Vacant Possession

CHAPTER 7

Now the summer was over. Suzanne moped about the house, making no plans. Her father understood her failure of will. “When the baby’s born,” she said, “Jim will think differently about it.”

Every night she scanned the FLAT LETS column in the evening paper. The properties were taken by the time she got to the phone. She talked about going back to Manchester to her friends, to join a squat in Victoria Park, but she did nothing about it. Pregnancy made her lethargic. Such energy as she could summon she spent on keeping out of her mother’s way. “You should have got rid of it before it was too late,” Sylvia said. “Upsetting us all like this. Breaking up our family life.”

Outside the house, Sylvia was busier than ever. She had joined a body called ECCE, invented and chaired by the vicar—Environmental Concern Creates Employment—and she spent a lot of time with Francis, attending meetings and lobbying at the town hall. ECCE wanted a grant to get to work on some of the derelict land left in the wake of the motorway link. It wanted to take a few teenagers out of the dole queue, perhaps “offer hope,” as it put it, to some of the older, long-term unemployed. Urban renewal was its object. Colin could not applaud it, not entirely. Come friendly bombs and fall on the entire North West and Midlands was more his idea. He could not remember a time—except after his break-up with Isabel—when his mood had been so black.

The vicar, he noticed, talked constantly about sewers. We were living, he said, on the legacy of the Victorians. Britain’s sewers had reached crisis point; a whole army of the unskilled could be put to work, renewing the system. To anyone who would listen he painted a vividly horrible picture of the disruption and decay which the pavements hid from view. Hermione had become a vegan. Colin felt sorry for him at times. His standards of comfort must be low, if he found comfort in Sylvia.

It was understandable that Sylvia should wish to spend as much time as possible outside the house. Each member of the family seemed to have marked out his own territory. Alistair, seldom at home himself, kept his bedroom locked whether he was in it or not. No one cared to imagine what lay behind the door. It had not been cleaned in months. Suzanne stayed in the bedroom from which she had evicted Karen; moon-faced and lank-haired, perpetually tearful, she crept downstairs when she heard her mother going out, and lumbered up again when she heard Sylvia’s key in the front door. Karen had colonised the living room. A studious child, she did her homework with a green felt-tipped pen, sitting at the big table. Presently she was found to have carved her initials in this table, and to have commenced a more ambitious work, “ALISTAIR IS A W—.” She was mutinous about the interruption to her labours. Colin might have let her finish, if it would not have meant the expense of a new table. He did not know that the young were interested in carving any more. It seemed a charming survival from a more innocent age.

The kitchen was occupied by Lizzie Blank, the monstrous domestic; without her labours, the house would cease to be a going concern. She was joined there by Claire, who was doing her cookery badge; her boiled eggs were often the only hot food prepared in the course of a day, but after the consumption of a few dozen they tended to pall. Sylvia, if she wanted peace and privacy, was driven to the marital bedroom, repository of her blighted hopes.

Is it possible, Colin asked himself, that I once really loved Sylvia? Did my heart beat faster at her approach? And not just with fear? Since the debacle ten years ago, Colin had come to believe that romantic love is an artefact, an invention of the eighteenth century. In a proper world, waning passion for breast and thigh would have been replaced by a solid affection for broad acres, an admiration for the odd copse and millstream. Given a proper respect for the social order, he would never have looked twice at Sylvia; it was hard to imagine her bringing him anything except some bad debts and a consumptive cow. In a proper world, their marriage would never have happened; he blames the century for his plight, the Rousseauist affectations of his forebears.

Meanwhile the two back rings on the cooker had given out entirely. The electric kettle had fused, and they had to boil up water in a milk pan. The toaster burned everything that was put into it, then catapulted it around the room, and the washing machine, unless operated on the Delicates cycle, pumped water all over the floor.

That pernicious fallacy was flourishing again in Colin’s life: that given Isabel, it would all be different. He knew it was a fallacy, and it caused him pain; he tried to uproot it from his life, to stamp it out. But he scanned all crowds, department stores on a Saturday, the people at the railway station that he passed every night as he drove home from school. The image in his mind was the image of the woman in the photograph, and what frightened him most was the knowledge that he might pass her in the street, stand behind her at the checkout in the supermarket, and not even notice her, so fast and so much did women change, making over their bodies and their emotions like deceitful insects from one year to the next. Isabel was an aberration; but must he not have his aberrations? He looked into the faces of women drivers who pulled up next to him at traffic lights.

The academic year had now begun. The bill came in for redecorating the kitchen. Sylvia thought that, after all, they ought to buy a new dining table; she could not undertake the purchase and laundering of tablecloths, because she and Lizzie Blank would soon be fully occupied. Mrs. Sidney was coming home. Twice a week now they went to St. Matthew’s to see her, and the hospital was talking about a discharge date.

Throughout the summer, the old lady had remained unshakable in her royal delusions; but these had not hindered her physical progress. She was moved to C Ward; she had her own chair in the day room, and made her neighbours miserable by grilling them on protocol and criticising their dress.

“Look here,” said Colin, when Sylvia sent him to buttonhole the consultant. “You can’t seriously expect us to manage her at home. One of the nurses told me that it was quite usual to believe that you were a member of the royal family. That can’t be right?”

“How painfully,” said the physician, “has she imposed order on the chaos of her internal world! All time has stopped for her. Reality is many-sided. If she remains incontinent, of course there are these special pads you can get.”

“But for God’s sake,” Colin said, “we’re not nurses, we won’t know how to deal with her. What will she think has happened, where will she think she is? She’s used to hospital life.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, “there we have it. We believe the rigidity of institutional life has provided a too forceful model for her inner reality. She has become occupied with rules, procedures, precedents, and routines. The institution has become, in fact, an external psychosis. Besides that,” he said impatiently, “if she shouts at you we can give her a pill.”

“I’ve never heard such rubbish,” Sylvia said when he got home. She was sitting in the kitchen with Francis; Francis, with evident enjoyment, was eating a boiled egg. “It’s a con trick, all this about discharging people into the community. They’re doing it to save money.”

“Quite true,” Francis said, dabbing at his upper lip with a piece of kitchen roll. “Community care properly carried through is a most expensive option. Done shabbily, it’s cheap. The social workers, God bless them, have been urging it for years. Now they’ve fallen right into the budgeters’ trap.”

“I’ve never heard you ask God to bless anyone before,” Colin said.

“Francis is right.”

“I know he is. That doesn’t help us though.”

“Daddy,” Claire said, “you should see the way Lizzie eats eggs, it’s really disgusting. She cuts a piece off the end, then she sucks it out—like this—”

“And Florence won’t give up her job to look after her,” Sylvia said. “She loves it, turning people down for heating allowances, that sort of thing.”

“Oh, now why should she give up her job?” Colin said. “Be fair. She did her share of caretaking before Mother went into St. Matthew’s. If Mother comes home, we’ll have to split her between us.”

“You mean, me and Florence will have to split her. You’ll be sheltering behind your job. I’ll be running up and down stairs with disgusting buckets and bandages—”

“You make it sound like Scutari.”

“—and you’ll be sitting in your nice tidy office ruling lines and sticking little coloured pins in wall charts.”

“Perhaps Colin can help out at weekends,” Francis suggested. “And can’t you get an attendance allowance?”

“I’ll have to ask Florence about that,” Colin said. “She’ll know the daily rate for a lady-in-waiting.”

“I wish I had a job,” Sylvia said. “I wish I could go out to work and escape the things that are going on in this family. I should have done that years ago, got a full-time job and made myself independent and let you lot get on with it. At least before I was married I had an income to call my own, but since then I’ve been a slave to my family.”

“I always thought you married straight from the schoolroom,” the vicar said. “What was your work?”

The question caught Sylvia unprepared. “I was in charcuterie,” she replied hastily.

“Can you get Lizzie to work some extra hours?” Colin asked. “We’ll afford it somehow.”

“She has a night job. Hermione wanted her, but she said no.”

“Well, ask her again. Perhaps her circumstances have changed.”

“I could up her hourly rate a bit.”

“No, I don’t think you could. Unless bankruptcy takes your fancy.”

“We can’t expect her to work for love. When the baby comes we’ll be wading around up to the knees in excrement.”

“We will be anyway,” the vicar said, “if something isn’t done about Britain’s sewers. Do you know that in Greater Manchester there’ve been fifty major collapses in ten years? They measure them by how many double-decker buses you could drive through.”

“What an extraordinary concept,” Colin said whimsically. “I wonder if the passengers are given any warning?”

October came. Suzanne was in her fifth month; the miners’ dispute with the National Coal Board was in its eighth. Sylvia laid candles in, despising the government’s assurances that there would be no power cuts. That would be the limit, she said, spending New Year’s Day in the dark. Suzanne stopped telephoning Jim Ryan, and gave herself over to waiting. “I’m glad I’m pregnant,” she said. “It’s something to do.”

Not far away, in Wilmslow, an Iron Age corpse was found in a bog. “Here, let me see it,” Alistair said excitedly, tearing the newspaper from his father’s hands. “‘The whole body survived because of the absence of—’ what’s this?”

“Oxygen,” Karen said, reading over his shoulder. “Didn’t you do no chemistry? ‘Because of the absence of oxygen in the water-logged bog.’”

“Here, give it to me, it’s mine,” Alistair said, shrugging his sister off and hunching over the newspaper. “‘May have been a ritual sacrifice.’ We could do with something like that for us rites.”

“What rites?” Colin enquired.

“That we have at us den. Austin runs them, sometimes we have guest ministers. It’s like evensong, but bloodier. Listen to this, Kari. ‘…bashed him twice on the head with a narrow-bladed axe, and slashed his jugular vein to obtain his blood.’”

“I hope this isn’t giving you ideas,” Sylvia said disapprovingly.

“This is how he was found. ‘Face twisted and squashed into one shoulder, forehead deeply puckered, teeth clenched tightly together…’” Alistair laughed raucously. “Sounds just like you, Dad.”

Colin took the paper from his son. He ran his eyes over the description of the bog man, and noted that the historian Tacitus had opined that the barbarians drowned in bogs those who had committed “heinous crimes, such as adultery.” He felt indignant; the poor man might just have been mugged. There was a knock at the kitchen door. Lizzie Blank was arriving for work, taking off her leopard-skin jacket. “Can I have that paper when you’ve finished with it?” she asked. Colin sucked his underlip speculatively. “He is expected to go on show to the public,” he read, “freeze-dried, at the British Museum, in about two years’ time.”

These days Muriel found that she was seeing less and less of her old friends. She still called at Crisp’s to change her personality, but very often he was out, and there was no longer a note on the table to say where he was attending service. The nights began to draw in, and Sholto’s shop was burgled, cleaned out over two successive nights by people who came in through the skylight. The shop was to be closed down anyway; he had lost his job, and was sleeping rough. They were drifting apart; she doubted that there would be any day trips next summer.

Clyde, from the dating agency, had been as good as his word. He’d told her he’d track her down. It was foolish of her, she now realised, to have let Lizzie Blank use Poor Mrs. Wilmot’s address. He was neglecting his butter sculpture in favour of hanging around in the street. He scanned the upper windows of Mr. K.’s house, and paced around the block with his great hands swinging. You had to credit him with determination, and initiative too. He knocked at the door one day, with a baker’s tray and some cock-and-bull story, and gave Mr. K. a wheatmeal loaf.

Mr. K. shut the door on him before his story was over. The features seemed to have shrunk in his coarse bristling face, as if his eyes wanted to turn and look into the skull. He held the loaf at arm’s length, and carried it into the hall; there was a small table in the hall, and there he placed it. With one hand he massaged his ribs, around the heart.

When Miss Anaemia came home she stopped off to poke its crust with her starved finger. “Your bread’s come,” she called. She went into the kitchen. “What are you doing cleaning a gun?” she asked. Then she burst into tears. “They’ve stopped my giro,” she said. “They’ve accused me of cohabiting with a giant.”

“Wait,” cried Mr. K. He put down the gun. “It is the same giant who delivered the loaf, there could not be two such. I took him for some pal of Snoopers.” He wrung his rag between his hands. “I have asked Poor Mrs. Wilmot to cast light on the matter, but she cannot. She says that she does not know the giant, and the giant does not know her.” He sat down shakily in a kitchen chair, holding his head. “I am ill, my dear young lady, with the suspense. I have a message in the hall, menacing me about my letter box, signed by Olga Korbut. That is why I am cleaning my Luger. As for the bread, it is no doubt poisoned. Please to leave it where it is, and if in need take some of this Hovis.”

“Thanks very much,” Miss Anaemia said. She scrubbed away her tears with the back of her hand and picked a slice or two out of the wrappings. “Cheers,” she said. Her emotions were short-lived; it was just as well, of course. It didn’t do to get excited about the future, or too attached to any project; you never knew when some change in the benefit rules would turn your life upside down. It was companionable, here at Napier Street, but they were talking about chopping rent allowances and making young people move on. In the world outside people called her Anne-Marie, and asked her to account for yourself; have you seen a psychiatrist? they said. If she left here she’d have to go home to Burton-on-Trent and live with her mum and dad, who never spoke to each other, and who made it clear that she was a big disappointment, and asked why she hadn’t gone to work for Marks & Spencer. They only take quite wholesome people; Mum and Dad didn’t seem to realise that.

On the night of old Mrs. Sidney’s discharge, Poor Mrs. Wilmot gave in her notice. She would be sadly missed, the nurses told her, by staff and patients alike. A willing, stooped, humble body, with her heart in the right place; the cleaners were being privatised, and they would not look upon her like again.

She went down Eugene Terrace, to Crisp’s house. He and Sholto were eating sausage rolls together. “If you want a revenge for Effie,” she said, “you can get on with it now.”

Crisp said the hospital had killed Effie, that she’d got pneumonia and they’d let her die; seeing that she was old, and mad, and not worth the antibiotics. In fact she had been far gone when the ambulance brought her in, frozen and raving. But they had to amuse themselves. Crisp was trying to get into trouble by hanging around with juveniles. As for Sholto, he said he was sick to death of the soup at the night shelter. They were both scheming to be sent back to Fulmers Moor. It didn’t matter to her, because her scheme was one she had to carry out alone; she didn’t need their help, or anybody’s.

Mother had not materialised; but often, as she polished the scratched dining table at Buckingham Avenue, Muriel thought she felt her hanging in the air. She wanted her and didn’t want her, that was the trouble. She couldn’t explain that to Crisp and Sholto. She said goodbye to them and went downstairs. It was ten o’clock when she got out into the street, and the Mukerjees were closing up the shop. A plump Asian gentleman was drawing away from the kerb in his big car. He drove slowly behind Lizzie Blank as she minced along to the corner. He put down his electric window, leaned out, and made her an offer. She stopped dead, staring at him. As if he had not made his meaning clear, he held up a fat paper packet and jingled it. “Ten pounds in five pees, all yours,” he told her. He smiled encouragingly, showing a gold tooth. They were heading for the wasteland; there were no street lights now. Just his white cuffs gleamed in the darkness, and his gold ring and his gold tooth. “Name your price,” he told her. Her heart began to thud. She felt a desperate strangling rage rise up inside her. When the box breaks, the baby will fall, out comes Little Muriel, teeth bones and all. She raised her fists at the man in the car, and a great hoarse bellow rose out of her chest and echoed back down the dark caverns of the Punjab. Sweat starting out on his face, the man put his foot on the accelerator and roared away into the night.

When the ambulance drew up outside Florence’s house, all the family except Alistair were waiting in the front garden. Colin’s face was drawn with apprehension, but his wife and sister looked like women who knew exactly what to expect. The two little girls, who had been briefed about their grandmother’s misapprehensions, were giggling and practising their curtseys; Claire had insisted on wearing her Brownie uniform. Suzanne lurked in the shadow of the porch, with a blanket round her shoulders. As the winter came on she looked more and more demoralised and disreputable. There were whole days when she didn’t speak a word to anybody, and didn’t set foot outside the house.

The back doors of the ambulance opened, and the ambulance men lifted Mrs. Sidney and her wheelchair and set them carefully on the ground. One of them waved in the direction of the family. They swivelled the chair in the road, edged it onto the pavement, and pushed it to the front gate. Mrs. Sidney was swaddled in a gay scarlet blanket: only the top of her head showed. “Here we go,” the attendants cried, running her up the path. “She can walk, you know, but she says it’s not etiquette. Are we glad to see you lot! Took one old lass home last week, the whole family had done a moonlight. Like the Mary Celeste. Took the police a week to find them. Said they’d gone up to Aberdeen looking for work on the North Sea oil.”

As they brought the wheelchair to a halt, Mrs. Sidney’s skeletal hand emerged from her wrappings. She pulled the blanket aside from her face and peered out. “Where’s your father?” she enquired of Colin in her rasping voice. Colin looked at Sylvia for aid.

“Tell her,” Sylvia said. “Tell her he’s dead. Don’t pander to her.”

Colin cleared his throat. “He’s passed on, Mother. Don’t you remember? It was, oh, ten or eleven years back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Sidney said. “I expect he’s off shooting at Sandringham. Who is that woman in a certain condition, standing in the porch?”

“Well, can we give you a hand?” the ambulance men enquired. “Where do you want her? Upstairs, downstairs, in my lady’s chamber?” Suzanne stood back to let them pass. They winked at her on the way out. “Give us a call if you start up sudden, love. Twenty-four-hour service, that’s us, no job too large or small.”

“What nice men,” Claire said. “I wonder if they’d like a boiled egg?”

“All yours!” they cried, as they sped off down the path.

Mr. Ryan—Jim—was a spare eager man in his early thirties. He had a sandy moustache and brown dog-like eyes.

“Sit down, Mr. Sidney,” he said. He paused, unhopefully. “I don’t suppose it’s about the account, is it?”

Colin pulled a chair up to the desk. “My wife thought that perhaps we ought to talk, but I don’t know…perhaps somewhere else would have been preferable?”

“It hardly matters,” Ryan said. “As long as you keep your voice down.”

“I haven’t come to make a scene.”

“No…well, that’s all right then.” Mr. Ryan shrunk a little in his swivel chair. His eyes wandered over Colin and away to the framed print of a fishing village which hung on the far wall. The quay seemed strangely deserted; little boats bobbed on blue-black waves. “Only it wouldn’t help if I lost my job.”

“Is that likely?”

“She’s a customer.”

“Of course.”

“And we have our professional ethics.”

“Like doctors and dentists? I didn’t know that. I mean, if a woman comes in to open a deposit account, you don’t ask her to take her clothes off, do you? Not in the normal case; though I can see there are exceptions.”

“You’d be surprised what happens, Mr. Sidney.” Mr. Ryan’s dark eyes flickered; he picked up a paper clip from his tray and began to unbend it. “You really see life from behind this desk. When the customers get divorced, they come into your office and fight.”

“I had no idea.”

“Oh yes. They get very personal.” He met Colin’s eye briefly. “That’s not what I came into banking for, I don’t enjoy it at all. They come in to divide their account, and then next thing you know, they’re arguing about fellatio and who’s going to have the hamster.”

Colin took out a packet of cigarettes. “Smoke?”

Ryan shook his head gloomily, as if at this moment any silly habit would have been a relief. “It’s no joke,” he said. “I don’t like it. It upsets me.”

“You don’t like emotions.” Colin lit his cigarette. “Leave it to the women, eh?”

“Why not?” said Ryan, sneering a little. “They have the expertise, don’t they, or so they say? They keep shifting the ground, you can’t keep up. To them, big rows are like, what do you call it, fashion accessories—they have a new set every season.”

“Have you got an ashtray?” Colin said. I won’t be drawn, he thought, I’ll keep my cool. He looked up. “I can’t help observing, Mr. Ryan, that you are a man of what…thirty-three, thirty-four?”

“Whereas Suzanne is eighteen. You think I took advantage of her.”

“I haven’t heard that expression in years,” Colin said. “But still, in this case…I can’t imagine where you met.”

“We met at the university,” Ryan said. “We have these annual promotions, you know, you must have seen the adverts. We call it our Someday Package. Someday You’ll Make a Million, that’s the slogan. The people who dream up these things are living in the past. They still think there are jobs for graduates.”

“Yes?”

“And there was your daughter, coming in for her free plastic clipboard with the logo, and her free packet of felt-tipped pens. Myself, I thought the felt-tips were a mistake, a bit juvenile, but your daughter said, on the contrary, you know, she being a student of geography, they’d be useful to her—and that’s how we got into conversation.”

“And then?”

Ryan ran a hand through his hair. “Then I asked her to meet me for a drink…you know how it goes. You know the rest. It’s not interesting, is it?”

“Well, only in one respect.”

“And what’s that?”

“I hoped you could enlighten me as to why you let her get pregnant!”

“I didn’t ‘let her.’ What do you mean? You’d think—I know she’s only eighteen, you’ve pointed that out, but you’d think she’d have the sense to swallow a pill.”

“She told you she was on the pill?”

Mr. Ryan stared at him, mute; then each capillary flushed and blossomed, turning him pink from his hairline to the white collar of his striped shirt.

“It’s a fad,” Colin said calmly. “They don’t like the pill. I thought you’d come to an agreement about it. Natural methods.”

“What?” Ryan said. “What are you talking about?”

“Sorry. I’d have broken it more gently…not that it matters now. Academic interest, as people say.”

“It’s of more than academic interest to me! What was I supposed to do?”

“Withdraw, I think. It’s natural population control. Peasants do it. In Italy. There’s a book about it.”

“Well, I must have missed that.” He was scarlet now with shock and indignation. “I’ll have to join the Book of the Month Club, won’t I, before I pick a girl up again, I’ll have to go by W. H. Smith and check out what bloody insanities she might have in store for me. Is that right?”

“Or go for a woman of thirty,” Colin said. “They’d be on the pill, wouldn’t mind poisoning themselves for a fine upstanding man like you. Oh, really, Ryan, get hold of yourself, calm down, if you’ve any brain there won’t be a next time. Does your wife know?”

“Does she know? Your daughter told her on the phone. When I got home she was waiting. I knew right away there was something up. She said, ‘I’ve had a most disturbing phone call from a girl called Suzanne.’ That was it. I had to tell her everything.”

Plod on, Colin thought; the old pedestrian tone.

“I think Suzanne expects you to leave your wife and set up with her.”

“Leave my wife?”

“I’m afraid she took your relationship too seriously.”

Ryan covered his face with his hands. “I’ve been conned all along then, haven’t I?” he said wearily. “This wasn’t my understanding of it. Not my understanding at all. It was just…a fling. One of those things that you do.”

“A fling?” Colin said. “Come on, mate. This is 1984. Victorian Values.”

“Nothing Victorian about the way your daughter ran after me—”

“No, but there is this about it,” Colin said patiently, “that you pay for what you do. It isn’t the scot-free seventies, you can’t expect to go littering the countryside with your by-blows and expect the state to pick up the tab. You’ve got to feel the guilt, Mr. Ryan, you’ve got to put your hand in your pocket. You’d really better think of limiting your activities. Or you might get one of these special diseases.”

There was a short silence. Ryan slumped in his chair. “I offered to pay for the abortion.”

“She doesn’t want one. Anyway, it’s too late for that.”

“Girls today…I can’t take it in.” With his fingertips Ryan worked the skin above his eyebrows. “She must understand…you must make her understand…I can’t leave my wife. It’s simply not one of the options. Isabel’s not well.”

“Not well?” Colin said sharply. Ryan sat up, at his tone.

“Her nerves. At least I think it’s her nerves. There’s something amiss. To be honest—may I be honest with you?”

“Feel free.”

“I suppose I thought, with Suzanne, that she would take my mind off things. I’m a very troubled man, Mr. Sidney. So would you be, if you had Isabel to deal with.”

“Would I?”

“You see, Isabel was twenty-six when I met her, and unmarried. No one had taken her on. I thought I was her first lover, though later I learned different. She was wary of me, very wary, do you know what I mean? She put men off, men in general. It took me months to get anywhere near her. The day we were married I don’t think I knew her at all.”

Ryan picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and began to fold and pleat it between his fingers. “And do you know her now?” Colin asked.

“Oh, now…She drinks. Gin mostly. Or whisky. Quite a lot. She has rages, the most horrible emotional storms. If you knew her you’d understand why I looked elsewhere, but at the same time, as a practical matter, if I left her what would she do? I can’t just dump her, can I? She can’t take care of herself.”

“Look,” Colin said desperately. “You don’t have to tell me any of this.”

“Oh, but it’s a relief, get it off my chest. Her father died just recently in hospital, and that’s made things worse, because they were always at outs, you know, and she’s got some idea that she wished him dead. It seems that before he died he told her he’d got…well, I don’t know, some sort of responsibility, an illegitimate child I think, some woman he met in a park. Now she goes on and on about it. She talks about her life, the life she’s had.”

“We all have a life.”

“But you have to put the past behind you, don’t you?”

“If it will let you.”

“That’s what she says. She says time’s circular, she can feel it snapping at her ankles.”

“She has a point.”

“There was this other man, before we met.” He had made an aeroplane; he held it up, admiring it distractedly. “In the last few months she’s talked about him all the time. She says she thinks he understood her, as much as anyone has ever understood her. But he let her down. Of course, with her being as she is, I don’t know if he ever existed. She might have made him up to torment me.”

Made him up? “No, I don’t think so,” Colin said. “She wouldn’t do that, would she?”

“She can go back to him if she can find him.” Ryan sniffed. “Let him have an innings.”

“Perhaps he wouldn’t want her now.”

“Not if he knew her, he wouldn’t want her. Not if he knew how she was now.”

“Not anyway. It’s a long time ago. We have to try, you know—” he spoke gently, realising it—“to put ourselves together in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”

“But she doesn’t, do you see? Isabel gets drunk on her past, she goes crazy on it. She used to be a social worker, I suppose she saw some terrible sights. Sometimes she talks about this old woman who locked her in a room, and about these invisible things that came out and touched her legs. She says she thought she was going to die.”

Colin felt afraid; a tight ball of shame and regret pushed up into his diaphragm, shortening his breath. He stood up, pushing his chair away clumsily, and walked across to the far wall. He inspected the seascape. “Perhaps she needs help. You know. A doctor. That kind of help.”

“Help? She needs an exorcism. Oh, she can put on a good front. All the social work skills. They know how to detect neurotics, you see, and alcoholics, and so they know how to pretend they aren’t. She keeps herself on a very tight rein. You wouldn’t know, to meet her, that she’s had breakdowns.”

“Breakdowns?”

“Two, three. I’m not sure really. They all shade into one another.”

“I had no idea.”

“No, why should you have? I didn’t tell Suzanne, except just the usual, you know, the complaints one makes. Suzanne seemed to understand me, at the time—” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought that she’d have such weird ideas, but you can never tell, can you?”

Colin examined the picture, looked at the cracks in the frame. How could Isabel have settled for Jim Ryan? But all marriages are mysteries. What had Suzanne seen in him? Weakness; something of her father perhaps. Strength was being like Sylvia; making your opinions felt. Ryan was still flushed, his thin straw hair stuck up in tufts where he had raked his fingers through it when he talked about Isabel. He was a mass of little tics, of amoral reflexes, of tiny mental knee-jerks that kept him out of guilt and anguish and justified himself to himself.

“Do you always say people are mad if they threaten to inconvenience you?” Colin turned away from the wall. But his heart was not in it. Suzanne was abandoned; Isabel was sick. Sylvia was at home, waiting to know what he had made of the situation.

“Well, it is an extraordinary idea, you have to admit,” Ryan said. “Looking to Italian peasants for advice on birth control. It’s nearly as daft as some of Isabel’s ideas. I sometimes think, you know, all these people, walking the streets, pretending to be sane—they ought to go out at random and pick up a few people, and examine them to see what delusions they’ve got.”

“Perhaps it’s this town,” Colin said. “I think they put something in the water.”

A further quarter-hour passed in exchange of pleasantries. Colin smoked his last cigarette. He crumpled up the packet and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Ryan said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this about my wife, it’s personal stuff.” He would regret it tomorrow; he was beginning to regret it now. He floated his paper aeroplane across the desk. It flew up, bombed sharply downwards, and landed at Colin’s feet.

“Right then,” Colin said. “There’s nothing to add, is there? I’ll be on my way.”

Ryan leaped up to see him out, as if he were a client. His hand, extended, hung in the air. Colin stopped at the door. He turned. “I am the man your wife says let her down. I knew her ten years ago. We had an affair.”

Ryan stared at him for a moment; but he had run the gamut of his talents for self-expression. He merely resumed his seat quietly, as if he were in church. His brown eyes had an opaque glaze. “Do you want to discuss it?” he asked.

“No,” Colin said. “I never want to discuss it as long as I live.” Half out of the door he paused, and spoke over his shoulder. “I’m moving my account.”

Head in his hands, Ryan groaned.

He saw her as soon as he closed the door; with the precision of nightmare, moving from a blurred backdrop and into view; defined, in her strange anorak with the racing-team flashes, against the mill of senior shop assistants rattling their cash bags, and the housewives rummaging for biros in the depths of their bags. Once he would have been surprised, but now he was not surprised any longer. Figure thickened a little, features blurred; dark eyes alight in her usual pallor, the complexion he remembered.

Can you set a term to passion? Two years? Five? Ten? For a moment he was going to call out to her, but then he didn’t, and as he didn’t, he noticed the irretrievable moment, splitting off and slipping away. From the fraction of a second which this failure occupied, his life changed; unnoticeably, irreparably, in silence. It was just like York Minster; no one had actually seen the lightning strike. Long before he had recovered his wits, long before he had time to gauge the extent of his loss, the queue for the quick-service till had parted, and swallowed her up.

When Colin got home his wife said, “Go next door for the Royal Variety Performance. She’s been waiting for you.”

In a daze, he went back down the front path. He hardly noticed his surroundings; the plants in the stone urns were withered and brown, unable to withstand the onward march of the autumn weather. It was strange that Sylvia had not taken them out; perhaps they had died overnight. He let himself out through his own front gate and went round the corner to Florence’s. Really, with all the coming and going between the two houses, it would be better if he made a hole in the hedge. How lucky it was, come to think of it, that Florence had not moved to a smaller place, as friends had often urged her. Trite, mundane, his little thoughts ran on; he knew them acutely, every tiny quibble, but he felt remote, as if he were viewing them down a telescope. Tick, tick, tick. Sylvia and Isabel. Like the Pit and the Pendulum.

Florence met him in the hall. “This digital clock’s gone mad,” she said. “It’s already tomorrow by it. I didn’t think they could, I thought it was only clockwork clocks that went mad.”

Colin took the timepiece from her and shook it. “You can’t mend them by shaking them,” she said. “Not this kind. I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t understand it. The pictures keep falling off the walls.”

“Our house is pretty much a wreck,” Colin said. “The electrics have all gone wrong. Well, you know.”

“My house plants are dying.”

“Yes, ours too.”

Florence looked flushed and aggrieved. “Do you know,” she said, “I hardly had time to take my coat off before she was yelling for me. I walk in here at five-thirty, and Sylvia’s off like a shot. And where’ve you been? Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Better go up to her.”

“Yes, if you could sit with her for half an hour, it would be a help, I could just clean up in the kitchen. There’s some broken glass in there, I don’t know where it came from, I nearly trod in it.”

“Leave her to me,” Colin said soothingly. Inside, he screamed for morphine, brandy: for oblivion.

“Without that Blank woman I don’t know what we’d do. She’s been in with Sylvia this afternoon, turning her. She says she can handle old people.”

“That’s all to the good then.”

“Yes, but I don’t like her in my house.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, Colin, she’s so gross.”

“I agree her personal appearance leaves something to be desired, but we should be thankful we’ve got her. Look, Florence, why don’t you put your feet up for half an hour?”

“I don’t know,” Florence muttered. “Claimants all day, and then to come home to this. She’s driving me mad, Colin. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it.”

“You know they said if it got really bad, they’d take her back. And then there’s that holiday-beds scheme, to give you a break for six weeks.”

“What’s six weeks?” Florence’s eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. “She could live another fifteen years.”

Colin trailed upstairs. He could already hear his mother talking to herself in the dry peremptory voice she had affected since she rose from the dead. She seemed to be making preparations for her wedding in St. James’s Palace Chapel, 6th July 1893. If only there were some chronological sense within her delusions, it would be easier to deal with her, but in the space of a few minutes she could get herself from her early engagement to the Duke of Clarence through to the coronation of George VI. He stopped to listen outside the door. “Victoria,” she said. “Mary. Augusta. Louise. Olga. Pauline. Claudine. Agnes.”

“Hello, Mum,” Colin cried gaily, pushing the door open.

Mrs. Sidney glared at him. She was sitting bolt upright in bed. She tried nowadays to keep her spine straight. “Tell that footman to bring me my medicine,” she said. “It’s time.”

The room was stuffy; the central heating had been turned up, and the curtains had been drawn since four o’clock. The fuzzy light from the streetlamp shone through them and illuminated Mrs. Sidney’s bedside cabinet with its glass of barley water and array of pills. Colin tiptoed over and picked up some of the bottles and packets. He turned them about in the dim light and read their names. God knows what she was being given, but there was a lot of it. He went to the door.

“Florence!”

“What?”

“She says it’s time for her pills. Which do I give her?”

“Give her what she fancies,” Florence’s wrathful voice came back. “Oh, hold on, I’m coming.”

He imagined he could hear the sharp intake of breath as Florence levered herself to her feet. Now he heard her grumbling and gasping to herself as she came upstairs. She was not young herself; all this was too much for her. Now she was in the room, glaring at the invalid.

“I’m sorry. Sorry to fetch you up again. But I don’t know what she should have. I don’t want to poison her.”

“Well, you say that with some conviction.” Breathing hard, Florence went to the side of the bed and picked up a couple of the bottles. “How about these?” she enquired, rattling them under her mother’s nose. “How does she know it’s time for her tablets?” she flung over her shoulder. “She never gets the time right to within fifty years.”

“We want the yellow ones,” Mrs. Sidney said.

“The yellow ones are for your blood pressure. If you have too many you’ll pop off.”

“That is not a nice way to talk about us. We shall have them when you are out of the room.”

“Better take them away,” Colin said in alarm.

Florence replaced them firmly on the bedside table. “They can stay there.” She met his eyes. “It’s inconvenient for me to have her medicines strewn all over the house.”

“But what if she—”

Florence snatched the bottle up and once more rattled the tablets, in a passion. “They’re childproof,” she said. “Childproof! She hasn’t got the strength in her wrists.” Noisily, she began to cry.

Colin felt helpless and embarrassed. He stood watching her from the foot of the bed, unable to comfort or even approach her. He was used to Sylvia, with her tears of temper, but he could not remember seeing his sister like this. She was obviously at the end of her tether, a woman appalled by her own thoughts. Under pressure, the violent side of her was emerging. It seemed absurd to think of Florence, with her cable-stitch woollies, having a violent side. But he knew from the newspapers that everyone has their depths. No one could be more ruthless in pursuit of his ends than a peace campaigner. In the United States, opponents of abortion had taken to dynamiting clinics. And Florence, so insistent on the sacred quality of human life; would it after all be so surprising if she felt that Mother were an exception to her general rule?

“Oh, come on, old lass,” he said. He stretched his hand out. “Give me those.”

With a spluttering sob, Florence put the bottle into his hand. Mother’s eyes watched them, the little black pupils darting to and fro. “I’m sorry,” Florence said. She got out her handkerchief, with its frill of cheap lace and its initial. “It’s just that I didn’t sleep a wink last night. She was shouting out every half hour. She wanted the Court and Social page, and that woman Blank had gone and thrown the paper away. What could I do? I couldn’t go out and print it.”

Colin put his arm around her shoulders. The feeling of unreality remained. Speech was painful, an effort. It was an effort to bring his mind to bear on what was happening. “We must talk to the doctor again. The GP, I mean. Tell him she needs something to make her sleep.”

“I’ve got something. She spits it out. She just spits her pills out and asks for the yellow ones.”

“Well, we’d better put him in the picture, hadn’t we?”

Florence took a deep breath, mastering herself. “I’m not going to let it get to me, Colin. I never thought she would get me to this pitch. I never thought I would entertain such thoughts, about my own mother.”

Colin squeezed her arm. “Go down and have a snooze. Go on. I’ll stay with her for a while.”

“All right. Perhaps I could get Sylvia to sleep in for the odd night. But then who will look after her during the day? We’ll have to depend on that woman.”

Colin sat down by his mother’s bedside. He might as well be here as at home, and do Florence a bit of good. He might as well sit here with his thoughts, in the close semi-darkness and the smell of invalidity. He shut his eyes. Perhaps he could sleep. Sleep would be good for him. He might wake up and find that his conversation with Jim Ryan had receded a little, softened around the edges. Just now there were fragments of it that lay behind his eyes, like bits of broken glass.

Isabel was different from the other women he had known. She sat still, and spoke very little. He had attributed wisdom to her. “She keeps herself on a very tight rein.” It wasn’t wisdom that had stilled her; it was fear that froze her up.

I know, he thought—I suppose I know—that people who are so exercised about the human condition are often refusing to face problems of their own. Like Sylvia; she rushes down the road to do some good elsewhere. He had never thought to compare the two ladies before. No doubt if they could meet, they would have a lot to say to each other. They would be able to pluck out a few thoughts of their heart and run a little comparison survey. Men did not do that. He understood why Jim Ryan had been so undignified. How would it be if he walked into the staff room tomorrow and said, “Gentlemen, I need to talk to you, I need to unburden myself and hear your advice?” It was unthinkable. They’d make a dash for it and there he’d be, standing by the photocopier while they rang for an ambulance. Yet without some process like this, how could he know what other men felt? He thought of his colleagues; after the first flurry of excitement, putting a minute diamond on some girl’s finger, were they ever again beset by the stirrings of romance? Never: in his view. Stirrings of lechery, perhaps; those passed. One woman was the same as the next to them. Marriage was a practical arrangement which they entered into for the sake of comfort, and which they left under protest when the standard of comfort declined too far. They were inert, his colleagues, collections of cells for copulating and eating pork chops and going to the municipal swimming pool on a Sunday afternoon.

It was with the notion of Isabel that he had conspired to avoid this fate; it was with his picture he conspired, with the far-seeing eyes and mandarin lips. Always he had believed that somehow, somewhere, and one of these days, he would place before her his confusions, his doubts, the great mass of unsatisfied needs that doubled and raged inside him like a convulsing child; and there would be one word, and she would say it, and with that word she would put his life to rights.

And now? There was no future, but that was not it. There was no past; something had reached back and changed it. Had she always been crazy? It was easy to believe. She would turn into one of those women who stumble about the streets, talking to themselves; who sit in bus shelters in bitter weather with bottles sticking out of their shopping bags. She would grow old, decrepit, insane; and he would be old too, and so would Sylvia, a touching old Darby and Joan; and there would be Isabel, legless in a flower bed when they went to get the sunshine in the park.

“His Majesty is not feeling up to much today,” his mother said conversationally. “I think I shall have to tour the Empire alone.” She watched him, nodding in the hard chair. “You aren’t going to marry that woman?” she said sharply.

He jerked awake. “What woman?”

“That woman you’re always thinking about. Mrs. Ernest Simpson, you know what woman.”

“Oh, her. No,” he said slowly, dazed. “No, it would be too fraught and complicated, wouldn’t it? I don’t think I’ll bother. I don’t know why I ever thought I could.”

“Speculation is rife. You must put an end to it at once.”

He rubbed his eyes. “Okay.”

That night, Lizzie Blank went down to Gino’s Club. It was Ladies’ Half-Price Nite, and very crowded. There was a man who stood up on a stage and insulted the audience, and people laughed at him. She was amazed when she learned that he got a wage for it. She thought it was just one of those things that happen.

She had just got on the right side of her first Tequila Sunrise when Clyde appeared. He made a nuisance of himself all night, nursing a Brown Split, with his feet stuck out and getting in the way of the dancers. She could see him watching her, his lugubrious face splintered by the mirror ball into a thousand bloodshot eyes.

It was two o’clock when she left, slipping out of the back door. She thought in terms of an early night, although it was true that sleep didn’t interest her like it did other people. For a time she had taken Lizzie Blank’s clothes with her in a carrier bag when she went out at night, and changed in a ladies’ lavatory somewhere, but the weather was getting a bit chilly for that, and she didn’t expect to meet Mr. Kowalski on the stairs. And what if she did? She smiled absently to herself. She had just got some new boots, white leather ones with platform soles and very high heels. Clyde saw her from the knee downwards, as he blundered out of the strobe lights and into the dark.

It had been raining earlier; the air was still damp, and there were puddles underfoot. Clyde had a torch. Slicing through the clammy night, the beam buried itself in her new coney coat, nuzzling at the dark-brown fur. She saw her face in one of the puddles, a white moon, a globe. There was a smell of vomit and chicken curry. Cats cried like human babies from the wall of an old washhouse. She put her back to the plum-coloured brick, waiting for him to catch her up.

Clyde thought his luck was in. She could tell that from the way his long face split in an uncertain grin, and from the way he fumbled at his flies. He lowered the torch beam decorously. She reached forward and took the torch from him, tickling the back of his hand in a flirtatious way with her long nails. Her face downcast, she turned the beam full on Clyde’s exposed genital equipment. Clyde darted back. “Shy?” she said; half challenging and very coy. She reached out with her right hand for what he had on offer. A thin wail rose to join the noise of the cats. For good measure, she hit him with the torch on the side of the head. It was surprisingly sturdy, she thought, for plastic; she would keep it as a souvenir. Clyde backed off, folding his long body in half and retching onto the cobblestones. He flailed his arms and upended a dustbin with a clatter. Its entrails spilled out across the yard. From inside the club, Sam-7 and the Alkali Inspectorate ground their rhythms into the smoky air; off the beat, Lizzie stamped on Clyde’s fingers. From way across the town she could hear the sound of a train rattling across the points, the 1.10 A.M. sleeper from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston. Fearing that the damp might bring Lizzie’s hair out of curl, she took her chiffon scarf from her pocket and shook it out. She saw the stars through it, the fuzzy and rose-pink constellations, so lost and far away, all shot through with the Lurex in the weave. Her blood was up. She knotted it under her chin as she clicked along the street.

She was only a quarter of a mile from Napier Street when she met Mr. K.; and it was all over quickly. She was not surprised to see the familiar shape trundling along, enjoying the amenities of the small hours. For a moment she forgot that it was Lizzie who was out, and she almost called to him. They came face to face at the street corner. It was clear at once that he shared Clyde’s misperceptions; he thought that she was an amenity herself. He raised his stubbly head, and she saw the loneliness and hunger in his eyes. Bugger this for a game of coconuts, she thought. He put out a hand, so she bit it. It was quickly and unreflectingly done; a few clumps with her doubled fist, while the torch beam blinded him. She was not stronger than other women, but quite free from their dread of inflicting pain. “Mater Amabilis!” he cried, as her platform sole seemed to displace his kneecap. He did not resist; it was as if he felt he had it coming. Refuge of Sinners, Health of the Sick. The red nails came at him out of the dazzle. Morning Star, Ark of the Covenant: at first her blows seemed to make no impact on his larded torso, but gradually his knees began to sag. Tower of Ivory, Cause of Our Joy: grunting with effort, she pounded the ribs in the region of his heart. Virgin Most Merciful, Mirror of Justice: he gagged and staggered up against the wall, hunching his spine and throwing his arms over his head. Queen of the Apostles, Gate of Heaven: soon she would stop, either from boredom or fatigue. But her stamina was remarkable. She was treading on his feet now, one two, one two, like a storm trooper. Singular Vessel of Devotion, Mystical Rose, Tower of David, Mother most pure, ora pro nobis; not quite at the Hour of Our Death, but now, please, while we are bleeding in the gutter and it can still do us some good.

Colin’s dreams now lay in ruins; also, it was necessary for him to move his bank account. He called into one or two, picking up leaflets about mortgages and saving schemes, furtively eyeing the cashiers to see if they appeared libidinous. Standing in the High Street, he found himself clutching a sheaf of dark purple leaflets entitled “Our Executor Service.” Hastily he stuffed them into a passing litter bin, looking round to see if he was being observed.

When he arrived home, Dr. Rudge was just leaving. Sylvia, bundled into her combat jacket, was seeing him off at Florence’s gate. It was 4:30 P.M., blue and cold. He let himself in at the front door. Suzanne was hanging about in the hall, probably waiting for the phone to ring.

“Did Jim call you?” he asked.

“Yes, he called.”

“So you know what happened?”

“Yes, so I know.” Her voice was listless. She crossed her arms over her belly. “I can’t follow all the—permutations. It tires me. My back aches.”

“Have you told your mother?”

“No, what’s the point? That’s up to you.”

“Yes…thanks.”

“Only, if you start rowing, I’ll have to leave. I can’t stand it.”

“I don’t think that will arise.”

“You’re not going to tell her about Isabel?”

“She probably knows. I think she does. Oh, not the name…but that there was somebody. I’m not sure that Isabel being Jim’s wife adds a new dimension to our problems. It seems to, when you first think about it, but…it’s not incest or anything, is it?”

“No, it’s not that. Well, I hope you can sort yourselves out.” Suzanne nodded distantly, as if they were only slight acquaintances. It was good of her, he thought, not to take up a moral stance. “It’s kind of weird,” she added, as she lumbered away.

Sylvia came in, rubbing her blue hands. “Oh, there you are, Colin. I’ve had a rotten day.”

“You look all in.”

“She’s shouted and raved for hours. You know what it is now? She keeps pointing at Lizzie and saying that her name’s Wilmot. She says she’s called Wilmot and she used to live next door.”

“This is next door.”

“I know that. I’d worked that out. There was never anybody called Wilmot living here, was there?”

“Not that I remember. I only remember the Axons. They lived here for years.”

“Yes, Evelyn and what’s her name, Muriel. You’d hardly mix those two up with anybody else. I never knew Evelyn’s husband. What was he called?”

“Clifford. Clifford Axon. Florence would tell you.”

“Perhaps he had a friend called Wilmot.”

“I don’t think so. He was an eccentric. He spent all his time in the garden shed. What did the doctor say, then?”

“I reminded him of what the hospital told us. That if we got desperate they’d offer her a bed. He wasn’t very sympathetic. He didn’t seem to think we were desperate.” I have often been desperate, Colin thought, but no one ever offered me a bed. “He told me this awful story about some people he knows who’ve got a demented mother and a handicapped fourteen-year-old in a council flat on the eighth floor. He said, there are two of you ladies. I told him I had commitments. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Charity begins at home.’ I could have choked him.”

“Is Florence back? Is Mum on her own?”

“Just for a few minutes. It won’t hurt her. He said we could get the children to help. Can you imagine? He doesn’t know our children. I have to pay Lizzie to stay with her every time I go out to the CAB.”

“Perhaps Francis could arrange the odd parish helper.”

“Everyone’s gone on the peace march,” Sylvia said. “And here I am, stuck at home. Anyway, he’s given her some more sedatives, he says they’re strong.” Her gaze slid away from Colin’s face; it came to rest obliquely, at the side of his head. He took her arm.

“I expect we ought to talk some time, Sylvia. We can’t continue like this, exchanging the occasional word wedged up behind the front door.”

“I never have time to sit down. Your mother, and Suzanne—it’s driven everything else out of my head.” You need leisure for an unhappy marriage, she seemed to imply. “But I can’t go on like this.”

“No?”

“No. There are half a dozen community projects to be set in train.”

“I’m worried about Florence,” he said impulsively. “I think the strain’s too much for her. I think she might—”

“What?”

“No. Nothing. Never mind.”

Jim Ryan said to his wife: “I suppose we could adopt it?”

“Adopt it?” she said. “I’d rather drown it.” She looked at him; her voice and expression suddenly altered. “Besides, there’s no need now.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Come here. Feel.”

“Feel what? What are you doing?”

Carefully she laid the flat of his hand against the front of her body, keeping it covered with her own.

“I thought it was my liver,” she said. “But it can’t be, can it?”

“How did it happen? After all this time?”

“I have no bloody idea.”

“You’d better go to the doctor,” Jim said. He was alarmed. He almost felt that it was not a natural occurrence.

“He’ll tell me to stop drinking.”

“You’ll have to stop. You’ll damage it.”

Isabel smiled into his face, madly and slyly. “You never know,” she said, “who’ll be damaged most in the end.”

Muriel met Sholto. He looked haggard; his feet were damp, and his clothes were wearing out. “Still holding down your job?” he asked. She nodded. “You’re doing all right, Muriel. Still going in disguise?”

“Yes. But not for long now.”

“You don’t still hold this changeling crap?”

She said, “I’m lonely, Sholto, out here in the town. Sometimes I’d like to climb back into my head. I’d like to sit on my bed and double up, and slide right down my own throat. Do you understand?”

“I’m finished with Crisp,” Sholto said, not listening. “He’s turned criminal. And you—I don’t want to know. You’ll be taking babies out of prams at the supermarket.”

“They don’t have prams,” Muriel said. “They strap them into those buggy things, or carry them on their backs. When I look at Miss Suzanne, all the words get tangled up inside my head, all those words you showed me on that pot head. In my mother’s day, Sholto, we had a special room in our house. In that room my mother said there were things would pick the flesh off your bones. Where did it go to, that flesh? It isn’t dead. It must be somewhere.”

“You murdered that poor old bugger at the hospital.”

“It wasn’t murder. It was an execution. He didn’t do well by me, Sholto. I could have been a married wife by now. He did it all without a by-your-leave. He never gave me a bouquet. Single red roses, that’s what you give a girl.”

“Now you’re driving that Polack mad; or whatever he is.”

“I don’t drive. They go by themselves. He says there are men on the streets with poisoned umbrellas. He says there are countries where women walk round with black curtains over their heads. And that there’s a man called Castro, and they sent him exploding cigars. He says they have factories where they make diseases.” She blinked. “I never told him any of that.”

Sholto glowered at her, out of his little rat’s face. “When I met you, Muriel, I asked you if you was mad, or stupid. You said you was both. It took us in.”

“I’m all gone to nothing.” She hit her fist against her ribs, bending over as if to muffle the hollow sound. “Those ghosties have sucked the life out of me. Mother set them on. I’ve stopped expecting her. I think they’ve sucked her up too. Now there’s only the changeling left.”

“What you are is wicked,” Sholto said.

Behind her thick glasses, Muriel blinked again.

“Do you know,” said Sylvia, as she poured her muesli, “that in the past two years, according to a recent opinion poll, one in four of the population visited a canal?”

“Really?” Colin yawned. “Any particular population? It can’t be Venice, I suppose.”

“You know what I mean. In England and Wales. In fact, twenty-seven per cent. That’s more than one in four.”

“Stranger than fiction,” Colin said.

“Now of these people, seventy-one per cent went for a walk. Eight per cent went fishing. Seven per cent hired a boat.”

“That still leaves a number unaccounted for. What were they doing?”

“One per cent went swimming,” Sylvia offered.

“I wouldn’t fancy that in our canal.”

“Exactly the point,” Sylvia said. “We’re going to have a community canal clean-up.”

Colin looked at her warily over the top of the newspaper, and sank down a little in his chair. He thought that his mother had tired her out, but she seemed to be getting a second wind. He heard her speak of sponsorship and job creation and government schemes, and how the probation service would bring along strong young recidivists, and the Sea Scouts and the Brownies would pick up the litter from the banks. He ducked his head well below the holidays page. Exclusive villa parties, he read, wind-surfing, houseparties on the water’s edge. Barbados, Crete, the Algarve. Love Nest for Two by Sardinia’s Sandy Beaches. Cheap flights. Cheap flights, free escapes. Cheap flights without leaving Coketown. “Hard Times,” he said to himself.

“Of course they are,” Sylvia agreed. “But this stretch should have been done two years ago. It was scheduled. I’ve got to get on to the Inland Waterways Board. Of course, it’s Francis’s idea really, but he’s got a lot on at the moment. There’s this man picketing the church.”

“Good God,” Colin said. “Is he violent?”

“No, not so far, he’s just a nuisance, but he does make threatening motions with his banner. He tries to stop people going in to Francis’s services. You know when we had that Christians Against Rate-Capping meeting? He stood outside howling abuse. If it goes on Francis will have to get the police in, and that’s against his principles.”

“Yes, I see the problem.” A November morning pressed its cold grey face against the kitchen window. No wonder he often felt that someone was looking over his shoulder. “Oh, well. It’s not as bad as any of ours.”

But Sylvia did not want to talk about the family. She did not mean to be deflected. Sylvia made progress; it was only his mind that went round and round endlessly, revolving the same problems. Isabel: my God, how miserable she must be. How frustrated, how agonised inside. Had he not some responsibility there? Supposing he had left his family all those years ago, would Isabel be different now? What if? And what if?

I could do with being two people really, he thought; people who could live quite alternative lives, and meet up from time to time to compare notes. I am incapable of a decision, and always have been; I wait for circumstances to make my decisions for me, and just as I pray for resolution, so I dread it. Act, and you might as well be dead. Action is the great abortionist. It wipes out freedom. It terminates desire.

“And then there was the chromium-plating plant,” Sylvia was saying, “pumping out acids year after year. And the dye works. I can remember a time when there were weeds on the canal, but now there’s just an inch of scum on the surface and that awful smell of rotten eggs. Francis says that there’s no oxygen in it at all. The water doesn’t move, and there’s a couple of feet of poisonous mud at the bottom. The walls are collapsing in. It could be damaging our health. He says there could be literally anything at the bottom of that canal.”

Since Dr. Rudge’s visit, Mrs. Sidney had sunk into a twilit world, sleeping for twenty hours of the twenty-four, surfacing only occasionally to ask for the Lord Chamberlain. It was much more peaceful, but unfortunately—and perhaps because of her new sedatives—she had become doubly incontinent. Florence had rung the hospital, but they said that, with Christmas coming up, and the long-range weather forecast being what it was, they could hardly think of taking her in before next May. Since then, disaster had struck.

It had made the national news: FIRE HAS BROKEN OUT AT A GERI ATRIC HOSPITAL IN THE MIDLANDS, TRAPPING STAFF AND PATIENTS IN A FIRST-FLOOR WARD. FIREMEN WHO EVACUATED VICTIMS FROM THE FORMER WORKHOUSE SAID THAT ESCAPE ROUTES WERE GROSSLY INADEQUATE. A PUBLIC INQUIRY HAS BEEN CALLED FOR.

When Florence heard, she went upstairs to her mother’s room. She stood by the bed with her arms folded, watching the withered eyelids flutter in drugged sleep. “That could have been you,” she whispered.

Dr. Rudge came by. “Lucky escape,” he said.

“If you say so, Doctor.”

“Oh, come come, Miss Sidney. You want your mother with you for some years yet.” As he coiled his stethoscope into his bag, Dr. Rudge looked sharply at her expression. He was a bald, tubby man, who prided himself on being humane; but really, there were no geriatric beds, and that was that.

Florence had run downstairs after him and followed him into the street. “I can’t go on,” she wailed. “Dr. Rudge, listen to me.”

Dr. Rudge stopped in surprise, bouncing his car keys on his palm. “But you’ve got the district nurse, Miss Sidney. Be thankful for small mercies.”

“But I can’t manage! The smell! And the way she wakes up and thinks she’s at Marlborough House! It frightens me!”

“You have domestic help, I understand.”

“She keeps abusing her! She says she’s the daughter of the woman who used to live next door. She accuses her of holding seances. It’s horrible. It’s worse than May of Teck. She’s totally and completely mad.”

“Really, pull yourself together,” said Dr. Rudge. “You know we’re promised a geriatric unit for 1990. Go in, Miss Sidney, it’s starting to rain. And I do have other calls to make.”

“But I can’t go on.” Florence’s voice rose into the damp afternoon. “Don’t you understand? We can’t take any more, any of us.” Two women, coming back from the Parade, rested their shopping baskets on a low wall and watched attentively. The Deakins, elderly people from down the road, were peeping out from their porch. Dr. Rudge cursed under his breath, and felt in his overcoat pockets for his prescription pad. He scribbled on it and ripped the page off.

“Try this to calm you down, Miss Sidney.” He thrust the prescription at her. Florence crumpled it in her fist and threw it after him. It struck him smartly on the neck as he jumped into his Volvo. He slammed the door and drove away.

“Old Aunt Flo,” said Suzanne now, coming into the kitchen. “Making a scene like that in the street. All the neighbours will be talking about it.”

“We’re beyond caring what the neighbours say,” Sylvia said. “We have to be.”

Suzanne manoeuvred herself into a chair. “I’ve come to tell you. I’m moving out when the baby’s born.”

Sylvia regarded her sadly. “I can’t stop you. Where are you planning to go?”

“I’ve got this friend, Edwina. She’s got this flat.”

“Unusual name,” Colin said.

“She’ll let me stay with her till Jim sorts himself out.”

“Jim will never be sorted out. You know that, Suzanne.”

“Don’t tell me what I know. Who are you to advise anybody?”

“How will Edwina like having a baby around?” Sylvia said. “She’ll soon get tired of it.”

“I’ve got other friends. I can move on.”

“You’re not a bloody gypsy. Babies can’t do with that sort of life. They have to be settled. They need a routine. They need to be kept warm.”

“Don’t think I’m staying here.” Suzanne’s voice quivered, on the edge of hysteria. “You’ve all let me down. This house is horrible. Nothing works. There’s no hot water. The lightbulb’s gone in my room and I daren’t stand on a chair. It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta. If I stand on a chair I’ll go dizzy and I’ll fall off and have a miscarriage and then Jim will never marry me.”

“I think you’re getting things out of proportion,” Sylvia said, with a restraint that Colin could only commend. “You ought to calm down. Ask Aunt Florence to give you one of your grandmother’s pills.”

“I can’t have pills,” Suzanne said, blubbering. Colin handed her his handkerchief. “I’ll give birth to a monster. I suppose I will anyway. What can you expect, coming from a family like this?”

Colin and Sylvia exchanged a glance, each beaten and weary face eyeing the other. Colin understood that cleaning up the canal was a diversion for his wife, just as pining for the lost girl who was now Isabel Ryan was a diversion for him. They were like a pair of felons roped together, singing to pass the time on their trip to Tyburn. Suzanne blew her nose into his handkerchief and gave it back to him. Her chin drooped. She looked eleven months gone.