What a Carve Up!

1

Tragedy had struck the Winshaws twice before, but never on such a terrible scale.

The first of these incidents takes us back to the night of November 30th 1942, when Godfrey Winshaw, then only in his thirty-third year, was shot down by German anti-aircraft fire as he flew a top-secret mission over Berlin. The news, which was relayed to Winshaw Towers in the early hours of the morning, was enough to drive his elder sister Tabitha clean out of her wits, where she remains to this day. Such was the violence of her distraction, in fact, that it was deemed impossible for her even to attend the memorial service which was held in her brother’s honour.

It is a curious irony that this same Tabitha Winshaw, today aged eighty-one and no more in possession of her thinking faculties than she has been for the last forty-five years, should be the patron and sponsor of the book which you, my friendly readers, now hold in your hands. The task of writing with any objectivity about her condition becomes somewhat problematic. Yet the facts must be stated, and the facts are these: that from the very moment she heard of Godfrey’s tragic demise, Tabitha has been in the grip of a grotesque delusion. In a word, it has been her belief (if such it can be called) that he was not brought down by German gunfire at all, but that the killing was the work of his own brother, Lawrence.

I have no wish to dwell unnecessarily on the pitiful infirmities which fate has chosen to visit upon a poor and weak-minded woman, but this matter must be explained insofar as it has a material bearing on the subsequent history of the Winshaw family, and it must, therefore, be put into some sort of context. I shall at least endeavour to be brief. The reader should know, then, that Tabitha was thirty-six years old when Godfrey died, and that she was still living the life of a spinster, never having shown the slightest inclination towards matrimony. In this regard it had already been noticed by several members of her family that her attitude towards the male sex was characterized at best by indifference and at worst by aversion: the lack of interest with which she received the approaches of her occasional suitors was matched only by her passionate attachment and devotion to Godfrey — who was, as the few reports and surviving photographs testify, by far the gayest, most handsome, most dynamic and generally prepossessing of the five brothers and sisters. Knowing the strength of Tabitha’s feelings, the family had fallen prey to a certain anxiety when Godfrey announced his engagement in the summer of 1940: but in place of the violent jealousy which some had feared, a warm and respectful friendship grew up between sister and prospective sister-in-law, and the marriage of Godfrey Winshaw to Mildred, née Ashby, passed off most successfully in December of that year.

Instead, Tabitha continued to reserve the sharpest edge of her animosity for her eldest brother Lawrence. The origins of the ill-feeling which subsisted between these unhappy siblings are not easy to trace. Most probably they had to do with temperamental differences. Like his father Matthew, Lawrence was a reserved and sometimes impatient man, who pursued his extensive national and international business interests with a single-minded determination which many construed as ruthlessness. That realm of feminine softness and delicate feeling in which Tabitha moved was thoroughly alien to him: he considered her flighty, over-sensitive, neurotic and — in a turn of phrase which can now be seen as sadly prophetic—‘a bit soft in the head’. (Nor, it has to be admitted, was he entirely alone in this view.) In short, they did their best to keep out of each other’s way; and the wisdom of this policy can be judged from the appalling events which followed upon Godfrey’s death.

Immediately before setting off on his fatal mission, Godfrey had been enjoying a few days’ rest in the tranquil atmosphere of Winshaw Towers. Mildred, of course, was with him: she was at this stage several months pregnant with their first and only child (a son, as it was to turn out), and it was presumably the prospect of seeing these, her favourite members of the family, which induced Tabitha to forsake the comfort of her own substantial residence and cross the threshold of her hated brother’s home. Although Matthew Winshaw and his wife were still alive and in good health, they were by now effectively consigned to a set of chambers in a self-contained wing, and Lawrence had established himself as master of the house. It would be stretching a point, all the same, to say that he and his wife Beatrice made good hosts. Lawrence, as usual, was preoccupied with his business activities, which required him to spend long hours on the telephone in the privacy of his office, and even, on one occasion, to make an overnight trip to London (for which he departed without making any kind of apology or explanation to his guests). Meanwhile Beatrice made no pretence of welcoming her husband’s relatives, and would leave them unattended for the better part of each day while she retired to her bedroom on the pretext of a recurrent migraine. Thus Godfrey, Mildred and Tabitha, perhaps as they themselves would have wished, were thrown back on their own devices, and passed several pleasant days in each other’s company, wandering through the gardens and amusing themselves in the vast drawing, sitting, dining and reception rooms of Winshaw Towers.

In the afternoon on which Godfrey was to leave for the airfield at Hucknall on the first leg of his mission — something of which his wife and sister had only an inkling — he had a long and private interview with Lawrence in the brown study. No details of their discussion will ever be known. Following his departure, both women became uneasy: Mildred with the natural anxiety of a wife and mother-to-be whose husband has set out upon an errand of some importance and uncertain outcome, Tabitha with a more violent and uncontrolled agitation which manifested itself in a worsening of her hostility towards Lawrence.

Her irrationality in this respect was already evident from a foolish misunderstanding which had arisen only a few days earlier. Bursting into her brother’s office late in the evening, she had surprised him during one of his business conversations and snatched away the scrap of paper upon which — in her version of events — he had been transcribing secret instructions over the telephone. She even went so far as to claim that Lawrence had been ‘looking guilty’ when she interrupted him, and that he had attempted to seize the piece of paper back from her by force. With pathetic obstinacy, however, she clung on to it and subsequently stored it away among her personal documents. Later, when she made her fantastic accusation against Lawrence, she threatened to bring it forward as ‘evidence’. Fortunately the excellent Dr Quince, trusted physician to the Winshaws for several decades, had by that stage made his diagnosis — the effect of which was to determine that no statements made by Tabitha thereafter would be received with anything other than the deepest scepticism. History, incidentally, seems to have vindicated the good doctor’s judgment, because when certain of Tabitha’s relics recently came into the hands of the present writer, the contended scrap of paper was found to be among them. Now yellowed with age, it turned out to contain nothing more remarkable than Lawrence’s scribbled note to the butler, asking for a light supper to be sent up to his room.

Tabitha’s condition deteriorated still further after Godfrey had left, and on the night that he flew his final mission a peculiar incident took place, both more serious and more ludicrous than any that had gone before. This grew out of another of Tabitha’s delusions, to the effect that her brother was holding secret meetings with Nazi spies in his bedroom. Time and again she claimed to have stood outside his locked bedroom door and caught the distant murmur of voices talking in clipped, authoritative German. Finally, when not even Mildred was able to take this allegation seriously, she attempted to make a desperate proof. Having pilfered the key (the only key) to Lawrence’s bedroom earlier that afternoon, she waited until such time as she was convinced that he was engaged in one of his sinister conferences, then locked the door from the outside and ran downstairs, shouting at the top of her voice that she had captured her brother in the very act of betraying his country. The butler, the maids, the kitchen staff, the chauffeur, the valet, the bootboy and all the domestics immediately came to her aid, followed closely by Mildred and Beatrice; and the entire company, now gathered in the Great Hall, was about to climb the staircase to investigate when Lawrence himself emerged, cue in hand, from the billiard room where he had been passing the hours after dinner in a few solitary frames. Needless to say, his bedroom was found empty; but this demonstration did not satisfy Tabitha, who continued to scream at her brother, accusing him of every manner of trickery and under-handedness, until finally she was restrained and carried to her room in the West Wing, where a sedative was administered by the ever-resourceful Nurse Gannet.

Such was the atmosphere at Winshaw Towers on that dreadful evening, as the deathly silence of nightfall spread itself over the venerable old seat; a silence which was to be broken at three o’clock in the morning by the ringing of the telephone, and with it the news of Godfrey’s terrible fate.

No bodies were ever recovered from that wreckage; neither Godfrey nor his co-pilot was ever to be accorded the honour of a Christian burial. Two weeks later, however, a small memorial service was held at the Winshaws’ private chapel. His parents sat stone-faced and ashen throughout the proceedings. His younger brother Mortimer, his sister Olivia and her husband Walter had all travelled to Yorkshire to pay their respects: only Tabitha was absent, for as soon as she heard the news, she had thrown herself into a frenzy. Among the instruments of violence with which she had attacked Lawrence were candlesticks, golf umbrellas, butter knives, razor blades, riding crops, a loofah, a mashie, a niblick, an Afghan battle horn of considerable archaeological interest, a chamber-pot and a bazooka. The very next day, Dr Quince signed the papers which authorized her immediate confinement in a nearby asylum.

She was not to step outside the walls of this establishment for another nineteen years. During that time she rarely attempted to communicate with other members of the family, or expressed any interest in receiving them as visitors. Her mind (or what few, pitiable shreds and tatters of it remained) continued to dwell inflexibly on the circumstances surrounding her brother’s death, and she became an obsessive reader of books, journals and periodicals concerned with the conduct of the war, the history of the Royal Air Force, and all matters even remotely connected with aviation. (During this period, for instance, her name appears on the regular subscribers’ lists of such magazines as Professional Pilot, Flypast, Jane’s Military Review and Cockpit Quarterly.) And so there she remained, prudently left to the care of a trained and dedicated staff, until September 16th 1961, when she was granted a temporary release at the request of her brother Mortimer: a decision, however compassionately taken, which in itself would soon come to be regarded as unfortunate.

Death visited Winshaw Towers again that night.

2

Sitting at the bay window of their bedroom, looking out over the East Terrace and the bleak sprawl of the moors which rolled towards the horizon, Rebecca felt Mortimer’s hand rest gently against her shoulder.

‘It’ll be all right,’ he said.

‘I know.’

He squeezed her and went over to the mirror, where he made small adjustments to his tie and cummerbund.

‘It’s really very nice of Lawrence. In fact they’re all being very nice. I’ve never known my family be so nice to each other.’

It was Mortimer’s fiftieth birthday and to honour the occasion Lawrence had organized a small but lavish dinner, to which the entire family — even the outcast Tabitha — was invited. It would be the first time that Rebecca, thirteen years her husband’s junior and still possessed of a childlike, rather vulnerable beauty, had met them all at one sitting.

‘They’re not monsters, you know. Not really.’ Mortimer rotated his left cuff-link through fifteen degrees, squinting at the angle critically. ‘I mean, you like Mildred, don’t you?’

‘But she’s not really family.’ Rebecca continued to stare out of the window. ‘Poor Milly. It’s such a shame she never remarried. I’m afraid Mark’s turned into an awful handful.’

‘He’s just got in with a boisterous set, that’s all. Happened to me when I was at school. Oxford’ll soon knock that out of him.’

Rebecca turned her head: an impatient gesture.

‘You’re always making excuses for them. I know they all hate me. They’ve never forgiven us for not inviting them to the wedding.’

‘Well that was my decision, not yours. I didn’t want them all there, gawping at you.’

‘Well there you are: it’s quite obvious that you don’t like them yourself, and there must be a rea—’

There was a discreet knock on the door, and the butler’s gaunt, solemn figure took a few deferential steps into the room.

‘Drinks are now being served, sir. In the ante-drawing room.’

‘Thank you, Pyles.’ He had turned on his heels and was about to leave when Mortimer detained him. ‘Oh, Pyles?’

‘Sir?’

‘If you could just look in and check on the children. We left them in the nursery. They were with Nurse Gannet, but you know how she … dozes, sometimes.’

‘Very good, sir.’ He paused and added, before withdrawing: ‘And may I offer you, sir, on behalf of all the staff, our warmest congratulations, and many happy returns of the day.’

‘Thank you. That’s very kind.’

‘Our pleasure, sir.’

He made a silent exit. Mortimer walked over to the window and stood behind his wife, whose gaze remained fixed on the pitiless landscape.

‘Well, we’d better be getting downstairs.’

Rebecca did not move.

‘The kids’ll be fine. He’ll keep an eye on them. He’s an absolute brick, really.’

‘I hope they don’t break anything. Their games always seem so violent, and then we’d never hear the end of it from Lawrence.’

‘It’s Roddy who’s the little devil. He goads Hilary on. She’s a sweet little thing.’

‘They’re both as bad as each other.’

Mortimer began stroking her neck. He could feel her nervousness.

‘Darling, you’re shivering.’

‘I don’t know what it is.’ He sat beside her and impulsively she nestled against his shoulder, like a bird seeking refuge. ‘I’m all of a flutter. I can hardly bear to face them.’

‘If it’s Tabitha you’re worried about—’

‘Not just Tabitha—’

‘—then you’ve nothing to be afraid of. She’s changed completely in the last couple of years. She and Lawrence even talked for a little while this afternoon. I honestly think she’s forgotten that whole business about Godfrey: she doesn’t even remember who he was. She’s been writing these nice letters to Lawrence from the — from the home, and he’s said the whole thing’s forgiven and forgotten as far as he’s concerned, so I don’t think there’ll be any trouble from that quarter tonight. The doctors say she’s more or less back to normal.’

Mortimer heard the hollowness of these words and hated himself for it. Only that afternoon he had seen evidence of his sister’s continued eccentricity, when he had surprised her in the course of a walk around the wildest and most far-flung reaches of the grounds. He had been emerging from the hounds’ graveyard and was about to strike out in the direction of the croquet lawn when he caught what seemed to be a glimpse of Tabitha crouched in one of the densest areas of shrubbery. As he approached, without making a sound for fear of alarming her, he was dismayed to find that she was muttering to herself. His heart sank: it seemed that he had, after all, been too optimistic about her condition, and perhaps too precipitate in suggesting that she should be allowed to attend the family party. Unable to make out anything intelligible from her broken mumbles and whispers, he had coughed politely, whereupon Tabitha gave a little scream of shock, there was a violent rustling from the bushes, and she burst out a few seconds later, nervously brushing the twigs and thorns from her clothing and almost speechless with confusion.

‘I — Morty, I had no idea, I–I was just …’

‘I didn’t mean to surprise you, Tabs. It’s just —’

‘Not at all, I was — I was out for a walk, and I saw — I thought I’d explore … Heavens, what must you think of me? I’m mortified. Morty-fied, in front of Morty …’

Her voice died, and she coughed: a high, anxious cough. To ward off a heavy silence, Mortimer said:

‘Magnificent, isn’t it? This garden. I don’t know how they keep it so well.’ He took a deep breath. ‘That jasmine. Just smell it.’

Tabitha didn’t reply. Her brother took her by the arm and walked her back towards the terrace.

He had not mentioned this incident to Rebecca.

‘It’s not just Tabitha. It’s this whole house.’ Rebecca turned towards him and for the first time that evening looked deep into his eyes. ‘If we ever came to live here, darling, I should die. I’m sure I would.’ She shuddered. ‘There’s something about this place.’

‘Why on earth should we come to live here? What a silly thing to say.’

‘Who else is going to take it over when Lawrence is gone? He’s got no sons to leave it to; and you’re his only brother, now.’

Mortimer gave an irritable laugh; it was clear he wanted the subject dropped. ‘I very much doubt if I shall outlive Lawrence. He’s got a good many more years in him yet.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ said Rebecca, after a while. She took a long, last look at the moors, then gathered up her pearls from the dresser and fastened them carefully. Outside the dogs were howling for their supper.

Poised in the doorway leading from the Great Hall, her own small hand folded tightly in Mortimer’s, Rebecca found herself confronted by a roomful of Winshaws. There were no more than a dozen of them, but to her it seemed like a vast, numberless throng, whose braying and mewling voices merged into a single unintelligible clamour. Within seconds she and her husband had been pounced upon, separated, absorbed into the crowd, patted and touched and kissed, welcomed and congratulated, plied with drink, their news solicited, their health inquired after. Rebecca could not distinguish half of the faces; she didn’t even know who she was talking to, some of the time, and her recollection of each conversation would forever afterwards be hazy and unfocused.

For our part, meanwhile, we should seize the opportunity offered by this gathering to become more closely acquainted with four particular members of the family.

Here, for one, is Thomas Winshaw: thirty-seven, unmarried, and still having to justify himself to his mother Olivia, in whose eyes all his glittering success in the financial world counts for nothing beside his continued failure to start a family of his own. Now she listens tight-lipped as he tries to put a favourable gloss on a new development in his career which clearly strikes her as more frivolous than most.

‘Mother, you can get an extremely high return from investing in films these days. You’ve only got to be involved with one really big hit, you see, and you’re sitting on an absolute fortune. Enough to compensate for a dozen failures.’

‘If you were just in it for the money you’d have my blessing, you know you would,’ says Olivia. Her Yorkshire accent is thicker than her brothers’ and sister’s, but her mouth has the same downward, humourless turn. ‘The Lord knows, you’ve shown yourself clever enough where that’s concerned. But Henry’s told me what your real motives are, so don’t try to deny it. Actresses. That’s what you’re after. You like being able to tell them you can get them a job in the pictures.’

‘You do talk nonsense sometimes, Mother. You should listen to yourself.’

‘I just don’t want any member of this family making a fool of himself, that’s all. They’re no better than whores, most of those women, and you’ll only end up catching something nasty.’

But Thomas, who feels for his mother no more or less than he feels for most people — namely, such contempt that he seldom considers them worth arguing with — merely smiles. Something about her last remark seems to amuse him, and his eyes take on a cold glaze of private reminiscence. He is thinking, in fact, that his mother is quite wide of the mark: for his interest in young actresses, strong as it is, does not extend to physical contact. His real interest is in watching, not touching, and so for Thomas the principal benefit of his new-found role in the film industry lies in the excuse it gives him to visit the studios whenever he wants. Thus he is able to turn up during the filming of scenes which, on the screen, will simply offer innocent titillation, but which in the actual making provide perfect opportunities for the serious voyeur. Bedroom scenes; bathroom scenes; sunbathing scenes; scenes involving missing bikini tops and vanishing soap suds and falling towels. He has friends, spies, minions among the cast and camera crew to alert him in advance whenever such a scene is about to be shot. He has even persuaded editors to give him access to discarded footage, sequences which turned out to be too revealing for inclusion in the final cut. (For Thomas has started out by investing in comedies, modestly budgeted, reliably popular entertainments starring the likes of Sid James, Kenneth Connor, Jimmy Edwards and Wilfrid Hyde-White.) From these, he likes to clip his favourite images and turn them into slides which he will project on to the wall of his office in Cheapside late at night, long after his employees have gone home. So much cleaner, so much more personal, so much less risky than the tedious business of inviting actresses back to his house, making them absurd promises, all that fumbling and coercion. Thomas is annoyed with Henry, then, not so much for giving away secrets to his mother, as for implying that his own motives could be quite so commonplace and demeaning.

‘You shouldn’t take notice of anything that Henry tells you, you know,’ he now says, with a chilly smile. ‘After all, he is a politician.’

And here is Henry, Thomas’s younger brother, already recognized as one of the most ambitious Labour MPs of his generation. Their relationship goes beyond the ordinary ties of blood and extends to a number of common business interests, for Henry has a seat on the board of several companies generously supported by Thomas’s bank. Should anyone have the temerity to suggest a conflict of loyalty between these activities and the socialist ideals which he professes so loudly in the House of Commons, Henry has a variety of well-rehearsed answers. He is used to dealing with naïve questions, which is why he is able to laugh airily as his young cousin Mark shoots him a teasing glance and says:

‘So, I take it you’ll be travelling back to London first thing tomorrow morning, in time for the demonstration? We all know that you Labour bods are in cahoots with CND.’

‘Some of my colleagues will undoubtedly be attending. You won’t find me there. There are no votes in the nuclear issue, for one thing. Most of the people in this country recognize the unilateralists for what they are: a bunch of cranks.’ He pauses to allow one of the under-footmen to refill their glasses of champagne. ‘Do you know the best bit of news I’ve heard all month?’

‘Bertrand Russell getting seven days in the slammer?’

‘That did bring a smile to my face, I must say. But I was thinking more about Khrushchev. I suppose you’ve heard that he’s started testing H-bombs again, out in the Arctic or somewhere?’

‘Really?’

‘Ask Thomas what that did to shares in the munitions companies a couple of days later. Through the roof, they went. Through the bloody roof. We made a few hundred grand overnight. I’m telling you, earlier this year, with Gagarin coming over and everyone talking about a bit of a thaw, things were beginning to look a bit shaky. I didn’t like the look of it at all. Thank God it turned out to be a flash in the pan. First the Wall goes up, and now the Russkies start letting off fireworks again. Looks like we’re back in business.’ He drains his glass and pats his cousin affectionately. ‘Of course, I can talk to you like this, because you’re family.’

Mark Winshaw digests this information in silence. Perhaps because he never knew his own father, Godfrey, he has always regarded his cousins as paternal figures and looked to them for guidance. (His mother has attempted to offer him guidance too, of course, has tried to inculcate her own values and codes of conduct, but he has, from an early age, made a point of ignoring her.) He has already learned a great deal from Thomas and Henry, about how to make money, and how the divisions and conflicts between lesser, weaker-minded men can be exploited for personal gain. He will be going up to Oxford in a few weeks’ time, and has just spent the summer working in a minor administrative capacity at the office of Thomas’s bank in Cheapside.

‘It was so kind of you to give him that job,’ Mildred now says to Thomas. ‘I do hope he wasn’t a nuisance or anything.’

Mark’s expression is one of undiluted hatred, but his glance goes unnoticed, and he says nothing.

‘Not at all,’ Thomas answers. ‘He was very useful to have around. In fact he made quite an impression on my colleagues. Quite an impression.’

‘Really? In what way?’

Thomas proceeds to tell the story of a discussion which took place between senior members of the bank over lunch in the City one Friday afternoon: a lunch to which Mark had been invited. The conversation had turned to the recent resignation of one of the partners over the role taken by the bank in the Kuwait crisis. Thomas feels called upon to explain the details of this crisis to Mildred, assuming that, as a woman, she won’t know anything about it. He therefore tells her how Kuwait was declared an independent Sheikdom in June, and how, only one week later, Brigadier-General Kassem had announced his intention of absorbing it into his own country, claiming that according to historical precedent it had always been an ‘integral part of Iraq’. He reminds her that Kuwait had appealed to the British government for military support, which had been promised by both the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, and the Lord Privy Seal, Edward Heath; and that, since the first week of July, more than six thousand British troops had been moved to Kuwait from Kenya, Aden, Cyprus, the United Kingdom and Germany, establishing a sixty-mile defence line only five miles from the border in readiness for an Iraqi attack.

‘The thing is,’ says Thomas, ‘that this junior partner fellow, Pemberton-Oakes, couldn’t stomach the fact that we were still lending enormous sums of money to the Iraqis to help them keep their army going. He said that they were the enemy, and we were more or less at war with them, so we shouldn’t be giving them any help at all. He said it was Kuwait we should be dealing with as a matter of principle — I think that was the word he used — even though their borrowing requirements were pretty negligible and the bank wouldn’t get much out of it in the long run. Well, there we all were, with people chipping in on both sides, putting the alternative points of view, when somebody had the bright idea of asking young Mark what he thought.’

‘And what did he think?’ asks Mildred, with a resigned note to her voice.

Thomas chuckles. ‘He said it was perfectly obvious, as far as he could see. He said we should be lending money to both sides, of course, and if war broke out we should lend them even more, so they could be kept at it for as long as possible, using up more and more equipment and losing more and more men and getting more and more heavily in our debt. You should have seen their faces! Well, it was probably what they’d all been thinking, you see, but he was the only one who had the nerve to come right out with it.’ He turns to Mark, whose face has remained, throughout this conversation, a perfect blank. ‘You’ll go a long way in the banking business, Mark, old boy. A long way.’

Mark smiles. ‘Oh, I don’t think banking is for me, to be honest. I intend to be more in the thick of things. But thanks for giving me the opportunity, all the same. I certainly learned a thing or two.’

He turns and crosses the room, conscious that his mother’s eyes have never left him.

Mortimer now approaches Dorothy Winshaw, the stolid, ruddy-faced daughter of Lawrence and Beatrice, who is standing alone in a corner of the room, her lips set in their usual petulant, ferocious pout.

‘Well, well,’ says Mortimer, straining to inject a note of cheerfulness into his voice. ‘And how’s my favourite niece?’ (Dorothy is, by the way, his only niece, so his use of this epithet is a touch disingenuous.) ‘Not long now before the happy event. A bit of excitement in the air, I dare say?’

‘I suppose so,’ says Dorothy, sounding anything but excited. Mortimer’s reference is to the fact that she will shortly, at the age of twenty-five, be married off to George Brunwin, one of the county’s most successful and well-liked farmers.

‘Oh, come on,’ says Mortimer. ‘Surely you must be feeling a little … well …’

‘I feel exactly what you would expect in any woman,’ Dorothy cuts in, ‘who knows that she is about to marry one of the biggest fools in the world.’

Mortimer looks around to see whether her fiancé, who has also been invited to the party, might have heard this remark. Dorothy doesn’t seem to care.

‘What on earth can you mean?’

‘I mean that if he doesn’t grow up, soon, and join the rest of us in the twentieth century, he and I aren’t going to have a penny between us in five years’ time.’

‘But Brunwin’s is one of the best-run farms for miles around. That’s common knowledge.’

Dorothy snorts. ‘Just because he went to agricultural college twenty years ago, that doesn’t mean that George has a clue what’s going on in the modern world. He doesn’t even know what a conversion rate is, for God’s sake.’

‘A conversion rate?’

‘The ratio,’ Dorothy explains patiently, as if to a dim-witted farmhand, ‘of how much food you put in to an animal, compared to what you get out of it in the end, by way of meat. Really, all you have to do is read a few issues of Farming Express, and it all becomes perfectly clear. You’ve heard of Henry Saglio, I suppose?’

‘Politician, isn’t he?’

‘Henry Saglio is an American chicken farmer who’s been promising great things for the British housewife. He’s managed to breed a new strain of broiler which grows to three and a half pounds in nine weeks, with a feed conversion rate of 2.3. He uses the most up-to-date and intensive methods.’ Dorothy is growing animated; more animated than Mortimer has ever seen her in his life. Her eyes are aglow. ‘And here’s George, the bloody simpleton, still letting his chickens scratch around in the open air as if they were household pets. Not to mention his veal calves, which are allowed to sleep on straw and get more exercise than his blasted dogs do, probably. And he wonders why he doesn’t get good white meat out of them!’

‘Well, I don’t know …’ says Mortimer. ‘Perhaps he has other things to think about. Other priorities.’

‘Other priorities?’

‘You know, the … welfare of the animals. The atmosphere of the farm.’

‘Atmosphere?’

‘Sometimes there can be more to life than making a profit, Dorothy.’

She stares at him. Perhaps it is her fury at finding herself addressed in a tone which she remembers from many years ago — the tone which an adult would adopt towards a trusting child — which provokes the insolence of her reply.

‘You know, Daddy always said that you and Aunt Tabitha were the odd ones of the family.’

She puts down her glass, pushes past her uncle and moves quickly to join in a conversation on the other side of the room.

Meanwhile, up in the nursery, there are two more Winshaws with a part to play in the family’s history. Roddy and Hilary, aged nine and seven, have tired of the rocking-horse, the model railway, the table-tennis set, the dolls and the puppets. They have even tired of their attempts to rouse Nurse Gannet by tickling her softly under the nose with a feather. (The feather in question having previously belonged to a sparrow which Roddy shot down with his airgun earlier that afternoon.) They are on the point of abandoning the nursery altogether and going downstairs to eavesdrop on the party — although, to tell the truth, the thought of walking down those long, dimly lit corridors and staircases frightens them somewhat — when Roddy has a flash of inspiration.

‘I know!’ he says, seizing upon a little pedal car and squeezing himself with difficulty into the driver’s seat. ‘I’ll be Yuri Gagarin, and this is my space-car, and I’ve just landed on Mars.’

For like every other boy of his age, Roddy worships the young cosmonaut. Earlier in the year he was even taken to see him when he visited the Earl’s Court exhibition, and Mortimer had held him aloft so that he could actually shake hands with the man who had voyaged among the stars. Now, crammed awkwardly into the undersized car, he starts to pedal with all his might while making guttural engine noises. ‘Gagarin to Mission Control. Gagarin to Mission Control. Are you reading me?’

‘Well who am I supposed to be then?’ says Hilary.

‘You can be Laika, the Russian space dog.’

‘But she’s dead. She died in her rocket. Uncle Henry told me.’

‘Well just pretend.’

So Hilary starts scampering around on all fours, barking madly, sniffing at the Martian rocks and scratching in the dust. She keeps it up for about two minutes.

‘This is really boring.’

‘Shut up. This is Major Gagarin to Mission Control. I have safely landed on Mars and am now looking for signs of intelligent life. All I can see so far are some — hey, what’s that?’

A bright object on the nursery floor has caught his eye, and he pedals towards it as fast as he can: but Hilary gets there first.

‘A half-crown!’

She covers the coin with her hand and her eyes shine with triumph. Then Major Gagarin steps out of his space-car and stands over her.

‘I saw it first. Give me that.’

‘Not on your life.’

Slowly but purposefully, Roddy places his right foot over Hilary’s hand and begins to press down.

‘Give it to me!’

‘No!’

Her voice rises to a scream as Roddy increases the pressure, until there is a sudden crack: the sound of bones crushing and splintering. Hilary howls as her brother lifts his foot and picks up the coin with calm satisfaction. There is blood on the nursery floor. Hilary sees this and her screams get shriller and wilder until they are loud enough to wake even Nurse Gannet from her cocoa-induced stupor.

Downstairs, the dinner party is by now well advanced. The guests have whetted their appetite with a light soup (stilton and steamed pumpkin) and have made short work of their trout (poached in dry Martini with a nettle sauce). While waiting for the third course to arrive, Lawrence, who is seated at the head of the table, excuses himself and leaves the room; on his return, he stops to have a few words with Mortimer, the guest of honour, who is seated at the centre. Lawrence’s intention is to make a discreet inquiry into the condition of their sister.

‘How d’you reckon the old loony’s bearing up?’ he whispers.

Mortimer winces, and his reply has a reproving tone: ‘If you’re referring to Tabitha, then you’ll find that she’s behaving herself perfectly. Just as I said she would.’

‘I saw you both having a bit of a chinwag this afternoon on the croquet lawn. You looked rather serious, that’s all. There wasn’t anything up, was there?’

‘Of course not. We’d just been for a walk together.’ Mortimer sees an opportunity to change the subject at this point. ‘The gardens are looking magnificent, by the way. Especially your jasmine: the scent was quite overpowering. Wouldn’t mind learning your secret, one of these days.’

Lawrence laughs cruelly. ‘Sometimes I think you’re as bats as she is, old boy. There’s no jasmine in our garden, I can vouch for it. Not even a sprig!’ He glances up and notices a huge silver tureen being carried in at the far end of the dining room. ‘Hello, here comes the next course.’

Midway through her saddle of curried hare, Rebecca hears a diffident cough at her side.

‘What is it, Pyles?’

‘A word in private, if I may, Mrs Winshaw. It’s a matter of some urgency.’

They withdraw into the transverse corridor and when Rebecca returns, a minute later, her face is pale.

‘It’s the children,’ she tells her husband. ‘There’s been some silly accident in the nursery. Hilary’s hurt her hand. I’m going to have to take her to the hospital.’

Mortimer half-rises from his seat in panic.

‘Is it serious?’

‘I don’t think so. She’s just a bit upset.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No, you’ll have to stay here. I doubt if I’ll be much more than an hour. You stay and enjoy your party.’

But Mortimer does not enjoy his party. The only aspect of it which he was enjoying in the first place was the company of Rebecca, upon whom he has come to depend more and more in the last few years as a means of shielding himself from his hated family. Now, in her absence, he is forced to spend most of the evening in conversation with his sister Olivia; dry, sour-faced Olivia, who is so implacably loyal to the Winshaw pedigree that she even married one of her own cousins, and who now drones on remorselessly about the management of her estate and her husband’s impending knighthood for services to industry and the political future of her son Henry who has at least been clever enough to see that it’s the Labour Party which offers him the best prospect of a cabinet position by the age of forty. Mortimer nods tiredly throughout her monologue, and takes an occasional glance at the other faces around the table: Dorothy shovelling food into her mouth; her sheep-faced fiancé sitting morosely beside her; Mark’s ratty, calculating eyes maintaining their restless vigil; sweet, bewildered Mildred telling some shy anecdote to Thomas, who listens with all the frosty indifference of a merchant banker about to withhold a loan from a small businessman. And there, of course, is Tabitha, sitting erect at the table and not saying a word to anyone. He notices that she consults her pocket watch every few minutes, and that more than once she asks one of the footmen to check the time on the grandfather clock in the hallway. Otherwise, she sits perfectly still and keeps her eyes fixed upon Lawrence. It’s almost as if she is waiting for something to happen.

Rebecca returns from the hospital just as coffee is about to be served. She slips in beside her husband and squeezes his hand.

‘She’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘Nurse Gannet is just putting her to bed.’

Lawrence stands up, raps on the table with his dessertspoon and proposes a toast.

‘To Mortimer!’ he says. ‘Health and happiness on his fiftieth birthday.’

Muted echoes of ‘Mortimer’ and ‘Health and happiness’ resound throughout the room as the guests drain off whatever is left in their glasses. Then there is a loud and contented sigh, and somebody says:

‘Well! It has been a most pleasant evening.’

All heads turn. Tabitha has spoken.

‘It’s so nice to get out and about. You’ve no idea. Only—’ Tabitha frowns, and her face assumes a lost, downcast expression. ‘Only … I was just thinking how nice it would have been, if Godfrey could have been here tonight.’

There is a long pause; broken eventually by Lawrence, who says, with an attempt at jovial sincerity: ‘Quite so. Quite so.’

‘He was so fond of Mortimer. Morty was most definitely his favourite brother. He told me so, many times. He much preferred Mortimer to Lawrence. He was quite decided about it.’ She frowns again, and looks around the table: ‘I wonder why?’

Nobody answers. Nobody meets her eye.

‘I suppose it’s because … I suppose it’s because he knew — that Mortimer had no intention of killing him.’

She watches her relatives’ faces, as if looking for confirmation. Their silence is horror-struck and absolute.

Tabitha lays her napkin down on the table, pushes her chair back and rises painfully to her feet.

‘Well, it’s time I was getting to bed. Up Wood Hill to Blanket Fair, as Nanny used to say to me.’ She walks towards the dining-room door, and it becomes hard to tell whether she is still talking to the guests or merely to herself. ‘Up the long and winding stairs; up the stairs, to say my prayers.’ She turns, and there can be no doubt that her next question is addressed to her brother.

‘Do you still say your prayers, Lawrence?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘I should say them tonight, if I were you.’

Drained of feeling, Rebecca lay back against the thick bank of pillows. Slowly she stretched her legs apart and massaged her thigh, easing the soreness. Beside her, his head weighing heavy upon her shoulder, Mortimer was already sinking into sleep. It had taken him almost forty minutes to reach his climax. It took longer every time; and although he was on the whole a gentle and considerate lover, Rebecca was beginning to find these marathon sessions something of a trial. Her back ached and her mouth was dry, but she did not reach out for the bedside glass of water in case she disturbed her husband.

He started to mumble something drowsy and incoherent. She stroked his thinning hair.

‘… what I’d do without you … so lovely … make everything all right … bearable …’

‘There, there,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll be going home tomorrow. It’s over.’

‘… hate them all … what I’d do if you weren’t here to … make things better … feel like killing them sometimes … kill them all …’

Rebecca hoped that Hilary was managing to get some sleep. Three of her fingers had been broken. She didn’t believe that story about it being an accident, didn’t believe it for a moment. There was nothing she wouldn’t put past Roddy, these days. Like those photographs she’d caught him with: which had turned out to be a present from Thomas, damn him …

Half an hour later, at a quarter to two in the morning, Mortimer was snoring rhythmically and Rebecca was still wide awake. That was when she thought she heard the footsteps in the corridor, stealing past their bedroom door.

Then the noises started. Crashes and banging and the unmistakable sounds of a fight. Two men fighting, using all their strength on each other, grabbing whatever weapons came to hand. Grunting with the exertion, shouting and calling each other names. She barely had time to slip into her dressing-gown and turn on the bedroom light when she heard a long and terrible cry, far louder than the rest. Lights were going on all over Winshaw Towers by now and she could hear people running in the direction of the disturbance. But Rebecca stayed where she was, paralysed with fear. She had recognized that cry, even though she had never heard anything like it before. It was the sound of a man dying.

Two days later, the following story appeared in the local newspaper:

On Sunday morning, the day after his birthday party, Mortimer found his loyalties divided. Family sentiment, or what little residue of it continued to lurk inside him, insisted that he should stay with his brother and help him to recover from his ordeal; but at the same time, Rebecca’s anxiety to leave Winshaw Towers and return to their Mayfair apartment as soon as possible could not be disguised. It was not, in the end, a difficult decision to make. He could never deny his wife anything; and besides, there remained a whole army of relatives who could safely be trusted with the task of helping Lawrence to recuperate. By eleven o’clock their cases were gathered in the hall waiting to be carried out to the silver Bentley, and Mortimer was preparing to pay his final respects to Tabitha, who had yet to emerge from her room after learning of last night’s shocking events.

Mortimer caught sight of Pyles at the far end of the hallway, and beckoned him over.

‘Has Dr Quince been in to see Miss Tabitha this morning?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir. He visited her quite early, at about nine o’clock.’

‘I see. I don’t suppose … I hope nobody in the servants’ quarters is thinking that she might be in any way connected with … what happened.’

‘I wouldn’t know what the other servants are thinking, sir.’

‘No, of course not. Well, if you’ll see to it that our cases are taken out, Pyles, I think I’ll go and have a quick word with her myself.’

‘Very good, sir. Except that — I think she has another visitor with her at the moment.’

‘Another visitor?’

‘A gentleman called about ten minutes ago, sir, inquiring after Miss Tabitha. Burrows dealt with the matter and I’m afraid to say that he showed him up to her room.’

‘I see. I think I’d better go and investigate this.’

Mortimer rapidly climbed the several sets of stairs leading to his sister’s chambers, then paused outside her door. He could hear no voices issuing from within: not until he knocked and, after a substantial pause, heard Tabitha’s cracked, expressionless cry of ‘Enter’.

‘I just came to say goodbye,’ he explained, finding that she was alone after all.

‘Goodbye,’ said Tabitha. She was knitting something large, purple and shapeless, and a copy of Spitfire! magazine was propped open on the desk beside her.

‘We must see more of each other in future,’ he went on, nervously. ‘You’ll come to visit us in London, perhaps?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Tabitha. ‘The doctor was here again this morning, and I know what that means. They’re going to try to blame me for what happened last night, and have me put away again.’ She laughed, and shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘Well, what if they do. I’ve missed my chance, now.’

‘Missed your …?’ Mortimer began, but checked himself. Instead he walked to the window, and tried to adopt a casual tone as he said: ‘Well, of course, there are some … circumstances which take some accounting for. The library window, for instance. Pyles swears that he locked it as usual, and yet this man, this burglar, whoever he was, doesn’t seem to have forced it in any way. I don’t suppose you’d happen to know anything …’

He tailed off.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do with your chatter,’ said Tabitha. ‘I’ve dropped a stitch.’

Mortimer could see that he was wasting his time.

‘Well, I’ll be off,’ he said.

‘Have a nice journey,’ Tabitha answered, without looking up.

Mortimer paused in the doorway.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘who was your visitor?’

She stared at him blankly.

‘Visitor?’

‘Pyles said that someone had called on you a few minutes ago.’

‘No, he was mistaken. Quite mistaken.’

‘I see.’ Mortimer took a deep breath and was about to leave, when something detained him; he turned back with a frown. ‘Am I just imagining this,’ he said, ‘or is there a peculiar smell in here?’

‘It’s jasmine,’ said Tabitha, beaming at him for the first time. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’

3

Yuri was my one and only hero at this time. My parents would save every photograph from the magazines and newspapers, and I fixed them to the wall of my bedroom with drawing-pins. That wall has been re-papered now, but for many years after the pictures came down you could still see the pin marks, dotted into a random and fantastic pattern like so many stars. I knew that he had visited London recently: I had watched the scenes on television as he drove through streets lined with welcoming crowds. I had heard of his appearance at the Earl’s Court exhibition, and the knowledge that he had shaken hands with hundreds of lucky children turned me hot with envy. Yet it had never occurred to me to ask my parents to take me there. A trip to London for my family would have been as bold and far-fetched a proposition as a trip to the moon itself.

For my ninth birthday, however, my father proposed, if not a trip to the moon, then at least a tentative shot into the stratosphere in the form of a day’s outing to Weston-super-Mare. I was promised a visit to the newly opened model railway and aquarium, and, if the weather was fine, a swim in the open-air pool. It was mid September: September 17th 1961, to be precise. My grandparents were invited on this trip, as well — by which I mean my mother’s parents, because we had nothing to do with my father’s; had not even heard from them, in fact, for as long as I could remember, although I knew they were still alive. Perhaps my father himself secretly kept in contact; but I doubt it. It was never easy to know what he was feeling, and I couldn’t say, even now, whether or not he missed them very much. He got on passably well with Grandma and Grandpa, in any case, and over the years had built up a quiet defensive wall against Grandpa’s genial but consistent teasing. I think it was my mother who invited them along with us that day, probably without consulting him. All the same, there was no hint of a quarrel. My parents never quarrelled. He simply muttered something to the effect that he hoped they would sit in the back.

But it was the women who sat in the back, of course, with me sandwiched in between. Grandpa sat in the passenger seat with a road atlas open on his knees and that distant, facetious smile which clearly announced that my father was in for a hard time. They had already been arguing about which car they should take. My grandparents’ Volkswagen was old and unreliable but Grandpa never missed an opportunity to pour scorn on the British models which my father, who worked for a local engineering firm, had a small hand in designing and bought out of loyalty both to his employers and to his country.

‘Fingers crossed,’ said Grandpa, as my father reached for the ignition key. And when the car started first time: ‘Wonders will never cease.’

I had been given a travelling chess set for my birthday, so Grandma and I played a few games to while away the journey. Neither of us understood the rules at all, but we didn’t like to admit this to each other and managed to get by with an improvisation that was something like a cross between draughts and table football. My mother, withdrawn and reflective as ever, merely stared out of the window: or perhaps she was listening to the conversation from the front of the car.

‘What’s the matter?’ Grandpa was saying. ‘Are you trying to save petrol or something?’

My father took no notice of this.

‘You can do fifty miles along here, you know,’ he went on. ‘It’s a fifty-mile limit.’

‘We don’t want to get there too early. We’re in no hurry.’

‘Mind you, I suppose this old crock soon starts to rattle if you try going above forty-five. We want to get there in one piece, after all. Hang on, though, I think that bicycle behind us wants to overtake.’

‘Look, Michael, cows!’ said my mother, by way of diversion.

‘Where?’

‘In the field.’

‘The boy’s seen cows before,’ said Grandpa. ‘Leave him be. Can anybody hear a rattle?’

Nobody could hear a rattle.

‘I’m sure I can hear a rattle. Sounds like one of the fittings or something, coming loose.’ He turned to my father. ‘Which bit of this car was it that you designed, Ted? The ashtrays, wasn’t it?’

‘The steering column,’ said my father.

‘Look, Michael, sheep!’

We parked at the sea front. The wisps of cloud streaking the sky made me think of candy floss, setting in motion a train of thought which led inevitably to a booth by the pier, where my grandparents bought me a huge pink ball of the glutinous ambrosia, and a stick of rock which I put by for later. Normally my father would have said something about the adverse effects — dental and psychological — of granting me such favours, but because it was my birthday he let it pass. I sat on a low wall overlooking the sea and gobbled the candy floss down, savouring the delicious tension between its unthinkable sweetness and the slightly prickly texture, until I got about three quarters of the way through and started to feel sick. It was quiet on the sea front. Cocooned in my own happiness, I wasn’t paying much attention to the passers-by, but I have a hazy impression of respectful couples walking arm in arm, and of a few older people striding past more purposefully, dressed for church.

‘I hope it wasn’t a mistake,’ whispered my mother, ‘coming on a Sunday. It would be awful if nothing was open.’

Grandpa treated my father to one of his more eloquent winks: in a moment it combined malicious sympathy with the amused recognition of a familiar situation.

‘Looks like she’s dropped you in it again,’ he said.

‘Well, birthday boy,’ said my mother, wiping my lips with a tissue. ‘Where do you want to start?’

We went to the aquarium first. It was probably a very good aquarium, but I have only the palest recollection: strange to think that my family schemed so hard to provide these entertainments, and yet it’s their own unplanned words, their own thoughtless gestures and inflections, which have clung to my memory like flies caught on flypaper. I do know, anyway, that the sky was already starting to cloud over as we came out, and that a vigorous sea breeze made it difficult for my mother to enjoy the picnic which we shared on the Beach Lawns, our deck-chairs clustered in a semi-circle: I can still see her bounding off in pursuit of stray paper bags, struggling to distribute the sandwiches amid the wilful flap of their greaseproof wrapping. There were plenty left over, and she ended up offering them to the man who came to ask for money for our deck-chairs. (In common with all of their generation, my parents had the gift of getting into conversation with strangers without apparent difficulty. It was a gift I assumed I would one day grow into — once the shynesses of childhood and adolescence were behind me, perhaps — but it never happened, and I realize now that the easy sociability which they seemed to enjoy wherever they went had more to do with the times than with any special maturity of temperament.)

‘Good bit of ham, this,’ said the man, after taking an experimental bite. ‘Mind you, I like a bit of mustard on it myself.’

‘So do we,’ said Grandpa. ‘But his nibs won’t have it.’

‘She spoils him,’ said Grandma, smiling in my direction. ‘Spoils him something rotten.’

I pretended not to hear, and stared so hard at the last piece of my mother’s chocolate cake that she handed it to me without a word, putting a warning finger to her mouth in a mock display of conspiracy. It was my third piece. She never used ordinary cake-making chocolate: only real Dairy Milk.

It was getting to the point where I didn’t feel I could wait much longer for the promised swim, but she told me I would have to let my food settle first. Hoping to walk off my impatience, my father took me out to the sea, which was at low tide, with a grey expanse of muddy sand stretched almost to the horizon and a few dogged toddlers trotting out like fledgling explorers, a shrimping net in one hand and a reluctant parent in the other. We wandered pointlessly for about half an hour, and then at last we were allowed to go to the swimming-pool. It wasn’t very crowded. There were a few people lying or sitting on deck-chairs and sun-loungers next to the water: the minority who had chosen to swim were doing so very vigorously, with much splashing and shouting. There was a confusion of different musics. Watery orchestral pieces leaked out over a tannoy system, but they were in competition with a number of transistor radios, playing everything from Cliff Richard to Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. The water shimmered and sparkled irresistibly. I couldn’t understand why people preferred to lie flat on their backs listening to the radio when faced with the prospect of such liquid happiness. My father and I emerged from the changing cubicles together: I thought he looked easily the strongest and most handsome man at the poolside that afternoon, but to my memory’s eye our thin white bodies now seem equally childlike and vulnerable. I ran ahead of him and stood at the water’s edge, relishing a tiny but priceless moment of expectancy. After that I jumped; and after that, screamed.

The pool was not heated. Why had we thought that it would be? A bolt of ice shot through me and at once I was numb with shock, but my first response — not only to the physical sensation but to the higher agony of pleasure anticipated and then denied — was to burst into tears. How long this continued I don’t know. My father must have lifted me from the water; my mother must have run down from the spectators’ gallery where she had been sitting with Grandma and Grandpa. Her arms were around me, everybody’s eyes were upon me, and still I was inconsolable. They told me afterwards that it felt as though I would never stop crying. But somehow they got me changed, dressed and shepherded into an outside world which was by now dark with the threat of heavy rain.

‘It’s a disgrace,’ Grandma was saying. She had given one of the pool attendants a piece of her mind, not something to be wished upon anybody. ‘There ought to be a notice. Or a chart, telling you what the temperature is. We ought to write a letter.’

‘Poor little lamb,’ said my mother. I was still snivelling a little bit. ‘Ted, why don’t you run back to the car and fetch the umbrellas? Otherwise we’re all going to catch our deaths. We’ll wait for you here.’

‘Here’ was a bus shelter near the sea front. The four of us sat there listening to the rain hammering on the glass roof. Grandpa muttered ‘Dear heart alive’, and this — a sure sign that the day was, in his estimation, taking a nose dive into disaster — was the cue for me to resume my wailing with twice the energy. When my father returned, carrying two umbrellas and a tightly folded plastic headscarf, my mother looked at him with silent panic; but he had clearly been giving the situation some thought and his resourceful suggestion was, ‘Perhaps there’s something on at the cinema.’

The nearest and biggest was the Odeon, which was showing a film called The Naked Edge with Gary Cooper and Deborah Kerr. My parents took one look at this and hurried on, although I lingered yearningly, catching the exotic scent of forbidden pleasures in the title, and intrigued by a card which the cinema manager had placed in a prominent position beneath the poster: NO ONE, BUT NO ONE, WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE THEATRE DURING THE LAST THIRTEEN MINUTES OF THIS FILM. FLASHING RED LIGHT WILL WARN YOU. Grandpa took me roughly by the hand and dragged me away.

‘What about this one?’ said my father.

We stood in front of a smaller and less imposing building which announced itself as ‘Weston’s Only Independent Cinema’. My mother and Grandma bent down to peer closely at the lobby cards. Grandma’s lips formed into a doubtful pucker and a gentle frown creased my mother’s brow.

‘Do you think it looks suitable?’

‘Sid James and Kenneth Connor. Should be funny.’

Grandpa said this but his real attention, I noticed, was on a picture of a beautiful blonde actress called Shirley Eaton, who was the third star of the film.

‘Certificate U,’ my father pointed out.

Then I shouted, ‘Mum! Mum!’

Her eyes followed my pointing finger. I had found a notice which announced that the supporting film told the story of the Russian space programme, and was called With Gagarin to the Stars. Furthermore, the notice boasted, it was ‘in colour’, although I for one didn’t need this extra inducement. I launched into a routine of wide-eyed supplication, sensing even as I began that it wasn’t really necessary, because my parents had already made up their minds. We joined the queue to buy tickets. When the woman at the ticket desk took a dubious look at me from her lofty enclosure, my hand gripping anxiously on to my father’s, she said, ‘Are you sure he’s old enough?’, and suddenly I experienced the same plummeting misery, the same emotional nausea that I had felt the second I jumped into the unheated swimming-pool. But Grandpa wasn’t having any of this. ‘Just sell us the tickets, woman,’ he said, ‘and mind your own business.’ Someone in the queue behind us giggled. Then we were filing into the dark, musky auditorium and I was sinking deeper and deeper into my seat in a heaven of contentment, Grandma to the left of me, my father to the right.

Six years later, Yuri would be dead, his MiG-15 diving inexplicably out of low cloud and crashing to the ground during an approach to landing. I was old enough by then to have imbibed some of the prevailing distrust of all things Russian, to take notice of the dark mutterings about the KGB and the displeasure my hero may have incurred in his own country for having so charmed the cheering Westerners. Perhaps Yuri really had condemned himself the day he shook hands with all those children at Earl’s Court; and yet it had been them that I wished dead at the time. Whatever the explanation, I can no longer recapture or even imagine the state of innocence in which I must have sat through that afternoon’s artless, stentorian celebration of his achievement. I wish that I could. I wish that he had remained an object of unthinking adoration, instead of becoming another of adulthood’s ubiquitous, insoluble mysteries: a story without a proper ending. I was soon to find out about those.

Just as the lights were going down for the second time, and the censor’s certificate appeared on the screen to announce the beginning of the main feature, my mother leaned over and started whispering across the top of my head.

‘Ted, it’s nearly six o’clock.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, how long’s this film going to go on?’

‘I don’t know. About ninety minutes, I suppose.’

‘Well then we’ve got to drive all the way back. It’ll be hours past his bedtime.’

‘It won’t matter just this once. It is his birthday, after all.’

The credits had started and my eyes were fixed on the screen. The film was in black and white and the music, although it was not without a certain jokiness, somehow filled me with foreboding.

‘And then there’s dinner,’ my mother whispered. ‘What are we going to do about dinner?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Stop somewhere on the way back.’

‘But then we’ll be even later.’

‘Just sit back and enjoy it, can’t you?’

But I noticed that for the next few minutes, my mother kept leaning towards the light in order to sneak regular glances at her watch. After that I don’t know what she was doing, because I was too busy concentrating on the film.

It told the story of a nervous, mild-mannered man (played by Kenneth Connor) who was startled in his flat late one night by the arrival of a sinister solicitor. The solicitor had come to tell him that his rich uncle had recently died, and that he was required to travel immediately up to Yorkshire, where the reading of the will was to take place at the family home, Blackshaw Towers. Kenneth went up to Yorkshire by train in the company of his friend, a worldly bookmaker (played by Sidney James), and found that Blackshaw Towers was situated on a remote edge of the moors far from the nearest village. Failing to find a taxi, they accepted a lift in a hearse, which left them stranded on the moors in the middle of a dense fog.

When they finally arrived at the house, they could hear the distant howling of dogs.

Sidney said: ‘Not exactly a holiday camp, is it?’

Kenneth said: ‘There’s something creepy about this place.’

The rest of the audience seemed to be finding it funny, but by now I was thoroughly scared. I had never been taken to see anything like this before: although it wasn’t strictly a horror film, the detail was very convincing, and the gloomy atmosphere, dramatic music and perpetual sense that something terrible was about to happen all combined to torment me with a strange mixture of fear and exhilaration. Part of me wanted nothing more than to run out of the cinema into what was left of the daylight; but another part of me was determined to stay until I found out where it was all leading.

Kenneth and Sidney crept into the hallway of Blackshaw Towers, and found that the house was just as eerie as it had looked from the outside. They were met by a gaunt and forbidding butler called Fisk, who led them upstairs and showed them to their rooms. Much to his dismay, Kenneth found himself not only being taken to the East Wing, far away from his friend, but being required to sleep in the very room where his late uncle had died. Soft, unsettling organ music could be heard in the corridor. They went downstairs again and were introduced to the other members of Kenneth’s family: his cousins Guy, Janet and Malcolm, his Uncle Edward, and his mad Aunt Emily, for whom time seemed to have stood still ever since the First World War. Just before the solicitor began reading the will, another woman appeared: a young, blonde and beautiful woman played by the actress Shirley Eaton. She was there because she had nursed Kenneth’s uncle during his final illness. There weren’t enough chairs for everybody to sit around the table, so Kenneth had to balance on Shirley’s knee. He seemed quite pleased about this.

The will was read and it transpired that none of the relatives had been left anything at all: they had been made the victims of a practical joke. They argued with each other bitterly as they began getting ready for bed. Then, suddenly, all the lights in the house went off. By now there was a terrible storm raging outside and Fisk suggested that the generator must have broken down. Kenneth and Sidney volunteered to go with him and investigate. When they reached the shed which housed the generator they found that the machinery had been smashed to pieces. They started going back towards the house, but were amazed to find Uncle Edward sitting on a deck-chair in the middle of the lawn, drenched by the pouring rain.

Sidney said: ‘What’s he sitting out there for?’

Kenneth laughed and said: ‘It’s unbelievable. He’ll catch his death of — death of—’

He gave a violent sneeze, and Uncle Edward fell stiffly off the deck-chair. He was dead.

Kenneth said: ‘Sid … is he?’

Sidney said: ‘Well if he ain’t, he’s a very heavy sleeper.’

There was a terrific thunderclap, and my mother leaned across to my father. She whispered: ‘Ted, come on, let’s go.’

My father was laughing. He said: ‘What for?’

My mother said: ‘It’s not suitable.’

Kenneth said: ‘Well I mean, we can’t leave him round here, can we? Look, let’s put him in the potting shed — it’s over there somewhere.’

There was more audience laughter as Kenneth, Sid and the butler attempted to pick up Uncle Edward’s corpulent body.

Sidney said: ‘Look, it’d be easier to bring the potting shed over to him.’

Even Grandma laughed at that. But my mother just looked at her watch again and my father, perhaps imagining that I might be frightened, ruffled my hair and laid his arm close by, so that I could take hold of it and lean against him.

Kenneth and Sid went back inside and told the rest of the family that Uncle Edward had been killed. Sid tried to telephone the police, only to discover that the line had been cut off. Kenneth said that he was going home, but the solicitor pointed out that the moors were impassable in this weather, and that if he were to leave now, he would be the first to come under suspicion for Edward’s murder. He recommended that everyone should go to bed at once and lock their doors.

Fisk said: ‘It’s only the start of it. There’ll be another one yet, mark my words.’

Sidney said: ‘Good-night, laughing boy.’

Kenneth and Sidney went back upstairs, but then, left to his own devices, Kenneth found it easy to get lost in the rambling old house. He opened the door to what he thought was his bedroom and discovered that it was already occupied by Shirley, wearing only her slip and about to put on a nightgown.

Kenneth said: ‘I say, what are you doing in my room?’

Shirley said: ‘This isn’t your room. I mean, that isn’t your luggage, is it?’

She clutched the nightgown modestly to her bosom.

Kenneth said: ‘Oh, blimey. No. Wait a minute, that’s not my bed, either. I must have got lost. I’m sorry. I’ll — I’ll push off.’

He started to leave, but paused after only a few steps. He turned and saw that Shirley was still holding on to her nightgown, unsure of his intentions.

My mother stirred uneasily in her chair.

Kenneth said: ‘Miss, you don’t happen to know where my bedroom is, do you?’

Shirley shook her head sadly and said: ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

Kenneth said: ‘Oh,’ and paused. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go now.’

Shirley hesitated, a resolve forming within her: ‘No. Hang on.’ She gestured with her hand, urgently. ‘Turn your back a minute.’

Kenneth turned, and found himself staring into a mirror in which he could see his own reflection, and beyond that, Shirley’s. Her back was to him, and she was wriggling out of her slip, pulling it over her head.

He said: ‘J— just a minute, miss.’

My mother tried to get my father’s attention.

Kenneth hastily lowered the mirror, which was on a hinge.

Shirley turned to him and said: ‘You’re sweet.’ She finished pulling her slip over her head, and started to unfasten her bra.

My mother said: ‘Come on. We’re going. It’s far too late already.’

But Grandpa and my father were both staring goggle-eyed at the screen as the beautiful Shirley Eaton took her bra off with her back to the camera, while Kenneth heroically tried to stop himself from peeping into the mirror which would have yielded a precious glimpse of her body. I was staring at her too, I suppose, and thinking that I had never seen anyone so lovely, and from that moment it was no longer Kenneth she spoke to but me, my own nine-year-old self, because I was now the person who had lost his way in the corridor, and, yes, it was me that I saw on the screen, sharing a room with the most beautiful woman in the world, trapped in that old dark house in that terrible storm in that shabby little cinema in my bedroom that night and in my dreams forever afterwards. It was me.

Shirley emerged from behind my head, her body swathed in the knee-length gown, and said: ‘You can turn round now.’

My mother stood up, and the woman behind her said: ‘For Heaven’s sake sit down, can’t you.’

On the screen, I turned and looked at her. I said: ‘Cor. Very provoking.’

Shirley brushed back her hair, embarrassed.

My mother grabbed my hand and pulled me out of my seat. I let out a little howl of protest.

The woman behind us said: ‘Sssh!’

Grandpa said: ‘What are you doing?’

My mother said: ‘We’re leaving is what we’re doing. And you’re coming too, unless you want to walk all the way back to Birmingham.’

‘But the film hasn’t finished yet.’

Shirley and I were sitting on the double bed together. She said: ‘I’ve a proposal to make.’

Grandma said: ‘Come on then, if we’re going. We’ve got to stop somewhere for dinner, I suppose.’

On the screen, I said: ‘Oh?’

Off the screen, I said: ‘Mum, I want to stay and see the end.’

‘Well you can’t.’

My father said: ‘Oh well. Looks like we’ve been given our marching orders.’

Grandpa said: ‘I’m staying put. I’m enjoying this.’

The woman behind us said: ‘Look, I’m going to call the management in a minute.’

Shirley moved closer towards me. She said: ‘Why don’t you stay here tonight? I don’t fancy spending the night alone, and we’d be company for each other.’

My mother grabbed me underneath the armpits and lifted me out of my seat, and for the second time that day I burst into tears: partly out of real distress and partly, no doubt, because of the sheer indignity of it. I hadn’t been picked up like that since I was tiny. She pushed past the other people in the row and started carrying me down the steps towards the exit.

On the screen I seemed to be uncertain how to respond to Shirley’s offer. I mumbled something but in the confusion I couldn’t hear what it was. I could see Grandma and my father following us into the aisle and Grandpa rising reluctantly from his seat. As my mother pushed open the door which led to the chill concrete stairs and the salty air, I turned and caught a last glimpse of the screen. I was leaving the room but Shirley didn’t know this because she had her back to me and was fiddling with the bed.

Shirley said: ‘I’ll be quite all right on the—’ She turned, and stopped. She saw that I had gone.

‘—chair.’

The door closed and my family were clattering down the stairway. I shouted, ‘Let me down. Let me down!’, and when my mother put me down I immediately tried to run back up the stairs into the cinema, but my father caught me and said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’, and then I knew that it was all over. I pummelled him with my fists and even tried to scratch his cheek with my fingernails. For the first and only time in his life my father swore and smacked me, hard, across the face. After that, we were all very quiet.

In the car going home, I pretend to be asleep, but in reality my eyelids are not properly closed and I can see the light from the amber roadlamps flashing across my mother’s face. Light, shadow. Light, shadow.

Grandpa says, ‘Now we’ll never know what happened,’ and from the back of the car Grandma says, ‘Oh do shut up,’ and she pokes him in the shoulder.

I am no longer crying, no longer even sulking. As for Yuri, he has been quite forgotten and I can barely even call to mind the film which so excited me a couple of hours ago. All I can think of is the fearsome atmosphere of Blackshaw Towers, and the inexplicable scene in the bedroom where this beautiful, beautiful woman asks Kenneth to spend the night with her, and he runs away when she isn’t looking.

But why did he run away? Out of fear?

I look at my mother and I’m on the point of asking her if she understands why Kenneth ran away instead of spending the night with a woman who would have made him feel safe and happy. But I know that she wouldn’t really answer. She would just say that it was a silly film and it’s been a long day and I should go to sleep and forget about it. She doesn’t realize that I can never forget about it. And it’s in this private knowledge that I lie back and pretend to be asleep, with my head on her lap and my eyelids half-closed so that I can just make out the light from the amber roadlamps flashing across her face. Light, shadow. Light, shadow. Light, shadow.