch on Nico’s or Aldo’s. Fewer people passed by for a start, and the one cappuccino he’d been served yesterday by the Cucciolo’s dour waiter had tasted of the last person’s sugar. But the trouble with sitting outside Nico’s or Aldo’s was that people often turned off the Zattere before they reached them, and he happened to know that the pretty little German girl was still in the pensione because he’d seen the fat one striding off on her own half an hour ago. Of course it could be that the pretty one had preceded her friend, in which case he’d be four hundred lire down, which would be annoying.

‘Prego, signore?’

He ordered his coffee. He wished he spoke Italian so that he might draw the waiter’s attention to the inadequately washed cup he’d been presented with yesterday. He’d have done so in England: one of the few good things about being old was that you could make a fuss. Another was that you could drop into conversation with people without their thinking it was peculiar of you. Last night he’d wandered in from his stroll after Verity had gone to her room, and had noticed the two girls in the lounge. He’d leafed through a pile of magazines that had to do with the work of the Venetian police, and then the girls had begun to giggle unrestrainedly. By way of a polite explanation, the pretty one had spoken to him in English, explaining that it was the remark about where waiters go between meals which had caused their merriment. After that the conversation had drifted on. He’d told them a thing or two about Venice, which he knew quite well in a professional way.

Mr Unwill was retired, having been employed for all his adult life in a shipping office. Ships and their cargoes, the building, sale and insuring of ships, were what he was most familiar with. It was this interest that had first brought him to Venice, as it had to many other great ports. While his three children were still growing up it had been necessary to limit such travel to the British Isles, but later he and his wife had travelled as far and as adventurously as funds permitted, always economizing so that journeys might be extended or prolonged. Venice had become their favourite.

‘Hullo there!’ he called out to the German girl as she stepped around the corner, shading her eyes against the sun. She was wearing a short dress that was almost the same colour as her very blonde hair.

‘What a day!’ Mr Unwill said, standing up so that she could not easily just walk by. ‘Now, how about a coffee?’

Her teeth, when she smiled her appreciation of this invitation, glistened damply, large white teeth, each one perfectly shaped. But to his disappointment, while smiling she also shook her head. She was late already, she explained: she was to meet her friend at the Rialto Bridge.

He watched her hurrying along the Zattere, her sturdy legs nicely bronzed, a camera slung across her shoulder. She turned the corner by the Church of the Gesuati and Mr Unwill sighed.

In the Church of San Zaccaria Verity gazed at the Bellini altarpiece her mother had sent her postcards of. Perfectly, she still contained her thoughts, conjecturing again. Had her mother stood on this very spot? Had her father accompanied her to the churches she liked so much or in all their visits had he been concerned only with duller interests? Verity didn’t know; it had never seemed important.

The lights that illuminated the picture abruptly went out. Verity felt in her purse for two hundred lire, but before she found the coins a man stepped forward and dropped his through the slot of the little grey box on one side of the altar. The Virgin and her saints, in sacred conversation, were there again. Verity looked for a few moments longer and then moved away.

She hadn’t looked at pictures that July. For a second she saw herself and heard her laughter: in a dress with primroses on it, wearing sunglasses and laughing, although she had not felt like laughing. In the church she felt again the effort of that laughter and was angry because for a single second her concentration had faltered. She dropped some money into a poor-box by the door. She hadn’t realized how fond she’d been of her mother until the very last moment, until the coffin had soundlessly slipped away behind a beige curtain in the chapel of the crematorium. The soundlessness was eerie and unpleasant; Verity had hated that moment.

She left the church and walked back to the Riva. Metal trestles supported planks of wood, like crude tabletops, on which people might walk if the tides rose and the floods of autumn began. These improvised bridges were called passerelle, her father had told her, pointing them out to her on the Zattere. ‘Oh heavens, of course I’ll manage,’ he’d kept repeating on the afternoon of the funeral and all of them, her brothers and her sisters-in-law, she herself, had admired his urbanity and his resolve not to be a nuisance.

She rose and walked slowly along the Riva towards the Arsenale. Already the quayside hotels had a deserted look; the pink Gabrielli-Sandwirth had put up its shutters. ‘No, absolutely not,’ her father had said on some later occasion. ‘You have your own life, Verity.’ And of Course she had: her own life, her own job, her own flat in which love might be made.

A fun-fair was being erected further along the quay, dodgem cars and a tunnel of fear, swing-boats and fruit machines. ‘American Games’ a garish announcement read; ‘Central Park’ proclaimed another. Two bespectacled old women washed down a rifle-range; hobby-horses were unloaded. Outside the Pensione Bucintoro a shirt-sleeved waiter smoked a cigarette and watched.

In the Via Garibaldi children with satchels or school books chased one another on their journey home from morning school; women jostled and pushed at the vegetable stalls. In the public park, tatty and forgotten in the low season, cats swarmed or huddled – mangy tomcats with ravenous eyes, pitiful kittens that seemed resentful of their recent birth, leanly slinking mothers. All of them were dirty; two weakly fought, a hissing, clawing ball of different-coloured fur. Verity bent down and tried to attract a dusty marmalade-coloured kitten, but alarmed by her attentions it darted off. She walked on, still determinedly dwelling upon her father’s heartlessness in so casually returning to this city, to the pensione, to the Zattere. She dwelt again upon her mother’s misplaced loyalty, which had kept the marriage going. But she herself, in her primrose-yellow dress and her sunglasses, crept through these irrelevant reflections so crudely forced upon her consciousness. Her parents arm-in-arm in Venice, loving or not loving, vanished into wisps of mist, and were replaced by the sound of her own ersatz laughter. There was an image of her face, strained with a smile that choked away the hopelessness she was frightened to surrender to. The ice tinkled in her well-chilled Soave; the orchestras played in the great, romantic square. ‘Oh, I am happy!’ came the echo of her lying voice, and in the dingy public park her beauty fled as swiftly as the marmalade kitten had leapt from her grasp. She wept, but it did not matter because no one was about.

Mr Unwill, deprived of a conversation with the German girl, left the Cucciolo Bar and strolled down the Zattere in the direction of the western Stazione Marittima. It was an interesting place, this particular Stazione Marittima, and he would like one day to find someone who would show him round it. He often loitered by the bridge that led almost directly into it, hoping to catch the eye of some official with an hour or two on his hands who would welcome the interest of an Englishman who had been concerned with maritime commerce for a lifetime. But the officials were always in a hurry, and usually in groups of three or four, which made matters difficult. Clerks of course they’d be, not quite right anyway. Once he’d noticed a man with gold braid on his cap and his uniform, but when Mr Unwill smilingly approached him the man expostulated wildly, alarmed presumably by the sound of a language he did not understand. Mr Unwill had thought it a strange reaction in a seafaring man, who should surely be used to the world’s tongues.

A cargo boat called the Allemagna Express, registered in Venice in spite of its German-sounding name, and flying the Italian flag, was being painted. On planks suspended along the side of its hull men dipped long-handled rollers into giant paint-containers which dangled at a convenient drop below each man. A single painter used a brush, touching in the red outline on the letters of Allemagna Express. Cautiously he moved back and forth on his plank, often calling up to his colleagues on the deck to work one of the ropes or pulleys. A yellow stripe extended the length of the hull, separating the white of the ship’s upper reaches from the brown beneath, The old girl was certainly beginning to look smart, Mr Unwill considered, and wondered if they’d still be in Venice when the job was completed. There was nothing as rewarding as a well-painted ship, nothing as satisfying even if your own contribution had only been to watch the men at work. Mr Unwill sat for a long time on a stone bench on the quayside, content in this unexacting role. He wondered why Express was spelt with an ‘x’ since the vessel was Italian. That morning from his bedroom window he’d noticed the Espresso Egitto chugging by.

At half past eleven he rose and walked to Nico’s, where he bought a banana ice-cream and ate it sitting on a passerella.

‘There was a time, you know, when the Venetians could build a warship in a day.’

For dinner they sat at a round table in a corner of the low-ceilinged dining-room of the pensione. The bearded waiter doled out salad on to side plates, and the one who looked like Fred Astaire went round with platters of chicken and fried potatoes.

‘I passed near the Arsenale today,’ Verity said, remembering that that was where such warships had been built. ‘Grazie’

‘Prego, signorina.’

‘You called in at the Naval Museum, did you?’

‘No, actually I didn’t.’

Apart from the German girls, the people who’d been in the dining-room the night before were there again. The American woman, with a blue-and-white bow tie, sat with her husband and her daughter at the table closest to the Unwills’. The two thin Frenchwomen and the frail man were beside the screen that prevented draughts. The solitary Italian woman in the purple hat was by the door. Other Italians, a couple who had not been in the dining-room last night, were at a table next to the German girls.

‘I remember going to the Naval Museum,’ Mr Unwill said. ‘Oh, years ago. When I was first in Venice with your mother.’

‘Did she go too?’

‘Your mother always liked to accompany me to places. Most interesting she found the Naval Museum. Well, anyone would.

He went on talking, telling her about the Naval Museum; she didn’t listen. That afternoon she’d gone across to the Lido because it was a part of Venice they hadn’t visited that July. But instead of the escape she’d hoped for she’d caught a nostalgic, mood from its windswept, shuttered emptiness and its dead casino. She’d sat in a bar drinking brandy she didn’t like the taste of, and when she returned to the pensione she found herself not wanting to change out of the clothes she’d worn all day. She’d seen her father glancing in surprise at her tired orange suit and she’d felt, ridiculously, that she was letting him down.

‘Ah, here they are!’ he exclaimed, making a sudden noise as the German girls entered. ‘Buona sera!’ he shouted at them eagerly.

The girls smiled, and Verity wondered what on earth they thought of him. One of the Frenchwomen was complaining that her gnocchi was cold. The waiter who resembled Fred Astaire looked worried. She could not eat cold gnocchi, the woman protested, throwing her fork down, marking the white tablecloth.

‘Where have you been today?’ Mr Unwill called across the dining-room to the German girls. ‘Done something nice?’

‘Ja,’ the fat girl replied. ‘We have been in a glass factory.’

‘Very sensible,’ said Mr Unwill.

Another plate of gnocchi replaced the cold one at the French table. The American woman told her daughter that on her wedding day in Nevada she had thrown a cushion out of a window because she’d felt joyful. ‘I guess your momma’d been drinking,’ the father said, laughing very noisily. The Italian couple talked about the Feast of St Martin.

There had been only one love-making weekend since she’d moved back to the family house: she’d told her father some lie, not caring if he guessed.

‘It’s an interesting thing,’ he was saying to her now, ‘this St Martin business. They have a week of it, you know. Old people and children get gifts. Have you seen the confections in the shop windows? San Martino on horseback?’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed them.’ Made of biscuit, she had presumed, sometimes chocolate-coated, sometimes not, icing decorated with sweets.

‘And cotognata,’ he went on. ‘Have you seen the cotognata? Centuries old, that St Martin’s sweetmeat is, far nicer than Turkish delight.’

She smiled, and nodded. She’d noticed the cotognata also. She often wondered how he came by his information, and guessed he was for ever dropping into conversation with strangers in the hope that they spoke English.

‘The first ghetto was in Venice,’ he said. ‘Did you know that? It’s an Italian word, called after the place where the Jewish settlement was.’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, there you are. Something every day.’

The bearded waiter cleared their plates away and brought them each a bowl of fruit.

‘I thought we might wander down the Zattere after dinner,’ her father suggested, ‘and take a glass of mandarinetto and perhaps a slice of cake. Feel up to that, old girl?’

If she didn’t accompany him he’d bother the German girls. She said a glass of mandarinetto would be nice.

‘They’re painting the Allemagna Express. Fine-looking vessel.’

In her bedroom she tied a different scarf around her neck, and put her coat on because the nights were cold. When she returned to the hall her father was not there and when he did appear he came from the dining-room not from upstairs. ‘I told them we were going for a drink,’ he said. ‘They’ll join us in a moment. You all right, old girl?’

He was smoking a cigarette and, like her, he had gone to his room for his overcoat. On the Zattere he put his hat on at a jaunty angle. There was a smell of creosote because they’d been repainting the rafts that afternoon. Sheets of newspaper were suspended from strings that were looped along the quayside to draw attention to the newly treated timbers. A terrier settled down for the night among the rubble on a builder’s barge. Cats crept about. It was extraordinary, she suddenly thought, that just because she’d given up her flat she should find herself in Venice with this old man.

‘Nice here, eh?’ he said in the café, surveying the amber-coloured cloths on the tables, the busyness behind the bar. He took his hat and overcoat off, and sat down. He stubbed his cigarette out and lit a fresh one. ‘Mandarinetto,’ he said to the waiter who came up. ‘Due.’

‘Si, signore. Subito.’

She lit a cigarette herself, caressing her lighter with her fingers, then feeling angry and ashamed that she had done so.

‘Ah, here they are!’ Her father was on his feet, exclaiming like a schoolboy, waving his hat at the German girls. He shouted after the waiter, ordering two more mandarinettos. ‘I really recommend it here,’ he informed the German girls, flashing his tobacco-stained smile about and offering them cigarettes. He went on talking, telling them about the Allemagna Express. He mentioned the Stazione Marittima and asked them if they had noticed the biscuit horsemen and the cotognata. ‘By the weekend the Votive Bridge will be complete,’ he said. ‘A temporary timber bridge, you know, erected as a token of thanksgiving. Every year, for three days, Venetians celebrate the passing of the Plague by making a pilgrimage across it, their children waving balloons about. Then it’s taken down again.’

Verity smiled at the fatter German, who was receiving less attention than her friend. And a bridge of boats, her father continued, was temporarily established every summer. ‘Again to give thanks. Another tradition since the Plague.’

The Americans who had been in the pensione came in and sat not far away. They ordered ice-creams, taking a long time about it, questioning the waiter in English as to whether they would come with added cream.

‘Oh, I remember Venice forty years ago,’ Mr Unwill said. ‘Of course, it’s greatly changed. The Yugoslavs come now, you know, in busloads.’ He issued a polite little laugh. ‘Not to mention the natives of your own fair land.’

‘Too many, I think,’ the prettier girl responded, grimacing.

‘Ah, ja, too many,’ agreed her companion.

‘No, no, no. You Germans travel well, I always say. Besides, to the Venetian a tourist’s a tourist, and tourists mean money. The trouble with the Yugoslavs, they apparently won’t be parted from it.’

It wasn’t usually his opinion that Germans travelled well; rather the opposite. He told the girls that at one time the Venetians had been capable of building a warship in a day. He explained about ghettoes, and said that in Venice it was the cats who feared the pigeons. He laughed in his genial way. He said:

‘That was a very clever remark you made last night, Ingrid. About waiters.’

‘It was Brigitta who said it first, I think.’

‘Oh, was it? Well, it’s quite amusing anyway. Now, what we really want to know is how long you’re staying at the pensione?’

‘Ja, just today,’ Ingrid said. ‘Tomorrow we have gone.’

‘Oh dear me, now that’s very sad.’