The Collected Stories

‘He’s not a marrying man,’ said my father. ‘Amn’t I right, Henry?’

Mr Dukelow smiled at my father and left the kitchen without speaking. Mr Dicey began to say something, but my father interrupted him.

‘He’s not a marrying man,’ he repeated. He pressed a piece of bread into the grease on his plate. He cleaned the plate with it, and then ate it and drank some tea. Mr Dicey put his cup and saucer on to the table, telling Bridget she was a marvel at making tea. There wasn’t better tea in the town, Mr Dicey said, than the tea he drank in this kitchen. He wanted to remain, to hang around in case something happened: he was aware of a heavy atmosphere that morning and he was as puzzled as I was.

My mother was still reading the letter, my father was still staring at her head. Was he trying to hurt her? I wondered: was he attempting to upset her by saying that Bridget could have anyone she wanted as a husband?

She handed the letter to me, indicating that I should pass it on to him. I saw that it was from my sister Sheila, who had married, two Christmases before, a salesman of stationery. I gave it to my father and I watched him reading.

‘Bedad,’ he said. ‘She’s due for a baby.’

When I heard my father saying that I thought for only a moment about what the words signified. Bridget exclaimed appropriately, and then there was a silence while my father looked at my mother. She smiled at him in a half-hearted way, obliged by duty to do that, reluctant to share any greater emotion with him.

‘Is it Sheila herself?’ cried Mr Dicey in simulated excitement. ‘God, you wouldn’t believe it!’ From the way he spoke it was evident that he had known the details of the letter. He went on to say that it seemed only yesterday that my sister was an infant herself. He continued to talk, his squinting eyes moving rapidly over all of us, and I could sense his interest in the calm way my mother had taken the news, not saying a word. There was a damper on the natural excitement, which no one could have failed to be aware of.

My father tried to make up for the lack of commotion by shouting out that for the first time in his life he would be a grandfather. My mother smiled again at him and then, like Mr Dukelow, she rose and left the kitchen. Reluctantly, Mr Dicey took his leave of us also.

Bridget collected the dishes from the table and conveyed them to the sink. My father lit a cigarette. He poured himself a cup of tea, humming a melody that often, tunelessly, he did hum. ‘You’re as quiet as Henry Dukelow this morning,’ he said to me, and I wanted to reply that we were all quiet except himself, but I didn’t say anything. Sometimes when he looked at me I remembered the time he’d said to me that he wondered when I was grown up if I’d take over his shop and be a butcher like he was. ‘Your brothers didn’t care for that,’ he’d said, speaking without rancour but with a certain sorrow in his voice. ‘They didn’t fancy the trade.’ He had smiled at me coaxingly, saying that he was a happy man and that he had built up the business and wouldn’t want to see it die away. At the time I felt revulsion at the thought of cutting up dead animals all day long, knifing off slices of red steak and poking for kidneys. I had often watched him at work since he encouraged me to do that, even offering me the experience as a treat. ‘Well, mister-me-buck,’ he would shout at me, bustling about in his white apron, ‘is there a nice piece of liver there for Mrs Bourke?’ He would talk to his customers about me as he weighed their orders, remarking that I was growing well and was a good boy when I remembered to be. ‘Will you be a butcher like your daddy?’ a woman often asked me and I could feel the tension in him without at the time understanding it. It wasn’t until I saw Mr Dukelow going about the business in his stylish way that I began to say to the women that I might be a butcher one day. Mr Dukelow didn’t make me feel that he was cutting up dead animals at all: Mr Dukelow made it all seem civilized.

I didn’t leave the kitchen that morning until my father had finished his cup of tea and was ready to go also, in case he’d kiss Bridget when they were alone together. He told me to hurry up and go and help my mother, but I delayed deliberately and in the end I shamed him into going before me. Bridget went on cleaning the dishes in the sink, standing there silently, as if she didn’t know what was happening.

I went to my parents’ bedroom, where my mother was making their bed. She asked me to take the end of a sheet and to pull it up so that she wouldn’t have to walk around the bed and do it herself. She had taught me how to help her. I seized the end of the sheet and then the end of a blanket. I said:

‘If you go away I will go with you.’

She looked at me. She asked me what I’d said and I said it again. She didn’t reply. We went on making the bed together and when it was finished she said:

‘It isn’t me who’s going away, love.’

‘Is it Bridget?’

‘There’s no need for Bridget –’

‘I saw him –’

‘He didn’t mean any harm.’

‘Did you see him too?’

‘It doesn’t matter at all. Sheila’s going to have a little baby. Isn’t that grand?’

I couldn’t understand why she was suddenly talking about my sister having a baby since it had nothing to do with my father kissing Bridget.

‘It’s not he who’s going away?’ I asked, knowing that for my father to go away would be the most unlikely development of all.

‘Bridget was telling me yesterday,’ my mother said, ‘she’s going to marry the porter at the Munster and Leinster Bank. It’s a secret Bridget has: don’t tell your father or Mr Dicey or anyone like that.’

‘Mr Dukelow –’

‘It is Mr Dukelow who will be going away.’

She covered the big bed with a candlewick bedspread. She pointed a finger at the side of the bedspread that was near me, indicating that I should aid her with it.

‘Mr Dukelow?’ I said. ‘Why would –’

‘He moves around from one place to another. He does different kinds of work.’

‘Does he get the sack?’

My mother shrugged her shoulders. I went on asking questions, but she told me to be quiet. I followed her to the kitchen and watched her making potato-cakes, while Bridget went in and out. Occasionally they spoke, but they weren’t unfriendly: it wasn’t between them that there was anything wrong. I remembered Bridget saying to me one time that my mother was always very good to her, better than her own mother had ever been. She had a great fondness for my mother, she said, and I sensed it between them that morning because somehow it seemed greater than it had been in the past, even though the night before my father had been kissing Bridget in the hall. I kept looking at my mother, wanting her to explain whatever there was to explain to me, to tell me why Mr Dukelow, who’d said he never wanted to leave my father’s shop, was going to leave now, after only six months. I couldn’t imagine the house without Mr Dukelow. I couldn’t imagine lying in my bed without anyone to come and tell me about Vasco da Gama. I couldn’t imagine not seeing him lighting a Craven A cigarette with his little lighter.

‘Well, isn’t that terrible?’ said my father when we were all sitting down again at the kitchen table for our dinner. ‘Henry Dukelow’s shifting on.’

Mr Dukelow looked nervous. He glanced from me to my mother, not knowing that my mother had guessed he would be going, not knowing she’d suggested it to me.

‘We thought he might be,’ my mother said. ‘He’s learnt the business.’

My father pressed potatoes into his mouth and remarked on the stew we were eating. His mood was wholly different now: he wagged his head at my mother, saying she’d cooked the meat well. There wasn’t a woman in the country, he tediously continued, who could cook stew like my mother. He asked me if I agreed with that, and I said I did. ‘You’ll be back at school tomorrow,’ he said, and I agreed with that also. ‘Tell them they’ll have an uncle in the class,’ he advised, ‘and give the teacher a few smiles.’

Releasing an obstreperous laugh, he pushed his plate away from him with the stumps of two fingers. ‘Will we go down to Neenan’s,’ he suggested to Mr Dukelow, ‘and have a talk about what you will do?’

‘You can talk here,’ said my mother with severity. I could see her saying to herself that it was the half-day and if my father entered Neenan’s he’d remain there for the afternoon.

‘Hurry up, Henry,’ said my father, scraping his chair as he pushed it back on the flagged floor. ‘A tip-top stew,’ he repeated. He made a noise in his mouth, sucking through his teeth, a noise that was familiar to all of us. He told Mr Dukelow he’d be waiting for him in Neenan’s.

‘Keep an eye on him,’ my mother murmured when he’d gone, and Mr Dukelow nodded.

‘I would have told you that tonight,’ he said to me. ‘I didn’t want to say a thing until I’d mentioned it to your father first.’

‘Mr Dukelow’ll be here a month yet.’ My mother smiled at me. ‘He can tell you a good few stories in that time.’

But Mr Dukelow in fact did not remain in our house for another month. When he returned with my father later that day, my father, in a better mood than ever, said:

‘We’ve come to a good agreement. Henry’s going to pack his traps. He’ll catch the half-seven bus.’

But Mr Dukelow didn’t say anything. He walked from the kitchen without swaying like my father was swaying.

My father had his hat on. and he didn’t take it off. He took his turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket and examined it. ‘I can’t see without my glasses,’ he said to me. ‘Will you take a gander at it, boy?’

He never wore glasses, but he often made the joke when he’d been down to Neenan’s for a while. I told him it was twenty past six. He put the stumps of two fingers on my head and said I was a great boy. Did I know, he asked me, that in six months’ time I’d be an uncle? He had a way of touching me with his stumps instead of with the fingers that remained with him, just as he had a way of pushing from him a plate from which he’d eaten a meal. ‘Don’t forget to tell the teacher,’ he said. ‘It’s not every day he has an uncle to instruct.’

My mother took a barm brack from a tin and began to butter it for Mr Dukelow before he went. Bridget moved a kettle on to the hot area of the stove. It boiled at once. ‘Will I fry him something?’ she asked my mother.

‘There’s rashers there,’ said my mother, ‘and a bit of black pudding. Do him eggs, Bridget, and a few potato-cakes.’

‘He’s going,’ repeated my father. His face, redder than usually it was, had sweat on the sides of it. ‘He’s going,’ he said again.

I was sitting at the end of the table with a comic spread out in front of me. While I gazed at my father half my vision retained the confused mass of cartoon characters.

‘Well, that’s that,’ said my father.

He stood there swaying, his feet rooted to the kitchen floor, like a statue about to topple in a wind. He was wearing the blue-striped suit that he always wore on the half-day; his hands were hanging by his sides.

‘You should be bloody ashamed of yourself,’ he said suddenly, and I thought he was talking to me. He wasn’t looking at any of us; his eyes were turned upwards, regarding a corner of the ceiling. ‘A chancer like that,’ he said, ‘that gives a young fellow two-bob pieces.’ Instinctively I knew then that he was speaking to my mother, even though she did not acknowledge his remarks.

‘Sent up from Satan,’ he said. ‘Sent up to make wickedness. I’m sorry about that thing, Bridget.’

Bridget shook her head, implying that it didn’t matter, and I knew they were referring to what had happened in the hall last night.

‘Tell Henry Dukelow I’ll see him at the bus.’ He moved to the back door, adding that he was returning to Neenan’s until it was time to say goodbye to Mr Dukelow. ‘He’ll never make a butcher,’ he said, ‘Or any other bloody thing either.’

I closed the comic and watched my mother and Bridget preparing Mr Dukelow’s last meal in our house. They didn’t speak and I was afraid to, now. I still couldn’t understand why this series of events was taking place. I tried to connect one occurrence with another, but I failed. I felt forgotten in the house: I might have been dead at the table for all they considered me: they were assuming I had no mind.

Mr Dukelow came into the silence, carrying the suitcase he had first carried into the kitchen six months ago, bound up with what looked like the same piece of string. He ate in silence, and Bridget and my mother sat at the table, not saying anything either. I pretended to read the comic, but all the time I was thinking that I’d rather have Mr Dukelow for my father. I couldn’t help thinking it and I began to imagine my father sitting on the Bantry bus and Mr Dukelow staying where he was, running the shop better than my father had ever run it, cutting the meat better. I thought of Mr Dukelow in the big bed with my mother, lying asleep beside her. I saw his hands on the white sheets, the thin clever hands instead of hands that made you turn your head away. I saw Mr Dukelow and my mother and myself going out for a walk together on a Sunday afternoon, and Mr Dukelow telling us about Vasco da Gama and Columbus. Mr Dukelow could spend the afternoon in Neenan’s and not sway and lurch when he came back. There was no need for Mr Dukelow to go kissing the maid.

‘I’m sorry I upset him,’ said Mr Dukelow suddenly. ‘He’s a decent man.’

‘It has nothing to do with anything,’ said my mother. ‘He’s in a bad way with drink.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Dukelow.

As out of a fog the truth came in pieces to me, and some of the pieces as yet were missing. In six months Mr Dukelow had become a better butcher than my father and my father was jealous of that. Jealousy had caused him to see Mr Dukelow as a monster; jealousy had spread from him in different directions until it wrapped my mother and myself, and tortured my father’s pride until he felt he must get his own back and prove himself in some way.

‘I’ll say goodbye,’ said Mr Dukelow, and I hated my father then for his silly pettiness. I wanted Mr Dukelow to go to my mother and kiss her as my father had kissed Bridget. I wanted him to kiss Bridget too, in a way more elegant than the way of my father.

But none of that happened, nor did I ask why, in the face of everything, my father was being described as a decent man. Mr Dukelow left the kitchen, having shaken hands with the three of us. I sat down again at the table while my mother and Bridget prepared the tea. They did not say anything, but I thought to myself that I could see in Bridget’s flushed face a reflection of what was passing in her mind: that Mr Dukelow was a nicer man than the porter at the Munster and Leinster Bank. My mother’s face was expressionless, but I thought to myself that I knew what expression would be there if my mother cared to permit its presence.

Again I pretended I was reading the comic, but all the time I was thinking about what had silently occurred in our house and how for no sensible reason at all my father’s rumbustiousness had spoilt everything. No one but my father could not love Mr Dukelow: no one in the wide world, I thought, except that red-faced man with stumps on his hands, who fell over chairs when he’d been down in Neenan’s, who swayed and couldn’t read the time. I thought about the ugliness of my father’s jealous nature and the gentleness it had taken exception to. ‘Sent up from Satan,’ his stumbling voice had ridiculously announced. ‘Sent up to make wickedness.’ How could it be, I wondered, that I was the child of one instead of the other?

‘Well, mister-me-buck,’ said my father, returning to the kitchen after a time. When I looked at him I began to cry and my mother took me up to bed, saying I was tired.

O Fat White Woman

Relaxing in the garden of her husband’s boarding-school, Mrs Digby-Hunter could not help thinking that it was good to be alive. On the short grass of the lawn, tucked out of sight beneath her deck-chair, was a small box of Terry’s All Gold chocolates, and on her lap, open at page eight, lay a paper-backed novel by her second-favourite writer of historical fiction. In the garden there was the pleasant sound of insects, and occasionally the buzzing of bees. No sound came from the house: the boys, beneath the alert tutelage of her husband and Mr Beade, were obediently labouring, the maids, Dympna and Barbara, were, Mrs Digby-Hunter hoped, washing themselves.

Not for the moment in the mood for reading, she surveyed the large, tidy garden that was her husband’s pride, even though he never had a moment to work in it. Against high stone walls forsythia grew, and honeysuckle and little pear trees, and beneath them in rich, herbaceous borders the garden flowers of summer blossomed now in colourful variety. Four beech trees shaded patches of the lawn, and roses grew, and geraniums, in round beds symmetrically arranged. On either side of an archway in the wall ahead of Mrs Digby-Hunter were two yew trees and beyond the archway, in a wilder part, she could see the blooms of late rhododendrons. She could see as well, near one of the yew trees, the bent figure of Sergeant Wall, an ex-policeman employed on a part-time basis by her husband. He was weeding, his movements slow in the heat of that June afternoon, a stained white hat on his hairless head. It was pleasant to sit in the shade of a beech tree watching someone else working, having worked oneself all morning in a steamy kitchen. Although she always considered herself an easy-going woman, she had been very angry that morning because one of the girls had quite clearly omitted to make use of the deodorant she was at such pains to supply them with. She had accused each in turn and had got nowhere whatsoever, which didn’t entirely surprise her. Dympna was just fifteen and Barbara only a month or two older; hardly the age at which to expect responsibility and truthfulness. Yet it was her duty to train them, as it was her husband’s duty to train the boys. ‘You’ll strip wash, both of you,’ she’d commanded snappishly in the end, ‘immediately you’ve done the lunch dishes. From top to toe, please, every inch of you.’ They had both, naturally, turned sulky.

Mrs Digby-Hunter, wearing that day a blue cotton dress with a pattern of pinkish lupins on it, was fifty-one. She had married her husband twenty-nine years ago, at a time when he’d been at the beginning of a career in the army. Her father, well-to-do and stern, had given her away and she’d been quite happy about his gesture, for love had then possessed her fully. Determined at all costs to make a success of her marriage and to come up to scratch as a wife, she had pursued a policy of agreeableness: she smiled instead of making a fuss, in her easy-going way she accepted what there was to accept, placing her faith in her husband as she believed a good wife should. In her own opinion she was not a clever person, but at least she could offer loyalty and devotion, instead of nagging and arguing. In a bedroom of a Welsh hotel she had disguised, on her wedding night, her puzzled disappointment when her husband had abruptly left her side, having lain there for only a matter of minutes.

Thus a pattern began in their marriage and as a result of it Mrs Digby-Hunter had never borne children although she had, gradually and at an increasing rate, put on weight. At first she had minded about this and had attempted to diet. She had deprived herself of what she most enjoyed until it occurred to her that caring in this way was making her bad-tempered and miserable: it didn’t suit her, all the worrying about calories and extra ounces. She weighed now, although she didn’t know it, thirteen stone.

Her husband was leaner, a tall man with strong fingers and smooth black hair, and eyes that stared at other people’s eyes as if to imply shrewdness. He had a gaunt face and on it a well-kept though not extensive moustache. Shortly after their marriage he had abandoned his career in the army because, he said, he could see no future in it. Mrs Digby-Hunter was surprised but assumed that what was apparent to her husband was not apparent to her. She smiled and did not argue.

After the army her husband became involved with a firm that manufactured a new type of all-purpose, metal step-ladder. He explained to her the mechanism of this article, but it was complicated and she failed to understand: she smiled and nodded, murmuring that the ladder was indeed an ingenious one. Her husband, briskly businesslike in a herring-bone suit, became a director of the step-ladder company on the day before the company ran into financial difficulties and was obliged to cease all production.

‘Your father could help,’ he murmured, having imparted to her the unfortunate news, but her father, when invited to save the step-ladder firm, closed his eyes in boredom.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, rather miserably, feeling she had failed to come up to scratch as a wife. He said it didn’t matter, and a few days later he told her he’d become a vending-machine operator. He would have an area, he said, in which he would daily visit schools and swimming-pools, launderettes, factories, offices, wherever the company’s vending-machines were sited. He would examine the machines to see that they were in good trim and would fill them full of powdered coffee and powdered milk and a form of tea, and minerals and biscuits and chocolate. She thought the work odd for an ex-army officer, but she did not say so. Instead, she listened while he told her that there was an expanding market for vending-machines, and that in the end they would make a considerable amount of money. His voice went on, quoting percentages and conversion rates. She was knitting him a blue pullover at the time. He held his arms up while she fitted it about his chest; she nodded while he spoke.

Then her father died and left her a sum of money.

‘We could buy a country house,’ her husband said, ‘and open it up as a smart little hotel.’ She agreed that that would be nice. She felt that perhaps neither of them was qualified to run an hotel, but it didn’t seem worth making a fuss about that, especially since her husband had, without qualifications, joined a step-ladder firm and then, equally unskilled, had gone into the vending-machine business. In fact, their abilities as hoteliers were never put to the test because all of a sudden her husband had a better idea. Idling one evening in a saloon bar, he dropped into conversation with a man who was in a state of depression because his son appeared to be a dunce.

‘If I was starting again,’ said the man, ‘I’d go into the cramming business. My God, you could coin it.’ The man talked on, speaking of parents like himself who couldn’t hold their heads up because their children’s poor performances in the Common Entrance examination deprived them of an association with one of the great public schools of England. The next day Mrs Digby-Hunter’s husband scrutinized bound volumes of the Common Entrance examination papers.

‘A small boarding-school,’ he later said to her, ‘for temporarily backward boys; we might do quite nicely.’ Mrs Digby-Hunter, who did not immediately take to the notion of being surrounded day and night by temporarily backward boys, said that the idea sounded an interesting one. ‘There’s a place for sale in Gloucestershire,’ her husband said.

The school, begun as a small one, remained so because, as her husband explained, any school of this nature must be small. The turnover in boys was rapid, and it soon became part of the educational policy of Milton Grange to accept not more than twenty boys at any one time, the wisdom of which was reflected in results that parents and headmasters agreed were remarkable: the sons who had idled at the back of their preparatory school classrooms passed into the great public schools of England, and their parents paid the high fees of Milton Grange most gratefully.

At Milton Grange, part ivy-clad, turreted and baronial, Mrs Digby-Hunter was happy. She did not understand the ins and outs of the Common Entrance examination, for her province was the kitchen and the dormitories, but certainly life at Milton Grange as the headmaster’s wife was much more like it than occupying half the ground floor of a semi-detached villa in Croydon, as the wife of a vending-machine operator.

‘Christ, what a time we’re having with that boy for Harrow,’ her husband would say, and she would make a sighing noise to match the annoyance he felt, and smile to cheer him up. It was extraordinary what he had achieved with the dullards he took on, and she now and again wondered if one day he might even receive a small recognition, an OBE maybe. As for her, Milton Grange was recognition enough: an apt reward, she felt, for her marital agreeableness, for not being a nuisance, and coming up to scratch as a wife.

Just occasionally Mrs Digby-Hunter wondered what life would have been like if she’d married someone else. She wondered what it would have been like to have had children of her own and to have engaged in the activity that caused, eventually, children to be born. She imagined, once a year or so, as she lay alone in her room in the darkness, what it would be like to share a double bed night after night. She imagined a faceless man, a pale naked body beside hers, hands caressing her flesh. She imagined, occasionally, being married to a clergyman she’d known as a girl, a man who had once embraced her with intense passion, suddenly, after a dance in a church hall. She had experienced the pressure of his body against hers and she could recall still the smell of his clothes and the dampness of his mouth.

But Milton Grange was where she belonged now: she had chosen a man and married him and had ended up, for better or worse, in a turreted house in Gloucestershire. There was give and take in marriage, as always she had known, and where she was concerned there was everything to be thankful for. Once a year, on the last Saturday in July, the gardens of the school were given over to a Conservative fete, and more regularly she and her husband drove to other country houses, for dinner or cocktails. A local Boy Scout group once asked her to present trophies on a sports day because she was her husband’s wife and he was well regarded. She had enjoyed the occasion and had bought new clothes specially for it.

In winter she put down bulbs, and in spring she watched the birds collecting twigs and straw for nests. She loved the gardens and often repeated to the maids in the kitchen that one was ‘nearer God’s Heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth’. It was a beautiful sentiment, she said, and very true.

On that June afternoon, while Mrs Digby-Hunter dropped into a doze beneath the beech trees and Sergeant Wall removed the weeds from a herbaceous border, the bearded Mr Beade walked between two rows of desks in a bare attic room. Six boys bent over the desks, writing speedily. In the room next door six other boys wrote also. They would not be idling, Mr Beade knew, any more than the boys in the room across the corridor would be idling.

‘Amavero, amaveris, amaverit,’ he said softly, his haired lips close to the ear of a boy called Timpson. ‘Amaverimus, Timpson, amaverint,’ atnaverint.’ A thumb and forefinger of Mr Beade’s seized and turned the flesh on the back of Timpson’s left hand. ‘Amaveritis,’ he said again, ‘amaverint’ While the flesh was twisted this way and that and while Timpson moaned in the quiet manner that Mr Beade preferred, Dympna and Barbara surveyed the sleeping form of Mrs Digby-Hunter in the garden. They had not washed themselves. They stood in the bedroom they shared, gazing through an open, diamond-paned window, smoking two Embassy tipped cigarettes. ‘White fat slug,’ said Barbara. ‘Look at her.’

They looked a moment longer. Sergeant Wall in the far distance pushed himself from his knees on to his feet. ‘He’s coming in for his tea,’ said Barbara. She held cigarette smoke in her mouth and then released it in short puffs. ‘She can’t think,’ said Dympna, ‘She’s incapable of mental activity.’ ‘She’s a dead white slug,’ said Barbara.

They cupped their cigarettes in their hands for the journey down the back stairs to the kitchen. They both were thinking that the kettle would be boiling on the Aga: it would be pleasant to sit in the cool, big kitchen drinking tea with old Sergeant Wall, who gossiped about the village he lived in. It was Dympna’s turn to make his sandwich, turkey paste left over from yesterday, the easy-to-spread margarine that Mrs Digby-Hunter said was better for you than butter. ‘Dead white slug,’ repeated Barbara, laughing on the stairs. ‘Was she human once?’

Sergeant Wall passed by the sleeping Mrs Digby-Hunter and heard, just perceptibly, a soft snoring coming from her partially open mouth. She was tired, he thought; heat made women tired, he’d often heard. He removed his hat and wiped an accumulation of sweat from the crown of his head. He moved towards the house for his tea.

In his study Digby-Hunter sat with one boy, Marshalsea, listening while Marshalsea repeated recently acquired information about triangles.

‘Then DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘must be equal in all respects to –’

‘Why?’ inquired Digby-Hunter.

His voice was dry and slightly high. His bony hands, on the desk between himself and Marshalsea, had minute fingernails.

‘Because DEF –’

‘Because the triangle DEF, Marshalsea.’

‘Because the triangle DEF –’

‘Yes, Marshalsea?’

‘Because the triangle DEF has the two angles at the base and two sides equal to the two angles at the base and two sides of the triangle ABC –’

‘You’re talking bloody nonsense,’ said Digby-Hunter quietly. ‘Think about it, boy.’

He rose from his position behind his desk and crossed the room to the window. He moved quietly, a man with a slight stoop because of his height, a man who went well with the room he occupied, with shelves of textbooks, and an empty mantelpiece, and bare, pale walls. It was simple sense, as he often pointed out to parents, that in rooms where teaching took place there should be no diversions for the roving eyes of students.

Glancing from the window, Digby-Hunter observed his wife in her deck-chair beneath the beeches. He reflected that in their seventeen years at Milton Grange she had become expert at making shepherd’s pie. Her bridge, on the other hand, had not improved and she still made tiresome remarks to parents. Once, briefly, he had loved her, a love that had begun to die in a bedroom in a Welsh hotel, on the night of their wedding-day. Her nakedness, which he had daily imagined in lush anticipation, had strangely repelled him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d murmured, and had slipped into the other twin bed, knowing then that this side of marriage was something he was not going to be able to manage. She had not said anything, and between them the matter had never been mentioned again.

It was extraordinary, he thought now, watching her in the garden, that she should lie in a deck-chair like that, unfastidiously asleep. Once at a dinner-party she had described a dream she’d had, and afterwards, in the car on the way back to Milton Grange, he’d had to tell her that no one had been interested in her dream. People had quietly sighed, he’d had to say, because that was the truth.

There was a knock on the door and Digby-Hunter moved from the window and called out peremptorily. A youth with spectacles and long, uncared-for hair entered the sombre room. He was thin, with a slight, thin mouth and a fragile nose; his eyes, magnified behind the tortoiseshell-rimmed discs, were palely nondescript, the colour of water in which vegetables have been boiled. His lengthy hair was lustreless.

‘Wraggett,’ said Digby-Hunter at once, as though challenging the youth to disclaim this title.

‘Sir,’ replied Wraggett.

‘Why are you moving your head about like that?’ Digby-Hunter demanded.

He turned to the other boy. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘If the two angles at the base of DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘are equal to the two angles at the base of –’

‘Open the book,’ said Digby-Hunter. ‘Learn it.’

He left the window and returned to his desk. He sat down. ‘What d’you want, Wraggett?’ he said.

‘I think I’d better go to bed, sir.’

‘Bed? What’s the matter with you?’

‘There’s a pain in my neck, sir. At the back, sir. I can’t seem to see properly.’

Digby-Hunter regarded Wraggett with irritation and dislike. He made a noise with his lips. He stared at Wraggett. He said:

‘So you have lost your sight, Wraggett?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Why the damn hell are you bellyaching, then?’

‘I keep seeing double, sir. I feel a bit sick, sir.’

‘Are you malingering, Wraggett?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then why are you saying you can’t see?’

‘Sir –’

‘If you’re not malingering, get on with the work you’ve been set, boy. The French verb to drink, the future conditional tense?’

‘Je boive –’

‘You’re a cretin,’ shouted Digby-Hunter. ‘Get out of here at once.’

‘I’ve a pain, sir –’

‘Take your pain out with you, for God’s sake. Get down to some honest work, Wraggett. Marshalsea?’

‘If the two angles at the base of DEF,’ said Marshalsea, ‘are equal to the two angles at the base of ABC it means that the sides opposite the angles –’

His voice ceased abruptly. He closed his eyes. He felt the small fingers of Digby-Hunter briefly on his scalp before they grasped a clump of hair.

‘Open your eyes,’ said Digby-Hunter.

Marshalsea did so and saw pleasure in Digby-Hunter’s face.

‘You haven’t listened,’ said Digby-Hunter. His left hand pulled the hair, causing the boy to rise from his seat. His right hand moved slowly and then suddenly shot out, completing its journey, striking at Marshalsea’s jaw-bone. Digby-Hunter always used the side of his hand, Mr Beade the ball of the thumb.

‘Take two triangles, ABC and DEF,’ said Digby-Hunter. Again the edge of his right hand struck Marshalsea’s face and then, clenched into a fist, the hand struck repeatedly at Marshalsea’s stomach.

‘Take two triangles,’ whispered Marshalsea, ‘ABC and DEF.’

‘In which the angle ABC equals the angle DEF.’

‘In which the angle ABC equals the angle DEF.’

In her sleep Mrs Digby-Hunter heard a voice. She opened her eyes and saw a figure that might have been part of a dream. She closed her eyes again.

‘Mrs Digby-Hunter.’

A boy whose name escaped her stood looking down at her. There were so many boys coming and going for a term or two, then passing on: this one was thin and tall, with spectacles. He had an unhealthy look, she thought, and then she remembered his mother, who had an unhealthy look also, a Mrs Wraggett.

‘Mrs Digby-Hunter, I have a pain at the back of my neck.’

She blinked, looking at the boy. They’d do anything, her husband often said, in order to escape their studies, and although she sometimes felt sorry for them she quite understood that their studies must be completed since that was reason for their presence at Milton Grange. Still, the amount of work they had to do and their excessively long hours, half past eight until seven at night, caused her just occasionally to consider that she herself had been lucky to escape such pressures in her childhood. Every afternoon, immediately after lunch, all the boys set out with Mr Beade for a brisk walk, which was meant to be, in her husband’s parlance, twenty minutes of freshening up. There was naturally no time for games.

‘Mrs Digby-Hunter.’

The boy’s head was moving about in an eccentric manner. She tried to remember if she had noticed it doing that before, and decided she hadn’t. She’d have certainly noticed, for the movement made her dizzy. She reached beneath the deck-chair for the box of All Gold. She smiled at the boy. She said:

‘Would you like a chocolate, Wraggett?’

‘I feel sick, Mrs Digby-Hunter. I keep seeing double. I can’t seem to keep my head steady.’

‘You’d better tell the headmaster, old chap.’

He wasn’t a boy she’d ever cared for, any more than she’d ever cared for his mother. She smiled at him again, trying to make up for being unable to like either himself or his mother. Again she pushed the box of chocolates at him, nudging a coconut caramel out of its rectangular bed. She always left the coconut caramels and the blackcurrant boats: the boy was more than welcome to them.

‘I’ve told the headmaster, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’

‘Have you been studying too hard?’

‘No, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’

She withdrew her offer of chocolates, wondering how long he’d stand there waggling his head in the sunshine. He’d get into trouble if the loitering went on too long. She could say that she’d made him remain with her in order to hear further details about his pain, but there was naturally a limit to the amount of time he could hope to waste. She said:

‘I think, you know, you should buzz along now, Wraggett –’

‘Mrs Digby-Hunter –’

‘There’s a rule, you know: the headmaster must be informed when a boy is feeling under the weather. The headmaster comes to his own conclusions about who’s malingering and who’s not. When I was in charge of that side of things, Wraggett, the boys used to pull the wool over my eyes like nobody’s business. Well, I didn’t blame them, I’d have done the same myself. But the headmaster took another point of view. With a school like Milton Grange, every single second has a value of its own. Naturally, time can’t be wasted.’

‘They pull the hair out of your head,’ Wraggett cried, his voice suddenly shrill. ‘They hit you in a special way, so that it doesn’t bruise you. They drive their fists into your stomach.’

‘I think you should return to your classroom –’

‘They enjoy it,’ shouted Wraggett.

‘Go along now, old chap.’

‘Your husband half murdered me, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’

‘Now that simply isn’t true, Wraggett.’

‘Mr Beade hit Mitchell in the groin. With a ruler. He poked the end of the ruler –’

‘Be quiet, Wraggett.’

‘Mrs Digby-Hunter –’

‘Go along now, Wraggett.’ She spoke for the first time sharply, but when the boy began to move she changed her mind about her command and called him back. He and all the other boys, she explained with less sharpness in her voice, were at Milton Grange for a purpose. They came because they had idled at their preparatory schools, playing noughts and crosses in the back row of a classroom, giggling and disturbing everyone. They came to Milton Grange so that, after the skilled teaching of the headmaster and Mr Beade, they might succeed at an examination that would lead them to one of England’s great public schools. Corporal punishment was part of the curriculum at Milton Grange, and all parents were apprised of that fact. If boys continued to idle as they had idled in the past they would suffer corporal punishment so that, beneath its influence, they might reconsider their behaviour. ‘You understand, Wraggett?’ said Mrs Digby-Hunter in the end.

Wraggett went away, and Mrs Digby-Hunter felt pleased. The little speech she had made to him was one she had heard her husband making on other occasions. ‘We rap the occasional knuckle,’ he said to prospective parents. ‘Quite simply, we stand no nonsense.’

She was glad that it had come so easily to her to quote her husband, once again to come up to scratch as a wife. Boys who were malingering must naturally receive the occasional rap on the knuckles and her husband, over seventeen years, had proved that his ways were best. She remembered one time a woman coming and taking her son away on the grounds that the pace was too strenuous for him. As it happened, she had opened the door in answer to the woman’s summons and had heard the woman say she’d had a letter from her son and thought it better that he should be taken away. It turned out that the child had written hysterically. He had said that Milton Grange was run by lunatics and criminals. Mrs Digby-Hunter, hearing that, had smiled and had quietly inquired if she herself resembled either a lunatic or a criminal. The woman shook her head, but the boy, who had been placed in Milton Grange so that he might pass on to the King’s School in Canterbury, was taken away. ‘To stagnate’, her husband had predicted and she, knitting another pullover for him, had without much difficulty agreed.

Mrs Digby-Hunter selected a raspberry-and-honey cream. She returned the chocolate-box to the grass beneath her deck-chair and closed her eyes.

‘What’s the matter, son?’ inquired Sergeant Wall on his way back to his weeding.

Wraggett said he had a pain at the back of his neck. He couldn’t keep his head still, he said; he kept seeing double; he felt sick in the stomach. ‘God almighty,’ said Sergeant Wall. He led the boy back to the kitchen, which was the only interior part of Milton Grange that he knew. ‘Here,’ he said to the two maids, who were still sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. ‘Here,’ said Sergeant Wall, ‘have a look at this.’

Wraggett sat down and took off his spectacles. As though seeking to control its wobbling motion, he attempted to shake his head, but the effort, so Barbara and Dympna afterwards said, appeared to be too much for him. His shoulders slipped forward, the side of his face struck the scrubbed surface of the kitchen table, and when the three of them settled him back on his chair in order to give him water in a cup they discovered that he was dead.

When Mrs Digby-Hunter entered the kitchen half an hour later she blinked her eyes several times because the glaring sunshine had affected them. Trick the sausages,’ she automatically commanded, for today being a Tuesday it would be sausages for tea, a fact of which both Barbara and Dympna would, as always, have to be reminded. She was then aware that something was the matter.

She blinked again. The kitchen contained people other than Barbara and Dympna. Mr Beade, a man who rarely addressed her, was standing by the Aga. Sergeant Wall was endeavouring to comfort Barbara, who was noisily weeping.

‘What’s the matter, Barbara?’ inquired Mrs Digby-Hunter, and she noticed as she spoke that Mr Beade turned more of his back to her. There was a smell of tobacco smoke in the air: Dympna, to Mrs Digby-Hunter’s astonishment, was smoking a cigarette.

‘There’s been a tragedy, Mrs Digby-Hunter,’ said Sergeant Wall. ‘Young Wraggett.’

‘What’s the matter with Wraggett?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Dympna. She released smoke through her nose, staring hard at Mrs Digby-Hunter. Barbara, who had looked up on hearing Mrs Digby-Hunter’s voice, sobbed more quietly, gazing also, through tears, at Mrs Digby-Hunter.

‘Dead?’ As she spoke, her husband entered the kitchen. He addressed Mr Beade, who turned to face him. He said he had put the body of Wraggett on a bed in a bedroom that was never used. There was no doubt about it, he said, the boy was dead.

‘Dead?’ said Mrs Digby-Hunter again. ‘Dead?’

Mr Beade was mumbling by the Aga, asking her husband where Wraggett’s parents lived. Barbara was wiping the tears from her face with a handkerchief. Beside her, Sergeant Wall, upright and serious, stood like a statue. ‘In Worcestershire,’ Mrs Digby-Hunter’s husband said. A village called Pine.’ She was aware that the two maids were still looking at her. She wanted to tell Dympna to stop smoking at once, but the words wouldn’t come from her. She was asleep in the garden, she thought: Wraggett had come and stood by her chair, she had offered him a chocolate, now she was dreaming that he was dead, it was all ridiculous. Her husband’s voice was quiet, still talking about the village called Pine and about Wraggett’s mother and father.

Mr Beade asked a question that she couldn’t hear: her husband replied that he didn’t think they were that kind of people. He had sent for the school doctor, he told Mr Beade, since the cause of death had naturally to be ascertained as soon as possible.

‘A heart attack,’ said Mr Beade.

‘Dead?’ said Mrs Digby-Hunter for the fourth time.

Dympna held towards Barbara her packet of cigarettes. Barbara accepted one, and the eyes of the two girls ceased their observation of Mrs Digby-Hunter’s face. Dympna struck a match. Wraggett had been all right earlier, Mr Beade said. Her husband’s lips were pursed in a way that was familiar to her; there was anxiety in his eyes.

The kitchen was flagged, large grey flags that made it cool in summer and which sometimes sweated in damp weather. The boys’ crockery, of hardened primrose-coloured plastic, was piled on a dresser and on a side table. Through huge, barred windows Mrs Digby-Hunter could see shrubs and a brick wall and an expanse of gravel. Everything was familiar and yet seemed not to be. ‘So sudden,’ her husband said. ‘So wretchedly out of the blue.’ He added that after the doctor had given the cause of death he himself would motor over to the village in Worcestershire and break the awful news to the parents.

She moved, and felt again the eyes of the maids following her. She would sack them, she thought, when all this was over. She filled a kettle at the sink, running water into it from the hot tap. Mr Beade remained where he was standing when she approached the Aga, appearing to be unaware that he was in her way. Her husband moved. She wanted to say that soon, at least, there’d be a cup of tea, but again the words failed to come from her. She heard Sergeant Wall asking her husband if there was anything he could do, and then her husband’s voice said that he’d like Sergeant Wall to remain in the house until the doctor arrived so that he could repeat to the doctor what Wraggett had said about suddenly feeling unwell. Mr Beade spoke again, muttering to her husband that Wraggett in any case would never have passed into Lancing. ‘I shouldn’t mention that,’ her husband said.

She sat down to wait for the kettle to boil, and Sergeant Wall and the girls sat down also, on chairs near to where they were standing, between the two windows. Her husband spoke in a low voice to Mr Beade, instructing him, it seemed: she couldn’t hear the words he spoke. And then, without warning, Barbara cried out loudly. She threw her burning cigarette on the floor and jumped up from her chair. Tears were on her face, her teeth were widely revealed, though not in a smile. ‘You’re a fat white slug,’ she shouted at Mrs Digby-Hunter.

Sergeant Wall attempted to quieten the girl, but her fingernails scratched at his face and her fingers gripped and tore at the beard of Mr Beade, who had come to Sergeant Wall’s aid. Dympna did not move from her chair. She was looking at Mrs Digby-Hunter, smoking quietly, as though nothing at all was happening.

‘It’ll be in the newspapers,’ shouted Barbara.

She was taken from the kitchen, and the Digby-Hunters could hear her sobbing in the passage and on the back stairs. ‘She’ll sell the story,’ said Dympna.

Digby-Hunter looked at her. He attempted to smile at her, to suggest by his smile that he had a fondness for her. ‘What story?’ he said.

‘The way the boys are beaten up.’

‘Now look here, Dympna, you know nothing whatsoever about it. The boys at Milton Grange are here for a special purpose. They undergo special education –’

‘You killed one, Mr Digby-Hunter.’ Still puffing at her cigarette, Dympna left the kitchen, and Mrs Digby-Hunter spoke.

‘My God,’ she said.

‘They’re upset by death,’ said her husband tetchily. ‘Naturally enough. They’ll both calm down.’

But Mr Beade, hearing those remarks as he returned to the kitchen, said that it was the end of Milton Grange. The girls would definitely pass on their falsehoods to a newspaper. They were telling Sergeant Wall now, he said. They were reminding him of lies they had apparently told him before, and of which he had taken no notice.

‘What in the name of heaven,’ Digby-Hunter angrily asked his wife, ‘did you have to go engaging creatures like that for?’

They hated her, she thought: two girls who day by day had worked beside her in the kitchen, to whom she had taught useful skills. A boy had come and stood beside her in the sunshine and she had offered him a chocolate. He had complained of a pain, and she had pointed out that he must make his complaint to the headmaster, since that was the rule. She had explained as well that corporal punishment was part of the curriculum at Milton Grange. The boy was dead. The girls who hated her would drag her husband’s boarding-school through the mud.

She heard the voice of Sergeant Wall saying that the girls, one of them hysterical but calming down, the other insolent, were out to make trouble. He’d tried to reason with them, but they hadn’t even listened.

The girls had been in Milton Grange for two and a half months. She remembered the day they had arrived together, carrying cardboard suitcases. They’d come before that to be interviewed, and she’d walked them round the house, explaining about the school. She remembered saying in passing that once a year, at the end of every July, a Conservative fete was held, traditionally now, in the gardens. They hadn’t seemed much interested.

‘I’ve built this place up,’ she heard her husband say. ‘Month by month, year by year. It was a chicken farm when I bought it, Beade, and now I suppose it’ll be a chicken farm again.’

She left the kitchen and walked along the kitchen passage and up the uncarpeted back stairs. She knocked on the door of their room. They called out together, saying she should come in. They were both packing their belongings into their cardboard suitcases, smoking fresh cigarettes. Barbara appeared to have recovered.

She tried to explain to them. No one knew yet, she said, why Wraggett had died. He’d had a heart attack most probably, like Mr Beade said. It was a terrible thing to have happened.

The girls continued to pack, not listening to her. They folded garments or pressed them, unfolded, into their suitcases.

‘My husband’s built the place up. Month by month, year by year, for seventeen years he has built it up.’

‘The boys are waiting for their tea,’ said Dympna. ‘Mrs Digby-Hunter, you’d better prick the sausages.’

‘Forget our wages,’ said Barbara, and laughed in a way that was not hysterical.

‘My husband –’

‘Your husband,’ said Dympna, ‘derives sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children. So does Beade. They are queer men.’

‘Your husband,’ said Barbara, ‘will be jailed. He’ll go to prison with a sack over his head so that he won’t have to see the disgust on people’s faces. Isn’t that true, Mrs Digby-Hunter?’

‘My husband –’

‘Filth,’ said Dympna.

She sat down on the edge of a bed and watched the two girls packing. She imagined the dead body in the bedroom that was never used, and then she imagined Sergeant Wall and Mr Beade and her husband in the kitchen, waiting for the school doctor to arrive, knowing that it didn’t much matter what cause he offered for the death if these two girls were allowed to have their way.

‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked, quite calmly.

Neither replied. They went on packing and while they packed she talked, in desperation. She tried to speak the truth about Milton Grange, as she saw the truth, but they kept interrupting her. The bruises didn’t show on the boys because the bruises were inflicted in an expert way, but sometimes hair was actually pulled out of the boys’ scalps, small bunches of hair, she must have noticed that. She had noticed no such thing. ‘Corporal punishment,’ she began to say, but Barbara held out hairs that had been wrenched from the head of a boy called Bridle. She had found them in a wastepaper basket; Bridle had said they were his and had shown her the place they’d come from. She returned the hairs to a plastic bag that once had contained stockings. The hairs would be photographed, Barbara said; they would appear on the front page of a Sunday newspaper. They’d be side by side with the ex-headmaster, his head hidden beneath a sack, and Mr Beade skulking behind his beard. Milton Grange, turreted baronial, part ivy-clad, would be examined by Sunday readers as a torture chamber. And in the garden, beneath the beech trees, a man would photograph the deck-chair where a woman had slept while violence and death occurred. She and her husband might one day appear in a waxworks, and Mr Beade, too; a man who, like her husband, derived sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on children.

‘You are doing this for profit,’ she protested, trying to smile, to win them from the error of their ways.

‘Yes,’ they said together, and then confessed, sharing the conversation, that they had often considered telephoning a Sunday newspaper to say they had a story to tell. They had kept the hairs in the plastic bag because they’d had that in mind; in every detail they knew what they were going to say.

‘You’re making money out of –’

‘Yes,’ said Dympna. ‘You’ve kept us short, Mrs Digby-Hunter.’

She saw their hatred of her in their faces and heard it in both their voices; like a vapour, it hung about the room.

‘Why do you hate me?’ she asked again.

They laughed, not answering, as though an answer wasn’t necessary.

She remembered, although just now she didn’t wish to, the clergyman who had kissed her with passion after a dance in a church hall, the dampness of his lips, his body pressed into hers. The smell of his clothes came back to her, across thirty years, seeming familiar because it had come before. She might have borne his children in some rectory somewhere. Would they have hated her then?

Underclothes, dresses, lipsticks, Woolworth’s jewellery, unframed photo graphs of male singing stars were jumbled together in the two cardboard suitcases. The girls moved about the room, picking up their belongings, while Mrs Digby-Hunter, in greater misery than she had ever before experienced, watched them from the edge of the bed. How could human creatures be so cruel? How could they speak to her about being a figure in a waxworks tableau when she had done nothing at all? How could they so callously propose to tell lies to a newspaper about her husband and Mr Beade when the boy who had so tragically died was still warm with the memory of life?

She watched them, two girls so young that they were not yet fully developed. They had talked about her. In this room, night after night, they had wondered about her, and in the end had hated her. Had they said in their nightly gossiping that since the day of her marriage she had lived like a statue with another statue?

It was all her fault, she suddenly thought: Milton Grange would be a chicken farm again, her husband would be examined by a psychiatrist in a prison, she would live in a single room. It was all her fault. In twenty-nine years it had taken violence and death to make sense of facts that were as terrible.

The girls were saying they’d catch a bus on the main road. Without looking at her or addressing her again they left the bedroom they had shared. She heard their footsteps on the back stairs, and Dympna’s voice asking Barbara if she was all right now and Barbara saying she was. A white slug, the girl had called her, a fat white slug.

She did not leave the room. She remained sitting on the edge of the bed, unable to think. Her husband’s face appeared in her mind, with its well-kept moustache and shrewd-seeming dark eyes, a face in the bedroom of a Welsh hotel on the night of her wedding-day. She saw herself weeping, as she had not wept then. In a confused way she saw herself on that occasion and on others, protesting, shaking her head, not smiling.

‘I’m leaving the army for a step-ladder firm,’ he said to her, and she struck his face with her hands, tormented by the absurdity of what he said. She cried out in anger that she had married an army officer, not a step-ladder salesman who was after her father’s money. She wept again when ridiculously he told her that he intended to spend his days filling machines full of powdered coffee. He had failed her, she shrilled at him, that night in the Welsh hotel and he had failed her ever since. In front of boys, she accused him of ill-treating those who had been placed in his care. If ever it happened again, she threatened, the police would be sent for. She turned to the boys and ordered them to run about the gardens for a while. It was ludicrous that they should be cooped up while the sun shone, it was ludicrous that they should strive so painfully simply to pass an examination into some school or other. She banged a desk with her hand after the boys had gone, she spat out words at him: they’d all be in the Sunday papers, she said, if he wasn’t careful, and she added that she herself would leave Milton Grange for ever unless he pursued a gentler course with the boys who were sent to him, unless he at once dismissed the ill-mannered Mr Beade, who was clearly a sinister man.

In the room that had been the maids’ room Mrs Digby-Hunter wept as her mind went back through the years of her marriage and then, still weeping, she left the room and descended the back stairs to the kitchen. To her husband she said that it was all her fault; she said she was Sorry. She had knitted and put down bulbs, she said, and in the end a boy had died. Two girls had hated her because in her easy-going way she had held her peace, not wanting to know. Loyalty and devotion, said Mrs Digby-Hunter, and now a boy was dead, and her husband with a sack over his head would be taken from Milton Grange and later would have sessions with a prison psychiatrist. It was all her fault. She would say so to the reporters when they came. She would explain and take the blame, she would come up to scratch as a wife.

Her husband and Sergeant Wall and Mr Beade looked at Mrs Digby-Hunter. She stood in the centre of the kitchen, one hand on the table, a stout woman in a blue-and-pink dress, weeping. The tragedy had temporarily unhinged her, Sergeant Wall thought, and Mr Beade in irritation thought that if she could see herself she’d go somewhere else, and her husband thought that it was typical of her to be tiresomely stupid at a time like this.

She went on talking: you couldn’t blame them for hating her, she said, for she might have prevented death and hadn’t bothered herself. In a bedroom in Wales she should have wept, she said, or packed a suitcase and gone away. Her voice continued in the kitchen, the words pouring from it, repetitiously and in a hurry. The three men sighed and looked away, all of them thinking the same thing now, that she made no sense at all, with her talk about putting down bulbs and coming up to scratch.

Raymond Bamber and Mrs Fitch

For fifteen years, ever since he was twenty-seven, Raymond Bamber had attended the Tamberleys’ autumn cocktail party. It was a function to which the Tamberleys inclined to invite their acquaintances rather than their friends, so that every year the faces changed a bit: no one except Raymond had been going along to the house in Eaton Square for as long as fifteen years. Raymond, the Tamberleys felt, was a special case, for they had known him since he was a boy, having been close friends of his father’s.

Raymond was a tall man, six foot two inches, with spectacles and a small moustache. He was neat in all he did, and he lived what he himself referred to as a tidy life.

‘I come here every year,’ said Raymond at the Tamberleys’, to a woman he had not met before, a woman who was tall too, with a white lean face and lips that were noticeably scarlet. ‘It is an occasion for me. almost, like Christmas or Easter. To some extent, I guide my life by the Tamberleys’ autumn party, remembering on each occasion what has happened in the year gone by.’

‘My name is Mrs Fitch,’ said the woman, poking a hand out for a drink. ‘Is that vermouth and gin?’ she inquired of the Tamberleys’ Maltese maid, and the maid agreed that it was. ‘Good,’ said Mrs Fitch.

‘Raymond, Raymond,’ cried the voice of Mrs Tamberley as Mrs Tamberley materialized suddenly beside them. ‘How’s Nanny Wilkinson?’

‘She died,’ murmured Raymond.

‘Of course she did,’ exclaimed Mrs Tamberley. ‘How silly of me!’

‘Oh no –’

‘You put that sweet notice in The Times. His old nurse,’ explained Mrs Tamberley to Mrs Fitch. ‘Poor Nanny Wilkinson,’ she said, and smiled and bustled off.

‘What was all that?’ asked Mrs Fitch.

‘It’s one of the things that happened to me during the year. The other was –’

‘What’s your name, anyway?’ the woman interrupted. ‘I don’t think I ever caught it.’

Raymond told her his name. He saw that she was wearing a black dress with touches of white on it. Her shoulders were bare and bony; she had, Raymond said to himself, an aquiline face.

‘The other thing was that an uncle died and left me a business in his will. That happened, actually, before the death of Nanny Wilkinson and to tell you the truth, Mrs Fitch, I just didn’t know what to do. “What could I do with a business?” I said to myself. So I made my way to Streatham where the old lady lived. “Run a business, Raymond? You couldn’t run a bath,” she said.’ Raymond laughed, and Mrs Fitch smiled frostily, looking about her for another drink. ‘It rankled, that, as you may imagine. Why couldn’t I run a business? I thought. And then, less than a week later, I heard that she had died in Streatham. I went to her funeral, and discovered that she’d left me a prayer-book in her will. All that happened in the last year. You see, Mrs Fitch?’

Mrs Fitch, her eyes on her husband, who was talking to a woman in yellow in a distant corner of the room, said vaguely:

‘What about the business?’

‘I sold the business. I live alone, Mrs Fitch, in a flat in Bayswater; I’m forty-two. I’m telling you that simply because I felt that I could never manage anything like taking on a business so suddenly. That’s what I thought when I had considered the matter carefully. No good being emotional, I said to myself.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Fitch. She watched the woman move quite close to her husband and engage him in speech that had all the air of confidential talk. The woman wasn’t young, Mrs Fitch noticed, but had succeeded in giving the impression of youth. She was probably forty-four, she reckoned; she looked thirty.

So Mrs Tamberley had seen the notice in The Times, Raymond thought. He had worded it simply and had stated in a straightforward manner the service that Nanny Wilkinson had given over the years to his family. He had felt it her due, a notice in The Times, and there was of course only he who might do it. He remembered her sitting regally in his nursery teaching him his tidiness. Orderliness was the most important thing in life, she said, after a belief in the Almighty.

‘Get me a drink, dear,’ said Mrs Fitch suddenly, holding out an empty glass and causing Raymond to note that this woman was consuming the Tamberleys’ liquor at a faster rate than he.

‘Gin and vermouth,’ ordered Mrs Fitch. ‘Dry,’ she added. ‘Not that red stuff.’

Raymond smiled and took her glass, while Mrs Fitch observed that her husband was listening with rapt care to what the woman in yellow was saying to him. In the taxi-cab on the way to the Tamberleys’, he had remarked as usual that he was fatigued after his day’s work. ‘An early night,’ he had suggested. And now he was listening carefully to a female: he wouldn’t leave this party for another two hours at least.

‘It was quite a blow to me,’ said Raymond, handing Mrs Fitch a glass of gin and vermouth, ‘hearing that she was dead. Having known her, you see, all my life –’

‘Who’s dead now?’ asked Mrs Fitch, still watching her husband.

‘Sorry,’ said Raymond. ‘How silly of me! No, I meant, you see, this old lady whom I had known as Nanny Wilkinson. I was saying it was a blow to me when she died, although of course I didn’t see much of her these last few years. But the memories are there, if you see what I mean; and you cannot of course erase them.’

‘No,’ said Mrs Fitch.

‘I was a particularly tall child, with my spectacles of course, and a longish upper lip. “When you’re a big man,” I remember her saying to me, “you’ll have to grow a little moustache to cover up all that lip.” And declare, Mrs Fitch, I did.’

‘I never had a nanny,’ said Mrs Fitch.

‘ “He’ll be a tennis-player,” people used to say – because of my height, you see. But in fact I turned out to be not much good on a tennis court.’

Mrs Fitch nodded. Raymond began to say something else, but Mrs Fitch, her eyes still fixed upon her husband, interrupted him. She said:

‘Interesting about your uncle’s business.’

‘I think I was right. I’ve thought of it often since, of sitting down in an office and ordering people to do this and that, instead of remaining quietly in my flat in Bayswater. I do all my own cooking, actually, and cleaning and washing up. Well, you can’t get people, you know. I couldn’t even get a simple char, Mrs Fitch, not for love nor money. Of course it’s easy having no coal fires to cope with: the flat is all-electric, which is what, really, I prefer.’

Raymond laughed nervously, having observed that Mrs Fitch was, for the first time since their conversation had commenced, observing him closely. She was looking into his face, at his nose and his moustache and his spectacles. Her eyes passed up to his forehead and down the line of his right cheek, down his neck until they arrived at Raymond’s Adam’s apple. He continued to speak to her, telling of the manner in which his flat in Bayswater was furnished, how he had visited the Sanderson showrooms in Berners Street to select materials for chair-covers and curtains. ‘She made them for me,’ said Raymond. ‘She was almost ninety then.’

‘What’s that?’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘Your nurse made them?’

‘I measured up for her and wrote everything down just as she had directed. Then I travelled out to Streatham with my scrap of paper.’

‘On a bicycle.’

Raymond shook his head. He thought it odd of Mrs Fitch to suggest, for no logical reason, that he had cycled from Bayswater to Streatham. ‘On a bus actually,’ he explained. He paused, and then added: ‘I could have had them made professionally, of course, but I preferred the other. I thought it would give her an interest, you see.’

‘Instead of which it killed her.’

‘No, no. No, you’ve got it confused. It was in 1964 that she made the curtains and the covers for me. As I was saying, she died only a matter of months ago.’

Raymond noticed that Mrs Fitch had ceased her perusal of his features and was again looking vacantly into the distance. He was glad that she had ceased to examine him because had she continued he would have felt obliged to move away from her, being a person who was embarrassed by such intent attention. He said, to make it quite clear about the covers and the curtains:

‘She died in fact of pneumonia.’

‘Stop,’ said Mrs Fitch to the Tamberleys’ Maltese maid who happened to be passing with a tray of drinks. She lifted a glass to her lips and consumed its contents while reaching out a hand for another. She repeated the procedure, drinking two glasses of the Tamberleys’ liquor in a gulping way and retaining a third in her left hand.

‘Nobody can be trusted,’ said Mrs Fitch after all that. ‘We come to these parties and everything’s a sham.’

‘What?’ said Raymond.

‘You know what I mean.’

Raymond laughed, thinking that Mrs Fitch was making some kind of joke. ‘Of course,’ he said, and laughed again, a noise that was more of a cough.

‘You told me you were forty-two,’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘I in fact am fifty-one, and have been taken for sixty-five.’

Raymond thought he would move away from this woman in a moment. He had a feeling she might be drunk. She had listened pleasantly enough while he told her a thing or two about himself, yet here she was now speaking most peculiarly. He smiled at her and heard her say:

‘Look over there, Mr Bamber. That man with the woman in yellow is my husband. We were born in the same year and in the same month, January 1915. Yet he could be in his thirties. That’s what he’s up to now; pretending the thirties with the female he’s talking to. He’s praying I’ll not approach and give the game away. D’you see, Mr Bamber?’

‘That’s Mrs Anstey,’ said Raymond. ‘I’ve met her here before. The lady in yellow.’

‘My husband has eternal youth,’ said Mrs Fitch. She took a mouthful of her drink and reached out a hand to pick a fresh one from a passing tray. ‘It’s hard to bear.’

‘You don’t look fifty-one,’ said Raymond. ‘Not at all.’

‘Are you mocking me?’ cried Mrs Fitch. ‘I do not look fifty-one. I’ve told you so: I’ve been taken for sixty-five.’

‘I didn’t mean that. I meant –’

‘You were telling a lie, as well you know. My husband is telling lies too. He’s all sweetness to that woman, yet it isn’t his nature. My husband cares nothing for people, except when they’re of use to him. Why do you think, Mr Bamber, he goes to cocktail parties?’

‘Well–’

‘So that he may make arrangements with other women. He desires their flesh and tells them so by looking at it.’

Raymond looked serious, frowning, thinking that that was expected of him.

‘We look ridiculous together, my husband and I. Yet once we were a handsome couple. I am like an old crow while all he has is laughter lines about his eyes. It’s an obsession with me.’

Raymond pursed his lips, sighing slightly.

‘He’s after women in this room,’said Mrs Fitch, eyeing her husband again.

‘Oh, no, now –’

‘Why not? How can you know better than I, Mr Bamber? I have had plenty of time to think about this matter. Why shouldn’t he want to graze where the grass grows greener, or appears to grow greener? That Anstey woman is a walking confidence trick.’

‘I think,’ said Raymond, ‘that I had best be moving on. I have friends to talk to.’ He made a motion to go, but Mrs Fitch grasped part of his jacket in her right hand.

‘What I say is true,’ she said. ‘He is practically a maniac. He has propositioned women in this very room before this. I’ve heard him at it.’

‘I’m sure –’

‘When I was a raving beauty he looked at me with his gleaming eye. Now he gleams for all the others. I’ll tell you something, Mr Bamber.’ Mrs Fitch paused. Raymond noticed that her eyes were staring over his shoulder, as though she had no interest in him beyond his being a person to talk at. ‘I’ve gone down on my bended knees, Mr Bamber, in order to have this situation cleared up: I’ve prayed that that man might look again with tenderness on his elderly wife. But God has gone on,’ said Mrs Fitch bitterly, ‘in His mysterious way, not bothering Himself.’

Raymond did not reply to these observations. He said instead that he hadn’t liked to mention it before but was Mrs Fitch aware that she was clutching in her right hand part of his clothes?

‘He shall get to know your Anstey woman,’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘He shall come to know that her father was a bearlike man with a generous heart and that her mother, still alive in Guildford, is difficult to get on with. My husband shall come to know all the details about your Anstey woman: the plaster chipping in her bathroom, the way she cooks an egg. He shall know what her handbags look like, and how their clasps work – while I continue to wither away in the house we share.’

Raymond asked Mrs Fitch if she knew the Griegons, who were, he said, most pleasant people. He added that the Griegons were present tonight and that, in fact, he would like to introduce them to her.

‘You are trying to avoid the facts. What have the Griegons to recommend them that we should move in their direction and end this conversation? Don’t you see the situation, Mr Bamber? I am a woman who is obsessed because of the state of her marriage, how I have aged while he has not. I am obsessed by the fact that he is now incapable of love or tenderness. I have failed to keep all that alive because I lost my beauty. There are lines on my body too, Mr Bamber: I would show you if we were somewhere else.’

Raymond protested again, and felt tired of protesting. But Mrs Fitch, hearing him speak and thinking that he was not yet clear in his mind about the situation, supplied him with further details about her marriage and the manner in which, at cocktail parties, her husband made arrangements for the seduction of younger women, or women who on the face of it seemed younger. ‘Obsessions are a disease,’ said Mrs Fitch, drinking deeply from her glass.

Raymond explained then that he knew nothing whatsoever about marriage difficulties, to which Mrs Fitch replied that she was only telling him the truth. ‘I do not for a moment imagine,’ she said, ‘that you are an angel come from God, Mr Bamber, in order to settle the unfortunateness. I didn’t mean to imply that when I said I had prayed. Did you think I thought you were a messenger?’ Mrs Fitch, still holding Raymond’s jacket and glancing still at her husband and the woman in yellow, laughed shrilly. Raymond said:

‘People are looking at us, the way you are pulling at my clothes. I’m a shy man –’

‘Tell me about yourself. You know about me by now: how everything that once seemed rosy has worked out miserably.’

‘Oh, come now,’ said Raymond, causing Mrs Fitch to repeat her laughter and to call out for a further drink. The Tamberleys’ maid hastened towards her. ‘Now then,’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘Tell me.’

‘What can I tell you?’ asked Raymond.

‘I drink a lot these days,’ said Mrs Fitch, ‘to help matters along. Cheers, Mr Bamber.’

‘Actually I’ve told you quite a bit, you know. One thing and another –’

‘You told me nothing except some nonsense about an old creature in Streatham. Who wants to hear that, for Christ’s sake? Or is it relevant?’

‘Well, I mean, it’s true, Mrs Fitch. Relevant to what?’

‘I remember you, believe it or not, in this very room on this same occasion last year. “Who’s that man?” I said to the Tamberley woman and she replied that you were a bore. You were invited, year by year, so the woman said, because of some friendship between the Tamberleys and your father. In the distant past.’

‘Look here,’ said Raymond, glancing about him and noting to his relief that no one appeared to have heard what Mrs Fitch in her cups had said.

‘What’s the matter?’ demanded Mrs Fitch. Her eyes were again upon her husband and Mrs Anstey. She saw them laugh together, and felt her unhappiness being added to as though it were a commodity within her body. ‘Oh yes,’ she said to Raymond, attempting to pass a bit of the unhappiness on. ‘A grinding bore. Those were the words of Mrs Tamberley.’

Raymond shook his head. ‘I’ve known Mrs Tamberley since I was a child,’ he said.

‘So the woman said. You were invited because of the old friendship: the Tamberleys and your father. I cannot tell a lie, Mr Bamber: she said you were a pathetic case. She said you hadn’t learned how to grow up. I dare say you’re a pervert.’

‘My God!’

‘I’m sorry I cannot tell lies,’ said Mrs Fitch, and Raymond felt her grip tighten on his jacket. ‘It’s something that happens to you when you’ve been through what I’ve been through. That man up to his tricks with women while the beauty drains from my face. What’s it like, d’you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Raymond. ‘How on earth could I know? Mrs Fitch, let’s get one thing clear: I am not a pervert.’

‘Not? Are you sure? They may think you are, you know,’ said Mrs Fitch, glancing again at her husband. ‘Mrs Tamberley has probably suggested that very thing to everyone in this room. Crueller, though, I would have thought, to say you were a grinding bore.’

‘I am not a pervert –’

‘I can see them sniggering over that all right. Unmentionable happenings between yourself and others. Elderly newspaper-vendors –’

‘Stop!’ cried Raymond. Tor God’s sake, woman –’

‘You’re not a Jew, are you?’

Raymond did not reply. He stood beside Mrs Fitch, thinking that the woman appeared to be both drunk and not of her right mind. He did not wish to create a scene in the Tamberleys’ drawing-room, and yet he recognized that by the look of her she intended to hold on to his jacket for the remainder of the evening. If he attempted to pull it away from her, she would not let go: she did not, somehow, seem to be the kind of woman who would. She wouldn’t mind a scene at all.

‘Why,’ said Mrs Fitch, ‘did you all of a sudden begin to tell me about that woman in Streatham, Mr Bamber, and the details about your, chair-covers and curtains? Why did you tell me about your uncle dying and trying to leave you a business and your feeling that in your perverted condition you were unfit to run a business?’

Raymond’s hands began to shake. He could feel an extra tug on his jacket, as though Mrs Fitch was now insisting that he stand closer to her. He pressed his teeth together, grinding his molars one upon another, and then opened his mouth and felt his teeth and his lips quivering. He knew that his voice would sound strange when he spoke. He said:

‘You are being extremely offensive to me, Mrs Fitch. You are a woman who is a total stranger to me, yet you have seen fit to drive me into a corner at a cocktail party and hold me here by force. I must insist that you let go my jacket and allow me to walk away.’

‘What about me, Mr Bamber? What about my husband and your Anstey woman? Already they are immoral on a narrow bed somewhere; in a fifth-class hotel near King’s Cross station.’

‘Your husband is still in this room, Mrs Fitch. As well you know. What your husband does is not my business.’

‘Your business is your flat in Bayswater, is it? And curtains and covers from the Sanderson showrooms in Berners Street. Your world is people dying and leaving you stuff in wills – money and prayer-books and valuable jewellery that you wear when you dress yourself up in a nurse’s uniform.’

‘I must ask you to stop, Mrs Fitch.’

‘I could let you have a few pairs of old stockings if they interest you. Or garments of my husband’s.’

Mrs Fitch saw Raymond close his eyes. She watched the flesh on his face redden further and watched it twitch in answer to a pulse that throbbed in his neck. Her husband, a moment before, had reached out a hand and placed it briefly on the female’s arm.

‘So your nanny was a guide to you,’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘You hung on all her words, I dare say?’

Raymond did not reply. He turned his head away, trying to control the twitching in his face. Eventually he said, quietly and with the suspicion of a stammer:

‘She was a good woman. She was kind in every way.’

‘She taught you neatness.’

Raymond was aware, as Mrs Fitch spoke that sentence, that she had moved appreciably closer to him. He could feel her knee pressing against his. He felt a second knee, and felt next that his leg had been cleverly caught by her, between her own legs.

‘Look here,’ said Raymond.

‘Yes?’

‘Mrs Fitch, what are you trying to do?’

Mrs Fitch increased the pressure of her knees. Her right hand moved into Raymond’s jacket pocket. ‘I am a little the worse for wear,’ she said, ‘but I can still tell the truth.’

‘You are embarrassing me.’

‘What are your perversions? Tell me, Mr Bamber.’

‘I have no perversions of any kind. I live a normal life.’

‘Shall I come to you with a pram? I’m an unhappy woman, Mr Bamber. I’ll wear black woollen stockings. I’ll show you those lines on my body.’

‘Please,’ said Raymond, thinking he would cry in a moment.

Already people were glancing at Mrs Fitch’s legs gripping his so strongly. Her white face and her scarlet lips were close to his eyes. He could see the lines on her cheeks, but he turned his glance away from them in case she mentioned again the lines on her body. She is a mad, drunken nymphomaniac, said Raymond to himself, and thought that never in all his life had anything so upsetting happened to him.

‘Embrace me,’ said Mrs Fitch.

‘Please, I beg you,’ said Raymond.

‘You are a homosexual. A queer. I had forgotten that.’

‘I’m not a homosexual,’ shouted Raymond, aware that his voice was piercingly shrill. Heads turned and he felt the eyes of the Tamberleys’ guests. He had been heard to cry that he was not a homosexual, and people had wished to see for themselves.

‘Excuse me,’ said a voice. ‘I’m sorry about this.’

Raymond turned his head and saw Mrs Fitch’s husband standing behind him. ‘Come along now, Adelaide,’ said Mrs Fitch’s husband. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again to Raymond. ‘I didn’t realize she’d had a tankful before she got here.’

‘I’ve been telling him a thing or two,’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘We’ve exchanged life-stories.’

Raymond felt her legs slip away, and he felt her hand withdraw itself from the pocket of his jacket. He nodded in a worldly way at her husband and said in a low voice that he understood how it was.

‘He’s a most understanding chap,’ said Mrs Fitch. ‘He has a dead woman in Streatham.’

‘Come along now,’ordered her husband in a rough voice, and Raymond saw that the man’s hand gripped her arm in a stern manner.

‘I was telling that man,’ said Mrs Fitch again, seeming to be all of a sudden in an ever greater state of inebriation. Very slowly she said: ‘I was telling him what I am and what you are, and what the Tamberleys think about him. It has been home-truths corner here, for the woman with an elderly face and for the chap who likes to dress himself out as a children’s nurse and go with women in chauffeur’s garb. Actually, my dear, he’s a homosexual.’

‘Come along now,’ said Mrs Fitch’s husband. ‘I’m truly sorry,’ he added to Raymond. ‘It’s a problem.’

Raymond saw that it was all being conducted in a most civilized manner. Nobody shouted in the Tamberleys’ drawing-room, nobody noticed the three of them talking quite quietly in a corner. The Maltese maid in fact, not guessing for a moment that anything was amiss, came up with her tray of drinks and before anyone could prevent it, Mrs Fitch had lifted one to her lips. ‘In vino Veritas,’ she remarked.

Raymond felt his body cooling down. His shirt was damp with sweat, and he realized that he was panting slightly and he wondered how long that had been going on. He watched Mrs Fitch being aided through the room by her husband. No wonder, he thought, the man had been a little severe with her, if she put up a performance like that very often; no wonder he treated her like an infant. She was little more than an infant, Raymond considered, saying the first thing that came into her head, and going on about sex. He saw her lean form briefly again, through an opening in the crowded room, and he realized without knowing it that he had craned his neck for a last glimpse. She saw him too, as she smiled and bowed at Mrs Tamberley, appearing to be sober and collected. She shook her head at him, deploring him or suggesting, even, that he had been the one who had misbehaved. Her husband raised a hand in the air, thanking Raymond for his understanding.

Raymond edged his way through all the people and went to find a bathroom. He washed his face, taking his spectacles off and placing them beside a piece of lime-green soap. He was thinking that her husband was probably just like any other man at a cocktail party. How could the husband help it, Raymond thought, if he had not aged and if other women found him pleasant to talk to? Did she expect him to have all his hair plucked out and have an expert come to line his face?

Leaning against the wall of the bathroom, Raymond thought about Mrs Fitch. He thought at first that she was a fantastic woman given to fantastic statements, and then he embroidered on the thought and saw her as being more subtle than that. ‘By heavens!’ said Raymond aloud to himself. She was a woman, he saw, who was pathetic in what she did, transferring the truth about herself to other people. She it was, he guessed, who was the grinding bore, so well known for the fact that she had come to hear the opinion herself and in her unbalanced way sought to pretend that others were bores in order to push the thing away from her. She was probably even, he thought, a little perverted, the way in which she had behaved with her knees, and sought to imbue others with this characteristic too, so that she, for the moment, might feel rid of it: Mrs Fitch was clearly a case for a psychiatrist. She had said that her husband was a maniac where women were concerned; she had said that he had taken Mrs Anstey to a bed in King’s Cross when Mrs Anstey was standing only yards away, in front of her eyes. In vino veritas, she had said, for no reason at all.

One morning, Raymond imagined, poor Mr Fitch had woken up to find his wife gabbling in that utterly crazy manner about her age and her hair and the lines on her body. Probably the woman was a nuisance with people who came to the door, the deliverers of coal and groceries, the milkman and the postman. He imagined the Express Dairy on the telephone to Mrs Fitch’s husband, complaining that the entire milk-round was daily being disorganized because of the antics of Mrs Fitch, who was a bore with everyone.

It accounted for everything, Raymond thought, the simple fact that the woman was a psychological case. He closed his eyes and sighed with relief, and remembered then that he had read in newspapers about women like Mrs Fitch. He opened his eyes again and looked at himself in the mirror of the Tamberleys’ smallest bathroom. He touched his neat moustache with his fingers and smiled at himself to ascertain that his teeth were not carrying a piece of cocktail food. ‘You have a tea-leaf on your tooth,’ said the voice of Nanny Wilkinson, and Raymond smiled, remembering her.

Raymond returned to the party and stood alone watching the people talking and laughing. His eyes passed from face to face, many of which were familiar to him. He looked for the Griegons with whom last year he had spent quite some time, interesting them in a small sideboard that he had just had french polished, having been left the sideboard in the will of a godmother. The man, a Mr French amusingly enough, had come to Raymond’s flat to do the job there in the evenings, having explained that he had no real facilities or premises, being a postman during the day. ‘Not that he wasn’t an expert polisher,’ Raymond had said. ‘He did a most beautiful job. I heard of him through Mrs Adams who lives in the flat below. I thought it was reasonable, you know: seven guineas plus expenses. The sideboard came up wonderfully.’

‘Hullo,’ said Raymond to the Griegons.

‘How d’you do?’ said Mrs Griegon, a pleasant, smiling woman, not at all like Mrs Fitch. Her husband nodded at Raymond, and turned to a man who was talking busily.

‘Our name is Griegon,’ said Mrs Griegon. ‘This is my husband, and this is Dr Oath.’

‘I know,’ said Raymond, surprised that Mrs Griegon should say who she was since they had all met so pleasantly a year ago. ‘How do you do, Dr Oath?’ he said, stretching out a hand.

‘Yes,’ said Dr Oath, shaking the hand rapidly while continuing his conversation.

Mrs Griegon said: ‘You haven’t told us your name.’

Raymond, puzzled and looking puzzled, said that his name was Raymond Bamber. ‘But surely you remember our nice talk last year?’ he said. ‘I recall it all distinctly: I was telling you about Mr French who came to polish a sideboard, and how he charged only seven guineas.’

‘Most reasonable,’ said Mrs Griegon. ‘Most reasonable.’

‘We stood over there,’ explained Raymond, pointing. ‘You and I and Mr Griegon. I remember I gave you my address and telephone number in case if you were ever in Bayswater you might like to pop in to see the sideboard. You said to your husband at the time, Mrs Griegon, that you had one or two pieces that could do with stripping down and polishing, and Mr French, who’ll travel anywhere in the evenings and being, as you say, so reasonable –’

‘Of course,’ cried Mrs Griegon. ‘Of course I remember you perfectly, and I’m sure Archie does too.’ She looked at her husband, but her husband was listening carefully to Dr Oath.

Raymond smiled. ‘It looks even better now that the initial shine has gone. I’m terribly pleased with it.’ As he spoke, he saw the figure of Mrs Fitch’s husband entering the room. He watched him glance about and saw him smile at someone he’d seen. Following the direction of this smile, Raymond saw Mrs Anstey smiling back at Mrs Fitch’s husband, who at once made his way to her side.

‘French polishing’s an art,’ said Mrs Griegon.

What on earth, Raymond wondered, was the man doing back at the Tamberleys’ party? And where was Mrs Fitch? Nervously, Raymond glanced about the crowded room, looking for the black-and-white dress and the lean aquiline features of the woman who had tormented him. But although, among all the brightly coloured garments that the women wore there were a few that were black and white, none of them contained Mrs Fitch. ‘We come to these parties and everything’s a sham,’ her voice seemed to say, close to him. ‘Nobody can be trusted.’ The voice came to him in just the same way as Nanny Wilkinson’s had a quarter of an hour ago, when she’d been telling him that he had a tea-leaf on his tooth.

‘Such jolly parties,’ said Mrs Griegon, ‘The Tamberleys are wonderful.’

‘Do you know a woman called Mrs Fitch?’ said Raymond. ‘She was here tonight.’

‘Mrs Fitch!’ exclaimed Mrs Griegon with a laugh.

‘D’you know her?’

‘She’s married to that man there,’ said Mrs Griegon. She pointed at Mr Fitch and sniffed.

‘Yes,’ said Raymond. ‘He’s talking to Mrs Anstey.’

He was about to add that Mr Fitch was probably of a social inclination. He was thinking already that Mr Fitch probably had a perfectly sound reason for returning to the Tamberleys’. Probably he lived quite near and having seen his wife home had decided to return in order to say goodbye properly to his hosts. Mrs Anstey, Raymond had suddenly thought, was for all he knew Mr Fitch’s sister: in her mentally depressed condition it would have been quite like Mrs Fitch to pretend that the woman in yellow was no relation whatsoever, to have invented a fantasy that was greater even than it appeared to be.

‘He’s always up to that kind of carry-on,’ said Mrs Griegon. ‘The man’s famous for it.’

‘Sorry?’ said Raymond.

‘Fitch. With women.’

‘Oh but surely –’

‘Really,’ said Mrs Griegon.

‘I was talking to Mrs Fitch earlier on and she persisted in speaking about her husband. Well, I felt she was going on rather. Exaggerating, you know. A bit of a bore.’

‘He has said things to me, Mr Bamber, that would turn your stomach.’

‘She has a funny way with her, Mrs Fitch has. She too said the oddest things –’

‘She has a reputation,’ said Mrs Griegon, ‘for getting drunk and coming out with awkward truths. I’ve heard it said.’

‘Not the truth,’ Raymond corrected. ‘She says things about herself, you see, and pretends she’s talking about another person.’

‘What?’ said Mrs Griegon.

‘Like maybe, you see, she was saying that she herself is a bore the way she goes on – well, Mrs Fitch wouldn’t say it just like that. What Mrs Fitch would do is pretend some other person is the bore, the person she might be talking to. D’you see? She would transfer all her own qualities to the person she’s talking to.’

Mrs Griegon raised her thin eyebrows and inclined her head. She said that what Raymond was saying sounded most interesting.

‘An example is,’ said Raymond, ‘that Mrs Fitch might find herself unsteady on her feet through drink. Instead of saying that she was unsteady she’d say that you, Mrs Griegon, were the unsteady one. There’s a name for it, actually. A medical name.’

‘Medical?’ said Mrs Griegon.

Glancing across the room, Raymond saw that Mr Fitch’s right hand gripped Mrs Anstey’s elbow. Mr Fitch murmured in her ear and together the two left the room. Raymond saw them wave at Mrs Tamberley, implying thanks with the gesture, implying that they had enjoyed themselves.

‘I can’t think what it is now,’ said Raymond to Mrs Griegon, ‘when people transfer the truth about themselves to others. It’s some name beginning with an R, I think.’

‘How nice of you,’ said Mrs Tamberley, gushing up, ‘to put that notice in The Times’ She turned to Mrs Griegon and said that, as Raymond had probably told her, a lifelong friend of his, old Nanny Wilkinson, had died a few months ago. ‘Every year,’ said Mrs Tamberley, ‘Raymond told us all how she was bearing up. But now, alas, she’s died.’

‘Indeed,’ said Mrs Griegon, and smiled and moved away.

Without any bidding, there arrived in Raymond’s mind a picture of Mrs Fitch sitting alone in her house, refilling a glass from a bottle of Gordon’s gin. ‘In vino veritas,’ said Mrs Fitch, and began to weep.

‘I was telling Mrs Griegon that I’d been chatting with Mrs Fitch,’ said Raymond, and then he remembered that Mrs Tamberley had very briefly joined in that chat. ‘I found her strange,’ he added.

‘Married to that man,’ cried Mrs Tamberley. ‘He drove her to it.’

‘Her condition?’ said Raymond, nodding.

‘She ladles it into herself,’ said Mrs Tamberley, ‘and then tells you what she thinks of you. It can be disconcerting.’

‘She really says anything that comes into her head,’ said Raymond, and gave a light laugh.

‘Not actually,’ said Mrs Tamberley. ‘She tells the truth.’

‘Well, no, you see –’

‘You haven’t a drink,’ cried Mrs Tamberley in alarm, and moved at speed towards her Maltese maid to direct the girl’s attention to Raymond’s empty glass.

Again the image of Mrs Fitch arrived in Raymond’s mind. She sat as before, alone in a room, while her husband made off with a woman in yellow. She drank some gin.

‘Sherry, sir?’ said the Maltese maid, and Raymond smiled and thanked her, and then, in an eccentric way and entirely on an impulse, he said in a low voice:

‘Do you know a woman called Mrs Fitch?’

The girl said that Mrs Fitch had been at the party earlier in the evening, and reminded Raymond that he had in fact been talking to her.

‘She has a peculiar way with her,’ explained Raymond. ‘I just wondered if ever you had talked to her, or had listened to what she herself had to say.’ But the Maltese maid shook her head, appearing not to understand.

‘Mrs Fitch’s a shocker,’ said a voice behind Raymond’s back, and added: ‘That poor man.’

There was a crackle of laughter as a response, and Raymond, sipping his sherry, turned about and moved towards the group that had caused it. The person who had spoken was a small man with shiny grey hair. ‘I’m Raymond Bamber,’ said Raymond, smiling at him. ‘By the sound of things, you saw my predicament earlier on.’ He laughed, imitating the laughter that had come from the group. ‘Extremely awkward.’

‘She gets tight,’ said the small man. ‘She’s liable to tell a home truth or two,’ He began to laugh again. ‘In vino veritas,’ he said.

Raymond looked at the people and opened his mouth to say that it wasn’t quite so simple, the malaise of Mrs Fitch. ‘It’s all within her,’ he wished to say. ‘Everything she says is part of Mrs Fitch, since she’s unhappy in a marriage and has lost her beauty.’ But Raymond checked that speech, uttering in fact not a word of it. The people looked expectantly at him, and after a long pause the small man said:

‘Mrs Fitch can be most embarrassing.’

Raymond heard the people laugh again with the same sharpness and saw their teeth for a moment harshly bared and noted that their eyes were like polished ice. They would not understand, he thought, the facts about Mrs Fitch, any more than Mrs Griegon had seemed to understand, or Mrs Tamberley. It surprised Raymond, and saddened him, that neither Mrs Griegon nor Mrs Tamberley had cared to accept the truth about the woman. It was, he told himself, something of a revelation that Mrs Griegon, who had seemed so pleasant the year before, and Mrs Tamberley whom he had known almost all his life, should turn out to be no better than this group of hard-eyed people. Raymond murmured and walked away, still thinking of Mrs Griegon and Mrs Tamberley. He imagined them laughing with their husbands over Mrs Fitch, repeating that she was a bore and a drunk. Laughter was apparently the thing, a commodity that reflected the shallowness of minds too lazy to establish correctly the facts about people. And they were minds, as had been proved to Raymond, that didn’t even bother to survey properly the simple explanations of eccentric conduct – as though even that constituted too much trouble.

Soon afterwards, Raymond left the party and walked through the autumn evening, considering everything. The air was cool on his face as he strode towards Bayswater, thinking that as he continued to live his quiet life Mrs Fitch would be attending parties that were similar to the Tamberleys’, and she’d be telling the people she met there that they were grinding bores. The people might be offended, Raymond thought, if they didn’t pause to think about it, if they didn’t understand that everything was confused in poor Mrs Fitch’s mind. And it would serve them right, he reflected, to be offended – a just reward for allowing their minds to become lazy and untidy in this modern manner. ‘Orderliness,’ said the voice of Nanny Wilkinson, and Raymond paused and smiled, and then walked on.

The Distant Past

In the town and beyond it they were regarded as harmlessly peculiar. Odd, people said, and in time this reference took on a burnish of affection.

They had always been thin, silent with one another, and similar in appearance: a brother and sister who shared a family face. It was a bony countenance, with pale blue eyes and a sharp, well-shaped nose and high cheekbones. Their father had had it too, but unlike them their father had been an irresponsible and careless man, with red flecks in his cheeks that they didn’t have at all. The Middletons of Carraveagh the family had once been known as, but now the brother and sister were just the Middletons, for Carraveagh didn’t count any more, except to them.

They owned four Herefords, a number of hens, and the house itself, three miles outside the town. It was a large house, built in the reign of George II, a monument that reflected in its glory and later decay the fortunes of a family. As the brother and sister aged, its roof increasingly ceased to afford protection, rust ate at its gutters, grass thrived in two thick channels all along its avenue. Their father had mortgaged his inherited estate, so local rumour claimed, in order to keep a Catholic Dublin woman in brandy and jewels. When he died, in 1924, his two children discovered that they possessed only a dozen acres. It was locally said also that this adversity hardened their will and that, because of it, they came to love the remains of Carraveagh more than they could ever have loved a husband or a wife. They blamed for their ill-fortune the Catholic Dublin woman whom they’d never met and they blamed as well the new national regime, contriving in their eccentric way to relate the two. In the days of the Union Jack such women would have known their place: wasn’t it all part and parcel?

Twice a week, on Fridays and Sundays, the Middletons journeyed into the town, first of all in a trap and later in a Ford Anglia car. In the shops and elsewhere they made, quite gently, no secret of their continuing loyalty to the past. They attended on Sundays St Patrick’s Protestant Church, a place that matched their mood, for prayers were still said there for the King whose sovereignty their country had denied. The revolutionary regime would not last, they quietly informed the Reverend Packham: what sense was there in green-painted pillar-boxes and a language that nobody understood?

On Fridays, when they took seven or eight dozen eggs to the town, they dressed in pressed tweeds and were accompanied over the years by a series of red setters, the breed there had always been at Carraveagh. They sold the eggs in Gerrity’s grocery and then had a drink with Mrs Gerrity in the part of her shop that was devoted to the consumption of refreshment. Mr Middleton had whiskey and his sister Tio Pepe. They enjoyed the occasion, for they liked Mrs Gerrity and were liked by her in return. Afterwards they shopped, chatting to the shopkeepers about whatever news there was, and then they went to Healy’s Hotel for a few more drinks before driving home.

Drink was their pleasure and it was through it that they built up, in spite of their loyalty to the past, such convivial relationships with the people of the town. Fat Cranley, who kept the butcher’s shop, used even to joke about the past when he stood with them in Healy’s Hotel or stood behind his own counter cutting their slender chops or thinly slicing their liver. ‘Will you ever forget it, Mr Middleton? I’d ha’ run like a rabbit if you’d lifted a finger at me.’ Fat Cranley would laugh then, rocking back on his heels with a glass of stout in his hand or banging their meat on to his weighing-scales. Mr Middleton would smile. ‘There was alarm in your eyes, Mr Cranley,’ Miss Middleton would murmur, smiling also at the memory of the distant occasion.

Fat Cranley, with a farmer called Maguire and another called Breen, had stood in the hall of Carraveagh, each of them in charge of a shot-gun. The Middletons, children then, had been locked with their mother and father and an aunt into an upstairs room. Nothing else had happened: the expected British soldiers had not, after all, arrived and the men in the hall had eventually relaxed their vigil. ‘A massacre they wanted,’ the Middletons’ father said after they’d gone. ‘Damn bloody ruffians.’

The Second World War took place. Two Germans, a man and his wife called Winkelmann who ran a glove factory in the town, were suspected by the Middletons of being spies for the Third Reich. People laughed, for they knew the Winkelmanns well and could lend no credence to the Middletons’ latest fantasy: typical of them, they explained to the Winkelmanns, who had been worried. Soon after the War the Reverend Packham died and was replaced by the Reverend Bradshaw, a younger man who laughed also and regarded the Middletons as an anachronism. They protested when prayers were no longer said for the Royal Family in St Patrick’s, but the Reverend Bradshaw considered that their protests were as absurd as the prayers themselves had been. Why pray for the monarchy of a neighbouring island when their own island had its chosen President now? The Middletons didn’t reply to that argument. In the Reverend Bradshaw’s presence they rose to their feet when the BBC played ‘God Save the King’, and on the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II they drove into the town with a small Union Jack propped up in the back window of their Ford Anglia. ‘Bedad, you’re a holy terror, Mr Middleton!’ Fat Cranley laughingly exclaimed, noticing the flag as he lifted a tray of pork steaks from his display shelf. The Middletons smiled. It was a great day for the Commonwealth of Nations, they replied, a remark which further amused Fat Cranley and which he later repeated in Phelan’s public house. ‘Her Britannic Majesty,’ guffawed his friend Mr Breen.

Situated in a valley that was noted for its beauty and with convenient access to rich rivers and bogs over which game-birds flew, the town benefited from post-war tourism. Healy’s Hotel changed its title and became, overnight, the New Ormonde. Shopkeepers had their shop-fronts painted and Mr Healy organized an annual Salmon Festival. Even Canon Cotter, who had at first commented severely on the habits of the tourists, and in particular on the summertime dress of the women, was in the end obliged to confess that the morals of his flock remained unaffected. ‘God and good sense’, he proclaimed, meaning God and his own teaching. In time he even derived pride from the fact that people with other values came briefly to the town and that the values esteemed by his parishioners were in no way diminished.

The town’s grocers now stocked foreign cheeses, brie and camembert and Port Salut, and wines were available to go with them. The plush Cocktail Room of the New Ormonde set a standard: the wife of a solicitor, a Mrs Duggan, began to give six o’clock parties once or twice a year, obliging her husband to mix gin and Martini in glass jugs and herself handing round a selection of nuts and small Japanese crackers. Canon Cotter looked in as a rule and satisfied himself that all was above board. He rejected, though, the mixture in the jugs, retaining his taste for a glass of John Jameson.

From the windows of their convent the Loreto nuns observed the long, sleek cars with GB plates; English and American accents drifted on the breeze to them. Mothers cleaned up their children and sent them to the Golf Club to seek employment as caddies. Sweet-shops sold holiday mementoes. The brown, soda and currant breads of Murphy-Flood’s bakery were declared to be delicious. Mr Healy doubled the number of local girls who served as waitresses in his dining-room, and in the winter of 1961 he had the builders in again, working on an extension for which the Munster and Leinster Bank had lent him twenty-two thousand pounds.

But as the town increased its prosperity Carraveagh continued its decline. The Middletons were in their middle-sixties now and were reconciled to a life that became more uncomfortable with every passing year. Together they roved the vast lofts of their house, placing old paint tins and flower pot saucers beneath the drips from the roof. At night they sat over their thin chops in a dining-room that had once been gracious and which in a way was gracious still, except for the faded appearance of furniture that was dry from lack of polish and of a wallpaper that time had rendered colourless. In the hall their father gazed down at them, framed in ebony and gilt, in the uniform of the Irish Guards. He had conversed with Queen Victoria, and even in their middle-sixties they could still hear him saying that God and Empire and Queen formed a trinity unique in any worthy soldier’s heart. In the hall hung the family crest, and on ancient Irish linen the Cross of St George.

The dog that accompanied the Middletons now was called Turloch, an animal whose death they dreaded for they felt they couldn’t manage the antics of another pup. Turloch, being thirteen, moved slowly and was blind and a little deaf. He was a reminder to them of their own advancing years and of the effort it had become to tend the Herefords and collect the weekly eggs. More and more they looked forward to Fridays, to the warm companionship of Mrs Gerrity and Mr Healy’s chatter in the hotel. They stayed longer now with Mrs Gerrity and in the hotel, and idled longer in the shops, and drove home more slowly. Dimly, but with no less loyalty, they still recalled the distant past and were listened to without ill-feeling when they spoke of it and of Carraveagh as it had been, and of the Queen whose company their careless father had known.

The visitors who came to the town heard about the Middletons and were impressed. It was a pleasant wonder, more than one of them remarked, that old wounds could heal so completely, that the Middletons continued in their loyalty to the past and that, in spite of it, they were respected in the town. When Miss Middleton had been ill with a form of pneumonia in 1958 Canon Cotter had driven out to Carraveagh twice a week with pullets and young ducks that his housekeeper had dressed. ‘An upright couple,’ was the Canon’s public opinion of the Middletons, and he had been known to add that eccentric views would hurt you less than malice. ‘We can disagree without guns in this town,’ Mr Healy pronounced in his Cocktail Room, and his visitors usually replied that as far as they could see this was the result of living in a Christian country. That the Middletons bought their meat from a man who had once locked them into an upstairs room and had then waited to. shoot soldiers in their hall was a fact that amazed the seasonal visitors. You lived and learned, they remarked to Mr Healy.

The Middletons, privately, often considered that they led a strange life. Alone in their two beds at night they now and again wondered why they hadn’t just sold Carraveagh forty-eight years ago when their father died: why had the tie been so strong and why had they in perversity encouraged it? They didn’t fully know, nor did they attempt to discuss the matter in any way. Instinctively they had remained at Carraveagh, instinctively feeling that it would have been cowardly to go. Yet often it seemed to them now to be no more than a game they played, this worship of the distant past. And at other times it seemed as real and as important as the remaining acres of land, and the house itself.

‘Isn’t that shocking?’ Mr Healy said one day in 1968. ‘Did you hear about that, Mr Middleton, blowing up them post offices in Belfast?’

Mr Healy, red-faced and short-haired, spoke casually in his Cocktail Room, making midday conversation. He had commented in much the same way at breakfast-time, looking up from the Irish Independent. Everyone in the town had said it too: that the blowing up of sub-post offices in Belfast was a shocking matter.

‘A bad business,’ Fat Cranley remarked, wrapping the Middletons’ meat. ‘We don’t want that old stuff all over again.’

‘We didn’t want it in the first place,’ Miss Middleton reminded him. He laughed, and she laughed, and so did her brother. Yes, it was a game, she thought: how could any of it be as real or as important as the afflictions and problems of the old butcher himself, his rheumatism and his reluctance to retire? Did her brother, she wondered, privately think so too?

‘Come on, old Turloch,’ he said, stroking the flank of the red setter with the point of his shoe, and she reflected that you could never tell what he was thinking. Certainly it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to talk about.

‘I’ve put him in a bit of mince,’ Fat Cranley said, which was something he often did these days, pretending the mince would otherwise be thrown away. There’d been a red setter about the place that night when he waited in the hall for the soldiers: Breen and Maguire had pushed it down into a cellar, frightened of it.

‘There’s a heart of gold in you, Mr Cranley,’ Miss Middleton murmured, nodding and smiling at him. He was the same age as she was, sixty-six: he should have shut up shop years ago. He would have, he’d once told them, if there’d been a son to leave the business to. As it was, he’d have to sell it and when it came to the point he found it hard to make the necessary arrangements. ‘Like us and Carraveagh,’ she’d said, even though on the face of it it didn’t seem the same at all.

Every evening they sat in the big old kitchen, hearing the news. It was only in Belfast and Derry, the wireless said; outside Belfast and Derry you wouldn’t know anything was happening at all. On Fridays they listened to the talk in Mrs Gerrity’s bar and in the hotel. ‘Well, thank God it has nothing to do with the South,’ Mr Healy said often, usually repeating the statement.

The first British soldiers landed in the North of Ireland, and soon people didn’t so often say that outside Belfast and Derry you wouldn’t know anything was happening. There were incidents in Fermanagh and Armagh, in Border villages and towns. One Prime Minister resigned and then another one. The troops were unpopular, the newspapers said; internment became part of the machinery of government. In the town, in St Patrick’s Protestant Church and in the Church of the Holy Assumption, prayers for peace were offered, but no peace came.

‘We’re hit, Mr Middleton,’ Mr Healy said one Friday morning. ‘If there’s a dozen visitors this summer it’ll be God’s own stroke of luck for us.’

‘Luck?’

‘Sure, who wants to come to a country with all that malarkey in it?’

‘But it’s only in the North.’

‘Tell that to your tourists, Mr Middleton.’

The town’s prosperity ebbed. The Border was more than sixty miles away, but over that distance had spread some wisps of the fog of war. As anger rose in the town at the loss of fortune so there rose also the kind of talk there had been in the distant past. There was talk of atrocities and counter-atrocities, and of guns and gelignite and the rights of people. There was bitterness suddenly in Mrs Gerrity’s bar because of the lack of trade, and in the empty hotel there was bitterness also.

On Fridays, only sometimes at first, there was a silence when the Middletons appeared. It was as though, going back nearly twenty years, people remembered the Union Jack in the window of their car and saw it now in a different light. It wasn’t something to laugh at any more, nor were certain words that the Middletons had gently spoken, nor were they themselves just an old, peculiar couple. Slowly the change crept about, all around them in the town, until Fat Cranley didn’t wish it to be remembered that he had ever given them mince for their dog. He had stood with a gun in the enemy’s house, waiting for soldiers so that soldiers might be killed: it was better that people should remember that.

One day Canon Cotter looked the other way when he saw the Middle-tons’ car coming and they noticed this movement of his head, although he hadn’t wished them to. And on another day Mrs Duggan, who had always been keen to talk to them in the hotel, didn’t reply when they addressed her.

The Middletons naturally didn’t discuss these rebuffs, but they each of them privately knew that there was no conversation they could have at this time with the people of the town. The stand they had taken and kept to for so many years no longer seemed ridiculous in the town. Had they driven with a Union Jack now they might, astoundingly, have been shot.

‘It will never cease.’ He spoke disconsolately one night, standing by the dresser where the wireless was.

She washed the dishes they’d eaten from, and the cutlery. ‘Not in our time,’ she said.

‘It is worse than before.’

‘Yes, it is worse than before:’

They took from the walls of the hall the portrait of their father in the uniform of the. Irish Guards because it seemed wrong to them that at this time it should hang there. They took down also the crest of their family and the Cross of St George, and from a vase on the drawing-room mantelpiece they removed the small Union Jack that had been there since the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. They did not remove these articles in fear, but in mourning for the modus vivendi that had existed for so long between them and the people of the town. They had given their custom to a butcher who had planned to shoot down soldiers in their hall and he, in turn, had given them mince for their dog. For fifty years they had experienced, after suspicion had seeped away, a tolerance that never again in the years that were left to them would they know.

One November night their dog died and he said to her after he had buried it that they must not be depressed by all that was happening. They would die themselves and the house would become a ruin because there was no one to inherit it, and the distant past would be set to rest. But she disagreed: the modus vivendi had been easy for them, she pointed out, because they hadn’t really minded the dwindling of their fortunes while the town prospered. It had given them a life, and a kind of dignity: you could take a pride out of living in peace.

He did not say anything and then, because of the emotion that both of them felt over the death of their dog, he said in a rushing way that they could no longer at their age hope to make a living out of the remains of Carraveagh. They must sell the hens and the four Herefords. As he spoke, he watched her nodding, agreeing with the sense of it. Now and again, he thought, he would drive slowly into the town, to buy groceries and meat with the money they had saved, and to face the silence that would sourly thicken as their own two deaths came closer and death increased in another part of their island. She felt him thinking that and she knew that he was right. Because of the distant past they would die friendless. It was worse than being murdered in their beds.

In Isfahan

They met in the most casual way, in the upstairs office of Chaharbagh Tours Inc. In the downstairs office a boy asked Normanton to go upstairs and wait: the tour would start a little later because they were having trouble with the engine of the minibus.

The upstairs office was more like a tiny waiting-room than an office, with chairs lined against two walls. The chairs were rudimentary: metal frames, and red plastic over foam rubber. There was a counter stacked with free guides to Isfahan in French and German, and guides to Shiraz and Persepolis in English as well. The walls had posters on them, issued by the Iranian Tourist Board: Mount Damavand, the Chalus road, native dancers from the Southern tribes, club-swinging, the Apadana Palace at Persepolis, the Theological School in Isfahan. The fees and conditions of Chaharbagh Tours were clearly stated: Tours by De Lux microbus. Each Person Rls. 375 ($5). Tours in French and English language. Microbus comes to Hotel otherwise you’ll come to Office. All Entrance Fees. No Shopping. Chaharbagh Tours Inc. wishes you the best.

She was writing an air-mail letter with a ballpoint pen, leaning on a brochure which she’d spread out on her handbag. It was an awkward arrangement, but she didn’t seem to mind. She wrote steadily, not looking up when he entered, not pausing to think about what each sentence might contain. There was no one else in the upstairs office.

He took some leaflets from the racks on the counter. Isfahan était capitale de l’Iran sous les Seldjoukides et les Safavides. Sous le règne de ces deux dynasties l’ art islamique de l’Iran avait atteint son apogée.

‘Are you going on the tour?’

He turned to look at her, surprised that she was English. She was thin and would probably not be very tall when she stood up, a woman in her thirties, without a wedding ring. In a pale face her eyes were hidden behind huge round sunglasses. Her mouth was sensuous, the lips rather thick, her hair soft and black. She was wearing a pink dress and white high-heeled sandals. Nothing about her was smart.

In turn she saw a man who seemed to her to be typically English. He was middle-aged and greying, dressed in a linen suit and carrying a linen hat that matched it. There were lines and wrinkles in his face, about the eyes especially, and the mouth. When he smiled more lines and wrinkles gathered. His skin was tanned, but with the look of skin that usually wasn’t: he’d been in Persia only a few weeks, she reckoned.

‘Yes, I’m going on the tour,’ he said. ‘They’re having trouble with the minibus.’

‘Are we the only two?’

He said he thought not. The minibus would go round the hotels collecting the people who’d bought tickets for the tour. He pointed at the notice on the wall.

She took her dark glasses off. Her eyes were her startling feature: brown, beautiful orbs, with endless depth, mysterious in her more ordinary face. Without the dark’ glasses she had an Indian look: lips, hair and eyes combined to give her that. But her voice was purely English, made uglier than it might have been by attempts to disguise a Cockney twang.

‘I’ve been writing to my mother,’ she said.

He smiled at her and nodded. She put her dark glasses on again and licked the edges of the air-mail letter-form.

‘Microbus ready,’ the boy from downstairs said. He was a smiling youth of about fifteen with black-rimmed spectacles and very white teeth. He wore a white shirt with tidily rolled-up sleeves, and brown cotton trousers. ‘Tour commence please,’ he said. ‘I am Guide Hafiz.’

He led them to the minibus. ‘You German two?’ he inquired, and when they replied that they were English he said that not many English came to Persia. ‘American,’ he said. ‘French. German people often.’

They got into the minibus. The driver turned his head to nod and smile at them. He spoke in Persian to Hafiz, and laughed.

‘He commence a joke,’ Hafiz said. ‘He wish me the best. This is the first tour I make. Excuse me, please.’ He perused leaflets and guidebooks, uneasily licking his lips.

‘My name’s Iris Smith,’ she said.

His, he revealed, was Normanton.

They drove through blue Isfahan, past domes and minarets, and tourist shops in the Avenue Chaharbagh, with blue mosaic on surfaces everywhere, and blue taxi-cabs. Trees and grass had a precious look because of the arid earth. The sky was pale with the promise of heat.

The minibus called at the Park Hotel and at the Intercontinental and the Shah Abbas, where Normanton was staying. It didn’t call at the Old Atlantic, which Iris Smith had been told at Teheran Airport was cheap and clean. It collected a French party and a German couple who were having trouble with sunburn, and two wholesome-faced American girls. Hafiz continued to speak in English, explaining that it was the only foreign language he knew. ‘Ladies-gentlemen, I am a student from Teheran,’ he announced with pride, and then confessed: ‘I do not know Isfahan well.’

The leader of the French party, a testy-looking man whom Normanton put down as a university professor, had already protested at their guide’s inability to speak French. He protested again when Hafiz said he didn’t know Isfahan well, complaining that he had been considerably deceived.

‘No, no,’ Hafiz replied. ‘That is not my fault, sir, I am poor Persian student, sir. Last night I arrive in Isfahan the first time only. It is impossible my father send me to Isfahan before.’ He smiled at the testy Frenchman. ‘So listen please, ladies-gentlemen. This morning we commence happy tour, we see many curious scenes.’ Again his smile flashed. He read in English from an Iran Air leaflet: ‘Isfahan is the showpiece of Islamic Persia, but founded at least two thousand years ago! Here we are, ladies-gentlemen, at the Chehel Sotun. This is pavilion of lyric beauty, palace of forty columns where Shah Abbas II entertain all royal guests. All please leave microbus.’

Normanton wandered alone among the forty columns of the palace. The American girls took photographs and the German couple did the same. A member of the French party operated a moving camera, although only tourists and their guides were moving. The girl called Iris Smith seemed out of place, Normanton thought, teetering on her high-heeled sandals.

‘So now Masjed-e-Shah,’ Hafiz cried, clapping his hands to collect his party together. The testy Frenchman continued to expostulate, complaining that time had been wasted in the Chehel Sotun. Hafiz smiled at him.

‘Masjed-e-Shah,’ he read from a leaflet as the minibus began again, ‘is most outstanding and impressive mosque built by Shah Abbas the Great in early seventeenth century.’

But when the minibus drew up outside the Masjed-e-Shah it was discovered that the Masjed-e-Shah was closed to tourists because of renovations. So, unfortunately, was the Sheikh Lotfollah.

‘So commence to carpet-weaving,’ Hafiz said, smiling and shaking his head at the protestations of the French professor.

The cameras moved among the carpet-weavers, women of all ages, producing at speed Isfahan carpets for export. ‘Look now at once,’ Hafiz commanded, pointing at a carpet that incorporated the features of the late President Kennedy ‘Look please on this skill, ladies-gentlemen.’

In the minibus he announced that the tour was now on its way to the Masjed-e-Jamé, the Friday Mosque. This, he reported after a consultation of his leaflets, displayed Persian architecture of the ninth to the eighteenth century. ‘Oldest and largest in Isfahan,’ he read. ‘Don’t miss it! Many minarets in narrow lanes! All leave microbus, ladies-gentlemen. All return to microbus in one hour.’

At this there was chatter from the French party. The tour was scheduled to be conducted, points of interest were scheduled to be indicated. The tour was costing three hundred and seventy-five rials.

‘OΚ, ladies-gentlemen,’ Hafiz said. ‘Ladies-gentlemen come by me to commence informations. Other ladies-gentlemen come to microbus in one hour.’

An hour was a long time in the Friday Mosque. Normanton wandered away from it, through dusty crowded lanes, into market-places where letter-writers slept on their stools, waiting for illiterates with troubles. In hot, bright sunshine peasants with produce to sell bargained with deft-witted shopkeepers. Crouched on the dust, cobblers made shoes: on a wooden chair a man was shaved beneath a tree. Other men drank sherbet, arguing as vigorously as the heat allowed. Veiled women hurried, pausing to prod entrails at butchers’ stalls or to finger rice.

‘You’re off the tourist track, Mr Normanton.’

Her white high-heeled sandals were covered with dust. She looked tired.

‘So are you,’ he said.

‘I’m glad I ran into you. I wanted to ask how much that dress was.’

She pointed at a limp blue dress hanging on a stall. It was difficult when a woman on her own asked the price of something in this part of the world, she explained. She knew about that from living in Bombay.

He asked the stall-holder how much the dress was, but it turned out to be too expensive, although to Normanton it seemed cheap. The stall-holder followed them along the street offering to reduce the price, saying he had other goods, bags, lengths of cotton, pictures on ivory, all beautiful workmanship, all cheap bargains. Normanton told him to go away.

‘Do you live in Bombay?’ He wondered if she perhaps was Indian, brought up in London, or half-caste.

‘Yes, I live in Bombay. And sometimes in England.’

It was the statement of a woman not at all like Iris Smith: it suggested a grandeur, a certain style, beauty, and some riches.

‘I’ve never been in Bombay,’ he said.

‘Life can be good enough there. The social life’s not bad.’

They had arrived back at the Friday Mosque.

‘You’ve seen all this?’ He gestured towards it.

She said she had, but he had the feeling that she hadn’t bothered much with the mosque. He couldn’t think what had drawn her to Isfahan.

‘I love travelling,’ she said.

The French party were already established again in the minibus, all except the man with the moving camera. They were talking loudly among themselves, complaining about Hafiz and Chaharbagh Tours. The German couple arrived, their sunburn pinker after their exertions. Hafiz arrived with the two American girls. He was laughing, beginning to flirt with them.

‘So,’ he said in the minibus, ‘we commence the Shaking Minarets. Two minarets able to shake,’ he read, ‘eight kilometres outside the city. Very famous, ladies-gentlemen, very curious.’

The driver started the bus, but the French party shrilly protested, declaring that the man with the moving camera had been left behind. ‘Où est-ce qu’il est?’ a woman in red cried.

‘I will tell you a Persian joke,’ Hafiz said to the American girls. A Persian student commences at a party –’

‘Attention!’ the woman in red cried.

‘Imbécile!’ the professor shouted at Hafiz.

Hafiz smiled at them. He did not understand their trouble, he said, while they continued to shout at him. Slowly he took his spectacles off and wiped a sheen of dust from them. ‘So a Persian student commences at a party,’ he began again.

‘I think you’ve left someone behind,’ Normanton said. ‘The man with the moving camera.’

The driver of the minibus laughed and then Hafiz, realizing his error, laughed also. He sat down on a seat beside the American girls and laughed unrestrainedly, beating his knees with a fist and flashing his very white teeth. The driver reversed the minibus, with his finger on the horn. ‘Bad man!’ Hafiz said to the Frenchman when he climbed into the bus, laughing again. ‘Heh, heh, heh,’ he cried, and the driver and the American girls laughed also.

‘Il est fou!’ one of the French party muttered crossly. ‘Incroyable!’

Normanton glanced across the minibus and discovered that Iris Smith, amused by all this foreign emotion, was already glancing at him. He smiled at her and she smiled back.

Hafiz paid two men to climb into the shaking minarets and shake them. The Frenchman took moving pictures of this motion. Hafiz announced that the mausoleum of a hermit was located near by. He pointed at the view from the roof where they stood. He read slowly from one of his leaflets, informing them that the view was fantastic. ‘At the party,’ he said to the American girls, ‘the student watches an aeroplane on the breast of a beautiful girl. “Why watch you my aeroplane?” the girl commences. “Is it you like my aeroplane?” “It is not the aeroplane which I like,” the student commences. “It is the aeroplane’s airport which I like.” That is a Persian joke.’

It was excessively hot on the roof with the shaking minarets. Normanton had put on his linen hat. Iris Smith tied a black chiffon scarf around her head.

‘We commence to offices,’ Hafiz said. ‘This afternoon we visit Vank Church. Also curious Fire Temple.’ He consulted his leaflets. ‘An Armenian Museum. Here you can see a nice collection of old manuscripts and paintings.’

When the minibus drew up outside the offices of Chaharbagh Tours Hafiz said it was important for everyone to come inside. He led the way, through the downstairs office and up to the upstairs office. Tea was served. Hafiz handed round a basket of sweets, wrapped pieces of candy locally manufactured, very curious taste, he said. Several men in light-weight suits, the principals of Chaharbagh Tours, drank tea also. When the French professor complained that the tour was not satisfactory, the men smiled, denying that they understood either French or English, and in no way betraying that they could recognize any difference when the professor changed from one language to the other. It was likely, Normanton guessed, that they were fluent in both.

‘Shall you continue after lunch?’ he asked Iris Smith. ‘The Vank Church, an Armenian museum? There’s also the Theological School, which really is the most beautiful of all. No tour is complete without that.’

‘You’ve been on the tour before?’

‘I’ve walked about. I’ve got to know Isfahan.’

‘Then why –’

‘It’s something to do. Tours are always rewarding. For a start, there are the other people on them.’

‘I shall rest this afternoon.’

‘The Theological School is easy to find. It’s not far from the Shah Abbas Hotel.’

‘Are you staying there?’

‘Yes.’

She was curious about him. He could see it in her eyes, for she’d taken off her dark glasses. Yet he couldn’t believe that he presented as puzzling an exterior as she did herself.

‘I’ve heard it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘The hotel.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I think everything in Isfahan is beautiful.’

‘Are you staying here for long?’

‘Until tomorrow morning, the five o’clock bus back to Teheran. I came last night.’

‘From London?’

‘Yes.’

The tea-party came to an end. The men in the light-weight suits bowed. Hafiz told the American girls that he was looking forward to seeing them in the afternoon, at two o’clock. In the evening, if they were doing nothing else, they might meet again. He smiled at everyone else. They would continue to have a happy tour, he promised, at two o’clock. He would be honoured to give them the informations they desired.

Normanton said goodbye to Iris Smith. He wouldn’t, he said, be on the afternoon tour either. The people of a morning tour, he did not add, were never amusing in the afternoon: it wouldn’t be funny if the Frenchman with the moving camera got left behind again; the professor’s testiness and Hafiz’s pidgin English might easily become wearisome as the day wore on.

He advised her again not to miss the Theological School. There was a tourist bazaar beside it, with boutiques, where she might find a dress. But prices would be higher there. She shook her head: she liked collecting bargains.

He walked to the Shah Abbas. He forgot about Iris Smith.

She took a mild sleeping-pill and slept on her bed in the Old Atlantic. When she awoke it was a quarter to seven.

The room was almost dark because she’d pulled over the curtains. She’d taken off her pink dress and hung it up. She lay in her petticoat, staring sleepily at a ceiling she couldn’t see. For a few moments before she’d slept her eyes had traversed its network of cracks and flaking paint. There’d been enough light then, even though the curtains had been drawn.

She slipped from the bed and crossed to the window. It was twilight outside, a light that seemed more than ordinarily different from the bright sunshine of the afternoon. Last night, at midnight when she’d arrived, it had been sharply different too: as black as pitch, totally silent in Isfahan.

It wasn’t silent now. The blue taxis raced their motors as they paused in a traffic-jam outside the Old Atlantic. Tourists chattered in different languages. Bunches of children, returning from afternoon school, called out to one another on the pavements. Policemen blew their traffic whistles.

Neon lights were winking in the twilight, and in the far distance she could see the massive illuminated dome of the Theological School, a fat blue jewel that dominated everything.

She washed herself and dressed, opening a suitcase to find a black-and-white dress her mother had made her and a black frilled shawl that went with it. She rubbed the dust from her high-heeled sandals with a Kleenex tissue. It would be nicer to wear a different pair of shoes, more suitable for the evening, but that would mean more unpacking and anyway who was there to notice? She took some medicine because for months she’d had a nagging little cough, which usually came on in the evenings. It was always the same: whenever she returned to England she got a cough.

In his room he read that the Shah was in Moscow, negotiating a deal with the Russians. He closed his eyes, letting the newspaper fall on to the carpet.

At seven o’clock he would go downstairs and sit in the bar and watch the tourist parties. They knew him in the bar now. As soon as he entered one of the barmen would raise a finger and nod. A moment later he would receive his vodka lime, with crushed ice. ‘You have good day, sir?’ the barman would say to him, whichever barman it was.

Since the Chaharbagh tour of the morning he had eaten a chicken sandwich and walked, he estimated, ten miles. Exhausted, he had had a bath, delighting in the flow of warm water over his body, becoming drowsy until the water cooled and began to chill him. He’d stretched himself on his bed and then had slowly dressed, in a different linen suit.

His room in the Shah Abbas Hotel was enormous, with a balcony and blown-up photographs of domes and minarets, and a double bed as big as a night-club dance-floor. Ever since he’d first seen it he’d kept thinking that his bed was as big as a dance-floor. The room itself was large enough for a quite substantial family to live in.

He went downstairs at seven o’clock, using the staircase because he hated lifts and because, in any case, it was pleasant to walk through the luxurious hotel. In the hall a group of forty or so Swiss had arrived. He stood by a pillar for a moment, watching them. Their leader made arrangements at the desk, porters carried their luggage from the airport bus. Their faces looked happier when the luggage was identified. Swiss archaeologists, Normanton conjectured, a group tour of some Geneva society. And then, instead of going straight to the bar, he walked out of the hotel into the dusk.

They met in the tourist bazaar. She had bought a brooch, a square of coloured cotton, a canvas carrier-bag. When he saw her, he knew at once that he’d gone to the tourist bazaar because she might be there. They walked together, comparing the prices of ivory miniatures, the traditional polo-playing scene, variously interpreted. It was curiosity, nothing else, that made him want to renew their acquaintanceship.

‘The Theological School is closed,’ she said.

‘You can get in.’

He led her from the bazaar and rang a bell outside the school. He gave the porter a few rials. He said they wouldn’t be long.

She marvelled at the peace, the silence of the open courtyards, the blue mosaic walls, the blue water, men silently praying. She called it a grotto of heaven. She heard a sound which she said was a nightingale, and he said it might have been, although Shiraz was where the nightingales were. ‘Wine and roses and nightingales,’ he said because he knew it would please her. Shiraz was beautiful, too, but not as beautiful as Isfahan. The grass in the courtyards of the Theological School was not like ordinary grass, she said. Even the paving stones and the water gained a dimension in all the blueness. Blue was the colour of holiness: you could feel the holiness here.

‘It’s nicer than the Taj Mahal. It’s pure enchantment.’

‘Would you like a drink, Miss Smith? I could show you the enchantments of the Shah Abbas Hotel.’

‘I’d love a drink.’

She wasn’t wearing her dark glasses. The nasal twang of her voice continued to grate on him whenever she spoke, but her eyes seemed even more sumptuous than they’d been in the bright light of day. It was a shame he couldn’t say to her that her eyes were just as beautiful as the architecture of the Theological School, but such a remark would naturally be misunderstood.

‘What would you like?’ he asked in the bar of the hotel. All around them the Swiss party spoke in French. A group of Texan oilmen and their wives, who had been in the bar the night before, were there again, occupying the same corner. The sunburnt German couple of the Chaharbagh tour were there, with other Germans they’d made friends with.

‘I’d like some whisky,’ she said. ‘With soda. It’s very kind of you.’

When their drinks came he suggested that he should take her on a conducted tour of the hotel. They could drink their way around it, he said. ‘I shall be Guide Hafiz.’

He enjoyed showing her because all the time she made marvelling noises, catching her breath in marble corridors and fingering the endless mosaic of the walls, sinking her high-heeled sandals into the pile of carpets. Everything made it enchantment, she said: the gleam of gold and mirror-glass among the blues and reds of the mosaic, the beautifully finished furniture, the staircase, the chandeliers.

‘This is my room,’ he said, turning the key in the lock of a polished mahogany door.

‘Gosh!’

‘Sit down, Miss Smith.’

They sat and sipped at their drinks. They talked about the room. She walked out on to the balcony and then came and sat down again. It had become quite cold, she remarked, shivering a little. She coughed.

‘You’ve a cold.’

‘England always gives me a cold.’

They sat in two dark, tweed-covered armchairs with a glass-topped table between them. A maid had been to turn down the bed. His green pyjamas lay ready for him on the pillow.

They talked about the people on the tour, Hafiz and the testy professor, and the Frenchman with the moving camera. She had seen Hafiz and the American girls in the tourist bazaar, in the tea-shop. The minibus had broken down that afternoon: he’d seen it outside the Armenian Museum, the driver and Hafiz examining its plugs.

‘My mother would love that place,’ she said.

‘The Theological School?’

‘My mother would feel its spirit. And its holiness.’

‘Your mother is in England?’

‘In Bournemouth.’

‘And you yourself –’

‘I have been on holiday with her. I came for six weeks and stayed a year. My husband is in Bombay.’

He glanced at her left hand, thinking he’d made a mistake.

‘I haven’t been wearing my wedding ring. I shall again, in Bombay.’

‘Would you like to have dinner?’

She hesitated. She began to shake her head, then changed her mind. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Here, in the hotel?’

‘The food is the least impressive part.’

He’d asked her because, quite suddenly, he didn’t like being in this enormous bedroom with her. It was pleasant showing her around, but he didn’t want misunderstandings.

‘Let’s go downstairs,’ he said.

In the bar they had another drink. The Swiss party had gone, so had the Germans. The Texans were noisier than they had been. ‘Again, please,’ he requested the barman, tapping their two glasses.

In Bournemouth she had worked as a shorthand typist for the year. In the past she had been a shorthand typist when she and her mother lived in London, before her marriage. ‘My married name is Mrs Azann,’ she said.

‘When I saw you first I thought you had an Indian look.’

‘Perhaps you get that when you marry an Indian.’

‘And you’re entirely English?’

‘I’ve always felt drawn to the East. It’s a spiritual affinity.’

Her conversation was like the conversation in a novelette. There was that and her voice, and her unsuitable shoes, and her cough, and not wearing enough for the chilly evening air: all of it went together, only her eyes remained different. And the more she talked about herself, the more her eyes appeared to belong to another person.

‘I admire my husband very much,’ she said. ‘He’s very fine. He’s most intelligent. He’s twenty-two years older than I am.’

She told the story then, while they were still in the bar. She had, although she did not say it, married for money. And though she clearly spoke the truth when she said she admired her husband, the marriage was not entirely happy. She could not, for one thing, have children, which neither of them had known at the time of the wedding and which displeased her husband when it was established as a fact. She had been displeased herself to discover that her husband was not as rich as he had appeared to be. He owned a furniture business, he’d said in the Regent Palace Hotel, where they’d met by chance when she was waiting for someone else: this was true, but he had omitted to add that the furniture business was doing badly. She had also been displeased to discover on the first night of her marriage that she disliked being touched by him. And there was yet another problem: in their bungalow in Bombay there lived, as well as her husband and herself, his mother and an aunt, his brother and his business manager. For a girl not used to such communal life, it was difficult in the bungalow in Bombay.

‘It sounds more than difficult.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘He married you because you have an Indian look, while being the opposite of Indian in other ways. Your pale English skin. Your – your English voice.’

‘In Bombay I give elocution lessons.’

He blinked, and then smiled to cover the rudeness that might have shown in his face.

‘To Indian women,’ she said, ‘who come to the Club. My husband and I belong to a club. It’s the best part of Bombay life, the social side.’

‘It’s strange to think of you in Bombay.’

‘I thought I mightn’t return. I thought I’d maybe stay on with my mother. But there’s nothing much in England now.’

‘I’m fond of England.’

‘I thought you might be.’ She coughed again, and took her medicine from her handbag and poured a little into her whisky. She drank a mouthful of the mixture, and then apologized, saying she wasn’t being very ladylike. Such behaviour would be frowned upon in the Club.

‘You should wear a cardigan with that cough.’ He gestured at the barman and ordered further drinks.

‘I’ll be drunk,’ she said, giggling.

He felt he’d been right to be curious. Her story was strange. He imagined the Indian women of the Club speaking English with her nasal intonation, twisting their lips to form the distorted sounds, dropping ‘h’s’ because it was the thing to do. He imagined her in the bungalow, with her elderly husband who wasn’t rich, and his relations and his business manager. It was a sour little fairy-story, a tale of Cinderella and a prince who wasn’t a prince, and the carriage turned into an ice-cold pumpkin. Uneasiness overtook his curiosity, and he wondered again why she had come to Isfahan.

‘Let’s have dinner now,’ he suggested in a slightly hasty voice.

But Mrs Azann, looking at him with her sumptuous eyes, said she couldn’t eat a thing.

He would be married, she speculated. There was pain in the lines of his face, even though he smiled a lot and seemed lighthearted. She wondered if he’d once had a serious illness. When he’d brought her into his bedroom she wondered as they sat there if he was going to make a pass at her. But she knew a bit about people making passes, and he didn’t seem the type. He was too attractive to have to make a pass. His manners were too elegant; he was too nice.

‘I’ll watch you having dinner,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind in the least watching you if you’re hungry. I couldn’t deprive you of your dinner.’

‘Well, I am rather hungry.’

His mouth curved when he said things like that, because of his smile. She wondered if he could be an architect. From the moment she’d had the idea of coming to Isfahan she’d known that it wasn’t just an idea. She believed in destiny and always had.

They went to the restaurant, which was huge and luxurious like everywhere else in the hotel, dimly lit, with oil lamps on each table. She liked the way he explained to the waiters that she didn’t wish to eat anything. For himself, he ordered a chicken kebab and salad.

‘You’d like some wine?’ he suggested, smiling in the same way. ‘Persian wine’s very pleasant.’

‘I’d love a glass.’

He ordered the wine. She said:

‘Do you always travel alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re married?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘And your wife’s a home bird?’

‘Yes.’

She imagined him in a house in a village, near Midhurst possibly, or Sevenoaks. She imagined his wife, a capable woman, good in the garden and on committees. She saw his wife quite clearly, a little on the heavy side but nice, cutting sweet-peas.

‘You’ve told me nothing about yourself,’ she said.

‘There’s very little to tell. I’m afraid I haven’t a story like yours.’

‘Why are you in Isfahan?’

‘On holiday.’

‘Is it always on your own?’

‘I like being on my own. I like hotels. I like looking at people and walking about.’

‘You’re like me. You like travel.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I imagine you in a village house, in the Home Counties somewhere.’

‘That’s clever of you.’

‘I can clearly see your wife.’ She described the woman she could clearly see, without mentioning about her being on the heavy side. He nodded. She had second sight, he said with his smile.

‘People have said I’m a little psychic. I’m glad I met you.’

‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you. Stories like yours are rare enough.’

‘It’s all true. Every word.’

‘Oh, I know it is.’

‘Are you an architect?’

‘You’re quite remarkable,’ he said.

He finished his meal and between them they finished the wine. They had coffee and then she asked if he would kindly order more. The Swiss party had left the restaurant, and so had the German couple and their friends. Other diners had been and gone. The Texans were leaving just as Mrs Azann suggested more coffee. No other table was occupied.

‘Of course,’ he said.

He wished she’d go now. They had killed an evening together. Not for a long time would he forget either her ugly voice or her beautiful eyes. Nor would he easily forget the fairy-story that had gone sour on her. But that was that: the evening was over now.

The waiter brought their coffee, seeming greatly fatigued by the chore.

‘D’you think,’ she said, ‘we should have another drink? D’you think they have cigarettes here?’

He had brandy and she more whisky. The waiter brought her American cigarettes.

‘I don’t really want to go back to Bombay,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘I’d like to stay in Isfahan for ever.’

‘You’d be very bored. There’s no club. No social life of any kind for an English person, I should think.’

‘I do like a little social life.’ She smiled at him, broadening her sensuous mouth. ‘My father was a counter-hand,’ she said. ‘In a co-op. You wouldn’t think it, would you?’

‘Not at all,’ he lied.

‘It’s my little secret. If I told the women in the Club that, or my husband’s mother or his aunt, they’d have a fit. I’ve never even told my husband. Only my mother and I share that secret.’

‘I see.’

‘And now you.’

‘Secrets are safe with strangers.’

‘Why do you think I told you that secret?’

‘Because we are ships that pass in the night.’

‘Because you are sympathetic’

The waiter hovered close and then approached them boldly. The bar was open for as long as they wished it to be. There were lots of other drinks in the bar. Cleverly, he removed the coffee-pot and their cups.

‘He’s like a magician,’ she said. ‘Everything in Isfahan is magical.’

‘You’re glad you came?’

‘It’s where I met you.’

He rose. He had to stand for a moment because she continued to sit there, her handbag on the table, her black frilled shawl on top of it. She hadn’t finished her whisky but he expected that she’d lift the glass to her lips and drink what she wanted of it, or just leave it there. She rose and walked with him from the restaurant, taking her glass with her. Her other hand slipped beneath his arm.

‘There’s a discothèque downstairs,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m afraid that’s not really me.’

‘Nor me, neither. Let’s go back to our bar.’

She handed him her glass, saying she had to pay a visit. She’d love another whisky and soda, she said, even though she hadn’t quite finished the one in her glass. Without ice, she said.

The bar was empty except for a single barman. Normanton ordered more brandy for himself and whisky for Mrs Azann. He much preferred her as Iris Smith, in her tatty pink dress and the dark glasses that hid her eyes: she could have been any little typist except that she’d married Mr Azann and had a story to tell.

‘It’s nice in spite of things,’ she explained as she sat down. ‘It’s nice in spite of him wanting to you-know-what, and the women in the bungalow, and his brother and the business manager. They all disapprove because I’m English, especially his mother and his aunt. He doesn’t disapprove because he’s mad about me. The business manager doesn’t much mind, I suppose. The dogs don’t mind. D’you understand? In spite of everything, it’s nice to have someone mad about you. And the Club, the social life. Even though we’re short of the ready, it’s better than England for a woman. There’s servants, for a start.’

The whisky was affecting the way she put things. An hour ago she wouldn’t have said ‘wanting to you-know-what’ or ‘short of the ready’. It was odd that she had an awareness in this direction and yet could not hear the twang in her voice which instantly gave her away.

‘But you don’t love your husband.’

‘I respect him. It’s only that I hate having to you-know-what with him. I really do hate that. I’ve never actually loved him.’

He regretted saying she didn’t love her husband: the remark had slipped out, and it was regrettable because it involved him in the conversation in a way he didn’t wish to be.

‘Maybe things will work out better when you get back.’

‘I know what I’m going back to.’ She paused, searching for his eyes with hers. ‘I’ll never till I die forget Isfahan.’

‘It’s very beautiful.’

‘I’ll never forget the Chaharbagh Tours, or Hafiz. I’ll never forget that place you brought me to. Or the Shah Abbas Hotel.’

‘I think it’s time I saw you back to your own hotel.’

‘I could sit in this bar for ever.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not at all one for night-life.’

‘I shall visualize you when I’m back in Bombay. I shall think of you in your village, with your wife, happy in England. I shall think of you working at your architectural plans. I shall often wonder about you travelling alone because your wife doesn’t care for it.’

‘I hope it’s better in Bombay. Sometimes things are, when you least expect them to be.’

‘It’s been like a tonic. You’ve made me very happy.’

‘It’s kind of you to say that.’

‘There’s much that’s unsaid between us. Will you remember me?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

Reluctantly, she drank the dregs of her whisky. She took her medicine from her handbag and poured a little into the glass and drank that, too. It helped the tickle in her throat, she said. She always had a tickle when the wretched cough came.

‘Shall we walk back?’

They left the bar. She clung to him again, walking very slowly between the mosaiced columns. All the way back to the Old Atlantic Hotel she talked about the evening they had spent and how delightful it had been. Not for the world would she have missed Isfahan, she repeated several times.

When they said goodbye she kissed his cheek. Her beautiful eyes swallowed him up, and for a moment he had a feeling that her eyes were the real thing about her, reflecting her as she should be.

He woke at half past two and could not sleep. Dawn was already beginning to break. He lay there, watching the light increase in the gap he’d left between the curtains so that there’d be fresh air in the room. Another day had passed: he went through it piece by piece, from his early-morning walk to the moment when he’d put his green pyjamas on and got into bed. It was a regular night-time exercise with him. He closed his eyes, remembering in detail.

He turned again into the offices of Chaharbagh Tours and was told by Hafiz to go to the upstairs office. He saw her sitting there writing to her mother, and heard her voice asking him if he was going on the tour. He saw again the sunburnt faces of the German couple and the wholesome faces of the American girls, and faces in the French party. He went again on his afternoon walk, and after that there was his bath. She came towards him in the bazaar, with her dark glasses and her small purchases. There was her story as she had told it.

For his part, he had told her nothing. He had agreed with her novelette picture of him, living in a Home Counties village, a well-to-do architect married to a wife who gardened. Architects had become as romantic as doctors, there’d been no reason to disillusion her. She would for ever imagine him travelling to exotic places, on his own because he enjoyed it, because his wife was a home bird.

Why could he not have told her? Why could he not have exchanged one story for another? She had made a mess of things and did not seek to hide it. Life had let her down, she’d let herself down. Ridiculously, she gave elocution lessons to Indian women and did not see it as ridiculous. She had told him her secret, and he knew it was true that he shared it only with her mother and herself.

The hours went by. He should be lying with her in this bed, the size of a dance-floor. In the dawn he should be staring into her sumptuous eyes, in love with the mystery there. He should be telling her and asking for her sympathy, as she had asked for his. He should be telling her that he had walked into a room, not in a Home Counties village, but in harsh, ugly Hampstead, to find his second wife, as once he had found his first, in his bed with another man. He should in humility have asked her why it was that he was naturally a cuckold, why two women of different temperaments and characters had been inspired to have lovers at his expense. He should be telling her, with the warmth of her body warming his, that his second wife had confessed to greater sexual pleasure when she remembered that she was deceiving him.

It was a story no better than hers, certainly as unpleasant. Yet he hadn’t had the courage to tell it because it cast him in a certain light. He travelled easily, moving over surfaces and revealing only surfaces himself. He was acceptable as a stranger: in two marriages he had not been forgiven for turning out to be different from what he seemed. To be a cuckold once was the luck of the game, but his double cuckoldry had a whiff of revenge about it. In all humility he might have asked her about that.

At half past four he stood by the window, looking out at the empty street below. She would be on her way to the bus station, to catch the five o’clock bus to Teheran. He could dress, he could even shave and still be there in time. He could pay, on her behalf, the extra air fare that would accrue. He could tell her his story and they could spend a few days. They could go together to Shiraz, city of wine and roses and nightingales.

He stood by the window, watching nothing happening in the street, knowing that if he stood there for ever he wouldn’t find the courage. She had met a sympathetic man, more marvellous to her than all the marvels of Isfahan. She would carry that memory to the bungalow in Bombay, knowing nothing about a pettiness which brought out cruelty in people. And he would remember a woman who possessed, deep beneath her unprepossessing surface, the distinction that her eyes mysteriously claimed for her. In different circumstances, with a less unfortunate story to tell, it would have emerged. But in the early morning there was another truth, too. He was the stuff of fantasy. She had quality, he had none.

Angels at the Ritz

The game was played when the party, whichever party it happened to be, had thinned out. Those who stayed on beyond a certain point – beyond, usually, about one o’clock – knew that the game was on the cards and in fact had stayed for that reason. Often, as one o’clock approached, there were marital disagreements about whether or not to go home.

The game of swapping wives and husbands, with chance rather than choice dictating the formations, had been practised in this outer suburb since the mid-s. The swinging wives and husbands of that time were now passing into the first years of elderliness, but their party game continued. In the outer suburb it was most popular when the early struggles of marriage were over, after children had been born and were established at school, when there were signs of marital wilting that gin and tonic did not cure.

‘I think it’s awfully silly,’ Polly Dillard pronounced, addressing her husband on the evening of the Ryders’ party.

Her husband, whose first name was Gavin, pointed out that they’d known for years that the practice was prevalent at Saturday-night parties in the outer suburb. There’d been, he reminded her, the moment at the Meacocks’ when they’d realized they’d stayed too late, when the remaining men threw their car-keys on to the Meacocks’ carpet and Sylvia Meacock began to tie scarves over the eyes of the wives.

‘I mean, it’s silly Sue and Malcolm going in for it. All of a sudden, out of the blue like that.’

‘They’re just shuffling along with it, I suppose.’

Polly shook her head. Quietly, she said that in the past Sue and Malcolm Ryder hadn’t been the kind to shuffle along with things. Sue had sounded like a silly schoolgirl, embarrassed and not looking her in the eye when she told her.

Gavin could see she was upset, but one of the things about Polly since she’d had their two children and had come to live in the outer suburb was that she was able to deal with being upset. She dealt with it now, keeping calm, not raising her voice. She’d have been the same when Sue Ryder averted her eyes and said that she and Malcolm had decided to go in, too, for the outer suburb’s most popular party game. Polly would have been astonished and would have said so, and then she’d have attempted to become reconciled to the development. Before this evening came to an end she really would be reconciled, philosophically accepting the development as part of the Ryders’ middle age, while denying that it could ever be part of hers.

‘I suppose,’ Gavin said, ‘it’s like a schoolgirl deciding to let herself be kissed for the first time. Don’t you remember sounding silly then, Polly?’

She said it wasn’t at all like that. Imagine, she suggested, finding yourself teamed up with a sweaty creature like Tim Gruffydd. Imagine any school-girl in her senses letting Tim Gruffydd within two million miles of her. She still couldn’t believe that Sue and Malcolm Ryder were going in for stuff like that. What on earth happened to people? she asked Gavin, and Gavin said he didn’t know.

Polly Dillard was thirty-six, her husband two years older. Her short fair hair had streaks of grey in it now. Her thin, rather long face wasn’t pretty but did occasionally seem beautiful, the eyes deep blue, the mouth wide, becoming slanted when she smiled. She herself considered that nothing matched properly in her face and that her body was too lanky and her breasts too slight. But after thirty-six years she’d become used to all that, and other women envied her her figure and her looks.

On the evening of the Ryders’ party she surveyed the features that did not in her opinion match, applying eye-shadow in her bedroom looking-glass and now and again glancing at the reflection of her husband, who was changing from his Saturday clothes into clothes more suitable for Saturday night at the Ryders’: a blue corduroy suit, pink shirt and pinkish tie. Of medium height, fattening on lunches and alcohol, he was dark-haired and still handsome, for his chunky features were only just beginning to trail signs of this telltale plumpness. By profession Gavin Dillard was a director of promotional films for television, mainly in the soap and detergent field.

The hall doorbell rang as Polly rose from the chair in front of her looking-glass.

‘I’ll go,’ he said, adding that it would be Estrella, their babysitter.

‘Estrella couldn’t come, I had to ring Problem. Some Irish-sounding girl it’ll be.’

‘Hannah McCarthy,’ a round-faced girl at the door said. ‘Are you Mr Dillard, sir?’

He smiled at her and said he was. He closed the door and took her coat. He led her through a white, spacious hall into a sitting-room that was spacious also, with pale blue walls and curtains. One child was already in bed, he told her, the other was still in his bath. Two boys, he explained: Paul and David. His wife would introduce her to them.

‘Would you like a drink, Hannah?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say no to that, Mr Dillard.’ She smiled an extensive smile at him. ‘A little sherry if you have it, sir.’

‘And how’s the old country, Hannah?’ He spoke lightly, trying to be friendly, handing her a glass of sherry. He turned away and poured himself some gin and tonic, adding a sliver of lemon. ‘Cheers, Hannah!’

‘Cheers, sir! Ireland, d’you mean, sir? Oh, Ireland doesn’t change.’

‘You go back, do you?’

‘Every holidays. I’m in teacher training, Mr Dillard.’

‘I was at the Cork Film Festival once. A right old time we had.’

‘I don’t know Cork, actually. I’m from Listowel myself. Are you in films yourself, sir? You’re not an actor, Mr Dillard?’

‘Actually I’m a director.’

Polly entered the room. She said she was Mrs Dillard. She smiled, endeavouring to be as friendly as Gavin had been, in case the girl didn’t feel at home. She thanked her for coming at such short notice and presumably so far. She was wearing a skirt that Gavin had helped her to buy in Fenwick’s only last week, and a white lace blouse she’d had for years, and her jade beads. The skirt, made of velvet, was the same green as the jade. She took the babysitter away to introduce her to the two children.

Gavin stood with his back to the fire, sipping at his gin and tonic. He didn’t find it puzzling that Polly should feel so strongly about the fact that Sue and Malcolm Ryder had reached a certain stage in their marriage. The Ryders were their oldest and closest friends. Polly and Sue had known one another since they’d gone together to the Misses Hamilton’s nursery school in Putney. Perhaps it was this depth in the relationship that caused Polly to feel so disturbed by a new development in her friend’s life. In his own view, being offered a free hand with an unselected woman in return for agreeing that some man should maul his wife about wasn’t an attractive proposition. It surprised him that the Ryders had decided to go in for this particular party game, and it surprised him even more that Malcolm Ryder had never mentioned it to him. But it didn’t upset him.

‘All right?’ Polly inquired from the doorway, with her coat on. The coat was brown and fur-trimmed and expensive: she looked beautiful in it, Gavin thought, calm and collected. Once, a long time ago, she had thrown a milk-jug across a room at him. At one time she had wept a lot, deploring her lankiness and her flat breasts. All that seemed strangely out of character now.

He finished his drink and put the glass down on the mantelpiece. He put the sherry bottle beside the babysitter’s glass in case she should feel like some more, and then changed his mind and returned the bottle to the cabinet, remembering that they didn’t know the girl: a drunk babysitter – an experience they’d once endured – was a great deal worse than no babysitter at all.

‘She seems very nice,’ Polly said in the car. ‘She said she’d read to them for an hour.’

‘An hour? The poor girl!’

‘She loves children.’

It was dark, half past eight on a night in November. It was raining just enough to make it necessary to use the windscreen-wipers. Automatically, Gavin turned the car radio on: there was something pleasantly cosy about the glow of a car radio at night when it was raining, with the background whirr of the windscreen-wipers and the wave of warmth from the heater.

‘Let’s not stay long,’ he said.

It pleased her that he said that. She wondered if they were dull not to wish to stay, but he said that was nonsense.

He drove through the sprawl of their outer suburb, all of it new, disguised now by the night. Orange street lighting made the façades of the carefully designed houses seem different, changing the colours, but the feeling of space remained, and the uncluttered effect of the unfenced front gardens. Roomy Volvo estate-cars went nicely with the detached houses. So did Vauxhall Victors, and big bus-like Volkswagens. Families were packed into such vehicles on summer Saturday mornings, for journeys to cottages in the Welsh hills or in Hampshire or Herts. The Dillards’ cottage was in the New Forest.

Gavin parked the car in Sandiway Crescent, several doors away from the Ryders’ house because other cars were already parked closer to it. He’d have much preferred to be going out to dinner in Tonino’s with Malcolm and Sue, lasagne and peperonata and a carafe of Chianti Christina, a lazy kind of evening that would remind all of them of other lazy evenings. Ten years ago they’d all four gone regularly to Tonino’s trattoria in Greek Street, and the branch that had opened in their outer suburb was very like the original, even down to the framed colour photographs of A.C. Milan.

‘Come on in!’ Sue cried jollily at Number Four Sandiway Crescent. Her face was flushed with party excitement, her large brown eyes flashed adventurously with party spirit. Her eyes were the only outsize thing about her: she was tiny and black-haired, as pretty as a rosebud.

‘Gin?’ Malcolm shouted at them from the depths of the crowded hall. ‘Sherry, Polly? Burgundy?’

Gavin kissed the dimpled cheek that Sue Ryder pressed up to him. She was in red, a long red dress that suited her, with a red band in her hair and red shoes.

‘Yes, wine please, Malcolm,’ Polly said, and when she was close enough she slid her face towards his for the same kind of embrace as her husband had given his wife.

‘You’re looking edible, my love,’ he said, a compliment he’d been paying her for seventeen years.

He was an enormous man, made to seem more so by the smallness of his wife. His features had a mushy look. His head, like a pink sponge, was perched jauntily on shoulders that had once been a force to reckon with in rugby scrums. Although he was exactly the same age as Gavin, his hair had balded away to almost nothing, a rim of fluff not quite encircling the sponge.

‘You’re looking very smart yourself,’ Polly said, a statement that might or might not have been true: she couldn’t see him properly because he was so big and she was so close to him, and she hadn’t looked when she’d been further away. He was wearing a grey suit of some kind and a blue-striped shirt and the tie of the Harlequins’ Rugby Club. Usually he looked smart: he probably did now.

‘I’m feeling great,’ he said. ‘Nice little party we’re having, Poll.’

It wasn’t really little. Sixty or so people were in the Ryders’ house, which was similar to the Dillards’ house, well-designed and spacious. Most of the downstairs rooms, and the hall, had coffee-coloured walls, an experiment of Sue’s which she believed had been successful. For the party, the bulkier furniture had been taken out of the coffee-coloured sitting-room, and all the rugs had been lifted from the parquet floor. Music came from a tape-recorder, but no one was dancing yet. People stood in small groups, smoking and talking and drinking. No one, so far, appeared to be drunk.

All the usual people were there: the Stubbses, the Burgesses, the Pedlars, the Thompsons, the Stevensons, Sylvia and Jack Meacock, Philip and June Mulally, Oliver and Olive Gramsmith, Tim and Mary-Ann Gruffydd and dozens of others. Not all of them lived in the outer suburb; and some were older, some younger, than the Ryders and the Dillards. But there was otherwise a similarity about the people at the party: they were men who had succeeded or were in the process of succeeding, and women who had kept pace with their husbands’ advance. No one looked poor at the Ryders’ party.

At ten o’clock there was food, smoked salmon rolled up and speared with cocktail sticks, chicken vol-au-vents or beef Stroganoff with rice, salads of different kinds, stilton and brie and Bel Paese, and meringues. Wine flowed generously, white burgundy and red. Uncorked bottles were distributed on all convenient surfaces.

The dancing began when the first guests had eaten. To ‘Love of the Loved’, Polly danced with a man whose name she didn’t know, who told her he was an estate agent with an office in Jermyn Street. He held her rather close for a man whose name she didn’t know. He was older than Polly, about fifty, she reckoned, and smaller. He had a foxy moustache and foxy hair, and a round stomach, like a ball, which kept making itself felt. So did his knees.

In the room where the food was Gavin sat on the floor with Sylvia and Jack Meacock, and a woman in an orange trouser-suit, with orange lips.

‘Stevie wouldn’t come,’ this woman said, balancing food in the hollow of a fork. ‘He got cross with me last night.’

Gavin ate from his fingers a vol-au-vent full of chicken and mushrooms that had gone a little cold. Jack Meacock said nothing would hold him back from a party given by the Ryders. Or any party, he added, guffawing, given by anyone. Provided there was refreshment, his wife stipulated. Well naturally, Jack Meacock said.

‘He wouldn’t come,’ the orange woman explained, ‘because he thought I misbehaved in Olive Gramsmith’s kitchen. A fortnight ago, for God’s sake!’

Gavin calculated he’d had four glasses of gin and tonic. He corrected himself, remembering the one he’d had with the babysitter. He drank some wine. He wasn’t entirely drunk, he said to himself, he hadn’t turned a certain corner, but the corner was the next thing there was.

‘If you want to kiss someone you kiss him,’ the orange woman said. ‘I mean, for God’s sake, he’d no damn right to walk into Olive Gramsmith’s kitchen. I didn’t see you,’ she said, looking closely at Gavin. ‘You weren’t there, were you?’

‘We couldn’t go.’

‘You were there,’ she said to the Meacocks. ‘All over the place.’

‘We certainly were!’ Jack Meacock guffawed through his beef Stroganoff, scattering rice on to the coffee-coloured carpet.

‘Hullo,’ their hostess said, and sat down on the carpet beside Gavin, with a plate of cheese.

‘You mean you’ve been married twelve years?’ the estate agent said to Polly. ‘You don’t look it.’

‘I’m thirty-six.’

‘What’s your better half in? Is here, is he?’

‘He directs films. Advertisements for TV. Yes, he’s here.’

‘That’s mine.’ He indicated with his head a woman who wasn’t dancing, in lime-green. She was going through a bad patch, he said: depressions.

They danced to ‘Sunporch Cha-Cha-Cha’, Simon and Garfunkel.

‘Feeling OK?’ the estate agent inquired, and Polly said yes, not understanding what he meant. He propelled her towards the mantelpiece and took from it the glass of white burgundy Polly had left there. He offered it to her and when she’d taken a mouthful he drank some from it himself. They danced again. He clutched her more tightly with his arms and flattened a cheek against one of hers, rasping her with his moustache. With dead eyes, the woman in lime-green watched.

At other outer-suburb parties Polly had been through it all before. She escaped from the estate agent and was caught by Tim Gruffydd, who had already begun to sweat. After that another man whose name she didn’t know danced with her, and then Malcolm Ryder did.

‘You’re edible tonight,’ he whispered, the warm mush of his lips damping her ear. ‘You’re really edible, my love.’

‘Share my cheese,’ Sue offered in the other room, pressing brie on Gavin.

‘I need more wine,’ the woman in orange said, and Jack Meacock pushed himself up from the carpet. They all needed more wine, he pointed out. The orange woman predicted that the next day she’d have a hangover and Sylvia Meacock, a masculine-looking woman, said she’d never had a hangover in forty-eight years of steady drinking.

‘You going to stay a while?’ Sue said to Gavin. ‘You and Polly going to stay?’ She laughed, taking one of his hands because it was near to her. Since they’d known one another for such a long time it was quite in order for her to do that.

‘Our babysitter’s unknown,’ Gavin explained. ‘From the bogs of Ireland.’

The orange woman said the Irish were bloody.

‘Jack’s Irish, actually,’ Sylvia Meacock said.

She went on talking about that, about her husband’s childhood in County Down, about an uncle of his who used to drink a bottle and a half of whiskey a day – on top of four glasses of stout, with porridge and bread, for his breakfast. If you drank at all you should drink steadily, she said.

Gavin felt uneasy, because all the time Sylvia Meacock was talking about the drinking habits of her husband’s uncle in County Down Sue clung on to his hand. She held it lightly, moving her fingers in a caress that seemed to stray outside the realm of their long friendship. He was in love with Polly: he thought that deliberately, arraying the sentiment in his mind as a statement, seeing it suspended there. There was no one he’d ever known whom he’d been fonder of than Polly, or whom he respected more, or whom it would upset him more to hurt. Seventeen years ago he’d met her in the kitchens of the Hotel Belvedere, Penzance, where they had both gone to work for the summer. Five years later, having lived with one another in a flat in the cheaper part of Maida Vale, they’d got married because Polly wanted to have children. They’d moved to the outer suburb because the children needed space and fresh air, and because the Ryders, who’d lived on the floor above theirs in Maida Vale, had moved there a year before.

‘She’ll be all right,’ Sue said, returning to the subject of the Irish baby sitter. ‘She could probably stay the night. She’d probably be delighted.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, Sue.’

He imagined without difficulty the hands of men at the party unbuttoning Polly’s lace blouse, the hands of Jack Meacock or the sweaty hands of Tim Gruffydd. He imagined Polly’s clothes falling on to a bedroom carpet and then her thin, lanky nakedness, her small breasts and the faint mark of her appendix scar. ‘Oh, I say!’ she said in a way that wasn’t like her when the man, whoever he was, took off his own clothes. Without difficulty either, Gavin imagined being in a room himself for the same purpose, with the orange woman or Sylvia Meacock. He’d walk out again if he found himself in a room with Sylvia Meacock and he’d rather be in a room with Sue than with the orange woman. Because he wasn’t quite sober, he had a flash of panic when he thought of what might be revealed when the orange trouser-suit fell to the floor: for a brief, disturbing moment he felt it was actually happening, that in the bonhomie of drunkenness he’d somehow agreed to the situation.

‘Why don’t we dance?’ Sue suggested, and Gavin agreed.

‘I think I’d like a drink,’ Polly said to Philip Mulally, an executive with Wolsey Menswear. He was a grey shadow of a man, not at all the kind to permit himself or his wife to be a party to sexual games. He nodded seriously when Polly interrupted their dance to say she’d like a drink. It was time in any case, he revealed, that he and June were making a move homewards.

‘I love you in that lace thing,’ Malcolm Ryder whispered boringly as soon as Polly stopped dancing with Philip Mulally. He was standing waiting for her.

‘I was saying to Philip I’d like a drink.’

‘Of course you must have a drink. Come and quaff a brandy with me, Poll.’ He took her by the hand and led her away from the dancers. The brandy was in his den, he said.

She shook her head, following him because she had no option. Above the noise of Cilia Black singing ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ she shouted at him that she’d prefer some more white burgundy, that she was actually feeling thirsty. But he didn’t hear her, or didn’t wish to. ‘Ain’t misbehaving,’ the foxy estate agent mouthed at her as they passed him, standing on his own in the hall. It was an expression that was often used, without much significance attaching to it, at parties in the outer suburb.

‘Evening, all,’ Malcolm said in the room he called his den, closing the door behind Polly. The only light in the room was from a desk-lamp. In the shadows, stretched on a mock-leather sofa, a man and a woman were kissing one another. They parted in some embarrassment at their host’s jocular greeting, revealing themselves, predictably, as a husband and another husband’s wife.

‘Carry on, folks,’ Malcolm said.

He poured Polly some brandy even though she had again said that what she wanted was a glass of burgundy. The couple on the sofa got up and went away, giggling. The man told Malcolm he was an old bastard.

‘Here you are,’ Malcolm said, and then to Polly’s distaste he placed his mushy lips on hers and exerted some pressure. The brandy glass was in her right hand, between them: had it not been there, she knew the embrace would have been more intimate. As it was, it was possible for both of them to pretend that what had occurred was purely an expression of Malcolm Ryder’s friendship for her, a special little detour to show that for all these years it hadn’t been just a case of two wives being friends and the husbands tagging along. Once, in 1965, they’d all gone to the Italian Adriatic together and quite often Malcolm had given her a kiss and a hug while telling her how edible she was. But somehow – perhaps because his lips hadn’t been so mushy in the past – it was different now.

‘Cheers!’ he said, smiling at her in the dimness. For an unpleasant moment she thought he might lock the door. What on earth did you do if an old friend tried to rape you on a sofa in his den?

With every step they made together, the orange woman increased her entwinement of Oliver Gramsmith. The estate agent was dancing with June Mulally, both of them ignoring the gestures of June Mulally’s husband, Philip, who was still anxious to move homewards. The Thompsons, the Pedlars, the Stevensons, the Suttons, the Heeresmas and the Fultons were all maritally separated. Tim Gruffydd was clammily tightening his grasp of Olive Gramsmith, Sylvia Meacock’s head lolled on the shoulder of a man called Thistlewine.

‘Remember the Ritz?’ Sue said to Gavin.

He did remember. It was a long time ago, years before they’d all gone together to the Italian Adriatic, when they’d just begun to live in Maida Vale, one flat above the other, none of them married. They’d gone to the Ritz because they couldn’t afford it. The excuse had been Polly’s birthday.

‘March the 25th,’ he said. ‘1961.’ He could feel her breasts, like spikes because of the neat control of her brassière. He’d become too flabby, he thought, since March the 25th, 1961.

‘What fun it was!’ With her dark, petite head on one side, she smiled up at him. ‘Remember it all, Gavin?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘I wanted to sing that song and no one would let me. Polly was horrified.’

‘Well, it was Polly’s birthday.’

‘And of course we couldn’t have spoiled that.’ She was still smiling up at him, her eyes twinkling, the tone of her voice as light as a feather. Yet the words sounded like a criticism, as though she were saying now –fourteen years later – that Polly had been a spoilsport, which at the time hadn’t seemed so in the least. Her arms tightened around his waist. Her face disappeared as she sank her head against his chest. All he could see was the red band in her hair and the hair itself. She smelt of some pleasant scent. He liked the sharpness of her breasts. He wanted to stroke her head.

‘Sue fancies old Gavin, you know,’ Malcolm said in his den.

Polly laughed. He had put a hand on her thigh and the fingers were now slightly massaging the green velvet of her skirt and the flesh beneath it. To have asked him to take his hand away or to have pushed it away herself would have been too positive, too much a reflection of his serious mood rather than her own determinedly casual one. A thickness had crept into his voice. He looked much older than thirty-eight; he’d worn less well than Gavin.

‘Let’s go back to the party, Malcolm.’ She stood up, dislodging his hand as though by accident.

‘Let’s have another drink.’

He was a solicitor now, with Parker, Hille and Harper. He had been, in fact, a solicitor when they’d all lived in the cheaper part of Maida Vale. He’d still played rugby for the Harlequins then. She and Gavin and Sue used to watch him on Saturday afternoons, in matches against the London clubs, Rosslyn Park and Blackheath, Richmond, London Welsh, London Irish, and all the others. Malcolm had been a towering wing three-quarter, with a turn of speed that was surprising in so large a man: people repeatedly said, even newspaper commentators, that he should play for England.

Polly was aware that it was a cliché to compare Malcolm as he had been with the blubbery, rather tedious Malcolm beside whom it was unwise to sit on a sofa. Naturally he wasn’t the same. It was probably a tedious life being a solicitor with Parker, Hille and Harper day after day. He probably did his best to combat the blubberiness, and no man could help being bald. When he was completely sober, and wasn’t at a party, he could still be quite funny and nice, hardly tedious at all.

‘I’ve always fancied you, Poll,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Malcolm!’

She took the brandy glass from him, holding it between them in case he should make another lurch. He began to talk about sex. He asked her if she’d read, a few years ago, about a couple in an aeroplane, total strangers, who had performed the sexual act in full view of the other passengers. He told her a story about Mick Jagger on an aeroplane, at the time when Mick Jagger was making journeys with Marianne Faithfull. He said the springing system of Green Line buses had the same kind of effect on him. Sylvia Meacock was lesbian, he said. Olive Gramsmith was a slapparat. Philip Mulally had once been seen hanging about Shepherd Market, looking at the tarts. He hadn’t been faithful to Sue, he said, but Sue knew about it and now they were going to approach all that side of things in a different way. Polly knew about it, too, because Sue had told her: a woman in Parker, Hille and Harper had wanted Malcolm to divorce Sue, and there’d been, as well, less serious relationships between Malcolm and other women.

‘Since you went away the days grow long,’ sang Nat King Cole in the coffee-coloured sitting-room, ‘and soon I’ll hear ole winter’s song’ Some guests, in conversation, raised their voices above the voice of Nat King Cole. Others swayed to his rhythm. In the sitting-room and the hall and the room where the food had been laid out there was a fog of cigarette smoke and the warm smell of burgundy. Men sat together on the stairs, talking about the election of Margaret Thatcher as leader of the Conservative party. Women had gathered in the kitchen and seemed quite happy there, with glasses of burgundy in their hands. In a bedroom the couple who had been surprised in Malcolm’s den continued their embrace.

‘So very good we were,’ Sue said on the parquet dance-floor. She broke away from Gavin, seizing him by the hand as she did so. She led him across the room to a teak-faced cabinet that contained gramophone records. On top of it there was a gramophone and the tape-recorder that was relaying the music.

‘Don’t dare move,’ she warned Gavin, releasing his hand in order to poke among the records. She found what she wanted and placed it on the turntable of the gramophone. The music began just before she turned the tape-recorder off. A cracked female voice sang: That certain night, the night we met, there was magic abroad in the air…

‘Listen to it,’ Sue said, taking Gavin’s hand again and drawing him on to the dancing area.

‘There were angels dining at the Ritz, and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.’

The other dancers, who’d been taken aback by the abrupt change of tempo, slipped into the new rhythm. The two spiky breasts again depressed Gavin’s stomach.

‘Angels of a kind we were,’ Sue said. ‘And fallen angels now, Gavin? D’you think we’ve fallen?’

Once in New York and once in Liverpool he’d made love since his marriage, to other girls. Chance encounters they’d been, irrelevant and unimportant at the time and more so now. He had suffered from guilt immediately afterwards, but the guilt had faded, with both girls’ names. He could remeber their names if he tried: he once had, when suffering from a bout of indigestion in the night. He had remembered precisely their faces and their naked bodies and what each encounter had been like, but memories that required such effort hadn’t seemed quite real. It would, of course, be different with Sue.

‘Fancy Sue playing that,’ her husband said, pausing outside the den with Polly. ‘They’ve been talking about the Ritz, Poll.’

‘Goodness!’ With a vividness that was a welcome antidote to Malcolm’s disclosure about the sex-life of his guests, the occasion at the Ritz returned to her. Malcolm said:

‘It was my idea, you know. Old Gavin and I were boozing in the Hoop and he suddenly said, “It’s Polly’s birthday next week,” and I said, “For God’s sake! Let’s all go down to the Ritz.” ’

‘You had oysters, I remember.’ She smiled at him, feeling better because they were no longer in the den, and stronger because of the brandy. Malcolm would have realized by now how she felt, he wouldn’t pursue the matter.

‘We weren’t much more than kids.’ He seized her hand in a way that might have been purely sentimental, as though he was inspired by the memory.

‘My twenty-second birthday. What an extraordinary thing it was to do!’

In fact, it had been more than that. Sitting in the restaurant with people she liked, she’d thought it was the nicest thing that had ever happened to her on her birthday. It was absurd because none of them could afford it. It was absurd to go to the Ritz for a birthday treat: martinis in the Rivoli Bar because Malcolm said it was the thing, the gilt chairs and the ferns. But the absurdity hadn’t mattered because in those days nothing much did. It was fun, they enjoyed being together, they had a lot to be happy about. Malcolm might yet play rugby for England. Gavin was about to make his breakthrough into films. Sue was pretty, and Polly that night felt beautiful. They had sat there carelessly laughing, while deferential waiters simulated the gaiety of their mood. They had drunk champagne because Malcolm said they must.

With Malcolm still holding her hand, she crossed the spacious hall of Number Four Sandiway Crescent. People were beginning to leave. Malcolm released his hold of her in order to bid them goodbye.

She stood in the doorway of the sitting-room watching Gavin and Sue dancing. She lifted her brandy glass to her lips and drank from it calmly. Her oldest friend was attempting to seduce her husband, and for the first time in her life she disliked her. Had they still been at the Misses Hamilton’s nursery school she would have run at her and hit her with her fists. Had they still been in Maida Vale or on holiday on the Italian Adriatic she would have shouted and made a fuss. Had they been laughing in the Ritz she’d have got up and walked out.

They saw her standing there, both of them almost in the same moment. Sue smiled at her and called across the coffee-coloured sitting-room, as though nothing untoward were happening, ‘D’you think we’ve fallen, Polly?’ Her voice was full of laughter, just like it had been that night. Her eyes still had their party gleam, which probably had been there too.

‘Let’s dance, Poll,’ Malcolm said, putting his arms around her waist from behind.