The Family Arsenal

1

Seated on a cushion at the upstairs window of the tall house, Hood raised the cigarette to the sun and saw that it was half full of the opium mixture. Filling it was pleasurable, like the wilful care of delaying for love: to taste confidence. He winked and sighted with it, as if studying violence from afar, to take aim. He had a marksman’s princely squint and the dark furious face of an Apache; but he was only finding his landmarks with the unfinished cigarette.

He moved it slightly to the left and covered a church steeple on the next road. In the slow fire of the late afternoon the tall granite spire had the look of an old dagger. Then to the right, past the far-off bulb of the Post Office Tower, a matchstick in metal; past a row of riverside warehouses the sun had gutted, and more burnt spires, and the dome of St Paul’s — blue and simple as a bucket at this distance. Drawing the cigarette down he measured a narrow slice of the river between two brick buildings charred by shadow: part of a wharf, the gas works, the power station pouring a muscle of smoke into the sky, a crane poised dangerously like an ember about to snap, housetops shedding flames, then under his thumb the ditch at the end of the crescent where the trains ran.

The ditch wall was streaked with exulting paint: ARSENAL RULE and AGGRO and ALL WANKERS SUPPORT PALACE. That glint behind it was the river at Deptford, showing like a band of bright snake scales; but the snake lay hidden, and here when the wind was right on the creek it was a smell — a tidal odour of mudbanks and exposed pebbles, a blocked sink holding a dead serpent. Up close, in Albacore Crescent, the severe summer shadow gave the bending terraces of plump-fronted houses the look of iron closets, clamped against thieves, and it was the emptiness of the street — indeed, the emptiness of this part of South London — that made Hood think that in each locked house there was at least one impatient man plotting a reply to his disappointment.

Spying with his cigarette in this way, Hood saw the father and son approach, sweeping the road. They made their way in a bumping procession, detouring around a blind abandoned Zodiac parked on flat tyres, passing the widely spaced trees whose slender trunks were sleeved in wire mesh. The old man was on the broom, shoving at the gutter; behind him, the boy — no more than ten or eleven — fought with the handle of the cart, a dented yellow barrel on wheels. Even with the window closed Hood had heard the scrape of the broom and the bang of the old man’s tin scoop as he emptied a load into the barrel. Hood had been waiting since dawn for Mayo to arrive, and the suspense had made his hearing keen: his frustration amplified the slightest sound.

He was in a room of snoring children. He thought of them as children: they were young and slept like cats in a basket. They were not conspirators — they didn’t know the word. The girl, Brodie, was asleep across the room; Murf slept against the near wall, hugging a pillow. The crudely sketched tattoo on Brodie’s arm (a small chevron of needlemarks: a bluebird), and Murf’s ear-ring and hunting knife, looked especially ridiculous on these contented sleepers. Sleep had removed anger from their faces and made their youth emphatic. Hood used his cigarette to study them. He thought: It is possible to believe in a sleeper’s innocence.

Earlier — around two — Brodie had said, ‘Mayo got lost — or picked up. I’m crashing.’ And she had gone to the mantelshelf and pawed with her little hand in the drawers of the Burmese box and taken out a vial of powder. She faced him, hunching, ten inches from shoulder to shoulder, and shyly, because everything was Hood’s in this house, she showed him the vial. She hesitated, looked to Murf for encouragement, then back at Hood, who had not moved or spoken.

‘Please?’

‘Don’t say that.’

Brodie nibbled her underlip. She said, ‘Then fuck you.’

‘Or that.’

Hood frowned, and Murf laughed at the girl, showing the pegs of his teeth. And only then she seemed to realize her cleverness; she giggled and went round-shouldered. It was this that made them children: they could not be alone, but there was nothing they would refuse to do if they had company. Now they were happy, but even angry they were empty.

Quickly, Brodie had made two cigarettes and looked up for Hood’s approval — he had taught her the trick of making a joint one-handed. She knew enough of her dependency on him to offer him the first one. He said no. Murf rolled sideways and accepted it: ‘Fanks.’ Hood saw how their puffing weighted the air with warm opium fumes, and he had been tempted to abandon his vigil. But Mayo had promised to come — days ago. Hood knew she had what he wanted, the painting — the newspapers had reported her success before she sent him six inches of its fusty lining. He had sent an inch to The Times, but the story of her theft had slipped from the front pages: she was that close. He had expected her at dawn today, and he would not have been surprised to see her steer her ice-cream van from the fog — the signs SUPERTONY and MIND THAT CHILD bright with dampness on the van’s side — and leap out with the painting under her arm. But she didn’t come then, nor at noon. Hood had forgotten to eat lunch, and sick of waiting and not realizing his impatience was aggravated by simple hunger he resented his wasted day by the window; another day. He was quicker than any of them, so it was left to him to wait.

Waiting, a penalty, was his favour to them. He had not insisted on leading; he obliged himself to move at their speed. He looked again at Brodie and Murf. They slept smiling, Murf with his knees raised, Brodie on the cushion where she had propped herself to smoke. She had a smudge on her cheek that Hood found viciously attractive, a blot that threw her pretty face into relief and reminded him of the one fact he knew: she had planted a bomb in a locker at Euston. She slept in depths of silence that counterfeited a happy death. Awake, Hood felt like a parent in a room of napping children, and at five he had crossed the room to the Burmese box that had lain at the edge of his eye all day. He had taken it to the window and set to work. He crushed a cigarette and pinched out the tobacco, and he began filling the empty tube with alternate layers of tobacco and opium powder. He had delayed, tamping carefully, in the hope that Mayo’s arrival would interrupt him. It was the reason he had used it to stare out of the window for so long; and when the cigarette was finished he had avoided lighting the tightly twisted end and kissing the purple smoke from it. Now he did not want to be interrupted; the smoke was definite. It would warm him and give him sleep, release him from waiting and deliver him to a place of numb enchantment where all promises were kept and what he attempted he mastered. And more: fountains of light, the caress of moths’ wings, syrup in his throat, sex like splitting a peach with his teeth on the Perfume River, and all the green heat of Guatemala.

Striking a match he had heard the father and son again and was distracted by their muffled voices. They were in front of the house, the old man pushing into a pile the litter of papers, the boy resting on the handle of the cart, watching his father gasp. Hood shook out the match and from his window looked down two storeys, annoyed by the interruption, but feeling an affectionate pity for them and a hatred for their grubby job. The man was too old to be punching waste paper with a broom and stooping with his pan; the boy too young to be standing in the gutter with his clumsy barrel. It seemed to Hood a shabby and undeserved penance, which they performed sighing, with inappropriately serious faces; and Hood felt mingled outrage and self-contempt, wanting to save them from a job he would not do himself.

He knew the third figure, a tall man in a plum-coloured suit sauntering towards them on the opposite side of the street. And yet he was almost surprised to see him — he had once hammered that man so hard in a dream he was convinced the brute was dead. The man appeared cheerful, but that was deceptive. He crossed over, pitching forward into a tiger’s slouch with each step, and Hood could see he was drunk. The man paused and jerked his face at the old sweeper, muttered something and passed by. He went five paces, drew a bag from the pocket of his jacket and removed a brown bottle from the bag. He crumpled the bag and lazily drop-kicked it into the gutter the man had cleared. He shouted and pointed to it, but the old man ignored the protesting squawk; he went on sweeping. The boy looked back anxiously, not at the shouting man but at the crumpled bag in the newly swept gutter.

Hood placed his cigarette on the Burmese box and slid the window open. The men faced each other: authority in a plum-coloured suit, servitude with a push-broom, the simplest example of unfairness; and the judging child.

‘Pick it up!’

‘— no attention to him,’ the old man was saying to the boy.

But the boy left the cart and started in the direction of the bag.

‘Get back here,’ said the old man. ‘Don’t listen to him.’

The boy obeyed his father. This infuriated the drunk, and Hood heard again, ‘Pick it up!’

Now the old man turned and screamed, ‘Get off out of it! You stitched me up last week and you’re not going to stitch me up again! Right, you made the mess and you can bloody well —’

The tall man staggered towards the father and son, howling with his whole face and swinging the bottle in his hand; his voice, his suit insisted. The old man clutched his broom like a weapon and lowered his puckered face behind it, crying, ‘Pack it in!’ But it was the boy’s face that alarmed Hood: it had become delicate with fear, as if it might shatter like white china, and wincing it looked pathetically young. Not daring to draw a breath the boy wore the quick mask of a nervous infant panicked by noise. The man was threatening his father, now standing close, raising his arms and working his mad face at him.

Hood had been with Mayo that other time. She had said, ‘He’s not political, it doesn’t matter.’ ‘I’ll kill him,’ Hood had said; and she laughed and turned away from the window: ‘You’ve got an Irish temper! What would that effect?’ Watching the man go then he had said. ‘His ass, May. His ass.’

He wanted to see the old man triumph and teach the boy courage, and he looked for a flourish of the broom handle, a whack or an insult to turn the drunk away. Hood imagined himself leaping from the window, flying two storeys to the bastard’s back and dragging him to the street. In an uprush of anger he saw himself with the man by the ears and tearing his head off. But there was nothing. Hood seethed and stayed where he was, the thick curtains in his hands, the pelmet shaking above him. And the boy looked on, helplessly at his helpless father, as the man struck, slapped him (‘Dad!’), nearly losing his balance, and spat out something more. Hood saw the old man close his eyes and tighten his grip on the broom; he saw the boy’s face break and the tears, and the drunk’s expression — that of a scavenger seizing a piece of meat in his teeth and turning away to protect it. He saw all this with terrible clarity, but he heard nothing more, for at that moment a train passed in the ditch at the end of the crescent. The train closed in on the quarrel, quickly, without an announcing sound. Then there was for fifteen seconds the drone of wheels on rails and the rattle and screech of the carriages, sealing the humiliation by drowning it in a single wave of clatter; and ending it, for when the train had gone by, leaving the traces of a hum on the housefronts, the old man had the broom on his shoulder and the boy was trundling up the road, following his father with the yellow barrel. The drunk slouched away, carrying himself crookedly to the hill.

2

On that train, the 17.27 from Charing Cross, sat Ralph Gawber, an accountant. His thin face and his obvious fatigue gave him a look of kindliness, and he rode the train with tolerance, responding to the jump of the carriage with a gentle nod. In his heavy suit, in the harsh August heat, he had the undusted sanctity of a clergyman who has spent the day preaching without result in a stubborn slum. He held The Times in one hand, folded flat in a rectangle to make a surface for the crossword, and with the ballpoint pen in his other hand he might have been studying a clue. But the crossword was completely inked in. Mr Gawber was asleep. He had the elderly commuter’s habit of being able to sleep without shifting position; sleep took him and embalmed him lightly like a touch of sadness he would soon shake off. He was dreaming of having tea with the Queen in a sunny room in Buckingham Palace. Jammed in the corner, the standing passengers’ coats brushing his head, the lunchbox of the shirtless man next to him nudging his thigh, he dreamed. Around him, travellers slapped and shook their evening papers, but Mr Gawber slept on. The Queen suddenly smiled and leaned forwards and plucked open the front of her dress. Her full breasts tumbled out and Mr Gawber put his head between them and sobbed with shame and relief. They were so cool; and he felt her nipples against his ears.

He had caught the morning train dressed warmly for the chilly summer fog which blanketed Catford and gave him a secure feeling of privacy among the bulky lighted cars half-lost in vapour. The fog cheered him with forgetfulness, slowly and unaccountably, allowing him amnesia. But the sun had burst into his compartment at London Bridge, dramatically lighting the Peek Frean biscuit factory and releasing a powerful odour of shortbread. At once, he loathed his suit. The boats on the river were indistinguishable in the broad dazzle, and by the time Mr Gawber had walked the quarter mile to Kingsway he was perspiring. It seemed to him, in travelling this short distance from his home in South London, as if he had left a far-off place, where the weather was different, and had to cross a frontier to work.

All day at his desk at Rackstraw’s he had been hot, and twice he had gone to the tiled stairwell at the centre of the building, just to stand and be cool. ‘Lovely day,’ Miss French had said. He had to agree. Only the weather brought Mr Gawber and his secretary together in conversation. He bore it and memorized the clouds for her. He would not tell her what he secretly felt, that London looked deranged in summer heat, collapsing and crowded, sunburnt necks and ugly exposed navels, the paint blistering, the very bricks sweating old poisons through their cracks. And this summer something dreadful was happening: a slump, or worse — an eruption. He’d seen the figures and smelled smoke; the economy wanted a complete rejig.

Before lunch he had asked, ‘What do we hear from Miss Nightwing?’

‘Nothing,’ said Miss French. ‘Monty’s brought the second post. I’ve been through it myself.’

‘She’s very naughty,’ said Mr Gawber.

‘Oh, she looked lovely on telly the other night with Russell Harty. She’s going to play Peter Pan in the Christmas panto. I’m sure she’ll do it ever so much better than that rabbity Susan Hampshire. But I said to my mother. “She may be a great actress, but her tax is way overdue and she’s making our Mister Gawber sweat tears.” ’

‘Miss French, I think I should remind you that Miss Nightwing’s income tax is a confidential matter. She’s simply forgotten to send us details of her expenditure. Rumours could damage her reputation.’ He gave her a smile of rebuke. ‘Do let me handle it, won’t you?’

Miss French said, ‘They say she’s a communist. She wants to outlaw Punch and Judy shows. Says they’re cruel and decadent. Punch and Judy!’

He wanted to say how much they had frightened him as a child at the noisy fair in Ladywell Fields. He sighed, hearing Mister Punch’s reedy threats. The heat was a cloak that weighted his back and made him slump. He squinted and tasted dust and wished it would rain. He said, ‘I shall ring her.’

He dialled the number, but before it could ring the line seemed to burst and acquire an odd resonating clamour. In his ear, a male voice said, ‘That’s marathon, I’m sure.’

‘Monetary,’ said a woman.

‘Marathon.’

‘Monetary.’

Mr Gawber checked himself in an apology.

‘Not monetary.’

‘It fits. With tapir at seven down.’

‘Tapir perhaps. But what about that ovoid at eight down? That would put paid to your monetary.’

Mr Gawber saw. They were doing The Times crossword. He had put his paper away; it was his practice to do half of it on the way into work and complete it on the way home in the evening. He had got tapir, but not marathon. He listened, fascinated, as if to friends, fellow puzzlers. But his embarrassment grew — and something else bothered him about the crossed line: the man and woman seemed shut in the same cellar room, and their voices murmured as if lost in utter darkness.

‘All right, marathon,’ said the woman. ‘So with Elba at twenty-seven down and piano-tuner at sixteen across we’re left with that enormous blank at twelve across. Eight letters. Gosh.’

‘ “Bitten but —”.’

‘Please don’t read the clue again, Charles.’

‘I’m stumped.’

‘It looks easy enough.’

‘Second letter “a”, ending in “n”. Could be another marathon.’

Mr Gawber held the receiver away from his face and reached for his newspaper. He carried out the activity as if learning a stratagem. He was not used to deceptions. He turned the paper over and put his finger on twelve across. Of course.

‘You’re always saying how awfully good you are.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘You’re so full of corrections.’

‘I won’t listen to much more of this.’

‘If you could only hear yourself.’

The poor things, seeking the companionship of a puzzle in their darkness, had begun to row. Mr Gawber became anxious. He had been holding his breath for so long his eyes stung. The woman turned abusive; Mr Gawber blinked. He heard, ‘— bloody fed up,’ and took a deep breath.

‘The answer to twelve across,’ he intoned in a voice he did not recognize as his own, ‘is macaroon. Macaroon.’

‘Is that you, Charles?’

‘No, my dear — why it is macaroon!’

‘There’s someone on this line. Who’s there?’

The alert voice, a shaft from the darkness, spun a burr of panic at him.

‘Who’s there!’

Mr Gawber clapped the receiver down and covered his face with his hands. He felt that voice had been heard throughout Rackstraw’s. Shortly afterwards Miss French said, ‘Mister Gawber, you’re all flushed.’

He said it was the heat. He had done no damage, but the episode was shaming — he should have put the phone down at the beginning. He respected privacy. If, on a train, the person beside him took out a letter and began reading it Mr Gawber doubled up to convey the impression that he knew it was a letter and was not reading it — he reminded others of their privacy. And he had frightened those people: what were they saying about him now?

He did not touch the telephone again until after four, regarding it as a dangerous and unreliable instrument. But his in-tray still held the unfilled tax form of Araba Nightwing, and pinned to it a curt letter from Inland Revenue. He overcame his shyness and dialled the number again. It buzzed and was answered. He gave his name, apologized for his intrusion, and stated his business briefly.

‘I’m not paying,’ said the young woman in her famous voice.

‘It’s the law,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘We’ll have to get our skates on pretty smartly.’

‘Don’t they know — don’t you — there’s a war on!’

‘I couldn’t agree more —’

But the line had gone dead, and he was now enquiring in darkness himself: ‘Miss Nightwing?’

It had been an upsetting day, and not helped by the heat. Mr Gawber was glad to leave for home at five, to hurry away from the yakking that accused him of obscure errors. Lovely day, one woman says, smiling foolishly at the sun on the deranged street; Who’s there? demands the one on the crossed line; There’s a war on! the actress cries. These wrong voices moved through his mind, and he could not reply to any of them. For a moment in the cool stairwell at Rackstraw’s he felt his strength return. He damned them softly and wanted the city to be destroyed to silence them. It was coming, in any case: the thunderclap. He had seen the figures. Then he would walk out of the building, put his umbrella up, and cross the smoking rubble of the Strand, now an empty beach-head of destruction: the ruin proving him right.

But it was an idle thought; the spite was unworthy of him. He boarded the train and resumed the crossword, and minutes later — while the train was stalled on its approach to Waterloo — completed it with unusual speed: Elba, piano-tuner, marathon. Those strangers had made it easy for him. He drowsed in the crowded carriage and slept, while the evening papers crashed at his ears; he dreamed of the Queen, the sun, her body. New Cross, Lewisham, Ladywell: still he slept, and at Catford Bridge, his stop, the Queen leaned towards him and tugged at the front of her glittering dress. The train raced on to Lower Sydenham, where he woke. The carriage was nearly empty and nothing outside had the smallest wrinkle of familiarity.

He walked down the platform with such uncertainty his shoes seemed too large for him. He was walking with another man’s feet. The name on the station signboard was recognizable, but this particle of the familiar in so strange a place confounded him. The platform had no roof, and when the train drew out it was empty — the other passengers had quickly deserted it. And yet he enjoyed it and was surprised to notice how he lingered to savour the feeling and acquaint himself with the station. He said to himself with wondering pleasure, ‘I’ve never been here before!’

Halfway down the platform a black man in a British Rail uniform was tipped against the door of a glassed-in waiting room. Mr Gawber saw that he was talking to a fat black woman who was seated on a bench with a basket between her spread knees, two dimpled aubergines. The man was making her laugh in a way that gagged her and shook the brown pads of her cheeks. It was a race of willing comics: he had never believed in their anger. His neighbours — Mr Wangoosa, the Aromas, the light brown Mr Palmerston, the almost purple Mr Churchill — positively skipped with good humour. The British Rail man yapped his lips, the woman’s laughter kicked in her throat and she raised her feet and stamped them. The glass door was cracked, the walls were daubed with large red names: ARSENAL RULE, CHELSEA FOREVER, SPURS WANK. But the black people inhabiting it with their chatter lent it an air of ramshackle charm. In another mood Mr Gawber would have seen it all as an example of decay pushing towards ruin. This summer evening it amused him and he felt able to share in their laughter.

‘They all crazy like that up in Catford,’ said the black man. Then he straightened his cap and reached for Mr Gawber’s ticket. ‘Thank you.’

Mr Gawber showed his season pass in the plastic wallet. He said, ‘Caught napping!’

‘Excess charge,’ said the black man. He plucked again at the fingerprints on his visor.

‘Kah,’ said the woman. She looked away and blew, recovering.

‘I’ve never been here before.’

The black man took out a pad, inserted a carbon, and with a complicated care that interested Mr Gawber, wrote figures on the thin top sheet. This paperwork seemed a suitable acknowledgement for the degree to which Mr Gawber felt off-course, and he said again, ‘I’ve never been here before.’

‘Five pence additional,’ said the man. ‘Pay the cashier.’

‘Kah,’ said the woman.

‘And that not all,’ said the man. ‘You know the George up Rushey Green?’

Mr Gawber smiled: he knew the George. He wanted to enter the conversation, to give a conclusion to this oddly-spent day, and hear the couple cluck: You mean you never been here before? He waited for the black man to see him waiting.

After a moment the black man turned to him and said, ‘But if you come here again, mister, get the right ticket.’

Mr Gawber said, ‘I’m looking for a call-box.’

‘Don’t have to take no train for that,’ said the man. He chopped the air with his hands. ‘Down the footpath. Pass the shed. On you left. The Motive. Can’t miss it.’

Mr Gawber paid his fare and found the path. The late-afternoon brightness cooked a smell of hot pollen from the cat mint, the cow parsley and the tall weighted weeds swayed in a thickness of foraging bees. The path narrowed, and soon Mr Gawber was alone in the greenery, his suit flecked with seeds. He could smell the oily dirt and brake dust from the train tracks, but he could not see above the tops of the stalks and grasses. He almost laughed; he was delighted by this sense of being lost so near his home. Norah, I’m somewhere in Lower Sydenham! The sun heated the insects and made them crackle under the dusty over-sized weeds which, left to grow here undisturbed, were exaggerations of the small pulpy ones in his garden. He saw tall saw-toothed things, spiky blossoms, dragon-tailed leaves, white-haired stalks, thistles and wild garlic: assertive castaways. And he was gladdened by them. It was the perfect end to a day which had from the first seemed unusual: freedom!

He had been jostled out of his routine and he wanted to know every detail of its difference. He poked at this place with his umbrella’s point. His life had been without surprises; he did not want surprises. But this was manageable and it cheered him. Past the shed and a terrace of eight houses with useless numbers and corrugated iron sheets nailed to their windows he saw the public house and its sign, The Locomotive. He entered, and breathing wood planks and sawdust and beer he went to the bar to celebrate his arrival instead of flying to the telephone to tell Norah he’d be late.

3

All the way to the bus stop on the hill the pursuer was hidden from the man he chased by mothers smiling at the sun and turning their bodies gently as they walked. Pursuit was an easy secret in this crowd of casual shoppers, the women bringing a waist-high tide of children forward. Hood rolled steadily behind them as they paused and gathered like hookers — offering smiles, soliciting nods, not going anywhere — and he kept his eye on the plum-coloured shoulder thirty feet ahead. He boarded the bus with him and followed him up the stairs to the top deck; the man dropped into a front seat, Hood fell into the seat at his back. The conductor appeared, bowing as the bus lurched, clutching the knobs of his ticket machine: ‘Thank you.’ The man asked for a five pence ticket; Hood did the same. The bus swayed through the traffic, its roof occasionally striking branches — the leaves wiping streaks on the side windows. Hood stared forward at the man’s head and found a dent in it, and just above the expensive collar saw the futile contour of cowardice in the furrow of the man’s neck.

Hood shredded his bus ticket, impatience jerking his fingers. He had never been on that bus or gone in that direction, south in South London; so it seemed to him, on the move again, as if he was continuing the journey he had so abruptly started in Vietnam months before. This was part of that same world. He forgot Mayo and her painting, Murf and his ear-ring, tattooed Brodie. He longed to act; to abandon this chase would be an evasion of his strength. He craved the kind of blame that would release him honourably from the charge of inaction, a guilt-like grace. There was only one way: to frighten the bully and prove to himself not his own strength but that weeping boy’s. An accident had brought him here; but there were no accidents — instinct was offered expression by a hollowing of chance, and impulse seized it. You didn’t choose, you were chosen, claimed by an impulse that knew more than wisdom did of pain. That was justification enough: there was no law before passion’s anger. A year ago a man had said, These people are not worth it, and Hood had gone quite close to him and punched his face. Within an hour Hood had been suspended by the ambassador and ordered to Washington: he had punched a government minister. The act had freed him, and what looked in Hood to have been savagery, a casual reckoning of penalties, was extreme disobedience. He had launched himself blindly and doing so was granted the gift of sight. He had always, even as a consul, acted with simple energy and then, examining his work, seen how the pattern had been fixed for him. So it had been since he had arrived in London: Mayo’s plan at Ward’s Irish House, the room in Deptford, the snoring children; those sweepers, that drunk, this bus: he belonged here since he could not deny that boy his strength.

The bus continued to wheeze, leaning the upper deck at lamps and pub signs and parlour curtains as it rounded bends, and flinging a bridge’s shadow down the aisle. All this was new — the long rows of terraces breaking into segments of eight and four, then further down Brockley Rise clusters of two, pebbledash semis with brick and timber cowls, name-boards on the gate and roses set in rectangles of lawn. Down there on the pavement a running child, and twenty yards later a solitary sprinter, the one he chased. Hood glanced to the right as the bus stopped, and saw at the end of a rising road a wooded hill and a biscuit-brown church lying in a declivity of the slope, nearly hidden by the trees. The hill rose above the housetops; Hood studied the foliage which, at this distance, had the density of a box hedge. It was unexpected in the closely mapped city to see a place that looked nameless, but he knew from his own neighbourhood, near the tail of the Deptford Creek, how an ordinary street would close in and stop and show a fence; and beyond that was another district, all corners overgrown and broken glass and discarded motor gaskets and bushes spilling into the blocked street. The area, no more than a white trapezoid on a map, a blankness that might have been labelled Unexplored or Here Live Savages, was sealed from view in the huge exposed city, as neatly hidden as if it was an island that lay under the sea, the ultimate hiding place. He marked the hill on his memory.

The terraces had begun again, tinier now, their front doors directly on the street. They slid back and gave onto a row of shops — fruiterer, chemist, newsagent, butcher, off-licence, pub — then resumed, to be interrupted further on by a similar parade of shops. They were far now from Deptford, and Hood wanted the man to get off the bus. He thought: If you know what’s good for you, go. The time passed and Hood felt the consequences worsen, for with each mile the urgency he was rehearsing moved by degrees he could compute, from simple assault, to grievous bodily harm, to maiming. The man was leading him to that, delaying an incidental fight by an interval of waiting which made Hood only more angry.

A gas works lying behind a brick building, enclosed by a steel fence; a warehouse; a breaker’s yard; a bath-house of brown tiles standing like a cottage at a junction; and the man in the plum-coloured suit rose and started down the aisle, balancing himself by gripping the seats. He stared directly at Hood but did not see him. When the man was on the stairs, in a corner of the mirror’s bulge, Hood jumped up.

The man walked unsteadily down Bell Green, as if the sidewalk was in motion under him. He turned into Southend Lane and stopped at a house front. Hood memorized the number before he noticed that the man was only tying his shoe. It struck him as comic, the man attending to this detail, thinking it mattered. That morning in Hué Hood had set out his suit for a ministerial reception, and the same evening he was in Singapore; the minister — tearing off a bandage to show the wound — was shouting to the press. The suit remained on its hanger, the dress shoes beside the bed; and Hood was running. A year ago, another life.

On a corner, beneath a railway bridge, Hood saw the sign, The Locomotive, and saw the tall man pause and push at the door to the Saloon Bar. Hood followed him in and stood beside him. On Hood’s right a man in a bowler hat and wearing a heavy suit leaned over and smiled. Hood nodded, but said nothing.

Mr Gawber said, ‘I’ve never been here before.’

‘Neither have I,’ said Hood.

‘Ah, two lost souls! But first things first — what will you have? I’d like to push the boat out.’

‘Large whisky for me,’ said the tall man in the plum-coloured suit on Hood’s left. Then he laughed, ‘Sorry, mate, I thought you was talking to me.’

‘Who the hell are you?’ said Hood.

‘I’ll let you know, but it’ll hurt.’

‘Try me.’

‘Step outside,’ said the man, passing his hand over his face and distorting it with that gesture, seeming to pull his mouth into an expression of rage. ‘They’ll have to carry you home.’

Hood said, ‘They won’t be carrying you home, pal.’

‘You trying to slag me?’

‘Just a minute gentlemen,’ said Mr Gawber, touching Hood’s arm.

‘The geezer’s offering drinks and all,’ said the man to Hood. ‘If he don’t want to pay he don’t have to, but he’s waving that fiver like he don’t know what to do with it. Now get off my tits.’

‘I think he’s upset,’ said Hood to Mr Gawber.

Mr Gawber had listened to the exchange with a kind of horror, and he considered leaving. But he lifted the five-pound note again and said, ‘You don’t have change for this, do you?’

‘No,’ said Hood.

‘I’ll mind it for you if you like,’ said the man, grinning. ‘Stick him with his mates and all.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a wad of five-pound notes the thickness of a sandwich and riffled the edges with his thumb, flashing their blueness. Then he tucked them away and laughed, pushing out his jaw and snorting negligently.

Hood sensed tension in his voice when he said, ‘I think I had you wrong.’

‘I seen you looking at me dush. Listen, I don’t have to touch you. I could have you rompered for a fiver and get change.’

‘No harm done,’ said Hood.

‘Very good then,’ said Mr Gawber.

The man held his finger in Hood’s face. ‘You better watch your gob.’

Mr Gawber ordered drinks: a whisky for the man, a half of bitter for Hood, a bottle of light ale for himself. The barmaid told him the price of each as she set the glasses down. ‘Forty-six pence,’ said Mr Gawber, then he apologized for his speedy addition. ‘You must forgive me — I’m an accountant.’ He handed over his money and raised his glass. ‘It’s a lovely summer evening. I’ve never been here before, and I doubt that I’ll ever be this way again. A long life to you both.’

‘This is to the dogs,’ said the man. ‘First race in half an hour.’

Hood said, ‘Don’t lose your shirt.’

‘That’s nothing.’ The man slapped his pocket. ‘I could lose all that and laugh. But I won’t. Them dogs see me and start running. You don’t know me.’

‘I saw you two come in together,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘I thought you were chums.’

‘This is my dancing partner,’ said Hood.

‘Never seen him before in my life.’

‘There you go, boasting again.’

‘Piss off.’ The man dipped his head and put his mouth to his glass.

‘You forgot to say something, sweetheart,’ Hood said, tapping the man on the shoulder.

‘Get your hands off me.’

‘Say thank you.’

‘Thanks, dad,’ said the man. He turned to Hood. ‘You’re pleading for it. Remember, I can pay someone to have your gob fixed. I could get Bill to do it. Or maybe I’ll do it myself.’ He brushed his lapels.

‘Sorry,’ said Hood. ‘I forgot who I was talking to.’

‘You’re entirely welcome,’ said Mr Gawber to the man. ‘To tell the truth, I came here quite by accident. Normally, I do the crossword on the train and that keeps me awake. But today a most unusual thing happened.’

He told the story of the crossed-line, but he improved on it. The callers, whom he imagined in a dark cellar room muttering blind uncertainties, he made precise and dignified; and he made himself comic, a muddled old man, fussing with the phone, who didn’t have the sense to slam down the receiver. Telling the story he saw how the whole day, from the morning amnesia of fog and the intrusions at Rackstraw’s, to the arrival at the wrong station, had made this chance encounter at the pub possible: it was all preparation to bring his story here. He was pleased to have these listeners and he delivered his last line with solemn comedy: ‘ “macaroon,” I said, “macaroon.” ’

‘I got a crossed-line meself once. I’m always doing things like that. Some bird nattering to her old man. “Never want to see you no more,” she says. “Selfish bitch,” I says. “Hello,” she says, “did you say that, John?” “You leave John out of this,” I says and hangs up the earphone. I’m laughing like a drain.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Gawber, who had winced at the word bitch. ‘One feels as if one has been admitted to a secret. But really the most worrying thing is that afterwards, when you make another phone call you sense that someone is listening. Most of my business is highly confidential, so you can imagine my state of mind.’ It had distressed him at the time to hear Araba say There’s a war on! and he still wondered if anyone else had heard her.

‘Don’t worry about that, dad. The coppers’ll be on to you before long and have you in the nick. Bill hears everything. Just a matter of time.’

‘Oh, I know what they say about accountants. But don’t you believe any of it. We’re much maligned.’

‘Full of angles,’ said the man. ‘You get a good screw.’

‘Less than you might think,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘Though it’s interesting work. We’ve always had theatre people on our books. Sid Hope, Derek James, Max Morris, Araba Nightwing.’ He saw he was making no impression; actors believed in their names, no one else did. He said, ‘Araba’s going to be Peter Pan.’

‘I don’t care how much dush you snatch,’ said the man. ‘I get mine.’

Mr Gawber was picking through the leather slots of his wallet. He found what he wanted, two old business cards, and handed one to Hood and one to the man. ‘Bit tatty, I’m afraid. I don’t get much chance to use them. But there’s my name at the bottom, R. C. Gawber. Do ring me if you’ve got a financial problem you’d like sorted out. Or just to say hello!’

‘I don’t have cards anymore,’ said Hood. ‘But very nice to meet you. Valentine Hood.’

‘Not English, I think.’

‘American.’

‘Ron Weech,’ said the man. He finished his whisky. ‘I don’t have any financial problems, thanks all the same.’

‘Then you’re a very lucky man,’ said Mr Gawber.

‘Weech is loaded,’ said Hood.

‘I get mine. See this watch? Fifty quid anywhere you name. Probably a hundred in the West End. I got it for ten in Deptford. Fell off the back of a lorry. See this shirt, see this suit? Lord John — I could show you the labels. I got more at home, all colours. You wouldn’t believe what I paid for them. Fell off the back of a lorry. These shoes, this here belt, cuff-links, the lot. I’ve got cases of fags at me house.’ He smirked. ‘And that ain’t all. I know all the other fences. I’ll see them tonight at the track. Mates, we are. “Hi Ron” — that kind of thing. I get mine.’

‘You sound like a pretty clever operator,’ said Hood.

‘I get mine — dush, birds. I wouldn’t even tell you. What I want I get. Feller up in Millwall tries to sell me this Cortina. A hundred he wants for it, the geezer’s a mate of mine. Fell off the back of a lorry. I got the hundred — you seen it, right? I could show you the motor. Tape-deck, radio, the lot. All I have to do is paint it and get new plates. But I don’t buy it. Why? I just don’t want it.’

‘I wouldn’t own a car,’ said Mr Gawber.

‘You would if you seen this one. Beautiful she is. All the accessories.’

‘Well, I mean it’s silly to run one. My good lady doesn’t drive, and I work in Kingsway. Where would I park the bally thing?’

‘I know what you mean. What you’re saying, dad, it’s a fucking nuisance, right?’

The obscenity stopped Mr Gawber for a moment, like a spurt of flame in his face. He straightened his head and touched at his nose and mouth; the word had singed the hairs in his nostrils: he could smell it.

‘I get it,’ said Hood to Weech. ‘You do what you like, go your own way.’

‘Straight.’

‘Quite right,’ said Mr Gawber without conviction. ‘Good for you.’

‘I’m me own man,’ said Weech.

‘He’s got guts,’ said Hood.

‘I should say so. Admirable.’ Mr Gawber made a cautioning noise in his throat.

‘I look after meself.’

‘I’ll bet when you go up to the dog track they say, “Look out, here comes Ron Weech.” ’

‘They respect me, why not? They know me there. This ain’t my regular boozer — no one knows me here. I don’t care.’ Weech glanced at an elderly man on his left who had been listening to the conversation and smiling with shy gratitude when Weech grunted his remarks. Weech snarled. ‘What are you grinning at?’ The man swallowed and became sad.

‘Look at that — Weech is a tough cookie,’ said Hood, as the old man carried his pint of beer and his cigarettes to the opposite end of the bar.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Weech. ‘Most people are suckers. I go by these building sites and I see the silly bastards breaking their backs. I just look at them and say, “Suckers.” Sometimes they hear me — I don’t care. It’s incredible. Ever see them? These blokes, all about ninety years old, heartstruck and half caved in, and they’re trying to get some dirty great fridge off the pavement and not moving it an inch. Suckers. Lorry drivers, postmen, shop-girls, that hairy over there pulling pints — twenty quid a week, they think it’s a bloody fortune. They’re all suckers —’

As Weech ranted, Mr Gawber crept back. He was disappointed, and a little fearful — he had expected something else. He saw clumsy violence in the way Weech swung his big hands and spoke, and a disregard on Weech’s face, a sightless rudeness he did not want to call stupidity. He was angry with himself for having stayed and listened, and sorry his day had ended like this. He plucked his watch from the front of his waistcoat and said, ‘Has it really gone half-past? I must be off — my wife will think I’ve left the country.’

‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ said Weech. ‘Have another one on me.’

‘That’s very generous of you, but perhaps some other time,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘It’s been awfully good talking to you. You want to be careful carrying all that money about.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Weech.

‘He can take care of himself,’ said Hood.

Mr Gawber gathered up his briefcase and umbrella and hurried out. He had always hated public houses; they were dirty and uncongenial, the haunts of resignation, attracting men whose loneliness was not improved by their meeting one another. They talked inaccurately about the world, swapping cheerless opinions. England itself was turning into an enormous Darby and Joan Club in which deaf, nearsighted wrecks played skittles, ignoring the thunder and the shadow of the approaching rain. The ranting man had alarmed him more than the voices on the crossed line. Sometimes he could believe such people did not exist; this evening, toiling in his heavy suit past insolent youths of dangerous size, he felt there were no others. A world of them. He was concerned for that well-spoken one, that American. Had breeding.

‘There he goes,’ said Weech, seeing at the window Mr Gawber making his way down Southend Lane, ‘the old brolly-man.’

‘He seems nice enough.’

‘A sucker,’ said Weech. ‘Thinks he’s got dush. I could buy and sell him.’

‘How about another drink?’

‘Put your pennies away.’ Weech pulled out his sandwich of notes again, worked one loose with his thumb and slapped it on the bar. ‘Two large whiskies.’

‘You’re going to miss the first race,’ said Hood.

‘Don’t rush me. I’ll get a taxi.’ He looked at Hood closely. ‘What’s a Yank doing here, anyway? Tourist?’

Hood said, ‘I’m hiding.’

Weech made a face, as if he didn’t know the word. He said, ‘Working?’

‘Nope. I got fired.’

‘You look like a sucker.’

‘Listen, Weech,’ said Hood, lowering his voice. ‘I’ll tell you. I was an American Consul in Vietnam — a little town, you’ve never heard of it. I was there for about eight months. Then one day the Minister of Defence showed up for a reception. But before that — in the morning — he gave me some shit. So I let him have it. I don’t know what got into me — I just poked him in the snoot. The first time in the history of the foreign service any officer of my grade did that.’ Hood looked for a reaction. Weech stared. It meant nothing to him. ‘They suspended me, but that was pretty feeble, because I knew a quick way out of the country. I made myself a new passport — that’s what consuls do, you know — and I split. They’re still looking for me, but they’re looking in the wrong place.’

‘You hit the bloke, eh? Coloured bloke?’

‘Vietnamese.’

Weech grinned. ‘Me, I’m colour prejudiced as well.’

‘I’m not,’ said Hood. ‘It was something he said. He talked like you.’

‘I could turn you in, probably get a reward. What did you say your name was?’

‘Valentine Hood.’

‘I could go up to Grosvenor Square — it’s there, ain’t it? — and cough it all. No problem. I go up there now and then and play the wheel at the Clermont. You’re really thick — you shouldn’t have told me that. I might do it.’

‘You won’t,’ said Hood.

‘Don’t be so sure. I don’t like geezers who slag me.’

‘Do you read the newspapers?’

‘You think I’m a dummy, don’t you?’

‘I was just wondering if you knew about the painting that was stolen the other day.’

‘Yeah, the old-fashioned one.’ Weech sighed. ‘No fence would touch it. It’s too big. It’s worthless. There’s a reward for it, ain’t there?’

‘Right, right,’ said Hood. ‘But the interesting thing is — I know who’s got it. Yes, Weech, she’s delivering it to me tonight. She might be there now. How about that?’

Weech peered at Hood, then picked up his whisky and drank it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He belched and said, ‘You’re full of crap.’

‘You don’t believe me?’ Hood took the strip of wrinkled canvas from his wallet. It was brown, with a close weave on one side and on the other flakes of dark cracked paint, like old flattened nail parings. He showed it, holding it against the lamp on the bar. He said, ‘That’s part of it. It’s being sent to the papers, an inch at a time.’

‘That’s a piece of rubbish,’ said Weech. ‘What is it, an old sticking plaster or what?’

‘It’s from the edge of the painting.’

‘I don’t see no picture. I think you’re slagging me again. Anyway, why tell me?’

‘I want you to know everything, Weech,’ said Hood. ‘Oh, yes. Remember the Euston bomb? Well, the girl that did it lives at my house — she’s hiding, too. Albacore Crescent, Deptford.’

‘Hey,’ said Weech, showing an interest in the address that he had not shown in anything else Hood had said, ‘I live just behind it!’

‘What else do you want to know?’ Hood searched his mind for more: he wanted to startle the man, to rouse him with a secret. ‘The girl’s name is Brodie. She planted the bomb, but she didn’t make it. That was another kid, Murf. He’s supposed to be tough, like you. But he hasn’t got your money, so he’s more dangerous.’

‘You’re making this up. I think you’re a nutter.’

‘You levelled with me, Weech — about all those stolen goods — so I’m levelling with you.’

‘Stolen goods,’ Weech sneered. ‘I’m into the big stuff, Arab exports — get it? I wouldn’t even tell you. But that picture — they say it’s worth about a million quid.’

‘Not a million,’ said Hood. ‘But you could get ten grand as a reward.’

‘So I just say, look at Valentine’s place on Albacore Crescent.’

‘Number twenty-two.’

‘Yeah, and it’s all mine,’ said Weech. He gave a shallow laugh. ‘But if this was really true you wouldn’t be telling me.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Then I’ll tell the coppers, I’ll tell the American Embassy, I’ll cough it to the News of the World.’

‘No, you won’t.’

‘I fucking will.’

‘You don’t need the money. You’re loaded.’

‘I’ll do it for laughs. I’ll do it because you slagged me. I’ll get me picture in the papers.’

‘I almost forgot,’ said Hood. ‘I’ve got two kilos of opium at my house — that should interest the police. Here, it looks like this.’ Hood took out the cigarette he had made earlier in the evening and put it in Weech’s hand.

‘You’re joking. It’s just an ordinary cigarette. Look, it even says Silk Cut on the paper.’

‘Watch,’ said Hood. Taking it from Weech and holding it in his cupped hand he broke it open, spilling it into his palm. ‘That’s tobacco,’ he said, prodding the brown strands, ‘but see that powder, those yellow grains? Opium — all the way from the Golden Triangle.’

Weech’s face creased with interest. He said, ‘You’re as bad as me.’

‘No.’

‘Maybe worse,’ said Weech. ‘But I could tell you stories. I deal on the continent. Arab hardware. Get it?’ He grinned. ‘Bang-bang. You in the picture?’

Hood said, ‘You’re a fucking punk.’

‘You’re pleading for it,’ said Weech in a whisper, pushing at the bar with his large hands.

‘You’re a gutless son of a bitch.’

‘I’ll nail you, straight I will.’

‘You couldn’t nail a daisy.’

Weech was trembling, working his fingers, nodding his head and gasping as if he had been deprived of air. He hissed, ‘You bastard.’

Hood straightened up and smiled. ‘Well, I really must be going now. Nice talking to you, Weech. Keep your thumb on it.’

And he was out of the door, stepping into the half-dark of the summer evening. The iron railway bridge and the derelict houses and the high weeds bled into a dim motionless shadow that, in this faltering sunset, was like a memory of light, incomplete and simplifying and without warmth. There was a moon, and traces of stars, but the day remained, proceeding slowly to the edge of night with the season’s lengthened hesitation. Hood started towards the street, then turned back to the path that led through the tall cow parsley to the station. At the opening of this dishevelled glade, where some of the pub’s customers had parked their cars, he waited until the door banged and he saw Weech appear, swinging his arms.

‘Over here,’ Hood called, keeping his voice low.

Weech blundered towards him, chewing on rage and paddling with his fists. Angry, he seemed too large for his plum-coloured suit. When he was about ten feet away, Hood took a paper bag from his pocket and threw it to the path. It startled Weech: he jerked his face sideways, twisting his shoulders, as if he thought it might explode.

‘Pick it up,’ said Hood softly.

‘I’m going to nail you.’

He came at Hood, lunging with his arms out, landing a glancing punch on his upper arm. But Hood batted him away, and Weech falling back kicked at him; he was tall and nearly toppled himself with the kick.

‘Pick it up!’

Hood, breathless, had sobbed the command. He took Weech by the shoulders, and pulled him forward and down as he raised his knee quickly, cracking it into Weech’s face. Weech started to fall, but Hood kept him up, punching him erect with the force of his fists, catching the underside of Weech’s jaw and lifting his head. Then he let Weech drop. He fell backwards, against a car and slipped down, leaning into each contour as flexibly as a descending snake. Weech’s trouser cuffs were hitched to his knees and his sleeves to his elbows; his head was knocked over to one side, his ear against his shoulder. Hood knew he had broken the man’s neck, for when he pulled him away from the car Weech’s head flopped backwards from the ledge of his shoulder and hung there staring blindly behind him, tugging his abnormally long throat. The failing light gave the horrible translucence of a membrane to his white throat.

Kicking at it with his heel, Hood opened the small side window of the car and unlocked the door. It was a Volkswagen, and though he had no trouble jumping the wires and starting it he could not get Weech into the back seat. He pushed on the man’s legs, but the small space would not contain him. So Weech rode in front, propped by the seat and nodding each time Hood touched the brake. He drove fast up Bell Green and then along the bus route towards Brockley Rise.

They were such simple skills, like steadying a rifle to hit a target: following the bully and setting him up, faking a left to land a right, hot-wiring a car, and finding a place to dispose of the body — that wooded mound he saw was called One Tree Hill. It was all easy, and if there was blame it was in taking advantage of the simplicity of it. He had not known it would end like this, on a dimly lit path above Peckham. He had thought he would feel triumphant, but he was only angry and his fingers stank of error. It was furiously petty; the man was worth nothing; no one knew. But he was not sorry. The memory of a thing not done was worse than any deed. He had never wanted to go back, and now he had proved he couldn’t.

He dragged the body into the park and off the path and sank it in grass. Laughter carried down the slope from a thicket of bushes and low hiding trees: lovers. Beneath him London lay on a plain, the humps and spires showing in dim aqueous light, yellow distances like a burnt-out sea drenched and smouldering under a black sky.

4

Volta Road, Catford, was in his eyes a corridor of cracked Edwardian aunts in old lace, shoulder to shoulder, shawled with tiles and beaked with sloping roofs; the upper gables like odd bonnets with peaks jutting over the oblongs of window lenses and the dim eyes blinded by criss-crossings of mullioned veils. With the long breasts of their bay-fronts forward and their knees against bruised, clawed steps, they knelt in perpetual genuflection, their flat grey faces set at one another across the road, as if — gathering dust — they were dying in their prayers. They were tall enough to keep Volta Road in shadow for most of the day. In among those four-storey houses one’s primness stood out in the senility, paler than all the rest, with a low hedge and clematis beside the door and a garden gnome fishing in a dry bird-bath, Number Twelve, Gawber’s.

He walked towards it tonight in a mood of distress, hurrying home to be calmed. Once, this road had the preserved well-tended look of the nearby roads of lesser houses, small-shouldered bungalows with freshly painted trim, owned by families for their cosy size and kept in repair. But the houses on Volta — with servants’ bells in every room and names like The Sycamores — had fallen into the hands of speculators and building firms and enterprising landlords — who partitioned them with thin walls, sealing off serving-hatches and doors, building kitchens in back bedrooms, installing toilets in broom cupboards, bolting a sink or a cooker on a landing so that the stacked dishes were in full view of the street. Many of the houses were hives or insects’ nests, every bed-sitting room a tiny home in which people were battened down like weevils, murmuring to other families through the chipboard walls. The density was obvious from the panels of buzzer bells on the front doors or the clusters of unwashed milk bottles on the top steps.

Mr Gawber had been born in Number Twelve and he had grown up in it, moving into the front bedroom with Norah when, ten years after his father, his mother died. He had attended the boys’ school, St Dunstan’s, at the top of the road and the Anglican church at the bottom. Now the church was Baptist and mostly black; it had gone simple: he stayed away. He had seen the street’s residents grow old and die or retire to the country, and after the war the houses had moved into a phase of decline that was, even now, unchecked. The occupants were numerous, they were every human colour, and the street was made nearly impassable by their parked cars. The street had been lined with elms; the trees had risen, almost to the height of the house-tops, and the boughs had met over the street. Then they were cut down. The killing had taken a week, and hearing the drone of the saws Mr Gawber felt they were cutting his arms off. The stick-like saplings planted in their place had gone quickly, after one season of promising leaves — that autumn children had snapped their tender branches and used them for swords and spears. The window-boxes were empty, the hedges torn out, the gardens paved for cars and motor-bikes. In three front gardens old wheel-less cars rotted with their doors ajar. It was not a bad road — there were many worse — but it would never improve. Eventually it would be bought wholesale by the council and boarded up and rained on, then pulled down and tall blocks of flats built on it. That was the pattern. Out here there was nothing worth preserving, not even sentiment, for that had passed away with the older residents who had gone when the trees had.

The native families were dispersed, and Mr Gawber thought: I am a relic from that other age. Latterly, he had studied the new families. They were limpers and Negroes and Irishmen who wore bicycle clips; dog-faced boys in mangy fur coats and surly mothers with red babies and children with broken teeth and very old men who inched down the sidewalk tapping canes. All of them escapees who had arrived and would never go. There was a tall Chinese and his wife in Number Eight and an Indian with a blue Landrover next door — he washed the huge thing on Sunday mornings with his radio going. Mr Gawber had fit them into houses, matching their colours with names on the bell panels. He did not know them well; they did not seem to know each other, and oddest of all, none of the darker people wore socks. Tropical folk with tropical names: Wangoosa, Aroma, Palmerston, Churchill, Pang. Estate agents and men with unreliable eyes and dandruff on their shoulders had tried, first with leaflets pushed through the letter-slot and finally by bumptious visits, to gain possession of Mr Gawber’s house. They sat on Mr Gawber’s sofa with their knees apart and spoke ominously of encroaching blacks, using their own unlucky hostages as an oblique threat; they told Mr Gawber there was a nice class of owner-occupier and more fresh air in Orpington and often they alluded to the length of Volta Road that had already fallen to them, as if to show that it was only a matter of time before they would have it entirely. But Mr Gawber held on. Orpington? He was a Londoner. And he would not surrender his father’s house.

In winter it was tolerable; it had a bleakness Mr Gawber liked. The cold rain composed it, blew the newspapers into corners, restored the black shine to the street and kept the limpers indoors. Rain tidied it and gave London back some of her glamour, even some of her youth: the city was designed for grim weather, not crowds. It was best in drizzle or gleaming darkly under a thin layer of ice. Then Mr Gawber felt an affection for it and saw the pelted dripping lamps on the platform at New Cross as magical jelly moulds mounted on Arabian posts, or he lingered on Catford Hill to watch the heaving rain-reddened buses.

But winter was distant tonight. Mr Gawber walked down the sidewalk feeling spied-upon. In the warm weather that started the poisons in bricks and woke the smell of decay the life in those houses spilled into Volta Road — babies were wheeled out for approval; youths met and tinkered with motor-bikes and taunted girls; arguments turned into fights, shameless courtships into loud weddings. There, on the steps of Palmerston’s he had seen one on a Saturday afternoon, a wedding party enlivened by music from steel dustbins, the guests’ lavender buttocks on windowsills, all the people using the occasion to raise their voices. They hollered and laughed and late at night the party broke up, leaving pools of vomit all the way to the corner. This evening they were out, Wangoosa mending his bicycle, Churchill dandling his baby, the Indian tuning his Landrover, each one claiming his portion of the road. He wished these families away.

Mr Gawber destroyed it with his eyes. He policed the ruins and found the idlers guilty of causing a nuisance and a breach of the peace, of unlawful assembly, uttering menaces, outraging the public modesty and tax evasion. He blew a shrill whistle and had them carried off, then levelled the road, reducing the houses to a field of broken bricks and lumber; and he let the grass reassert itself and cover the rubble with its green hair. It would serve them right. The summer’s disorder, those hot lazy mobs, made him wish for a cleansing holocaust — some visible crisis, black frost combined with an economic crash. It was certainly coming: a slump, a smothering heaviness, a power cut and a blinding storm stopping lifts between floors and silting up the Thames, and but for the tolling of funeral bells there would be silence. Hardship was a great sorter. He rather enjoyed the thought of deprivation, candlelight, shortages, paying with official vouchers and coupons, and cold baths with home-made soap. He included himself in the challenge. It would be a fair test for everyone, like the war, that last dose of salts. Let it all come down! The foolish would go to the wall, but those who endured, and jolly good luck to them, would be the better for it. It would not be easy for him at his age — even harder for poor Norah — but he’d survive the collapse. It was a matter of patience, belt-tightening and book-keeping. In that sense he knew he was the older sort of Englishman: he valued decency above all things, and hardship, testing instinct, only made decency a greater prize.

Once, he had been calm, but this summer — was it those Irish bombs? — the city and its faces overwhelmed him with thoughts of ruin. He was not angry but apprehensive. His imagination exaggerated his simple feeling, and he never wished for the worst without an accompanying sense of shame and a frown of guilt he knew passers-by could read on his face.

The pain was not only his. Often he came home to Norah and knew from her eyes she had been blubbing.

He fitted his latchkey and peered at the red and green stained-glass window on the door for the shadow of Norah. Then he entered and met the familiar smell of dry carpets and dead relations. Home was that odour of furnishings and family, and an obscurer unfragrant one in the air of your own skin.

‘Rafie?’

His mother had called him that. The name had stuck, though Norah only used it when she feared something was wrong, to get near to his worry.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ He kissed her forehead. ‘You weren’t worried, Noddy?’

‘You’ve had a phone-call,’ said Norah, insisting on her alarm. ‘That Araba Nightwing. I didn’t know what to tell her. Rafie, I had no idea where you were!’

‘Shambles. Fell asleep on the train, pitched up in Lower Sydenham. Groping around the back end of the borough.’ He laughed, using his age to excuse his mistake: I’m getting feeble, don’t mind me. Nothing about the crossed-line; nothing about the men sparring dangerously in the public house; nothing about his destructive mood. ‘What did Miss Nightwing want?’

‘She was upset. I couldn’t understand a word she said. Poor girl.’

‘Not poor, Noddy. Her income last year ran to five figures. She’s going to be Peter Pan.’

‘She sounded distraught.’

‘She’s an excellent actress.’

‘She’ll make a lovely Peter Pan.’

‘I’m sure.’ He mistrusted actors off-stage: the most convincing were the most suspect. He could not deny their skill, but there was something about their swift ability to persuade that was itself unpersuasive. They did not have a voice of their own and when they attempted one it sounded vulgar and insincere. Their vanity was titanic, their capacity for bluff bottomless. Norah’s respect for them amounted almost to veneration; he was suspicious in the same degree. He had had them as clients his whole life and still did not know them, which was why.

Norah said, ‘I’ll get your tea.’

The rest was ritual. He sheathed his umbrella in the tall blue jar, fastened his coat on a hook, laid his briefcase and bowler hat on the table by the stairs and washed his hands. That was London done with. Then he sat in his unlaced shoes and for minutes there was only the tick of the wooden clock in the hall and the sound of the tea going down his throat, and Norah’s finishing first and saying, ‘I needed that.’

The room was dominated by a painting, blue stripes, an orange sun, a conflagration of red in one corner. He had accepted it in lieu of a small fee, but now the artist was famous and the painting was very valuable. Visitors remarked on it — because of its size and its fiery colour — and Mr Gawber told its story. He was glad to have the story; he had never found the painting much good. And next to the bookshelf, photographs of actors he’d represented, one now in the House of Lords, another the wife of a shipping tycoon, a suicide, a murder victim, several outright failures, a singer who made her name during the war and who in peacetime sank into obscurity: all smiling into their signatures. A fan of theatre programmes twenty years old lay on a small table as casually as if they had been used the previous night — Norah’s doing, and it was she who had framed the programme of the Royal Command Performance.

Norah said, ‘The butcher saved me some nice chops.’

They ate together in the back dining room, facing each other across a table whose grain he had memorized as a child on winter nights between algebra problems: there were yellow lyres and unstrung harps in the beautiful wood. But tonight he stared, seeing faces in the table, and he replayed the day’s conversations, all those extraordinary voices: Who’s there? Don’t be so bloody silly. There’s a war on! If he didn’t understand, was he dead?

Norah said, ‘You’ve gone all quiet, Rafie. Is there anything wrong?’

Everything. The overheated world has split its shell like a cooking egg. Deranged, deranged. The news was written in blood, and smudges of blistered paint said Arsenal Rule! Let it all come down; now he only bought the paper for its puzzle. Norah leaned to enquire, but he said nothing.

Norah said, ‘We’ll have a good holiday. You’ll see.’

He hated the word. He didn’t want a holiday’s brief deception of well-being. He had no intention of repeating last year’s disappointment, when he had sat in a shirt and tie, but with his trousers rolled to his knees, behind a canvas windbreak on a crowded Cornish beach. He had seen gluttonous Yorkshiremen turn into lobsters and tug at children with their claws. Sand blew between the pages of his book, which the sun prevented him from reading. The high-spirited parents, to amuse their children, disfigured the beach with deep trenches too far from the tide-mark to be altered by the sea, and so the scars on the sand remained as an appropriate parody of invasion on this littered beach-head. Holidays required skills Mr Gawber did not possess: pounding posts into the sand; humping and unflexing beach-chairs; acting as a waiter — with a clumsy tea-tray — for Norah. He endured it, praying for it to end, wishing the skies to darken and those families to be rained on. It was the sun — the sun maddened the English and turned them into farting Spaniards. The holiday, that rest at Polzeath, had exhausted him, and though Norah still spoke of it with pleasure it had taken two weeks at Rackstraw’s for him to regain his former grip on things.

Norah said, ‘If we’d had children we’d have our own grandchildren by now. They love the beach.’

A sadness. It was a son they’d had. He had lived for twelve hours and they hadn’t had the heart to name him. Baby Gawber, the death certificate read. Mr Gawber saw him once, and that was thirty years ago, but not a day went by that did not throw up that memory of the infant. He seemed to grow into manhood in his mind, and Mr Gawber always recalled with solemn clarity the chipped paint in the room where he had been told the news. For the second time that day, he remembered his boy.

Norah said, ‘You’ll want to listen to the wireless.’

It was late. The Proms concert was half over. He wouldn’t listen. The second half was always modern, thin and incomprehensible, unexpected pluckings and bongs and vagrantly sorrowing note shifts. It was soulless stuff. He preferred the coughing between movements to the music itself.

Norah said, ‘You’ve left half your meal. I did those runner beans especially for you.’

They tasted of dust. There was dust in the air, and outside in the street he could hear — even from this back room — the shouts of his neighbours, frighteningly loud, the honk of common speech. It could have been a riot, the voices looters’, the slapping feet fleeing felons’. But no, it was always that in summer, the ordinary tyranny of noise.

Norah said, ‘They’re at it again.’

Mr Gawber finished his meal. He ate the beans for Norah’s sake and knew as he did so they would rouse him in the night and make froth in his stomach. He went into the parlour and listened to Norah busy at the kitchen sink. At nine o’clock he heard the television, the yak of typewriters that preceded the news, and the factual voice of the newsreader, Robert Dougall: Ireland, bombs, the Prime Minister warned today, record crowds. Phrases reached him; he did not want to hear more. The newsreader said good night, and he heard Norah’s ‘Good night, Robert!’ She usually replied to salutations on the damned thing.

At nine-thirty — the bell shook him badly — the telephone rang. It was Araba Nightwing, breathless, drawling with apology in her deep attractive voice.

‘I’m at the theatre, Mr Gawber,’ she said. ‘It’s the interval, so this will have to be short, I’m afraid. I’m so glad I finally reached you. I’ve been thinking about you the whole day — well, ever since you rang —’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s quite all right.’ In the background he heard the thump of seats, the babble of the audience, shouts.

‘No, it’s not —’

He winced and held the receiver away from his ear.

‘— it’s unforgivable. I don’t know what got into me. It’s just this frightful business — all these rehearsals — and I’ve got so much on my mind these days. I’ve just been to the Continent — Rotterdam, nothing special. But I was rude to you.’

‘No harm done.’

‘I’m an absolute bloody bitch.’

He winced again: who was listening? ‘Miss Nightwing —’

‘You’re too kind to say it, but it’s true. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world. How can you be so kind to a bitch like me?’

‘I find it very easy.’

‘Because you’re so good! I don’t deserve it. But this play is such rubbish I can’t help myself. People say it’s destroying me. I can’t help that, and I was a bitch before it opened, as you know. Last year it was the same thing, that business with the fascist bank.’

‘Swiss bank, but that’s best forgotten.’

‘I tried to ring you before the show. Your wife said you weren’t there.’

‘No — I —’ Was she asking for an explanation? ‘I was held up. Rather a long story.’

‘It’s the story of my life. Mr Gawber, I want you to know that I’m very sorry. I don’t want you to get involved in this in any way.’

Involved in what? He said, ‘It’s just the small matter of your tax return. You’ve had a good year. An excellent year. Unfortunately.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘We’ll have a chat. It’ll sort itself out. You’ll see.’

‘But I don’t have the slightest intention — there goes the first bell. I must fly. My face —’

‘Don’t make yourself late, my dear.’

‘The reason I rang is that I have some tickets for you and your wife. They’re good seats, but the play’s pretty dreadful, utter crap really, a McGravy sit-com, Tea for Three. Naturally it’s a smash-hit, it’s always full — Americans and the coach-crowd. But it’s a night out and you could come backstage and meet Blanche and Dick. They’re awfully sweet.’

‘Are you sure it’s no trouble?’

‘I think that was another bell. No, no trouble at all. The tickets are for next month, the nineteenth — I hope that’s all right. I’d love to meet your wife. I just wish this play was better.’

‘We’ll be delighted —’

‘Tickets at the box office. Don’t pay attention to what I say. I don’t care if they expel me — I hate myself. You’re the kindest man I’ve ever met. Another bell! Bye!’

Norah watched him put the receiver into its cradle. He sighed and reported what the actress had said.

‘But that’s splendid,’ Norah said. ‘Tea for Three’s had wonderful notices.’

Glamour: he was glad. The day had been saved for her. He so seldom knew how to please her. She would have her hair done and meet him in town. An early dinner at Wheeler’s: Norah would have the prawn cocktail and he would have whitebait, and somehow Norah would find an occasion to say, ‘The lemon sole looks good.’ At the play she would eat half a pound of chocolates. She would remark on the scenery — she loved plays for that. Stage-sets dazzled her, and though she could never recall the title of a play, much less a line, she could describe in tedious detail the sets she’d seen before the war at the Lewisham Hippodrome in Catford, now torn down. There was nothing she liked more than to see the curtains go up and reveal on the stage a great frigate’s butt, fully rigged, with sails. Shakespeare was not always a good bet, but she remembered the fantastic trapezes in one play and the cushions when Araba had played Cleopatra; and still she mentioned the pyramids and the golden disc of sun in that play about the Incas. Tea for Three did not sound promising — perhaps a parlour — but Mr Gawber was hopeful. In any case, Norah would come away praising the bookshelves, the crockery, the wallpaper.

He would hate the play for its fakery, unless a door stuck, or some sudden accident intervened to give the play a brief jolt of reality. He always enjoyed seeing heavy men in blue boiler suits striding on stage between scenes to rearrange the furniture; those thumps and grunts; or simply an unexplained crash behind a closed curtain. Otherwise he would find it a mediocre puppet show — why didn’t they use puppets? — and he would sleep without changing position, the way he did on the train. Play dialogue and the presence of actors and even the heat and light of a theatre — the great mob ignoring itself — embarrassed him. It was like filing into church, but the wrong one.

That night in bed, he still heard voices in the road and the feet of people passing below. He wanted the limpers on their beam-ends. He had started the day happy, in that fog, and then the day had heated and turned strange for him, disturbing him to his very bones. He had tried to give it order, but failed: there were too many contending voices. So it closed in a babble, the people darting at his eyes — no wonder they called them gorillas. That was the whole of his life, a kind of concealment, guarding against alarm. And it was odd because it was all caution, so secretive, just the two of them hiding in their enormous shadowy house: it was the way he imagined conspirators to live.

5

‘The kids were asleep,’ Mayo hissed. ‘I had to climb the back fence and break the door to get in.’

Hood laughed, but darkly: she had given him a fright. He had entered by the back and seen the great crack in the door and the smashed tongue of the lock. Then in the kitchen he had seen a small man in an old pin-striped jacket, a tweed cap and gloves. He was on the point of kicking him in the ankles when the man turned: Mayo in her burglar’s get-up, and she said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

Now she said, ‘Murf can fix it. I’ll buy a new door.’

They were still in the kitchen: her gloves and jacket were on the chair. She slipped her cap off and shook out her hair. Hood pulled the broken door shut and said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be good at that sort of thing.’

‘I got in, didn’t I?’

‘Don’t take house-breaking literally, sweetheart. You nearly tore it off its hinges! What a burglar. It’s lucky you don’t depend on it for your living. You’d starve.’

‘Don’t race your motor.’ He stared almost bewildered at the painting that had lain stiffly rolled on the kitchen table when he came in. It was Flemish, and though it had been pictured in most of the newspapers in the past week, the real thing had none of the clarity of the little black and white reproductions. It was smaller than he had expected; it had a coarseness of texture; it yielded to no pattern. The reflection of the over-bright kitchen light crazed its roughened surface with glare, giving it the opacity and flaky shine of a piece of old leather. It was creased and scratched; it wouldn’t lie flat. Hood looked for a long time at the dark varnish before he recognized under the layers of that leathery yellow the face, the hat, the arms, the long boots. It was not large, and yet he had to study it in parts, losing the order of its composition as his eye moved in ellipses from section to section. At first he saw only rough shapes, like separated jigsaw pieces, and it was not until he set it at an angle to the light — spread it on the floor and stood on a chair above it — that he grasped the whole of it: the figure in the chalk-white collar and sombre hat posed peevishly by the window; the summer landscape outside that was dead still, and the carved posts of the interior furniture. It was dark, nearly all shadow, almost crudely done in melting solids, and it had the rank smell of a dusty attic. Artists painted not moods but conditions in their self-portraits, and this one by Rogier van der Weyden showed the sullen impatience of an unwilling exile.

‘So this is what all the fuss is about,’ said Hood hopping from the chair. ‘It’s not as good as The Just Judges.’

Mayo said, ‘It’s a good painting, Val.’

‘Quit leering at it.’ He looked at it again, but now it had become again a dense curtain of cracks. He saw a curious unlit antique, smeared with yellow glaze. He said, ‘It’s as ugly as money.’

‘It got them screaming.’

‘Screaming for money — the ones who have it. Collectors and art-dealers. The rest don’t give a damn, and they’re the ones who matter. I think we should burn this turkey right now.’

‘You wouldn’t dare.’ Mayo was controlling her voice but could not conceal the tremble of anger in it.

Hood knelt and clicked his lighter. It spurted: a jet of flame shot to one corner, sparking at the fibres on the edge.

‘Stop that.’ Mayo stepped on his hand. She was still wearing her men’s shoes. She pressed the thick sole down, tangling the lighter in his fingers, then freeing it. But there was no mark on the painting, just the greasy smell of singed cloth in a thread of smoke. ‘You’re a barbarian.’

‘That’s what they say about you.’

‘Let them.’

‘But they’re wrong, because if you were you wouldn’t think it was such a big deal to score an old master. You wouldn’t have set that stately home on fire. Anyway, why didn’t you leave a bomb behind?’

‘I think I know how to deal with them.’

‘I think I know why,’ he said. ‘You’re a barbarian with taste.’

‘Stop getting at me,’ said Mayo. Angry, she lost her slight Irish accent; her voice rose to a higher register of annoyance, gained precision and assumed a smart pitch of indignation that was haughty. ‘Besides, you’re missing the point.’

‘Lay it on me.’

‘It’s a symbol, you idiot.’

‘Now there’s a word that’s really hot shit. Where’d you pick that up?’

‘Stop playing dumb. You know what I mean.’

‘Sure I do. But symbols are a bad substitute for reality — they’re always the wrong size. Go the whole way or don’t go at all. Set the bastards on fire, don’t pick their pockets.’ Hood spat into the sink. ‘Jesus, I’d like to meet the guy that sent Brodie to Euston. A railway station? You must be joking. Who was it?’

‘You’ll find out,’ she said, growing calm at his sudden anger. ‘All in good time.’

‘I’d like to have a word with him. I’m not getting anywhere with Brodie. She sits around staring at her cartoon posters and watching television. She worries about her complexion. And what did she do? Blew a hole in a locker. Now they’ve roped off the lockers and closed the Left Luggage window. You give them a symbol and they give one back to you.’

‘All you can do is mock,’ she said. ‘Well, go ahead — no one’s hunting you.’

‘Not yet, but listen, honey, I think you underestimate yourself. You’ve got your painting and you’re tickled to death. So we’ll hang it up. Very expensive, right? The art world is horrified. But I’ve got news for you — we’re not declaring war on the art dealers and you won’t get anywhere with symbols.’

‘That’s what you say.’

‘It won’t work. You don’t want to win, you just want a few famous enemies.’

‘And what do you want?’

‘I want scalps,’ he said. ‘I’ll get them. You can’t lose if you make all the rules.’

Mayo swore and stooped to roll up the painting. Hood looked at her back and for a moment felt sorry for her. It was a small job but she had done it well; she had taken it seriously. But she hadn’t seen beyond the theft, to the time when that pretty painting would only be a burden.

‘Be serious, May,’ he said. ‘Would you get into the sack with a phallic symbol?’

‘I go to bed with you, don’t I?’ she said lightly, regaining her Irishness and tucking the last few inches of the painting into the roll.

He had met Mayo at Ward’s in Piccadilly in the late spring soon after he arrived. She was drunk; she told him, a perfect stranger, of her plan to steal the painting; and that carelessness worried him: who else would she tell? He spent the night with her and at last moved in and tutored her in caution. They agreed to work together and afterwards — long after he made love to her, since they isolated themselves and hid from each other in sex — he came to know her. She was a short brisk woman in her mid-thirties, habituated to gestures of tidying, as if attempting to sort the clutter in the house and match the order in her mind. But she was the only neat one in the place, and it made her preoccupation hopeless. She was slim, but the men’s work clothes she wore, the blue bib-overalls, the loose denim shirt with baggy sleeves, made her seem stocky, and she tramped clumsily in her heavy shoes. Her hands were small and beautiful, her face plain but unmarked. The clothes made her seem convincingly a man until she turned and showed her face. Then she seemed wrong for the clothes, and the posture — the up-turned collar, the masculine stress in her voice — only exaggerated the prettiness of her mouth. There was something else: the workclothes were clean and the shirt still bore the vertical creases from the box. And yet, in her mask and gloves she had succeeded; her description had been repeated in all the papers with the photograph of the Rogier self-portrait — they were looking for a person, probably armed, with a slight build, a black jacket and the trace of an Irish accent: a man.

Mayo put the painting on the table. She said, ‘Are they still asleep?’

‘Apparently.’

‘How do they do it?’

‘They don’t do anything else,’ said Hood. ‘They fight, make love, then fall asleep. When they wake up they start fighting.’ It was true: the quarrelling of Brodie and Murf invariably turned into love-making. He had seen it enough times to know when to avoid them. They didn’t take off their clothes; they wrestled themselves into an embrace and fumbled until their threats became sighs. It was sexual struggle made out of the most childish assault, and in the same fighting postures they slept, with their faces close.

‘Are you giving them coke?’

‘It’s not coke — it’s low-grade opium. And I’m not giving it to them, they’re taking it.’

‘I wish they’d take a little interest in the movement. And I can tell you one thing — the Provos don’t allow their people to take drugs. It’s an offence.’

‘I should have known. All that clean living,’ said Hood. ‘It shows.’

Mayo waited, then said impatiently, ‘Sometimes I can’t stand you. You wonder why I don’t tell you anything. Listen to yourself. You’re always asking about the Provos, but if I told you about it you’d only laugh.’

Hood said, ‘Just tell me what you do in Kilburn.’

‘That’s my business,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make myself some scrambled eggs. I’m hungry.’ She slid the frying pan onto the stove and started the burner. She said, ‘Hard drugs. You’ll turn her into an addict. And she’s — what? Sixteen? Jesus.’

‘She’s already been in the slammer — you said so yourself.’

‘So what? She’s a child.’

‘Tell that to the Provos.’

Mayo went into the larder saying, ‘Has she told you about her family?’ There was a clatter, a thud; Mayo came out cursing, carrying a box of eggs.

‘I’ve heard all about it.’

‘Terrifying,’ said Mayo.

‘It didn’t sound so bad to me,’ said Hood. ‘I must have disappointed her.’

‘I suppose you laughed.’

‘Not very loud.’

‘You should spend more time with her.’

‘The anxious parent,’ said Hood. ‘She’s a screamer and he’s a latent tip-toe. I try to treat them as equals — it’s quite a challenge.’

At Ward’s in June, where Mayo had introduced Brodie to Hood, the young girl was refused a drink. But she had taken it as a great joke and in the Ulster and Munster Room, while Mayo and Hood were drinking, had said, ‘I’m under-age!’ She had started to roll a joint and Hood showed her how to do it with one hand. Mayo said, ‘She’s on the run,’ and Brodie, with the tobacco in her hand, had watched Mayo say this; she smiled as if she had been complimented on her clothes. They treated her with excessive kindliness, as if they had just adopted her. Hood remembered how they had driven back to Deptford in the ice-cream van, how he had said, ‘So you’re the Euston bomber.’ She had looked at Mayo and giggled. Then she had asked Hood to stop at a corner shop. She had gone in and bought a bag of toffees, which she poked into her mouth for the rest of the drive. Hood said, ‘She looks scared to death.’ Murf had come later, with his satchel of powder and his case of clocks. The dark curtains went up on the front windows in the house on Albacore Crescent. Hood had trusted Mayo, but from the moment he set eyes on Brodie and Murf he felt insecure with this fragile family. He knew he could not rely on them: they were too reckless to be trusted, they took no precautions. They had no experience, so they had no belief; but still he felt protective towards them.

He had asked Brodie what it had been like to plant a bomb. She said, ‘It was in this carrier bag. I shoved it in one of them lockers. Is that what you mean?’ He pressed her for a motive. She was imprecise, uncomprehending. Yet she could be specific when she talked about herself. ‘Mayo saved me,’ she said. ‘I was a mess.’ He enquired further. She said, ‘Anorexia.’ Her smile appalled him more than the word.

The frying pan smoked with overheated fat. Mayo seemed not to notice it. She cracked the eggs on the side of the bowl, but they broke and dripped in her hand. Hood said, ‘Let me do that. You’re making a hash of it.’

‘Get away,’ said Mayo. She moved aside, spinning the bowl to the floor. ‘Now look what you made me do.’

She knelt quickly to pick up the fragments of yolk-smeared glass, and Hood helped, tossing them into the waste-basket. Then he saw Brodie’s bare feet, her thin ankles. She was at the door to the hall, squinting in the light, yawning lazily like a child whose sleep has been disturbed.

‘What’s all the noise?’ She saw Mayo. ‘Oh, you’re back.’

‘Hello, love,’ said Mayo. ‘You all right?’

Brodie nodded and broke into another yawn, her mouth wide open; her teeth were small and unstained. ‘Okay,’ she said pushing her hair back. ‘I just heard the racket and I was wondering.’

‘Get a load of her,’ said Hood. Brodie wore her purple tee-shirt. There was a wrinkle of sleep — a pink welt — on her cheek, and another across the tattoo on her arm.

‘I was getting the most fantastic flashes,’ she said. She moved towards the painting. ‘Hey.’ She unrolled it on the table, still yawning, keeping the canvas spread with her hands and touching it, seeming to study it with her slow fingers, like a learner at braille, tracing the loops of the collar, the contours of the man’s dark clothes. At this angle, Hood saw a gleam in it he had not noticed before, a softer light falling across the figure’s hand, relaxing it and answering the light on the face, dignifying the skin with a gentle sallowness. And he saw a tension of concern that was almost a smile on the mouth and the beginnings of motion in the legs — one knee canted left as if starting a dance-step. The clothes were not the stiff material he had seen earlier, but the level pelt of blue velvet with bluer folds crushed into it. Around his neck was a silver chain with square links and depending from it the medallion of a dead animal: a fox. Brodie smoothed the paint with her fingers, helping Hood see, and still touching it, still identifying its deft features, she said, ‘Anything on telly?’

He wanted to reply — to mock — but he was gagged. He was angry with himself, for the girl’s dismissal, that pale child’s blindness parodied his own reaction. Anything on telly! She had bettered him and with this new glimpse of the painting he felt reproached.

‘Have you had anything to eat?’ asked Mayo.

Brodie said no and let the painting roll itself on its own stiffness. She yawned again. ‘I’ll have a cup of tea.’

‘You’ll have to do better than that, my girl. Look at yourself — you’re getting skinny. Have some scrambled eggs at least.’

‘I’m not hungry —’

‘You’ll do as I say —’

Hood listened: mother and daughter, scolding and whining. Watching them bark and circle each other nagged all his desire away; their careless noise drove off his lust and killed his affection and left him with annoyance. Brodie brushed an eggshell to the floor; Mayo picked it up; and that simple action — the girl blundering, the woman righting it — caused in Hood an unreasonable anger. He wanted to shout. Instead, he moved Mayo aside and finished making the meal himself, saying, ‘Tell her to set the table.’

Brodie insisted on eating with the television on. Hood said, ‘One of these days I’m going to put an axe through that thing.’

Brodie pointed. ‘He’s on Dad’s Army.’

‘Eat,’ said Mayo.

‘Aw.’ Brodie picked up her fork and went on smiling at the television programme. It was a comedy, a pair of mimics quacking.

— Do you play an instrument?

— I pick my nose.

— That’s a start. Speaking of noses, what would you do if your nose went on strike?

— Picket!

‘Murf’s missing it,’ said Brodie.

‘Who taught you to cook?’ said Mayo.

‘If you don’t like it don’t eat it,’ said Hood.

‘Stop fighting,’ said Brodie. She put down her fork and picked up a banana from the basket of fruit. She peeled it, took it in her mouth and champed at the television.

‘See her eat that banana, honey? A symbol she hates her father. Remember that.’ Hood rose, went into the kitchen and came back with the painting. He held it against the wall, where Brodie’s Magic Roundabout poster was tacked. He said, ‘How about putting it here?’

Mayo was clearing away the plates, Brodie still watching television; neither one made a comment, but when Hood began prising the tacks from the Magic Roundabout poster, Brodie said, ‘Don’t do that’

‘I need the tacks.’

‘Don’t take it down. It’s mine. There’s more drawing-pins upstairs.’

‘Then pick your ass up and get them.’

‘No.’ Brodie glowered at the television.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Mayo called from the kitchen.

Hood threw the poster aside and put up the self-portrait, securing its top edge with a row of tacks. Its lower edge lifted and curled like a scroll. Hood stepped back. The man seemed to have moved slightly from the window and his gaze was no longer tense but mildly relieved, starting to smile. Hood had the impression that the wide-brimmed hat the man held in his hand had, earlier in the evening, been covering that fine hair. The peevishness, the anxiety, was gone from his face: Hood saw contentment in the dark eyes and light starting at the edges of the room where there had been shadow and old varnish.

He said, ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s poxy,’ said Brodie. ‘I like mine better’ — the poster was on her lap — ‘but I’ll put it in my room where you can’t touch it.’

‘I’ll do the same with this,’ he said.

Mayo drifted in saying, ‘I’ve done the dishes — thanks for the help.’ She looked at the self-portrait. ‘Incredible,’ she said. ‘It works beautifully in this room. Too bad we have to keep it upstairs.’

‘Look at her leer,’ said Hood.

Images jumped on the screen, a newsroom, an aged face: the late news. Brodie said, ‘Rubbish.’ There were shots of the seaside: ‘Record crowds —’ Hood sat between Brodie and Mayo on the sofa, his long legs extended, his hands clasped across his stomach. The drone of news made them remember — the unpaid electric bill, the broken door — and Hood listened, fascinated by how trivial their murmurs were, those low neutral voices on the old companionable sofa, in front of the crackling television. They stared at the television to ignore it, and it struck him as comic, their arrival at such simple topics, trading the bland family assumptions about the light bill, the missing bathplug, the burnt pan, the smashed bowl. ‘We’ll have to do some shopping.’ It related them; domesticity obliged them more than crime, and Hood almost laughed. The bomber went on murmuring to the thief: family matters — and he, the murderer, agreed to make cocoa.

‘Nothing about the picture,’ said Hood when the news ended. ‘Looks like you’re out of the running, Mother.’

‘We’ll send them another inch.’ said Mayo. She stretched, flattening her small breasts against her shirt. ‘I’m going to bed.’

Hood followed her to the top of the house, three flights. She paused on the last landing to kick off her shoes, and when she did Hood lifted her and kissed her. She stared at him with a wife’s detachment, considered his eyes, and moved past him. In bed Hood threw his arm around her and said, ‘Honey?’

‘I’m whacked,’ she said. ‘Not tonight.’

He spoke to the ceiling: ‘I had a ruck today.’

Mayo turned to him. ‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘You fool.’ She settled against her pillow, and he waited for her to say more. But she only sighed.

‘I snuffed him,’ he said. She said nothing: her sigh was sleep.

The house was purring an hour later when, wakeful, restless, Hood descended the stairs. He had not slept, but he knew how. He tore a pinch from his plug of opium and rolled a pill in his fingers: that was all the weight he needed to take him fathoms down through the world to Guatemala, to the Perfume River and beyond to the slowest rehearsal of damp sexual knots, the watery orbit of triumphant love. He swallowed the pill with a glass of water and the buzz in his ears changed to a new frequency, a low drawl that tugged and burred at the back of his eyes. The room was dark, but the painting had a light of its own, the white narrow face of that laughing man who stood, Hood saw for the first time, with one hand on the silver knob of a sheathed dagger. And the window he had seen as motionless with summer was alive with excited shapes, fat baffled men with buckets, bawling children, a rearing horse, a flock of fleeing chickens, riot. Rogier heard, but his back was to confusion, and on that face Hood saw his own alert eyes.