Date: 2003-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Short Stories; Nobel Prize; Romance; British Literature; Drama; Literature; Novella; Novels; Literary Fiction
Description: Four novellas by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, that once again show her to be unequalled in her ability to capture the truth of the human condition.The title story, ‘The Grandmothers’, is an astonishing tour de force, a shockingly intimate portrait of an unconventional extended family and the lengths to which they will go to find happiness and love. Written with a keen cinematic eye, the story is a ruthless dissection of the veneer of middle-class morality and convention.‘Victoria and the Staveneys’, takes us through 20 years of the life of a young underprivileged bl
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Rights: Copyright © 2003 by Doris Lessing

DORIS LESSING

The Grandmothers
Victoria and the Staveneys
The Reason For It
A Love Child

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

THE GRANDMOTHERS

VICTORIA AND THE STAVENEYS

THE REASON FOR IT

A LOVE CHILD

About the author

Reviews

By the same author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the Publisher

THE GRANDMOTHERS

On either side of a little promontory loaded with cafés and restaurants was a frisky but decorous sea, nothing like the real ocean that roared and rumbled outside the gape of the enclosing bay and barrier rocks known by everyone – and it was even on the charts – as Baxter’s Teeth. Who was Baxter? A good question, often asked, and answered by a framed sheet of skilfully antiqued paper on the wall of the restaurant at the end of the promontory, the one in the best, highest and most prestigious position. Baxter’s, it was called, claiming that the inner room of thin brick and reed had been Bill Baxter’s shack, built by his own hands. He had been a restless voyager, a seaman who had chanced on this paradise of a bay with its little tongue of rocky land. Earlier versions of the tale hinted at pacific and welcoming natives. Where did the Teeth come into it? Baxter remained an inveterate explorer of nearby shores and islands, and then, having entrusted himself to a little leaf of a boat built out of driftwood and expertise, he was wrecked one moony night on those seven black rocks, well within the sight of his little house where a storm lantern, as reliable as a lighthouse, welcomed in ships small enough to get into the bay, having negotiated the reef.

Baxter’s was now well planted with big trees that sheltered tables and attendant chairs, and on three sides below was the friendly sea.

A path wandered up through shrubs, coming to a stop in Baxter’s Gardens, and one afternoon six people were making the gentle ascent, four adults and two little girls, whose shrieks of pleasure echoed the noises of the gulls.

Two handsome men came first, not young, but only malice could call them middle-aged. One limped. Then two as handsome women of about sixty – but no one would dream of calling them elderly. At a table evidently well-known to them, they deposited bags and wraps and toys, sleek and shining people, as they are who know how to use the sun. They arranged themselves, the women’s brown and silky legs ending in negligent sandals, their competent hands temporarily at rest. Women on one side, men on the other, the little girls fidgeting: six fair heads? Surely they were related? Those had to be the mothers of the men; they had to be their sons. The little girls, clamouring for the beach, which was down a rocky path, were told by their grandmothers, and then their fathers, to behave and play nicely. They squatted and made patterns with fingers and little sticks in the dust. Pretty little girls: so they should be with such good-looking progenitors.

From a window of Baxter’s a girl called to them, ‘The usual? Shall I bring your usual?’ One of the women waved to her, meaning yes. Soon appeared a tray where fresh fruit juices and wholemeal sandwiches asserted that these were people careful of their health.

Theresa, who had just taken her school-leaving exams, was on her year away from England, where she would be returning to university. This information had been offered months ago, and in return she was kept up to date with the progress of the little girls at their first school. Now she enquired how school was going along, and first one child and then the other piped up to say their school was cool. The pretty waitress ran back to her station inside Baxter’s with a smile at the two men which made the women smile at each other and then at their sons, one of whom, Tom, remarked, ‘But she’ll never make it back to Britain, all the boys are after her to stay.’

‘More fool her if she marries and throws all that away,’ said one of the women, Roz – in fact Rozeanne, the mother of Tom. But the other woman, Lil (or Liliane), the mother of Ian, said, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and she was smiling at Tom. This concession, or compliment, to their, after all, claim to existence, made the men nod to each other, lips compressed, humorously, as at an often-heard exchange, or one like it.

‘Well,’ said Roz, ‘I don’t care, nineteen is too young.’

‘But who knows how it might turn out?’ enquired Lil, and blushed. Feeling her face hot she made a little grimace, which had the effect of making her seem naughty, or daring, and this was so far from her character that the others exchanged looks not to be explained so easily.

They all sighed, heard each other and now laughed, a full frank laugh that seemed to acknowledge things unsaid. One little girl, Shirley, said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ and the other, Alice, ‘What’s so funny? I don’t see anything funny,’ and copied her grandmother’s look of conscious naughtiness, which in fact had not been intended. Lil was uncomfortable and blushed again.

Shirley persisted, wanting attention, ‘What’s the joke, Daddy?’ and at this both daddies began a tussling and buffeting of their daughters, while the girls protested, and ducked, but came back for more, and then fled to their grandmothers’ arms and laps for protection. There they stayed, thumbs in their mouths, eyes drooping, yawning. It was a hot afternoon.

A scene of somnolence and satisfaction. At tables all around under the great trees similarly blessed people lazed. The seas all around them, only a few feet below, sighed and hissed and lapped, and the voices were low and lazy.

From the window of Baxter’s Theresa stood with a tray of cool drinks momentarily suspended and looked out at the family. Tears slid down her cheeks. She had been in love with Tom and then Ian, and then Tom again, for their looks and their ease, and something, an air of repletion, as if they had been soaking in pleasure all their lives and now gave it out in the form of invisible waves of contentment.

And then the way they handled the little girls, the ease and competence of that. And the way the grandmothers were always available, making the four the six … but where were the mothers, children had mothers, and these two little girls had Hannah and Mary, both startlingly unlike the blonde family they had married into, being small and dark, and, while pretty enough, Theresa knew neither of them was good enough for the men. They worked. They owned a business. That is why the grandmothers were so often here. Didn’t the grandmothers work, then? Yes, they did but were free to say, ‘Let’s go to Baxter’s’ – and up here to Baxters they came. The mothers too, sometimes, and there were eight.

Theresa was in love with them all. She had at last understood it. The men, yes, her heart ached for them, but not too severely. What made the tears come was seeing them all there, watching them, as she did now. Behind her, at a table near the bar, was Derek, a young farmer who had wished to marry her. She didn’t mind him, rather fancied him, but she knew that this, the family, was the real passion.

Over deep layers of tree shadow lanced with sunlight, sun enclosed the tree, the hot blue air, interfused with bliss, happiness, seemed about to exude great drops of something like a golden dew, which only she could see. It was at that moment she decided she would marry her farmer and stay here, on this continent. She could not leave it for the fitful charms of England, of Bradford, though the moors did well enough, when the sun did decide to shine. No, she would stay here, she had to. ‘I want it, I want it,’ she told herself, allowing the tears at last to run freely. She wanted this physical ease, the calm of it, expressing itself in lazy movements, in long brown legs and arms, and the glint of gold on fair heads where the sun had been.

Just as she claimed her future, she saw one of the mothers coming up the path. Mary – yes, it was. A little dark fidget of a woman, with nothing in her of the poise and style of The Family.

She was coming up slowly. She stopped, stared, went on, stopped, and she was moving with a deliberation that was willed.

‘Well, what’s got into her, I wonder?’ mused Theresa, at last leaving her window to take the tray to by now surely impatient customers. Mary Struthers was hardly moving at all. She stood staring at her family, frowning. Roz Struthers saw her and waved, and then again, and while her hand slowly lowered itself, as if caution had made an announcement, her face was already beginning to lose its gloss and glow. She was looking, but as it were indirectly, at her daughter-in-law, and because of what her face was saying, her son Tom turned to look, then wave. Ian, too, waved. Both men’s hands fell, as Roz’s had done; there was fatality in it.

Mary had stopped. Near her was a table and she collapsed into a chair. Still she stared at Lil, and then at Tom, her husband. From one face to the other those narrowed accusing eyes moved. Eyes that searched for something. In her hand was a packet. Letters. She sat perhaps ten feet away, staring.

Theresa, having dealt with her other tables, was in her window again, and she was thinking accusing thoughts about Mary, this wife of a son, and she knew it was jealousy. She defended herself thus: But if she was good enough for them, I wouldn’t mind her. She’s just nothing compared to them.

Only the eye of jealousy could have dismissed Mary, who was a striking, attractive, dark young woman. She wasn’t pretty now; her face was small and putty-coloured and her lips were thin. Theresa saw the bundle of letters. She saw the four people at the table. As if they were playing statues, she thought. Light was draining away from them. The splendid afternoon might be brazening it all out but they sat struck, motionless. And still Mary stared, now at Lil, or Liliane, now at Roz or Rozeanne; from them to Tom, and to Ian, and then around again, and again.

From an impulse Theresa did not recognise in herself she poured water from the jug in the fridge into a glass, and ran across with it to Mary. Mary did turn her head slowly to frown into Theresa’s face, but did not take the glass. Theresa set it down. Then Mary was attracted by the glitter of the water, reached out her hand for the glass, but withdrew it: her hand was shaking too hard to hold a glass.

Theresa went back to her window. The afternoon had gone dark for her. She was trembling too. What was the matter? What was wrong? Something was horribly, fatally wrong.

At last Mary got up, with difficulty, made the distance to the table where her family sat, and let herself subside into a chair that was away from them: she was not part of them.

Now the four were taking in that bundle of letters in Mary’s hand.

They sat quite still, looking at Mary. Waiting.

It was for her to speak. But did she need to? Her lips trembled, she trembled, she appeared to be on the verge of a faint, and those young clear accusing eyes moved still from one face to another. Tom. Lil. Roz. Ian. Her mouth was twisted, as if she had bitten into something sour.

‘What’s wrong with them, what’s wrong?’ thought Theresa, staring from her window, and whereas not an hour ago she had decided she could never leave this coast, this scene of pleasantness and plenitude, now she thought, I must get away. I’ll tell Derek, no. I want to get out.

Alice, the child on Roz’s lap, woke with a cry, saw her mother there, ‘Mummy, Mummy,’ – and held out her arms. Mary managed to get up, steadied herself around the table on the backs of chairs, and took Alice.

Now it was the other little girl, waking on Lil’s lap. ‘Where’s my mummy?’

Mary held out her hand for Shirley and in a moment both children were on her knees.

The little girls felt Mary’s panic, her anger, sensed some kind of fatality, and now tried to get back to their grandmothers. ‘Granny, Granny,’ ‘I want granny.’

Mary gripped them both tight.

On Roz’s face was a small bitter smile, as if she exchanged confirmation of some bad news with someone deep inside herself.

‘Granny, are you coming to fetch me tomorrow for the beach?’

And Alice, ‘Granny, you promised we would go to the beach.’

And now Mary spoke at last, her voice shaking. All she said was, ‘No, you will not be going to the beach.’ And, direct to the older women, ‘You will not be taking Shirley and Alice to the beach.’ That was the judgement and the sentence.

Lil said tentatively, even humbly, ‘I’ll see you soon, Alice.’

‘No you won’t,’ said Mary. She stood up, a child on either hand, the bundle of letters thrust into the pocket of her slacks. ‘No,’ she said wildly, the emotion that had been poisoning her at last pulsing out. ‘No. No, you won’t. Not ever. You will not ever see them again.’

She turned to go, pulling the children with her.

Her husband Tom said, ‘Wait a minute, Mary.’

‘No.’ Off she went down the path, as fast as she could, stumbling and pulling the children along.

And now surely these four remaining, the women and their sons, should say something, elucidate, make things clear? Not a word. Pinched, diminished, darkened, they sat on, and then at last one spoke. It was Ian who spoke, direct to Roz, in a passionate intimacy, wild-eyed, his lips stiff and angry.

‘It’s your fault,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s your fault. I told you. It’s all your fault this has happened.’

Roz met his anger with her own. She laughed. A hard angry bitter laugh, peal after peal. ‘My fault,’ she said. ‘Of course. Who else?’ And she laughed. It would have done well on the stage, that laugh, but tears poured down her face.

Out of sight down the path, Mary had reached Hannah, the wife of Ian, who had been unable to face the guilty ones, at least not with Mary, whose rage she could not match. She had let Mary go up by herself and she waited here, full of doubt, misery and reproaches that were beginning to bubble up wanting to overflow. But not in anger, no, she needed explanations. She took Shirley from Mary, and the two young women, their children in their arms, stood together on the path, just outside a plumbago hedge that was the boundary for another cafe. They did not speak, but looked into each other’s faces, Hannah seeking confirmation, which she got. ‘It’s true, Hannah.’

And now, the laughter. Roz was laughing. The peals of hard laughter, triumphant laughter, was what Mary and Hannah heard, each harsh loud peal lashed them, they shrank away from the cruel sounds. They trembled as the whips of laughter fell.

‘Evil,’ Mary pronounced at last, through lips that seemed to have become dough or clay. And as Roz’s final yells of laughter reached them, the two young women burst into tears and went running away down the path, away from their husbands, and their husbands’ mothers.

Two little girls arrived at the big school on the same day, at the same hour, took each other’s measure, and became best friends. Little things, so bravely confronting that great school, as populous and busy as a supermarket, but filled with what they already knew were hierarchies of girls they felt as hostile, but here was an ally, and they stood holding hands, trembling with fear and their efforts to be brave. A great school, standing on its rise, surrounded by parkland in the English manner, but arched over by a most un-English sky, about to absorb these little things, babies really, their four parents thought – enough to bring tears to their eyes! – and they did.

They were doughty, quick with repartee, and soon lived down the bullying that greeted new girls; they stood up for each other, fought their own and each other’s battles. ‘Like sisters,’ people said, and even, ‘Like twins.’ Fair, they were, with their neat gleaming ponytails, both of them, and blue-eyed, and as quick as fishes, but really, if you looked, not so alike. Liliane – or Lil – was thin, with a hard little body, her features delicate, and Rozeanne – Roz – was sturdier, and where Lil regarded the world with a pure severe gaze, Roz found jokes in everything. But it is nice to think, and say, ‘like sisters’, ‘they might be twins’; it is agreeable to find resemblances where perhaps none are, and so it went on, through the school terms and the years, two girls, inseparable, which was nice for their families, living in the same street, with parents who had become friends because of them, as so often happens, knowing they were lucky in their girls choosing each other and making lives easy for everyone.

But these lives were easy. Not many people in the world have lives so pleasant, unproblematical, unreflecting: no one on these blessed coasts lay awake and wept for their sins, or for money, let alone for food. What a good-looking lot, smooth and shiny with sun, with sport, with good food. Few people anywhere know of coasts like these, except perhaps for brief holidays, or in travellers’ tales like dreams. Sun and sea, sea and sun, and always the sound of waves on beaches.

It was a blue world the little girls grew up in. At the end of every street was the sea, as blue as their eyes – as they were told often enough. Over their heads the blue sky was so seldom louring or grey that such days were enjoyable for their rarity. A rare harsh wind brought the pleasant sting of salt and the air was always salty. The little girls would lick the salt from their own hands and arms and from each others too, in a game they called, ‘Playing puppies’. Bedtime baths were always salty so that they had to shower off the bath water with water coming from deep in the earth and tasting of minerals, not salt. When Roz stayed over at Lil’s house, or Lil at Roz’s, the parents would stand smiling down at the two pretty imps cuddled together like kittens or puppies, smelling now they were asleep not of salt but of soap. And always, throughout their childhoods, day and night, the sound of the sea, the gentle tamed waves of Baxter’s sea, a hushing and a lulling, like breathing.

Sisters, or, for that matter, twins, even best friends, suffer passionate rivalries, often concealed, even from each other. But Roz knew how Lil grieved when her breasts – Roz’s – popped forth a good year before Lil’s, not to mention other evidences of growing up, and she was generous in assurances and comfort, knowing that her own deep envy of her friend was not going to be cured by time. She wished that her own body could be as hard and thin as Lil’s, who wore her clothes with such style and ease, whereas she was already being called – by the unkind – plump. She had to be careful what she ate, whereas Lil could eat what she liked.

So there they were, quite soon, teenagers, Lil the athlete, excelling in every sport, and Roz in the school plays, with big parts, making people laugh, extrovert, large, vital, loud: they complemented each other as once they had been as like as two peas: ‘You can hardly tell them apart.’

They both went to university, Lil because of the sport, Roz because of the theatre group, and they remained best friends, sharing news about their conquests, and making light of their rivalries, but their closeness was such that although they starred in such different arenas, their names were always coupled. Neither went in for the great excluding passions, broken hearts, jealousies.

And now that was it, university done with, here was the grownup world, and this was a culture where girls married young. ‘Twenty and still not married!’

Roz began dating Harold Struthers, an academic, and a bit of a poet, too; and Lil met Theo Western, who owned a sports equipment and clothes shop. Rather, shops. He was well off. The men got on – the women were careful that they did, and there was a double wedding.

So far so good.

Those shrimps, the silverfish, the minnows, were now wonderful young women, one in a wedding dress like an arum lily (Liliane) and Roz’s like a silver rose. So judged the main fashion page of the big paper.

They lived in two houses in a street running down to the sea, not far from the outspit of land that held Baxter’s, unfashionable but artistic, and, by that law that says if you want to know if an area is going up, then look to see if those early swallows, the artists, are moving in, it would not be unfashionable for long. They were on opposite sides of the street.

Lil was a swimming champion known over the whole continent and abroad too, and Roz not only acted and sang, but was putting on plays and began devising shows and spectacles. Both were very busy. Despite all this Liliane and Theo Western announced the birth of Ian, and Rozeanne and Harold Struthers followed within a week with Thomas.

Two little boys, fair-haired and delightful, and people said they could be brothers. In fact Tom was a solid little boy easily embarrassed by the exuberances of his mother, and Ian was fine drawn and nervy and ‘difficult’ in ways Tom never was. He did not sleep well, and sometimes had nightmares.

The two families spent weekends and holidays together, one big happy family, as Roz sang, defining the situation, and the two men might go off on trips into the mountains or to fish, or backpacking. Boys will be boys, as Roz said.

All this went on, and anything that was not what it should be was kept well out of sight. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ Roz might say. She was concerned for Lil, for reasons that will emerge, but not for herself. Lil might have her problems, but not she, not she and Harold and Tom. Everything was going along fine.

And then this happened.

The scene: the connubial bedroom, when the boys were about ten. Roz lay sprawling on the bed, Harold sat on the arm of a chair, looking at his wife, smiling, but determined. He had just said he had been offered a professorship, in a university in another state.

Roz said, ‘Well, I suppose you can come down for weekends or we can come up.’

This was so like her, the dismissal of a threat – surely? – to their marriage, that he gave a short, not unaffectionate laugh, and after a pause said, ‘I want you and Tom to come too.’

‘Move from here? And Roz sat up shaking her fair and now curly head so that she could see him clearly. ‘Move?’

‘Why don’t you just say it? Move from Lil, that’s the point, isn’t it?’

Roz clasped her hands together on her upper chest, all theatrical consternation. But she was genuinely astounded, indignant.

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘I’m not suggesting. I’m saying. Strange as it may seem …’ – This phrase usually signals strife – ‘I’d like a wife. A real one.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘No. I want you to watch something.’ He produced a canister of film. ‘Please, Roz. I mean it. I want you to come next door and watch this.’

Up got Roz, off the bed, all humorous protest.

She was all but nude. With a deep sigh, aimed at the gods, or some impartial viewer, she put on a pink feathered negligee, salvaged from a plays wardrobe: she had felt it was so her.

She sat in the next room, opposite a bit of white wall kept clear of clutter. ‘And now what are you up to, I wonder?’ she said, amiably. ‘You big booby, Harold. Really, I mean, I ask you!’

Harold began running the film – home movies. It was of the four of them, two husbands, the two women. They had been on the beach, and wore wraps over bikinis. The men were still in their swimming trunks. Roz and Lil sat on the sofa, this sofa, where Roz now was, and the men were in hard upright chairs, sitting forward to watch. The women were talking. What about? Did it matter? They were watching each other’s faces, coming in quickly to make a point. The men kept trying to intervene, join in, the women literally did not hear them. Harold, then Theo, was annoyed, and they raised their voices, but the women still did not hear, and when at last the men shouted, insisting, Roz put out a hand to stop them.

Roz remembered the discussion, just. It was not important. The boys were to go to a friend’s for a weekend camp. The parents were discussing it, that was all. In fact the mothers were discussing it, the fathers might just as well not have been there.

The men had been silenced, sat watching and even exchanged looks. Harold was annoyed, but Theo’s demeanour said only, ‘Women, what do you expect?’

And then, that subject disposed of – the boys – Roz said, ‘I simply must tell you …’ and leaned forward to tell Lil, dropping her voice, not knowing she did this, telling her something, nothing important.

The husbands sat and watched, Harold all alert irony, Theo bored.

It went on. The tape ran out.

‘Do you mean to say you actually filmed that – to trap me? You set it up, to get at me!’

‘No, don’t you remember? I had made a film of the boys on the beach. Then you took the camera and filmed me and Theo. And then Theo said, “How about the girls?’”

‘Oh,’ said Roz.

‘Yes. It was only when I played it back later – yesterday, in fact, that I saw … Not that I was surprised. That’s how it always is. It’s you and Lil. Always.’

‘What are you suggesting? Are you saying we’re lezzies?’

‘No. I’m not. And what difference would it make if you were?’

‘I simply don’t get it.’

‘Obviously sex doesn’t matter that much. We have, I think, more than adequate sex, but it’s not me you have the relationship with.’

Roz sat, all twisted with emotion, wringing her hands, the tears ready to start.

‘And so I want you to come with me up north.’

‘You must be mad.’

‘Oh, I know you won’t, but you could at least pretend to think about it.’

‘Are you suggesting we divorce?’

‘I wasn’t, actually. If I found a woman who put me first then …’

‘You’d let me know!’ she said, all tears at last.

‘Oh, Roz,’ said her husband. ‘Don’t think I’m not sorry. I’m fond of you, you know that. I’ll miss you like crazy. You’re my pal. And you’re the best lay I’m ever likely to have and I know that too. But I feel like a sort of shadow here. I don’t matter. That’s all.’

And now it was his turn to blink away tears and then put his hands up to his eyes. He went back to the bedroom, lay down on the bed, and she joined him. They comforted each other. ‘You’re mad, Harold, do you know that? I love you.’ ‘And I love you too Roz, don’t think that I don’t.’

Then Roz asked Lil to come over, and the two women watched the film, without speaking, to its end.

‘And that’s why Harold is leaving me,’ said Roz, who had told Lil the outlines of the situation.

‘I don’t see it,’ said Lil at last, frowning with the effort of trying. She was deadly serious, and Roz serious but smiling and angry.

‘Harold says my real relationship is with you, not with him.’

‘What does he want, then?’ asked Lil.

‘He says you and I made him feel excluded.’

‘He feel excluded! I’ve always felt – left out. All these years I’ve been watching you and Harold and I’ve wished …’ Loyalty had locked her tongue until this moment, but now she came out with it at last: ‘I have a lousy marriage. I have a bad time with Theo. I’ve never … but you knew. And you and Harold, always so happy … I don’t know how often I’ve left you two here and gone home with Theo and wished …’

‘I didn’t know … I mean, I did know, of course, Theo isn’t the ideal husband.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘It seems to me it’s you who should be getting a divorce.’

‘Oh, no, no,’ said Lil, warding off the idea with an agitated hand. ‘No; I once said in joke to Ian – testing him out, what he’d think if I got a divorce and he nearly went berserk. He was silent for such a long time – you know how he goes silent, and then he shouted and began crying. “You can’t,” he said. “You can’t. I won’t let you.’”

‘So poor Tom is going to be without a father,’ said Roz.

‘And Ian doesn’t have much of one,’ said Lil. And then, when it could seem the conversation was at an end, she enquired, ‘Roz, did Harold say that we are lezzies?’

‘All but – well no, not exactly.’

‘Is that what he meant?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Roz was suffering now with the effort of this unusual and unwonted introspection. ‘I don’t understand, I told him. I don’t understand what you’re on about.’

‘Well, we aren’t, are we?’ enquired Lil, apparently needing to be told.

‘Well, I don’t think we are,’ said Roz.

‘We’ve always been friends, though.’

‘Yes.’

‘When did it start? I remember the first day at school.’

‘Yes.’

‘But before that? How did it happen?’

‘I can’t remember. Perhaps it was just – luck.’

‘You can say that again. The luckiest thing in my life – you.’

‘Yes,’ said Roz. ‘But that doesn’t make us … Bloody men,’ she said, suddenly energetic and brisk with anger.

‘Bloody men,’ said Lil, with feeling, because of her husband.

This note, obligatory for that time, having been struck, the conversation was over.

Off went Harold to his university which was surrounded, not by ocean and sea winds and the songs and tales of the sea, but by sand, scrub and thorns. Roz visited him, and then returned there to put on Oklahoma! – a great success – and they enjoyed their more than adequate sex. She said, ‘I don’t see what you’re complaining about,’ and he said, ‘Well, no, you wouldn’t, would you?’ When he came down to visit her and the boys – who being always together were always referred to in the plural – nothing seemed to have changed. As a family they went about, the amiable Harold and the exuberant Roz, a popular young couple – perhaps not so young now – as described often in the gossip columns. For a marriage that had been given its notice to quit the two seemed no less of a couple. As they jested – jokes had never been in short supply – they were like those trees whose centre has rotted away, or the bushes spreading from the centre, which disappear as its suburbs spring up. It was so hard for this couple to fray apart. Everywhere they went, his old pupils greeted him and people who had been involved in one of her productions greeted her. They were Harold and Roz to hundreds of people. ‘Do you remember me – Roz, Harold?’ She always did and Harold knew his old pupils. Like Royalty who expect of themselves that they remember faces and names. ‘The Struthers are separating? Oh, come on! I don’t believe it.’

And now the other couple, no less in the limelight, Lil always judging swimming or running or other sports events, bestowing prizes, making speeches. And there too was the handsome husband, Theo, known for the chain of sports equipment and clothes shops. The two lean, good-looking people, on view, like their friends, the other couple, but so different in style. Nothing excessive or exuberant about them, they were affable, smiling, available, the very essence of good citizenship.

The break-up of Roz and Harold did not disrupt Theo and Lil. The marriage had been a façade for years. Theo had a succession of girls, but, as he complained, he couldn’t get into his bed anywhere without finding a girl in it: he travelled a lot, for the firm.

Then Theo was killed in a car crash, and Lil was a well-off widow, with her boy Ian, the moody one, so unlike Tom, and in that seaside town, where the climate and the style of living put people so much on view, there were two women, without men, and their two little boys.

The young couple with their children: interesting that, the turning point, the moment of change. For a time, seen, commented on, a focus, the young parents, by definition sexual beings, and tagging along or running around them the pretty children. ‘Oh, what a lovely little boy, what a pretty little girl, What’s your name? – what a nice name!’ – and then all at once, or so it seems, the parents, no longer quite so young, seem to lose height a little, even to shrink, they certainly lose colour and lustre. ‘How old did you say he is, she is …’ The young ones are shooting up and glamour has shifted its quarters. Eyes are following them, rather than the parents. ‘They do grow up so fast these days, don’t they?’

The two good-looking women, together again as if men had not entered their equation at all, went about with the two beautiful boys, one rather delicate and poetic with sun-burnished locks falling over his forehead, and the other strong and athletic, friends, as their mothers had been at that age. There was a father in the picture, Harold, up north, but he’d shacked up with a young woman who presumably did not suffer from Roz’s deficiencies. He came to visit, and stayed in Roz’s house, but not in the bedroom (which had to strike both partners as absurd), and Tom visited him in his university. But the reality was, two women in their mid-thirties, and two lads who were not far off being young men. The houses, so close, opposite each other, seemed to belong to both families. ‘We are an extended family,’ cried Roz, not one to let a situation remain undefined.

The beauty of young boys – now, that isn’t an easy thing. Girls, yes, full of their enticing eggs, the mothers of us all, that makes sense, they should be beautiful and usually are, even if only for a year or a day. But boys – why? What for? There is a time, a short time, at about sixteen, seventeen, when they have a poetic aura. They are like young gods. Their families and their friends may be awed by these beings who seem visitors from a finer air. They are often unaware of it, seeming to themselves more like awkwardly packed parcels they are trying to hold together.

Roz and Lil lolled on the little verandah overlooking the sea, and saw the two boys come walking up the path, frowning a little, dangling swimming things they would put to dry on the verandah wall, and they were so beautiful the two women sat up to look at each other, sharing incredulity. ‘Good God!’ said Roz. ‘Yes,’ said Lil. ‘We made that, we made them,’ said Roz. ‘If we didn’t, who did?’ said Lil. And the boys, having disposed of their towels and trunks, went past with smiles that indicated they were busy on their own affairs: they did not want to be summoned for food or to tidy their beds, or something equally unimportant.

‘My God!’ said Roz again. ‘Wait, Lil …’ She got up and went inside, and Lil waited, smiling a little to herself, as she often did, at her friend’s dramatic ways. Out came Roz with a book in her hand, a photograph album. She pushed her chair against Lil’s, and together they turned the pages past babies on rugs, babies in baths – themselves, then ‘her first step’ and ‘the first tooth’ – and they were at the page they knew they both sought. Two girls, at about sixteen.

‘My God!’ said Roz.

‘We didn’t do too badly, then,’ said Lil.

Pretty girls, yes, very, all sugar and spice, but if photographs were taken now of Ian and Tom, would they show the glamour that stopped the breath when one saw them walk across a room or saunter up out of the waves?

They lingered over the pages of themselves, in this album, Roz’s; Lil’s would have to be the same. Photographs of Roz, with Lil. Two pretty girls.

What they were looking for they did not find. Nowhere could they find the shine of unearthliness that illuminated their two sons, at this time.

And there they were sitting, the album spread out across both their stretched-out brown legs – they were in bikinis – when the boys came out, glasses of fruit juice in their hands.

They sat on the wall of the verandah’s edge and contemplated their mothers, Roz and Lil.

‘What are they doing?’ Ian seriously asked Tom.

‘What are they doing?’ echoed Tom, owlishly, joking as always. He jumped up, peered down at the open page, half on Roz’s, half on Lil’s knees, and returned to his place. ‘They are admiring their beauty when they were nymphets,’ he reported to Ian. ‘Aren’t you, Ma?’ he said to Roz.

‘That’s right,’ said Roz. ‘Tempus fugit. It fugits like anything. You have no idea – yet. We wanted to find out what we were like all those years ago.’

‘Not so many years,’ said Lil.

‘Don’t bother to count,’ said Roz. ‘Enough years.’

Now Ian captured the album off the women’s thighs, and he and Tom sat staring at the girls, their mothers.

‘They weren’t bad,’ said Tom to Ian.

‘Not bad at all,’ said Ian to Tom.

The women smiled at each other: more of a grimace.

‘But you are better now,’ said Ian, and went red.

‘Oh, you are charming,’ said Roz, accepting the compliment for herself.

‘I don’t know,’ said the clown, Tom, pretending to compare the old photographs with the two women sitting there, in their bikinis. ‘I don’t know. Now? –’ and he screwed up his eyes for the examination. ‘And then.’ He bent to goggle at the photographs.

‘Now has it,’ he pronounced. ‘Yes, better now.’ And at this the two boys fell to foot-and-shoulder wrestling, or jostling, as they often still did, like boys, though what people saw were young gods who couldn’t take a step or make a gesture that was not from some archaic vase, or antique dance.

‘Our mothers,’ said Tom, toasting them in orange juice.

‘Our mothers,’ said Ian, smiling directly at Roz in a way that made her shift about in her chair and move her legs.

Roz had said to Lil that Ian had a crush on her, Roz, and Lil had said, ‘Well, never mind, he’ll get over it.’

What Ian was not getting over, had not begun to get over, was his father’s death, already a couple of years behind, in time. From the moment he had ceased to have a father he had pined, becoming thinner, almost transparent, so that his mother complained, ‘Do eat, Ian, eat something – you must.’

‘Oh, leave me alone.’

It was all right for Tom, whose father turned up sometimes, and whom he visited up there in his landlocked university. But Ian had nothing, not even warming memories. Where his father should have been, unsatisfactory as he had been with his affairs and his frequent absences, was nothing, a blank, and Ian tried to put a brave face on it, had bad dreams, and both women’s hearts ached for him.

A big boy, his eyes heavy with crying, he would go to his mother, where she sat on a sofa, and collapse beside her, and she would put her arms around him. Or go to Roz, and she embraced him, ‘Poor Ian.’

And Tom watched this, seriously, coming to terms with this grief, not his own, but its presence so close in his friend, his almost brother, Ian. ‘They are like brothers,’ people said. ‘Those two, they might as well be brothers.’ But in one a calamity was eating away, like a cancer, and not in the other, who tried to imagine the pain of grief and failed.

One night, Roz got up out of her bed to fetch herself a drink from the fridge. Ian was in the house, staying the night with Tom, as so often happened. He would use the second bed in Tom’s room, or Harold’s room, where he was now. Roz heard him crying and without hesitation went in to put her arms around him, cuddled him like a small boy, as after all she had been doing all his life. He went to sleep in her arms and in the morning his looks at her were demanding, hungry, painful. Roz was silent, contemplating the events of the night. She did not tell Lil what had happened. But what had happened? Nothing that had not a hundred times before. But it was odd. ‘She didn’t want to worry her!’ Really? When had she ever been inhibited from telling Lil everything?

It happened that Tom was over at Lil’s house, across the street, with Ian, for a couple of nights. Roz alone, telephoned Harold, and they had an almost connubial chat.

‘How’s Tom?’

‘Oh, he’s fine. Tom’s always fine. But Ian’s not too good. He really is taking Theo’s death hard.’

‘Poor kid, he’ll get over it.’

‘He’s taking his time, then. Listen, Harold, next time you come perhaps you could take out Ian by himself?’

‘What about Tom?’

‘Tom’d understand. He’s worried about Ian, I know’

‘Right. I’ll do that. Count on me.’

And Harold did come, and did take Ian off for a long walk along the sea’s edge, and Ian talked to Harold, whom he had known all his life, more like a second father.

‘He’s very unhappy,’ Harold reported to Roz and to Lil.

‘I know he is,’ said Lil.

‘He thinks he’s no good. He thinks he’s a failure.’

The adults stared at this fact, as if it were something they could actually see.

‘But how can you be a failure at seventeen?’ said Lil.

‘Did we feel like that?’ asked Roz.

‘I know I did,’ said Harold. ‘Don’t worry’ And back he went to his desert university. He was thinking of getting married again.

‘Okay,’ said Roz. ‘If you want a divorce.’

‘Well, I suppose she’ll want kids,’ said Harold.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘She’s twenty-five,’ said Harold. ‘Do I have to ask?’

‘Ah,’ said Roz, seeing it all. ‘You don’t want to put the idea into her head?’ She laughed at him.

‘I suppose so,’ said Harold.

Then Ian was again spending the night with Tom. Rather, he was there at bedtime. He went off to Harold’s room, and there was a quick glance at Roz, which she hoped Tom had not seen.

When she woke in the night, ready to go off to the fridge for a drink, or just to wander about the house in the dark, as she often did, she did not go, afraid of hearing Ian crying, afraid she would not be able to stop herself going into him. But then she found he had blundered through the dark into her room and was beside her, clutching at her like a lifebelt in a storm. And she actually found herself picturing those seven black rocks like rotten teeth in the black night out there, the waves pouring and dashing around them in white cascades of foam.

Next morning Roz was sitting at the table in the room that was open to the verandah, and the sea air, and the wash and hush and lull of the sea. Tom stumbled in fresh from his bed, the smell on him of youthful sleep. ‘Where’s Ian?’ he asked. Normally he would not have asked: both boys could sleep until midday.

Roz stirred her coffee, around and around, and said, without looking at him, ‘He’s in my bed.’

This normally would not have merited much notice, since this extended family’s casual ways could accommodate mothers and boys, or the women, or either boy with either woman, lying down for a rest or a chat, or the two boys, and, when he was around, Harold with any of them.

Tom stared at her over his still-empty plate.

Roz accepted that look, and her look back might as well have been a nod.

‘Jesus!’ said Tom.

‘Exactly,’ said Roz.

And then Tom ignored his plate and possible orange juice, leaped up, grabbed his swimming-trunks from the verandah wall, and he sprinted off down to the sea. Usually he would have yelled at Ian to go too.

Tom was not around that day. It was school holidays, but apparently he was off on some school holiday activity, generally scorned by him.

Lil was away, judging some sports competition, and was not back until evening. She came into Roz’s house and said, ‘Roz, I’m whacked. Is there anything to eat?’

Ian was at the table, sitting across from Roz but not looking at her. Tom had a plate of food in front of him. And now Tom began talking to Lil as if no one else was there. Lil scarcely noticed this, she was so tired, but the other two did. And he kept it up until the meal was over and Lil said she must go to bed, she was exhausted, and Tom simply got up and went with her into the dark.

Next morning, lateish for them all, Tom walked back across the street and found Roz at the table, in her usual careless, comfortable pose, her wrap loose about her. He did not look at her but all around her, at the room, the ceiling, through a delirium of happy accomplishment. Roz did not have to guess at his condition; she knew it, because Ian’s similar state had been enveloping her all night.

Now Tom was prowling around the room, taking swipes as he passed at a chair arm, the table, a wall, returning to aim a punch at the chair next to hers, like a schoolboy unable to contain exuberance, but then standing to stare in front of him, frowning, thinking – like an adult. Then he whirled about and was close to his mother, all schoolboy, an embodied snigger, a leer. And then trepidation – he was not sure of himself, nor of his mother, who blushed scarlet, went white, and then got up and deliberately slapped him hard, this way, that way, across the face.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she whispered, trembling with rage. ‘How dare you …’

Half crouching, hands to his head, protecting it, he peered up at her, face distorted in what could have been a schoolboy’s blubbering, but then he took command of himself, stood and said directly to her, ‘I’m sorry,’ though neither he nor she could have said exactly what it was he was sorry for, nor what he was not to dare. Not to let words, or his face, say what he had learned of women in the night just passed, with Lil?

He sat down, put his face in his hands, then leaped up, grabbed his swimming things and was off running into the sea, which this morning was a flat blue plate rimmed by the colourful houses of the enclosing arm of the bay opposite.

Tom did not come into his mother’s house that day but made a detour back to Lil’s. Ian slept late – nothing new in that. He, too, found it hard to look at her, but she knew it was the sight of her, so terribly familiar, so terribly and newly revelatory, it was too much, and so he snatched up his bundle of swimming things and was off. He did not come back until dark. She had done small tasks, made routine telephone calls, cooked, stood soberly scanning the house opposite, which showed no signs of life, and then, when Ian returned, made them both supper and they went back to bed, locking the house front and back – which was something not always remembered.

A week passed. Roz was sitting alone at the table with a cup of tea when there was a knock. She could not ignore it, she knew that, though she would have liked to stay inside this dream or enchantment that had so unexpectedly consumed her. She had dragged on jeans and a shirt, so she was respectable to look at, at least. She opened the door on the friendly, enquiring face of Saul Butler, who lived some doors along from Lil, and was their good neighbour. He was here because he fancied Lil and wanted her to marry him.

When he sat down and accepted tea, she waited.

‘Haven’t seen much of you lot recently, and I can’t get any reply at Lil’s.’

‘Well, it’s the school holidays.’

But usually she and the boys, Lil and the boys, would have been in and out, and often people waved at them from the street, where they all sat around the table.

‘That boy, Ian, he needs a father,’ he challenged her.

‘Yes, he does,’ she agreed at once: she had learned in the past week just how much the boy needed a father.

‘I’m pretty sure I’d be a father to Ian – as much as he’d let me.’

Saul Butler was a well-set-up man of about fifty, not looking his age. He ran a chain of artists’ equipment shops, paints, canvases, frames, all that kind of thing, and he knew Lil from working with her on the town’s trade associations. Roz and Lil had agreed he would make a fine husband, if either of them had been looking for one.

She said, as she had before, ‘Shouldn’t you be saying this to Lil?’

‘But I do. She must be sick of me – staking my claim.’

‘And you want me to support – your claim?’

‘That’s about it. I think I’m a pretty good proposition,’ he said, smiling, mocking his own boasting.

‘I think you’d be a good proposition too,’ said Roz, laughing, enjoying the flirtation, if that was what it was. A week of love-making, and she was falling into the flirtatious mode as if into a bed. ‘But that’s no use is it, it’s Lil you want.’

‘Yes. I’ve had my eye on Lil for – a long time.’ This meant, before his wife left him for another man. ‘Yes. But she only laughs at me. Now, why is that, I wonder? I’m a very serious sort of chap. And where are the lads this morning?’

‘Swimming, I suppose.’

‘I only dropped in to make sure you are all getting along all right.’ He got up, finished his tea standing, and said, ‘See you on the beach.’

Off he went and Roz rang Lil, and said, ‘We’ve got to be seen about a bit more. Saul dropped in.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Lil, her voice heavy, and low.

‘We should be seen on the beach, all four of us.’

A hot morning. The sea shimmered off light. The sky was full of a light that could punish the eyes, without dark defending glasses. Lil and Roz, in loose wraps over their bikinis, slathered with suncream, made their way behind the boys to the beach. It was a well-used beach, but at this hour, on a weekday, there were few people. Two chairs, set close against Roz’s fence, were faded and battered by storm and sun, but serviceable, and there the women sat themselves. The boys had gone running into the sea. Tom had scarcely greeted his mother; Ian’s look at Lil slid off her and away.

The waves were brisk enough for pleasure, but in here, in the bay, were never big enough for surfing, which went on outside, past the Teeth. For all the years of the boys’ childhood they played safe, on this beach, but now they saw it as good enough for a swim, and for the serious dangerous stuff they went out on to the surfers’ beaches. The two were swimming well apart, ignoring each other, and the women’s eyes were behind the secretive dark glasses, and neither wanted to talk – could not.

They saw a head like a seal’s quite far out grow larger, and then it was Saul, and he came out of the sea, waving at them, but went up through the salty sea bushes and past the houses up to the street.

The boys were swimming in. When they reached the shallows they stood up and faced each other. They began to tussle. Thus had they fought all through their growing-up, boy fashion, but soon it was evident that there was nothing childlike about this fight. They were standing waist deep, waves came rushing in, battering them with foam, and streamed away, and then Ian had disappeared and Tom was holding him down. A wave came in, another, and Lil started up in anguish and said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to kill Ian. Tom’s going to kill …’

Ian reappeared, gasping, clutching Tom’s shoulders. Down he went again.

‘Be quiet, Lil,’ said Roz. ‘We mustn’t interfere.’

‘He’s going to kill … Tom wants to kill …’

Then Ian had been down a long time, surely a minute, more …

Tom let out a great yell and let go of Ian, who bobbed up. He was hardly able to stand, fell, stood up again, and watched Tom striding through the waves to the beach. As Tom stepped up on to the sand, blood flowed from his calf. Ian had bitten him, deep under the waves, and it was a bad bite. Ian was standing swaying in the water, choking gasping.

Roz fought with herself, then ran out into the waves and supported Ian in. The boy was pale, vomiting sea water, but he shook off Roz and went to sit by himself on the sand, his head on his knees. Roz returned to her place. ‘Our fault,’ whispered Lil.

‘Stop it, Lil. That’s not going to help.’

Tom was standing on one leg, to examine his calf, which was pouring copious blood. He went back into the sea and stood sloshing the sea water on to the bite. He came out again, found his swimming towel, tore it in half, and tied one half tight around his leg. Then he stood, hesitating. He might have gone back into his house and through it to Lil’s. He might have stayed in his own house, claiming it from Ian? He could have flopped down where he stood near the fence, not far from the women. Instead he turned and stared hard, it seemed with curiosity, at Ian. Then he limped to where Ian sat, and sat down by him. No one spoke.

The women stared at these two young heroes, their sons, their lovers, these beautiful young men, their bodies glistening with sea water and sun oil, like wrestlers from an older time.

‘What are we going to do, Roz?’ whispered Lil.

‘I know what I am going to do,’ said Roz, and stood up. ‘Lunch,’ she called, exactly as she had been doing for years, and the boys obediently got up and followed the women into Roz’s house.

‘You’d better get that dressed,’ said Roz to her son. It was Ian who fetched the box of bandages and Elastoplast and put disinfectant on the bite, and then tied up the wound.

On the table was the usual spread of sausages and cheese and ham and bread, a big dish of fruit, and the four sat around the table and ate. Not a word. And then Roz spoke calmly, deliberately. ‘We all have to behave normally. Remember – everything must be as usual, as it always is.’

The boys looked at each other, for information, it seemed. They looked at Lil. They looked at Roz. They frowned. Lil was smiling, but only just. Roz cut an apple into four, pushed a quarter each at the others, and bit juicily into her segment.

‘Very funny,’ said Ian.

‘I think so,’ said Roz.

Ian got up, clutching a big sandwich stuffed with salad, the apple quarter in his other hand, and went into Roz’s room.

‘Well,’ said Lil, laughing with something like bitterness.

‘Exactly,’ said Roz.

Tom got up, and went out and across the street to Lil’s house.

‘What are we going to do?’ Lil asked her friend, as if she expected an answer, there and then.

‘It seems to me we are doing it,’ said Roz. She followed Ian into her bedroom.

Lil collected up the box with the medicaments and bandages, and walked across to her house. On the way she waved to Saul Butler, who was on his verandah.

School began: it was the boys’ last year. Both were prefects, and admired. Lil was often in other towns and places, judging, giving prizes, making speeches, a well-known figure, this slim, tall, shy woman, in her pale perfect linens, her fair hair smooth and neat. She was known for her kind smile, her sympathy, her warmth. Girls and boys had crushes on her and wrote letters that often included, ‘I know that you would understand me.’ Roz was supervising productions of musicals at a couple of schools, and working on a play, a farce, about sex, a magnetic noisy woman who insisted that her bite was much worse than her bark: ‘So watch out; don’t make me angry!’ The four were in and out, together or separately, nothing seemed to have changed, they ate their meals with windows open on the street, they swam, but sometimes were by themselves on the beach because the boys were out surfing, leaving them behind.

Both had changed, Ian more than Tom. Diffident, shy and awkward he had been, but now he was confident, adult. Roz, who remembered the anguished boy when he had first come to her bed, was quietly proud, but she could never of course say a word to anyone, not even Lil. She had made a man of him, all right. Look at him … never these days did he clutch and cling and weep, because of his loneliness and his vanished father. He was quietly proprietorial with her, which amused her – and she adored it. Tom, who had never suffered from shyness or self-doubt, had become a strong, thoughtful youth, who was protective of Lil in a way that Roz had not seen. These were no longer boys, but young men, and good-looking, and so the girls were after them, and both Lil’s house and Roz’s were, they joked – like fortresses against delirious and desirous young women. But inside these houses, open to sun, sea breezes, the sounds of the sea, were rooms where no one went but Ian and Roz, Tom and Lil.

Lil said to Roz she was so happy it made her afraid. ‘How could anything possibly be as wonderful?’ she whispered, afraid to be overheard – by whom? No one was anywhere near. What she meant was, and Roz knew she did, that such an intense happiness must have its punishment. Roz grew loud and jokey and said that this was a love that dare not speak its name, and sang, ‘I love you, yes I do, I love you, it’s a sin to tell a lie …’

‘Oh, Roz,’ said Lil, ‘sometimes I get so afraid.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Roz. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll soon get bored with the old women and go after girls their own age.’

Time passed.

Ian went to college and learned business and money and computers, and worked in the sports firms, helping Lil: soon he would take his father’s place. Tom decided to go into theatre management. The best course in the whole country was in his father’s university, and it seemed obvious that there was where he should go. Harold wrote and rang to say that there was plenty of room in the house he now shared with his new wife, his new daughter. Harold and Roz had divorced, without acrimony. But Tom said he would stay here, this town was his home, he didn’t want to go north. There was a good enough course right here, and besides, his mother was an education in herself. Harold actually made the trip to argue with his son, planning to say that Tom’s not wanting to leave home was a sign of his becoming a real mummy’s boy, but when he actually confronted Tom, this self-possessed and decided young man, much older than his real age, he could not bring out the evidently unjust accusation. While Harold was staying, several days, Ian had to stay home, and Tom too, in his own house, and none of the four liked this. Harold was conscious they wanted him to leave; he was not wanted. He was uneasy, he was uncomfortable, and said to Roz that surely the two boys were too old to be so often with the older women. ‘Well, we haven’t got them on leashes,’ said Roz. ‘They’re free to come and go.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Harold, in the end, defeated. And he went back to his new family.

Tom enrolled for theatre management, stage management, stage lighting, costume design, the history of the theatre. The course would take three years.

‘We’re all working like dogs,’ said Roz, loudly to Harold on the telephone. ‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about.’

‘You should get married again,’ said Roz’s ex-husband.

‘Well, if you couldn’t stand me, then who could?’ demanded Roz.

‘Oh, Roz, it’s just that I am an old-fashioned family man. And you must admit you don’t exactly fit that bill.’

‘Look. You ditched me. You’ve got yourself your ideal wife. Now, leave me alone. Get out of my life, Harold.’

‘I hope you don’t really mean that.’

Meanwhile, Saul Butler courted Lil.

It became a bit of a joke for all of them, Saul too. He would arrive with flowers and sweets, magazines, a poster, when he had seen Lil go into Roz’s, and call out, ‘Here comes old faithful.’ The women made a play of it all, Roz sometimes pretending the flowers were for her. He also visited Lil in her house, leaving at once if Tom were there, or Ian.

‘No,’ said Lil, ‘I’m sorry, Saul. I just don’t see myself married again.’

‘But you’re getting older, Lil. You’re getting on. And here is old faithful. You’ll be glad of him one day.’ Or he said to Roz, ‘Lil’ll be glad of a man about the place, one of these days.’

One day the boys, or young men, were readying themselves to go out to the big ocean for surfing, when Saul arrived, with flowers for both women. ‘Now, you two, sit down,’ he said. And the women, smiling, sat and waited.

The boys on the verandah over the sea were collecting surfboards, towels, goggles. ‘Hi, Saul,’ said Tom. A long pause before Ian’s, ‘Hello, Saul.’ That meant that Tom had nudged Ian into the greeting.

Ian resented and feared Saul. He had said to Roz, ‘He wants to take Lil away from us.’ ‘You mean, from you.’ ‘Yes. And he wants to get me too. A ready-made son. Why doesn’t he make his own kids?’

‘I thought I had got you,’ said Roz.

At which Ian leaped at her, or on her, demonstrating who had got whom.

‘Charming,’ said Roz.

‘And Saul can go and screw himself,’ had said Ian.

Saul waited until the two had gone off down the path to the sea, and said, ‘Now, listen. I want to put it to you both. I want to get married again. As far as I’m concerned, Lil, you’re the one. But you’ve got to decide.’

‘It’s no good,’ said Roz, and Lil only shrugged. ‘We can see how it must look. You’re just about as good a bargain as any women look for.’

‘And you’re talking for Lil, again.’

‘She’s often enough spoken for herself.’

‘But you’d both do better with a bloke,’ he said. ‘The two of you, without men, and the two lads. It’s all too much of a good thing.’

A moment of shock. What was he saying? Implying?

But he was going on. ‘You are two handsome girls,’ said this gallant suitor. ‘You’re both so …’ and then he seemed to freeze, his face showed he was struggling with emotions, violent ones, and then it set hard. He muttered, ‘Oh, my God …’ he stared at them, Lil to Roz and back again. ‘My God,’ he said again. ‘You must think me a bloody fool.’ His voice was toneless: the shock had gone deep.

‘I’m an idiot,’ he said. ‘So, that’s it.’

‘What?’ said Lil. ‘What are you talking about?’ Her voice was timid, because of what he might be talking about. Roz kicked her under the table. Lil actually leaned over to rub her ankle, still staring at Saul.

‘A fool,’ he said. ‘You two must have been having a good laugh at my expense.’ He got up and blundered out. He was hardly able to get across the street to his own house.

‘Oh, I see,’ said Lil. She was about to go after him, but Roz said, ‘Stop. It’s a good thing, don’t you see?’

‘And now it’s going to get around that we are lezzies,’ said Lil.

‘So what? Probably it wouldn’t be the first time. After all, when you think how people talk.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Lil.

‘Let them say it. The more the better. It keeps us all safe.’

Soon they all went to Saul’s wedding with a handsome young woman who looked like Lil.

The two sons were pleased. But the women said to each other, ‘We’re neither of us likely to get as good a deal as Saul again.’ That was Lil.

‘No,’ agreed Roz.

‘And what are we going to do when the boys get tired of us old women?’

‘I shall cry my eyes out. I shall go into a decline.’

‘We shall grow old gracefully,’ said Lil.

‘Like hell,’ said Roz. ‘I shall fight every inch of the way’

Not old women yet, nor anywhere near it. Over forty, though, and the boys were definitely not boys, and their time of wild beauty had gone. You’d not think now, seeing the two strong, confident, handsome young men, that once they had drawn eyes struck as much by awe as by lust or love. And the two women, one day reminding themselves how their two had been like young gods, rummaged in old photographs, and could find nothing of what they knew had been there: just as, looking at their old photographs, they saw pretty girls, nothing more.

Ian was already working with his mother in the management of the chain of sports shops, and was an up-and-coming prominent citizen. Harder to make a mark in the theatre: Tom was still working in the foothills when Ian was already near the top. A new position for Tom, who had always been first, Ian looking up to him.

But he persevered. He worked. And as always he was charming with Lil, and as often in her bed as he could, considering the long and erratic hours of the theatre.

‘There you are,’ said Lil to Roz. ‘It’s a beginning. He’s getting tired of me.’

But Ian showed no signs of relinquishing Roz, on the contrary. He was attentive, demanding, possessive, and when one day he saw her lying on her pillows, love-making just concluded, smoothing down loose ageing skin over her forearms, he let out a cry, clasped her, and shouted, ‘No, don’t, don’t, don’t even think of it. I won’t let you grow old.’

‘Well,’ said Roz, ‘it is going to happen, for all that.’

‘No.’ And he wept, just as he had done when he was still the frightened abandoned boy in her arms. ‘No, Roz, please, I love you.’

‘So I mustn’t get old, is that it, Ian? I’m not allowed to? Mad, the boy is mad,’ said Roz, addressing invisible listeners, as we do when sanity does not seem to have ears.

And alone, she felt uneasiness, and, indeed, awe. It was mad, his demand on her. It really did seem that he had refused to think she might grow old. Mad! But perhaps lunacy is one of the great invisible wheels that keep our world turning.

Meanwhile Tom’s father had not given up his aim, to rescue Tom. He made no bones about it. ‘I’m going to rescue you from those femmes fatales,’ he said on the telephone. ‘You get up here and let your old father take you in hand.’

‘Harold is going to rescue me from you,’ said Tom to his mother, on his way to Lil’s bed. ‘You’re a bad influence.’

‘A bit late,’ said Roz.

Tom spent a fortnight in the university town. In the evenings a short walk took him out into the hot sandy scrub where hawks wheeled and watched. He became friends with Molly, Roz’s successor, and with his half-sister, aged eight, and a new baby.

It was a boisterous child-centred house, but Tom told Ian he found it restful.

‘Nice to get to know you, at last,’ said Molly.

‘And now,’ said Harold, ‘don’t leave it so long.’

Tom didn’t. He accepted an offer to direct West Side Story in the university theatre, and said he would stay in his father’s house.

As always, the young women clustered and clung. ‘Time you were married, your father thinks,’ said Molly.

‘Oh, does he?’ said Tom. ‘I’ll marry in my own good time.’

He was in his late twenties. His classmates, his contemporaries, were married or had ‘partners’.

There was a girl he did like, perhaps because of her difference from Lil and from Roz. She was a little dark-haired, ruddy-faced girl, pretty enough, and she flirted with him in a way that made no claims on him. For here, so far from home, from his mother and from Lil, he understood how many claims and ties bound him there. He admired his mother, even if she exasperated him, and he loved Lil. He could not imagine himself in bed with anyone else. But they bound him, oh, yes, they did, and Ian, too, a brother in reality if not in fact. Down there – so he apostrophised his city, his home, so much part of the sea that here, when he heard wind in the bushes it was the waves he heard. ‘Down there, I’m not free.’

Up here, he was. He decided to accept work on another production. That meant another three months ‘up here’. By now it was accepted that he and Mary Lloyd were a unit, ‘an item’. Tom was passive, hearing this characterisation of him and Mary. He neither said yes, nor did he say no, he only laughed. But it was Mary who went with him to the cinema or who came home with him to his father for special meals.

‘You could do a lot worse,’ said Harold to his son.

‘But I’m not doing anything, as far as I can see,’ said Tom.

‘Is that so? I don’t think she sees it like that.’

Later Harold said to Tom, ‘Mary asked me if you’re queer?’

‘Gay?’ said Tom. ‘Not as far as I know’

It was breakfast time, the family ate at table, the girl watching what went on, as little girls do, the infant babbling attractively in her high chair. A delightful scene. Part of Tom ached for it, for his future, for himself. His father had wanted ordinary family life and here it was.

‘Then, what gives?’ asked Harold. ‘Is there a girl back home, is that it?’

‘You could say that,’ said Tom, calmly helping himself to this and that.

‘Then you should let Mary go,’ said Harold.

‘Yes,’ said Molly, on behalf of her sex. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘I wasn’t aware I had her tied.’

‘Tom,’ said his father.

‘That’s not on,’ said his father’s wife.

Tom said nothing. Then he was in bed with Mary. He had slept only with Lil, no one else. This fresh young bouncy body was delightful, he liked it all, and took quiet satisfaction in Mary’s, ‘I thought you were gay, I really did.’ Clearly, she was agreeably surprised.

So there it was. Mary came often to spend the night with Tom in Harold’s and Molly’s house, all very en famille and cosy. If weddings were not actually mentioned, that was because tact had been decided on. And because of something else, still ill-defined. In bed, Mary had exclaimed over the bite mark on Tom’s calf. ‘God,’ said she. ‘What was this? A dog?’ ‘That was a love bite,’ he said, after thought. ‘Who on earth …’ And Mary, in play, tried to fit her mouth over the bite, but found Tom’s leg, and then Tom, pulling away from her. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said, which was fair enough. But then, in a voice she had certainly never heard from him, nor anything like it: ‘Don’t you dare ever do that again.’

She stared, and began to cry. He simply got off the bed and went off into the bathroom. He came back clothed, and did not look at her.

There was something here … something bad … some place where she must not go. Mary understood that. She felt so shocked by the incident that she nearly broke off from Tom, then and there.

Tom thought he might as well go back home. What he loved about being ‘up here’ was being free, and that delightful condition had evaporated.

This town was imprisoning him. It was not a large one, but that wasn’t the point. He liked it, as a place, spreading suburbs of bungalows around a centre of university and business, and all around the scrubby shrubby desert. He could walk from the university theatre after rehearsal and find himself in ten minutes with strong-smelling thorny bushes all around, and under his feet coarse yellow sand where the fallen thorns made pale warning gleams: careful, don’t tread on us, we can pierce through the thickest soles. At night, after a performance or a rehearsal, he walked straight out into the dark and stood listening to the crickets, and above him the unpolluted sky glittered and sparked off coloured fire. When he got back to his father’s, Mary might be waiting for him.

‘Where did you get to?’

‘I went for a walk.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? I like to walk too.’

‘I’m a bit of a lone wolf,’ said Tom. ‘I’m the cat who walks by himself. So, if that’s not your style, I’m sorry.’

‘Hey,’ said Mary. ‘Don’t bite my head off.’

‘Well, you’d better know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

At this, Harold and Molly exchanged glances: that was a commitment, surely? And Mary, hearing a promise, said ‘I like cats. Luckily’

But she was secretly tearful and fearful.

Tom was restless, he was moody. He was very unhappy but did not know it. He had not been unhappy in his life. He did not recognise the pain for what it was. There are people who are never ill, are unthinkingly healthy, then they get an illness and are so affronted and ashamed and afraid that they may even die of it. Tom was the emotional equivalent of such a person.

‘What is it? What’s wrong with me?’ he groaned, waking with a heavy weight across his chest. ‘I’d like to stay right here in bed and pull the covers over my head.’

But what for? There was nothing wrong with him.

Then, one evening, standing out under the stars, feeling sad enough to howl up at them, he said to himself, ‘Good Lord, I’m so unhappy. Yes, that’s it.’

He told Mary he wasn’t well. When she was solicitous he said, ‘Leave me alone.’

From the periphery of the little town, roads which soon became tracks ran out into the desert, to places used by students for their picnics and excursions. In between the used ways almost invisible paths made their way between the odoriferous bushes that had butterflies clinging to them in the day, and at night sent out waves of scent to attract bats. Tom walked out on the tarmacked road, turned on to the dusty track, turned off that and found a faint path to a little hill that had rocks on it, one a big flat one, which held the sun’s heat well into the night. Tom lay on this hot rock and let unhappiness fill him.

‘Lil,’ he was whispering. ‘Lil.’

He knew at last that he was missing Lil, that was the trouble. Why was he surprised? Vaguely, he had all this time thought that one day he’d get a girl his own age and then … but it had been so vague. Lil had always been in his life. He lay face down on the rock and sniffed at it, the faint metallic tang, the hot dust, and vegetable aromas from little plants in the cracks. He was thinking of Lil’s body that always smelled of salt, of the sea. She was like a sea creature, in and out, the sea water often drying on her and then she was in again. He bit into his forearm, remembering that his earliest memory was of licking salt off Lil’s shoulders. It was a game they played, the little boy and his mother’s oldest friend. Every inch of his body had been available to Lil’s strong hands since he had been born, and Lil’s body was as familiar to him as his own. He saw again Lil’s breasts, only just covered by the bikini top, and the faint wash of glistening sand in the cleft between her breasts, and the glitter of tiny sand grains on her shoulders.

‘I used to lick her for the salt,’ he murmured. ‘Like an animal at a salt lick.’

When he went back, very late, the house dark, he did not sleep but sat down and wrote to Lil. Writing letters had not ever been his style. Finding his writing illegible, he remembered that an old portable typewriter had been stuffed under his bed, and he pulled it out, and typed, trying to muffle the sharp sound by putting the machine on a towel. But Molly had heard, knocked and said, ‘Can’t you sleep?’ Tom said he was sorry, and stopped.

In the morning he finished the letter and posted it and wrote another. His father, peering to see the inscription, said, ‘So, you’re not writing to your mother?’

Tom said, ‘No. As you see.’ Family life had its drawbacks, he decided.

Thereafter he wrote letters to Lil at the university, and posted them himself.

Molly asked him what was the matter and he said he wasn’t feeling up to scratch, and she said he should see a doctor.

Mary asked what was the matter and he said, ‘I’m all right.’

And still he didn’t go back ‘down there’; he stayed up here, and that meant staying with Mary.

He wrote to Lil daily, answered the letters, or rather notes, she sometimes wrote to him; he telephoned his mother, he went out into the desert as often as he could, and told himself he would get over it. Not to worry. Meanwhile his heart was a lump of cold loneliness, and he dreamed miserably.

‘Listen,’ said Mary, ‘if you want to call this off, then say so.’

He suppressed, ‘Call what off?’ and said, ‘Just give me time.’

Then, on an impulse, or perhaps because he soon would have to decide whether to accept another contract, he said to his father, ‘I’m off.’

‘What about Mary?’ asked Molly.

He did not reply. Back home, he was over at Lil’s and in her bed in an hour. But it was not the same. He could make comparisons now, and did. It was not that Lil was old – she was beautiful, so he kept muttering and whispering, ‘You’re so beautiful,’ – but there was claim on him, Mary, and that wasn’t even personal. Mary, another woman, did it matter? One day soon he must – he had to … everyone expected it of him.

Meanwhile Ian seemed to be doing fine with Roz. With his mother, Tom’s. Ian didn’t seem to be unhappy, or suffering, far from it.

And then Mary arrived, and found the four preparing to go to the sea. Flippers and goggles were found for her, and a surfboard. Within half an hour of her arrival she was ready to embark with the two young men, on the wide, dangerous, bad sea outside this safe bay. A little motorboat would take them out. So this pretty young thing, as smooth and shiny as a fish, larked about and played with Tom and Ian, and the two older women sat on their chairs, watching behind dark glasses and saw the motorboat arrive and take the three off.

‘She’s come for Tom,’ said Tom’s mother.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Tom’s lover.

‘She’s nice enough,’ said Roz.

Lil said nothing.

Roz said, ‘Lil, I think this is where we bow out.’

Lil said nothing.

‘Lil?’ Roz peered over at her, and pushed up her dark glasses to see better.

‘I don’t think I could bear it,’ said Lil.

‘We’ve got to.’

‘Ian doesn’t have a girl.’

‘No, but he should have. Lil, they’re getting on towards thirty.’

‘I know.’

Far away, where the sharp black rocks stood in their white foam at the mouth of the bay, three tiny figures were waving at them, before disappearing out of sight to the big beach.

‘We have to stand together and end it,’ said Roz.

Lil was quietly weeping. Then Roz was, too.

‘We have to, Lil.’

‘I know we do.’

‘Come on, let’s swim.’

The women swam hard and fast, out and back and around, and then landed on the beach, and went straight up to Roz’s house, to prepare lunch. It was Sunday. Ahead was the long difficult afternoon.

Lil said, ‘I’ve got work,’ and went off to one of her shops.

Roz served lunch, making excuses for Lil, and then she too said she had things to do. Ian said he would come with her. That left Tom and Mary alone, and there was a showdown. ‘Either on or off,’ said Mary. ‘Either yes or no.’ ‘There were plenty of fish in the sea.’ ‘It was time he grew up.’ All that kind of thing, as prescribed for this occasion.

When the others came back, Mary announced that she and Tom were getting married, and there were congratulations and a noisy evening. Roz sang lots of songs, Tom joined in, they all sang. And when it was bedtime Mary stayed with Tom, in his house, and Ian went home with Lil.

Then Mary went back home to plan the wedding.

And now it had to be done. The two women said to the young men that now that was it. ‘It’s over,’ said Roz.

Ian cried out, ‘What do you mean? Why? I’m not getting married.’

Tom sat quietly, jaw set, drinking. He filled his glass with wine, drained it, filled it again, drank, saying nothing.

At last he said to Ian, ‘They’re right, don’t you see?’

‘No,’ yelled Ian. He went into Roz’s room and called her, and Tom went with Lil to her house. Ian wept and pleaded. ‘Why, what for? We’re perfectly happy. Why do you want to spoil it?’ But Roz stuck it out. She was all heartless determination and only when she and Lil were alone together, the men having gone off to discuss it, they wept and said they could not bear it. Their hearts were breaking they said, how were they going to live, it would be unendurable.

When the men returned, the women were tear-stained but firm.

Lil told Tom that he must not come with her that night and Roz told Ian that he must go home with Lil.

‘You’ve ruined everything,’ said Ian to Roz. ‘It’s all your fault. Why couldn’t you leave things as they were?’

Roz jested, ‘Cheer up. We are going to become respectable ladies, yes, your disreputable mothers are going to become pillars of virtue. We shall be perfect mothers-in-law, and then we shall become wonderful grandmothers to your children.’

‘I’m not going to forgive you,’ said Ian to Roz.

And Tom said to Lil, low, to her only, ‘I’ll never ever ever forget you.’

Now, that was a valediction, almost conventional. It meant – surely? – that Tom’s heart was not likely to suffer permanent damage.

The wedding, needless to say, was a grand affair. Mary had been determined not to be upstaged by her dramatic mother-in-law, but found Roz was being the soul of tact, in a self-effacing outfit. Lil was elegant and pale and smiling, and the very moment the happy pair had driven off for their honeymoon she was down swimming in the bay, where Roz, a good hostess, could not leave her guests to join her. Later Roz crossed the street to find out how Lil was, but her bedroom door was locked and she would not respond to Roz’s knocks and enquiries. Ian as best man had made a funny and likeable speech, and, meeting Roz in the street as she was returning from Lils, said, ‘So? Are you pleased with yourself now?’ And he too went running down to the sea.

Now Roz was in her empty house, and she lay on her bed and at last was able to weep. When there were knocks at her door which she knew were Ian’s, she rolled in anguish, her fist stuffed into her mouth.

As soon as the honeymoon was over, Mary told Tom, who told his mother, that she thought Roz should move out and leave the house to them. It made sense. It was a big house, right for a family. The trouble was financial. Years ago the house had been affordable, when this whole area had been far from desirable, but now it was smart and only the rich could afford these houses. In an impulsive, reckless, generous gesture, Roz gave the house to the young couple as a wedding present. And so where was she to live? She couldn’t afford another house like this. She took up residence in a little hotel down the coast, and this meant that, for the first time ever, since she was born, she was not within a few yards of Lil. She did not understand at first why she was so restless, sad, bereft, put it all down to losing Ian, but then understood it was Lil she missed, almost as much as Ian. She felt she had lost everything, and literally from one week to the next. But she was not reflective, by nature: she was like Tom, who would always be surprised by his emotions, when he was forced to notice them. To deal with her feelings of emptiness and loss, she accepted a job at the university as a full-time teacher of drama, worked hard, swam twice a day, took sleeping pills.

Mary was soon pregnant. Jokes of a traditional kind were aimed at Ian, by Saul, among others. ‘You’re aren’t going to let your mate get ahead of you, are you? When’s your wedding?’

Ian was working hard, too. He was trying not to give himself time to think. No stranger to thought, reflection, introspection, he felt that they were enemies, waiting to strike him down. A new shop was opening in the town where Harold was. They were waiting for their child. Ian did not stay at Harold’s, but in a hotel, and of course visited Harold, who had been like a father to him – so he said. There he met a friend of Mary’s, who had paid attention to him at the wedding. Hannah. It was not that he disliked her, on the contrary, she pleased him, with her comfortable ways, that were easy to see as maternal, but he was inside an empty space full of echoes, and he could not imagine making love with anyone but Roz. He swam every morning from ‘their’ beach, sometimes seeing Roz there, and he greeted her, but turned away, as if the sight of her hurt him – it did. And he more often took the little motorboat out to the surfing beaches. He and Tom had always gone together, but Tom was so busy with Mary, and the new baby.

One day, seeing Roz drying herself on the sand, the boatman, who had come into the bay especially to find her, stopped his engine, let the boat rock on the gentle waves, and jumped down into the water, tugging the boat behind him like a dog on a leash to say, ‘Mrs Struthers, Ian’s doing some pretty dangerous stuff out there. He’s a picture to watch, but he scares me. If you see his mother – or perhaps you …’

Roz said, ‘Well, now. To tell a man like Ian to play it safe, that’s more than a mother’s life is worth. Or mine, for that matter.’

‘Someone should warn him. He’s asking for it. Those waves out there, you’ve got to respect them.’

‘Have you warned him?’

‘I’ve tried my best.’

‘Thanks,’ said Roz. ‘I’ll tell his mother

She told Lil, who said to her son that he was playing too close to the safety margins. If the old boatman was worried, then that meant something. Ian said, ‘Thanks.’

One evening, at sunset, the boatman came in to find Roz or one of them on the beach, but had to go up to the house, found Mary, told her that Ian was lying smashed up on one of the outer beaches.

Then Ian was in hospital. Told by the doctor, ‘You’ll live,’ his face said plainly he wished he could have heard something else. He had hurt his spine. But that would probably heal. He had hurt his leg, and that would never be normal.

He left hospital and lay in his bed at home, in a room which for years had not been much more than a place where he changed his clothes, before crossing the street to Roz. But in that house were now Tom and Mary. He turned his face to the wall. His mother tried to coax him up and on to his feet, but could not make him take exercise. Lil could not, but Hannah could and did. She came to visit her old friend Mary, slept in that house, and spent most of her time sitting with Ian, holding his hand, often in sympathetic tears.

‘For an athlete it must be so hard,’ she kept saying to Lil, to Mary, to Tom. ‘I can understand why he is so discouraged.’

A good word, an accurate one. She persuaded Ian to turn his face towards her, and then, soon, to get up and take the prescribed steps up and down the room, then on to the verandah, and soon, across the road and down to swim. But he would not ever surf again. He would always limp.

Hannah kissed the poor leg, kissed him, and Ian wept with her: her tears gave him permission to weep. And soon there was another wedding, an even larger one, since Ian and his mother Liliane were so well known, and their sports shops so beneficial to every town they found themselves in, and both were famed for their good causes and their general benevolence.

So there they were, the new young couple, Ian and Hannah, in Lil’s house with Lil. Opposite, Roz’s old house was now Tom’s and Mary’s. Lil was uncomfortable in her role as mother-in-law, and was unhappy every time she saw the house opposite, now so changed. But after all, she was rich, unlike Roz. She bought one of the houses almost on the beach, not a couple of hundred yards from the two young couples, and Roz moved in. The women were together again, and Saul Butler when he met them allowed a special measure of sarcastic comment into his, ‘Ah, together again, I see!’ ‘As you see,’ said Roz or Lil. ‘Can’t fool you, Saul, can we?’ said Lil, or Roz.

Then Hannah was pregnant and Ian was appropriately proud.

‘It has turned out all right,’ said Roz to Lil.

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Lil.

‘What more could we expect?’

They were on the beach, in their old chairs, moved to outside the new fence.

‘I didn’t expect anything,’ said Lil.

‘But?’

‘I didn’t expect to feel the way I do,’ said Lil. ‘I feel …’

‘All right,’ said Roz quickly. ‘Let it go. I know. But look at it this way, we’ve had …’

‘The best,’ said Lil. ‘Now all that time seems to me like a dream. I can’t believe it, such happiness, Roz,’ she whispered, turning her face and leaning forward a little, though there wasn’t a soul for fifty yards.

‘I know,’ said Roz. ‘Well – that’s it.’ And she leaned back, shutting her eyes. From below her dark glasses tears trickled.

Ian went off with his mother a good bit on trips to their shops. He was everywhere greeted with affectionate, respectful generosity. It was known how he had got his limp. As foolhardy as an Everest hero, as brave as – well, as a man outrunning a wave like a mountain – he was so handsome, so courteous, such a gentleman, so kind. He was like his mother.

On one such trip, they were in their hotel suite, before bedtime, and Lil was saying that she was going to take little Alice for the day when she got back to give Mary a chance to go shopping.

Ian said, ‘You two women are really pleased with yourselves.’

This was venomous, not like him; she had not – she thought – heard that voice from him before.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s all right for you.’

‘What do you mean, Ian, what are you saying?’

‘I’m not blaming you. I know it was Roz.’

‘What do you mean? It was both of us.’

‘Roz put the idea into your head. I know that. You’d never have thought of it. Too bad about Tom. Too bad about me.’

At this she began to laugh, a weak defensive laugh. She was thinking of the years with Tom, watching him change from a beautiful boy into a man, seeing the years claim him, knowing how it must end, must end, then should end, she should end it … she and Roz … but it was so hard, hard …

‘Ian, do you realise, you sound demented when you say things like that?’

‘Why? I don’t see it.’

‘What did you think? We’d all just go on, indefinitely, then you and Tom, two middle-aged men, bachelors, and Roz and me, old and then you two, old, without families, and Roz and I, old, old, old … we’re getting on for old now, can’t you see?’

‘No, you aren’t,’ said her son calmly. ‘Not at all. You and Roz knock the girls for six any time.’

Did he mean Hannah and Mary? If so … the streak here of sheer twisted lunacy frightened her and she got up. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘It was Roz put you up to it. I don’t forgive you for agreeing. And she needn’t think I’ll forgive her for spoiling everything. We were all so happy.’

‘Good night, I’ll see you at breakfast.’

Hannah had her baby, Shirley, and the two young women were much together. The two older women, and the husbands, waited to hear news of second pregnancies: surely the logical step. And then, to their surprise, Mary and Hannah announced that they thought of going into business together. At once it was suggested they should work in the sports shops: they would have flexible hours, could come and go, earn a bit of money … And, it was the corollary, fit second babies into a comfortable timetable.

They said no, they wanted to start a new business, the two of them.

‘I expect we can help you with the money,’ said Ian, and Hannah said, ‘No, thanks. Mary’s father can help us out. He’s loaded.’ When Hannah spoke, it was often Mary’s thought they were hearing. ‘We want to be independent,’ said Hannah, a trifle apologetic, herself hearing that she had sounded ungracious, to say the least.

The wives went off to visit their families for a weekend, taking the babies, to show them off.

The four, Lil and Roz, Ian and Tom, sat together at the table in Roz’s house – Roz’s former house – and the sound of the waves said that nothing had changed, nothing … except that the infant Alice’s paraphernalia was all over the place, in the way of modern family life.

‘It’s very odd, what they want,’ said Roz. ‘Do we understand why? What is it all about?’

‘We’re too – heavy for them,’ said Lil.

‘We. They,’ said Ian. ‘They. We.’

They all looked at him, to take in what he meant.

Then Roz burst out, ‘We’ve tried so hard. Lil and I, we’ve done our best.’

‘I know you have,’ said Tom. ‘We know that.’

‘But here we are,’ said Ian. ‘Here we are.’

And now he leaned forwards towards Roz, passionate, accusing – very far from the urbane and affable man everyone knew: ‘And nothing has changed, has it. Roz? Just tell me the truth, tell me, has it?’

Roz’s eyes, full of tears, did meet his, and then she got up to save herself with the ritual of supplying cold drinks from the fridge.

Lil said, looking calmly straight across at Tom, ‘It’s no good, Roz. Just don’t, don’t …’ For Roz was crying, silently, allowing it to be seen, her dark glasses lying on the table. Then she covered her eyes with the glasses, and directing those dark circles at Ian, she said, ‘I don’t understand what it is you want, Ian. Why do you go on and on? It’s all done. It’s finished.’

‘So, you don’t understand,’ said Ian.

‘Stop it,’ said Lil, beginning to cry too. ‘What’s the point of this? All we have to do is to decide what to tell them, they want our support.’

‘We will tell them that we will support them’ said Ian, and added, ‘I’m going for a swim.’

And the four ran down into the waves, Ian limping, but not too badly.

Interesting that in the discussion that afternoon, with the four, a certain key question had not been mentioned. If the two young wives were going to start a business, then the grandmothers would have to play a part.

A second discussion, with all six of them, was on this very point.

‘Working grandmothers,’ said Roz. ‘I quite fancy it, what about you, Lil?’

‘Working is the word,’ said Lil. ‘I’m not going to give up the shops. How will we fit in the babies?’

‘Easy,’ said Roz. ‘We’ll juggle it. I have long holidays at the university. You have Ian at your beck and call in the shops. There are weekends. And I daresay the girls’ll want to see their little angels from time to time.’

‘You’re not suggesting we’re going to neglect them?’ said Mary.

‘No, darling, no, not at all. Besides, both Lil and I had girls to help us with our little treasures, didn’t we, Lil?’

‘I suppose so. Not much, though.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Mary, ‘I suppose we can hire an au pair, if it’s like that.’

‘How you do flare up,’ said Roz. ‘Certainly we can get ourselves au pairs when needed. Meanwhile, the grannies are at your service.’

It was a real ritual occasion, the day the babies were to be introduced to the sea. All six adults were there on the beach. Blankets had been spread. The grandmothers, Roz and Lil, in their bikinis, were sitting with the babies between their knees, smoothing them over with suncream. Tiny, delicate creatures, fair-haired, fair-skinned, and around them, tall and large and protective, the big adults.

The mummies took them into the sea, assisted by Tom and Lil. There was much splashing, cries of fear and delight from the little ones, reassurance from the adults – a noisy scene. And sitting on the blankets where the sand had already blown, glistening in little drifts, were Roz and Ian. Ian looked long and intently at Roz and said, ‘Take your glasses off.’ Roz did so.

He said, ‘I don’t like it when you hide your eyes from me.’

She snapped the glasses back on and said, ‘Stop it, Ian. You’ve got to stop this. It’s simply not on.’

He was reaching forward to lift off her glasses. She slapped down his hand. Lil had seen, from where she stood to her waist in the sea. The intensity of it, you could say, even the ferocity … had Hannah noticed? Had Mary? A yell from a little girl – Alice. A big wave had leaped up and … ‘It’s bitten me,’ she shrieked. ‘The sea’s bitten me.’ Up jumped Ian, reached Shirley who also was making a commotion now. ‘Can’t you see,’ he shouted at Hannah, over the sea noise, ‘you’re frightening her? They’re frightened.’ With a tiny child on either shoulder he limped up out of the waves. He began a jiggling and joggling of the little girls in a kind of dance, but he was dipping in each step with the limp and they began to cry harder. ‘Granny’ wailed Hannah, ‘I want my granny’ sobbed Shirley. The infants were deposited on the rugs, Lil joined Roz, and the grandmothers soothed and petted the children while the other four went off to swim.

‘There, my ducky,’ sang Roz, to Hannah.

‘Poor little pet,’ crooned Lil to Shirley.

Not long after this the two young women were in their new office, in the suite which would be the scene of their – they were convinced – future triumphs. ‘We are having a little celebration,’ they had said, making it sound as if there would be associates, sponsors, friends. But they were alone, drinking champagne and already tiddly.

It was the end of their first year. They had worked hard, harder than they had expected. Things had gone so well there was already talk of expanding. That would mean even longer hours, and more work for the grandmothers.

‘They wouldn’t mind,’ said Hannah.

‘I think they would,’ said Mary.

There was something in her voice, and Hannah looked to see what Mary was wanting her to understand. Then, she said, ‘It’s not a question of us working our butts off – and their working their butts off – they want us to get pregnant again.’

‘Exactly,’ said Mary.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Hannah. ‘I told Ian, yes, but there’s no hurry. We can get our business established and then let’s see. But you’re right, that’s what they want.’

‘They,’ said Mary. ‘They want. And what they want they intend to have.’

Here Hannah showed signs of unrest. Compliant by nature, biddable, she had begun by deferring to Mary, such a strong character, but now she was asserting herself. ‘I think they are very kind.’

‘They,’ said Mary. ‘Who the hell are they to be kind to us?

‘Oh, come on! We wouldn’t have been able to start this business at all without the grandmothers helping with everything.’

‘Roz is so damned tactful all the time,’ said Mary, and it exploded out of her, the champagne aiding and abetting. She poured some more. ‘They’re both so tactful.’

‘You must be short of something to complain about.’

‘I feel they are watching us all the time to make sure we come up to the mark.’

‘What mark?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mary, tears imminent. ‘I wish I knew. There’s something there.’

‘They don’t want to be interfering mothers-in-law.’

‘Sometimes I hate them.’

‘Hate,’ Hannah dismissed, with a smile.

‘They’ve got them, don’t you see? Sometimes I feel …’

‘It’s because they didn’t have fathers – the boys. Ian’s father died and Tom’s went off and married someone else. That’s why the four of them are so close.’

‘I don’t care why. Sometimes I feel like a spare part.’

‘I think you’re being unfair.’

‘Tom wouldn’t care who he was married to. It could be a seagull or a … or a … wombat.’

Hannah flung herself back in her chair, laughing.

‘I mean it. Oh, he’s ever so damned kind. He’s so nice. I shout at him and I pick a fight, anything just to make him – see me. And then the next thing we’re in bed having a good screw.’

But Hannah didn’t feel anything like that. She knew Ian needed her. It was not only the slight dependence because of his gammy leg, he sometimes clung to her, childlike. Yes, there was something of the child in him – a little. One night he had called out to Roz in his sleep, and Hannah had woken him. ‘You were dreaming of Roz,’ she told him.

At once awake and wary, he said, ‘Hardly surprising. I’ve known her all my life. She was like another mother.’ And he buried his face in her breasts. ‘Oh, Hannah, I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

Now that Hannah was standing up to her, Mary was even more alone. Once she had felt, there’s Hannah, at least I’ve got Hannah.

Thinking over this conversation afterwards, Mary knew there was something there that eluded her. That was what she always felt. And yet what was she complaining about? Hannah was right. When she looked at their situation from outside, married to these two covetable men, well-known, well-set-up, well-off, generally liked – so what was she complaining about? I have everything, she decided. But then, a voice from her depths – I have nothing. She lacked everything. ‘I have nothing,’ she told herself, as waves of emptiness swept over her. In the deep centre of her life – nothing, an absence.

And yet she could not put her finger on it, what was wrong, what was lacking. So there must be something wrong with her. She, Mary, was at fault. But why? What was it? So she puzzled, sometimes so unhappy she felt she could run away out of the situation for good.

When Mary found the bundle of letters, forgotten in an old bit of luggage, she had at first thought they were all from Lil to Tom, conventional, of the kind you’d expect from an old friend or even a second mother. They began, Dear Tom and ended Love, Lil, with sometimes a cross or two for a kiss. And then there was the other letter, from Tom to Lil, that had not been posted. ‘Why shouldn’t I write to you, Lil, why not, I have to, I think of you all the time, oh my God, Lil, I love you so much, I dream of you, I can’t bear being apart from you, I love you I love you …’ and so on, pages of it. So, she read Lil’s letters again, and saw them differently And then she understood everything. And when she stood on the path with Hannah, below Baxter’s Gardens, and heard Roz’s laughter, she knew it was mocking laughter. It mocked her, Mary, and she understood everything at last. It was all clear to her.

VICTORIA AND THE STAVENEYS

Cold dark was already drizzling into the playground; the voices of two groups of children told people arriving at the great gate where they must direct their gaze: it was already hard to make out who was who. By some sort of sympathy, children in the bigger group were able to distinguish their own among the arrivals, and by ones or twos they darted off to be collected and taken home. There were two children by themselves in the centre of the space, which was surrounded by tall walls topped by broken glass. They were noisy. A little boy was kicking out or pummelling the air and shouting, ‘He forgot, I told her he’d forget,’ while a girl tried to console and soothe. He was a large child, she thin, with spiky pigtails sticking out, the pink ribbons on them dank and limp. She was older than him, but not bigger. Yet it was with the assurance of her two extra years that she admonished, ‘Now Thomas, don’t do that, don’t bawl, they’ll be here.’ But he wouldn’t be quietened. ‘Let me go, let me go – I won’t, he’s forgotten.’ Several people arrived at the same time at the gate, one a tall fair boy of about twelve, who stood peering through the gloom. He spied his charge, his brother Thomas, while others were already reaching out hands and stepping forward. It was a little scene of tumult and confusion. The tall boy, Edward, grabbed Thomas by the hand and stood while the little boy kept up his thrashing about and complaint. ‘You forgot me; yes, you did,’ and watched while the other children disappeared out into the street. He turned and went off out of sight with Thomas.

It was cold. Victoria’s clothes were not enough. She was shivering now that she did not have the recalcitrant child to keep her active. She stood with her arms wrapped about her, quietly crying. The school caretaker emerged from the dark, pulled the gates together, and locked them. He had not seen her either. She wore dark brown trousers and a black jacket and was a darker spot in the swirling gloom of the playground: the wind was getting up.

The awfulness of that day, which had begun with her aunt being rushed off to hospital, and had culminated in her being abandoned, now sank her to her knees, and she rocked there, eyes blank with tears until fears of being alone opened them again, and she stared at the big black locked gates. The bars were set wide. Carefully, as if engaged in some nefarious activity, she went to the gate to see if she could wriggle between the bars. She was thin, and told often enough there wasn’t enough flesh on her to feed a cat. That had been her mother’s verdict, and the thought of her dead mother made Victoria weep, and then wail. She had a few minutes ago been playing big girl to Thomas’s baby boy, but now she felt she was a baby herself, and her nine years were dissolving in tears. And then she was stuck there, in the bars. On the pavement people passed and passed, not seeing her, they were all hunched up under umbrellas; the playground behind was vast, dark and full of threat. Across the street, Mr Pat’s sweet and newspaper shop and cafe was all a soft shine of light. The street lights were making furry yellow splashes, and, just as Victoria decided to make another effort to wriggle free, Mr Patel came on to the pavement to take some oranges from the trays of fruit out there, and he saw her. She was in his shop, but usually with crowds of others, every school day, and she knew he was to be liked because her aunt, and her mother too, before she died, had said, ‘He’s okay, that Indian man.’

Mr Patel held up his hands to stop the traffic, which was only a car and a bicycle, and hastened over to her. As he arrived her wrigglings freed her and she fell into his hands, large good hands, that held her safe. ‘Victoria, is that you I am seeing?’

Saved, she abandoned herself to misery. He hoisted her up and was again holding up his hand – only one, the other held Victoria – to halt another car and a motorbike. Having arrived in the bright warmth of the cafe, Mr Patel set her on the high counter and said, ‘Now, dear, what are you doing here all by yourself?’

‘I don’t know,’ wept Victoria, and she did not. A message had come to her in class that she was to be picked up in the playground, with Thomas Staveney, whom she hardly knew: he was two classes down from her. There were customers waiting for Mr Patel’s attention. He looked around for help and saw a couple of girls sitting at a table. They were seniors from the school refreshing themselves before going home, and he said, ‘Here, keep an eye on this poor child for a minute.’ He set her down carefully on a chair by them. The big girls certainly did not want to be bothered with a snotty little kid, but gave Victoria bright smiles and said she should stop crying. Victoria sobbed on. Mr Patel did not know what to do. While he served sweets, buns, opening more soft drinks for the girls, as usual doing twenty things at once, he was thinking that he should call the police, when on the pavement opposite the tall boy who had dragged off his fighting little brother, suddenly appeared, like a ghost that has lost its memory. He stared wildly about, and then, holding on to the top bars of the gate with both hands, seemed about to haul himself up to its top. ‘Excuse me,’ shouted Mr Patel, as he ran to the door. ‘Come over here,’ he yelled, and Edward turned a woeful countenance to Mr Patel and the welcoming lights of the cafe and, without looking to see what traffic might be arriving, jumped across the street in a couple of bounds, just missed by a motorbike whose rider sent imprecations after him.

‘It’s a little girl,’ panted Edward. ‘I’m looking for a little girl.’

‘And here she is, safe and sound,’ and Mr Patel went in to stand by the counter where he kept an eye on the tall boy, who had sat himself by Victoria and was wiping her face with paper napkins that stood fanned in a holder. He seemed about to dissolve in tears himself. The two girls, much too old for this boy, nevertheless were making manifestations of femininity for his sake, pushing out their breasts and pouting. He didn’t notice. Victoria still wept and he was in an extreme of some emotion himself.

‘I’m thirsty,’ Victoria burst out, and Mr Patel handed across a glass of orange crush, with a gesture that indicated to Edward he shouldn’t dream of thinking of paying for it.

Edward held the glass for Victoria, who was indignant – she, a big girl, being treated like a baby, but she was grateful, for she did badly want to be a baby, just then.

Edward was saying, ‘I’m so sorry. I was supposed to pick you up, with my brother.’

‘Didn’t you see me?’ asked Victoria, accusing him.

And now Edward was scarlet, he positively writhed. This was the burning focus of his self-accusation. He had in fact seen a little black girl, but he had been told to collect a little girl, and for some reason had not thought this black child could be his charge. He could make all kinds of excuses for himself: the confusion as the other children were running off to the gate, the noise. Thomas’s bad behaviour, but the fact was, the absolute bottom line, he had not really seen her because Victoria was black. But he had seen her. All this would not have mattered to a good many people who came and went in and out of those big gates, but Edward was the child of a liberal house, and he was in fact in the throes of a passionate identification with all the sorrows of the Third World. At his school, much superior to the one here, though he had attended it, long ago, ‘projects’ of all kinds enlightened him and his fellow pupils. He collected money for the victims of AIDS and of famine, he wrote essays about these and many others of the world’s wrongs, his mother Jessy was ‘into’ every kind of good cause. There was no excuse for what he had done and he was sick with shame.

‘Will you come home with me now?’ he enquired, humbly, of the pathetic child, and without a word she stood and put up her hand for him to lead her.

‘Poor little kid,’ said one of the girls, apparently touched.

‘Oh, I don’t know, she’s doing all right,’ said the other.

‘It’s not that far,’ said Edward to the child, who was half his height. He bent down to make this communication. And she was stretching herself up, so sure was she that she ought to be behaving like a big girl, while she whimpered, like catches of her breath, staring up at his face which was contorted with concern for her.

‘Goodbye, Victoria,’ said Mr Patel, in a stern, admonitory way, that was directed at this white boy, who was reminding him of those summer insects, all flying legs and feelers, called Daddy-Long-Legs. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he shouted after the couple, for he was remembering he knew nothing about this boy, who should be informed that Victoria was not without friends. But the couple were already in the street, where their feet made sturdy progress through clogs of wet leaves, and puddles.

‘Where? Where to?’ the child pleaded, but in such a little voice he had not heard: he was bending continually to send her smiles he had no idea were agonised.

Just as Victoria thought they would be trudging until her feet dropped off, they turned in at a gate and were walking up into the face of a house whose windows blazed light, in a cliff of such houses.

Here Edward inserted a key and they were in a big place that seemed to Victoria like a shop, of the sort she sometimes gaped at in the High Street. Colour, light and warmth: she was cold now, for the wind had cut through her, and in a great mirror on a stand where Edward was, all touzled by the wind, was herself, yes, that was her. Victoria, that frightened thing, with her mouth open, staring, and then Edward was bundling her jacket off her and throwing it over the arm of a red chair. He was going on ahead and she ran after him leaving herself behind in the surface of the mirror. And now they were in a room larger than any she had seen, except for the school hall. Edward reached out for a kettle, which he filled at a sink, and Victoria thought that this part of the room was like a kitchen. Toys lay about. It occurred to her that this was where Thomas lived, so where was he?

‘Where is he?’ she whispered, and Edward stood still in the midst of his fussing with cups and saucers to work out what she meant. ‘Oh, Thomas? He’s gone off to sleep over with a friend,’ said Edward. ‘Now, you just sit down.’ When she did not, he lifted her and deposited her in a chair that was like a cuddle, it held her so soft and warm. She looked about cautiously for fear of seeing more than she could take in. This was a room so big all of her aunt’s flat would fit into it. And then, as she gaped and wondered, she slumped down, asleep: it had all been too much.

Edward, who was used to a small child – he still thought Victoria was that, she was such a tiny thin little thing – did not do more than lay her back in the cushions, for comfort, and then began searching in a vast refrigerator for something to eat. He did not know where his mother was, but he wished she was here. He had arranged to go out and meet schoolfriends, and here he was stuck with this child, whom he had so shockingly mistreated … it had better be said now that he was on the verge of an adolescence so conscience-driven, agonised, accusatory of his own world, passionately admiring of anything not Britain, so devoted to every kind of good cause, so angry with his mother, who in some way he saw as embodying all the forces of reaction, so sick to death with his father, who represented frivolity and indifference to suffering – his good humour could mean nothing less – that, at the end of it, about eight years from this night, Jessy Staveney told him, and everybody else around at the time, ‘Your bloody adolescence, my God, my God, it’s shortened my life by twenty years.’

Edward sat, in his usual way, as if he didn’t really have time for this lazing about, and spooned in yoghurt – low-fat yoghurt, with added vitamin D, and frowned over his dilemma about Victoria. Victoria went on sleeping.

If she were dreaming – she was subject to nightmares and sleepwalking – her dead mother might have appeared, smiling away, but always out of reach, evading Victoria’s reaching arms. She had died five years before. Victoria had had uncles but no father, or none that her mother was prepared to identify. No ‘uncle’ came forward to claim her or acknowledge responsibility. Victoria’s aunt, her real aunt, her mother’s sister, had no children. She had only recently agreed with herself that she was lucky, kids were such a grind, when she was landed with a four-year-old orphan. She was a social worker. She lived in a council flat – bedroom, lounge, kitchen, shower – in Francis Drake Buildings on a council estate (the other three were Frobisher, Walter Raleigh and Nelson), whose children went to Victoria’s school. She had pared her life down to the outlines of her work, which she loved, but then she had to take on Victoria, and she did, showing no reluctance, only a little weariness.

This very morning she had been taken ill. In the ambulance she remembered Victoria, and told the ambulance man that Victoria would be standing waiting in the playground to be picked up after school. He was not unfamiliar with this kind of situation. He telephoned the school, no easy matter, since Victoria’s aunt kept passing out with the pain of her illness, which would kill her when she was still not fifty. The ambulance man got the number of the school from the operator, rang the school secretary, explained the crisis. She went to the classroom where Victoria was copying sentences off a blackboard, a good little girl, while apparently oblivious of the noise made by the other children, who had no aspirations to be good. The teacher said, or shouted, No problem, Victoria could go home with Dickie Nicholls and she supposed someone would fetch her. The secretary said, No problem, returned to her office, looked for the Nicholls number, rang, no reply. Working mother, diagnosed the secretary, being one herself. She tried the numbers of various mothers, and at last one said she couldn’t help, but how about trying Thomas Steevey in the register: that was how Staveney had been pronounced. The deputy secretary rang the Staveney number and got Jessy Staveney, who told her son to collect a little girl at the same time as he did Thomas. The deputy secretary had not said that Victoria was black, but why should she? There were more black or brown children at the school than white, and she herself was brown, since her parents had come from Uganda, when the Indians were thrown out.

This kind of frantic telephoning and arranging being so common, because of working mothers, the deputy secretary thought no more of it: Victoria would be all right.

When Victoria woke from a short anxious sleep, into this unfamiliar place, Edward was seated at a very big table, and a tall woman, with her blonde hair down all around her face, sat opposite, leaning her arms on the table. Victoria had seen her in the playground coming to pick up Thomas.

Victoria kept quiet for a little, afraid to make her existence known, but then Edward, who had been keeping an eye on her, cried out, ‘Oh, Victoria, you’re awake, come and have some supper. This is Victoria,’ he told his mother, who said, ‘Hello, Victoria,’ and finished some remark she had been making to her son. That a little girl she didn’t know was asleep in her kitchen was nothing that needed comment. Edward’s friends, and Thomas’s, washed in and out of her house on social or school tides, and she welcomed them all. Thomas’s social life, in particular, since he was after all only seven and could not come and go like twelve-year-old Edward, was a bit of a trial, being such a complicated network of visits to this or that attraction, planetarium, museums, river boats, friends, sleep-overs, sleepins, eat-overs. Making events match with kids and times was a feat of organisation. She was pleased, rather than not, that the little girl was black because, as she never stopped complaining to Edward, his friends were all much too white, now that we lived in a multicultural society.

Why was Thomas at a very inferior school? Ideology. Mostly his father’s, Lionel, who was an old-fashioned socialist. While Thomas would certainly be lifted out and up into one of the good schools, at the right time, he was taking his chances in the lowest depths now. The phrase was Jessy’s, when engaged in altercation with her ex-husband, ‘Here is news from the lower depths,’ she would cry, announcing measles or some contretemps with a bill she could not pay. But she made the most of a situation she deplored, because she was able to look her less principled friends in the eye and say, ‘I’m sorry, but he has to know how the other half lives. Lionel insists.’

Victoria was lifted, put into a chair where her chin barely appeared over the edge of the table, and Edward adjusted the situation with big fat cushions. ‘And now, what do you feel like eating, Victoria?’

Victoria was not used to being asked and since nothing she saw on the table seemed familiar, looked helpless, and even ready to cry again. Edward understood and simply piled a plate with what he was eating, which happened to be Thai takeaway that Jessy had brought home, stuffed tomatoes from last night’s supper, and left over savoury rice. Victoria was hungry, and she did try, but only the rice seemed to meet with the approval of her stomach. Edward, who watched her – well, like an elder brother, as he would Thomas – found her some cake. That was better and she ate it all.

Jessy silently observed, her plate untouched, the cup of tea between her long hands held below her mouth, so steam went up past her face. Her eyes were large and green and Victoria thought they were witches’ eyes. Her mother talked often about witches, and while her aunt never did, it was her mother’s sing-song incantory voice that stayed in the child’s mind, explaining the bad things that happened. And they so often did.

‘Well, what are we going to do with you, Victoria?’ at last said Jessy Staveney, carelessly enough, as she might have done with any of the small children who appeared and had to be dealt with.

At this, tears sprang into Victoria’s eyes and she wailed. Even worse than the witchy eyes, ever since she could remember, even before her mother died, What shall I, what are we, what should I do with Victoria, was the refrain of her days and nights. She had been so often in the way, with her mother’s uncles. She was in the way when her mother had wanted to go to work, but did not know what to do with her, her child Victoria. And she knew her aunt Marion had not really wanted her, though she was always kind.

‘Poor little girl, she’s tired,’ said Jessy. ‘Well, I’ve got to get off. I’ve got a client’s first play at the Comedy and I must be there. Perhaps Victoria should just stay the night?’ she said to Edward, whose own eyes were full of tears too, so terribly, so unforgivably guilty, did he feel about everything.

Victoria was sitting straight up, her fists down by her sides, her face turned up to the ceiling from where struck a clear and truthful light illuminating the hopelessness of her despair. She sobbed, eyes tight shut.

‘Poor child,’ Jessy summed up, and departed.

Edward, who had not yet taken in that this child was not perhaps six, or seven, now came around to her, picked her up, put her on his lap, and sat clutching her tight. Her tears wetted his shoulder and the heat and fret of the taut little body made him feel not much better than a murderer.

‘Victoria,’ he said, in the intervals of her sobs, ‘shouldn’t I telephone somebody to say you are here?’

‘My auntie’s in hospital.’

‘Who else do you go to?’ – thinking of the networks of people used by him and by Thomas.

‘My auntie’s friend.’

At last necessity stopped Victoria’s sobs. She said her auntie’s friend was Mrs Chadwick, yes, there was a telephone.

Edward rang several Chadwicks until he reached a girl who said her mother was out. She was Bessie. Yes, she thought it would be all right if Victoria stayed the night. There was no bed for her here tonight: Bessie had her friends in to watch videos.

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Edward, abandoning his own plans for the evening. This necessitated several more telephone calls.

Meanwhile, Victoria was wandering about the great room, which she had not yet really understood was the kitchen, staring, but not touching, and she was wondering, Where are the beds?

There were no beds.

‘Where do you sleep, then?’ she asked Edward.

‘In my bedroom.’

‘Isn’t this your room?’

‘This is the kitchen.’

‘Where are all the other people?’

He had no idea what she meant. He sat, telephone silent in front of him, leaning his head on a fist, contemplating the child.

At last he said, hoping that this was what she was on about, ‘My mothers room is at the top of the house, and I have a room just up the stairs, and so does Thomas.’

Some monstrous truth seemed trying to get admittance into Victoria’s already over-stretched brain. It sounded as if he was saying this room did not comprise all their home. Victoria slept on a pull-out bed in her aunt’s lounge. She was not taking it in: she could not. She subsided back into the big chair which was like a hug, and actually put her thumb in her mouth though she was telling herself, You’re not a baby, stop it.

Who else lives here, she wanted to ask, but did not dare. Where are all the other people?

Edward was looking steadily at her, hoping for enlightenment. That anguished little face … those hot eyes … He followed his instincts, went to her, picked her up, cradled her.

‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said.

And he began on The Three Bears, which Victoria had seen on television. She had not really thought before that you could listen to a story, without seeing it in pictures. A voice, without pictures: she liked this new thing, the kind boy’s voice, just above her head, and the way he changed it to fit Big Bear, Middle Bear and Baby Bear, and Goldilocks too, while he rocked her, and she was thinking, But I’m not a baby, he thinks I am. As for him, he knew very well what he was holding: this was what he championed, made speeches about in school debates, and what he had recently announced he would dedicate his whole life to – the suffering of the world.

When he finished the story, he was about to ask if she would like a bath, but was afraid she might misunderstand.

‘Have you had enough to eat?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Then I’ll take you up to bed.’ It was nowhere near her bedtime: she stayed up late at home because she could not go to sleep until her aunt did. Or she would fall asleep while her aunt watched television and find herself, still in her day clothes, with a blanket over her, on the day-bed. She held on to the tall boy’s hand and was pulled fast up the stairs, flight after flight, and then she was in a room crammed with toys. Was this a toy shop?

‘This is Thomas’s room. But he won’t mind if you sleep in his bed, for tonight.’

No one had mentioned a toilet and Victoria was desperate. She stood staring at him, a silent please, and then he said, rightly interpreting, ‘I’ll show you the lavatory.’

She did not know what a lavatory was, but found herself in another room, the size of her bedroom at her mother’s, on a toilet seat of smooth, unchipped white. There was a big bath. She would have loved to get into it: she had known only showers. Edward was waiting for her outside the door.

She was led back to the toy-shop room across the landing.

‘When I go to bed I’ll be upstairs, just one flight,’ said Edward.

Panic. She was being abandoned. Above and below reached this great empty house.

‘I’ll be downstairs in the kitchen,’ said Edward.

Her face was set into an O of horror. At last Edward understood what was the problem. ‘Look. It’s all right. You’re quite safe. This is our house. No one can come into it but us. You are in Thomas’s room – where he sleeps. Well, when he’s not with one of his friends. You kids certainly do have a lot of friends …’ He stopped, doubtful. He supposed that this child did too? On he blundered. ‘I am here. You can give me a shout any time. And when my mother decides to come home she’ll be here too.’

Victoria had sunk on to Thomas’s bed, wishing she could go down with Edward to the kitchen. But she dare not ask. She had not really taken in that this great house had one family in it. People might easily have a family in two rooms, or sometimes even in one.

‘You’d better take off your jersey and your trousers,’ said Edward.

She hastily divested herself, and stood in little white knickers and vest.

He thought, how pretty on that dark skin. He didn’t know if this was a politically correct thought, or not.

‘Here is the light,’ he said, switching it on and off, so that the room momentarily became a creepy place full of the shapes of animals, and huge teddies. ‘And there’s a light by your bed. I’ll show you.’ He did. ‘I’ll leave the door open. I’ll be listening.’

He didn’t know whether to kiss her good night, or not. Seeing her without her bundling clothes, she was a tough wiry little thing, no longer a soft child, and he said, ‘How old are you, Victoria?’

‘I’m nine,’ she said, and added fiercely, ‘I know I’m small but that doesn’t mean I’m little.’

‘I see,’ he said, knowing he had been making mistakes. Once again scarlet with embarrassment, he lingered a while by the door, then said, ‘I’ll switch this off, then,’ did so, and went off down the stairs.

Victoria lay in a half dark, under a duvet that had Mickey Mouse all over it. She liked that, because she had had Mickey Mouse slippers when she was smaller. But this room, in this half-dark – she did let out another wail and then clamped her mouth shut with both hands. All these animals everywhere, she had never seen so many stuffed toys, they were heaped up in the corners, they loaded a table, and there were some teddies on her bed. She pulled a large teddy towards her, as protective shield against the looming lions and tigers and mysterious beasts and people, their eyes glinting from the light that came from outside. She couldn’t stay here, she couldn’t … perhaps she would creep down the stairs and go back to that place they called a kitchen and ask Edward if she might stay. He was kind, she knew. She could feel his arms tight round her, and she set herself to listen to his remembered voice in the story.

There was another fearful thing she had to contend with. Suppose she wet her bed? She did sometimes. Suppose she walked in her sleep and fell down the stairs. Her aunt Marion told her she did walk in her sleep, and she had been caught, fast asleep, out on the landing standing by the lift. If she wet the bed here, in this place, she would die of shame … and with this thought she fell asleep and woke with the light coming through a window she had not seen last night was there. She quickly felt the bed – no, she had not wet it. But now she wanted the toilet again. She crept out of the room, and in her little knickers and vest ran across the landing to the toilet. She felt like a burglar, and kept sending scared glances up the stairs and down. There were lights on everywhere. What time was it? Oh, suppose she was late for school, suppose … back inside her trousers and jersey, she went down the stairs and saw beneath her Edward at the table, eating toast. There was no sign of the woman with all that golden hair. Edward smiled nicely, made her toast, offered her tea, put the milk and sugar in the way she liked it, and then said he was going to take her to school.

She ought to have sandwiches or something, but did not like to ask. Perhaps Mr Pat would … she knew her lips were going to tremble again, but she made them tight, and smiled, and went off down the steps with Edward, leaving that house which in her mind was full of great rooms like shops. She scuttled along beside Edward through the lumps of wet leaves on the pavement. He took her to the great gate that last night had been so cruelly locked, and from there she ran to the classroom. On the way she saw Thomas.

‘I slept in your room,’ she announced proudly, superior and calm: she was her real age again and he was just a little kid.

‘Why did you?’

‘Your brother made me.’

‘Then, I hope you didn’t break any of my toys. Did you play with my Dangerman?’

She had not seen a Dangerman.

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Thomas, going off to his class.

She was thinking that this little boy, so much younger, had spent the night in a strange place but it hadn’t mattered to him. As for her, the night had been like a door opening into prospects and places she had not even known were there. She was thinking, ‘I want my own room. I want my own place.’ She did not dare to think, my own house, my own flat, that was far beyond her, but if she had her own room she could hide in it and be safe. Those wild animals with their gleaming eyes in Thomas’s room were dangers that could get to her, find her. If she had her own room she could go to bed any time she liked instead of having to wait for auntie Marion to get tired. She could have a light by her bed and turn it off. ‘My own place, my own …’ was what she brought into her own life from that night, which had been like a wonderland. But not entirely comfortable or even pleasant. She had behaved like a little girl instead of a big one, and she was ashamed to think what Edward must think of her. She had not missed his surprise when she had told him she was nine.

That afternoon, when the dark came, she stood near the gate to the street, waiting for someone to come and take her home. She was hoping that Edward would come for Thomas, and planned to smile at him, like a big girl, not all crying and stupid, and she’d say, ‘Hello Edward,’ and he would say, ‘Oh, there you are, Victoria, it’s you.’ But another woman came, who had a couple of older kids with her, and Thomas rushed towards them, shouting. Victoria was so hungry: at lunchtime she had gone over to Mr Pat’s, who would give her a big bag of crisps and let her pay tomorrow, but he wasn’t there, only a girl she didn’t know behind the counter. If her aunt’s friend Phyllis came perhaps she would buy her a bit of chocolate or something. But it was Phyllis Chadwick’s daughter Bessie, older than she was, and Victoria was ready with apologies for the mixup others had caused, but Bessie said, ‘Shame, poor little thing, your auntie’s very sick, you’re going to stay with us till she gets home.’

Running along beside the big girl Victoria said, ‘Please, please, have you got some chocolate or something?’

‘Didn’t they give you anything for lunchtime?’

‘They forgot – they didn’t know,’ Victoria begged, all apology for noble Edward.

Bessie swerved off into a fish and chips, bought chips for both of them, and they ate as they walked along.

Mrs Stevens, auntie Marion, came home from a stay in hospital an invalid, her formerly large body already gaunt. She was always being rushed back for treatments that left her sick and weak. Victoria looked after her. After school she did not go to other children’s homes to play, but came straight back to be a nurse. At school she was diligent and often praised. Victoria’s evenings were spent doing homework or watching television programmes that told her about the world.

One afternoon, she was sent by her aunt to fetch urgent medicine, and she took a wrong turning and found herself in a street she felt she knew. The house of that evening when the tall kind boy had looked after her was in a part of her mind that corresponded to her dreams of it, floating in another dimension, nothing to do with the quotidian, the ordinary. She remembered warmth and glowing colour, a room piled with toys. Sometimes she stopped in front of shops in the High Street and thought yes, it was like this, the richness, the abundance.

If that house had a geographical location, then it was far off, in a distant part of London. Her legs had ached – hadn’t they? Edward had pulled her along – oh, for ages. Yet wasn’t this the house, just in front of her, not ten minutes’ walk from her aunt’s flat? Yes, it was that one, that very one there – was it? – yes; and at that moment a child came running along the pavement towards her but he turned in at a gate and up the steps. Thomas. He was larger than he had been, no longer a little kid. He reached up to a bell and almost at once the door opened and he dashed inside. She had a glimpse of that room she now knew was a hall, from seeing them on films, full of light and colour. After that she often secretly went to the house and stood there, or walked up and down outside it, hoping no one would notice her, as much as she wished that someone would. This was not an area where black people lived, or not in this street. Once she saw Edward, who was even taller. He strode along not seeing her or anyone, passing so close she could have touched him. He bounded up the steps, letting himself in with his own key. Well, she had a key, Victoria did, tied around her neck on ribbon, so that her aunt wouldn’t have to get up and struggle to the door. More than once she saw the tall woman whose hair she remembered as being like Goldilocks, but now it was in a heap on top of her head. She was untidy. She was always worried, seeming in a struggle to keep hold of her bag, shopping bags, parcels. Victoria was critical, feeling that from this house only perfection should come. If she had hair like that, she couldn’t let it be in a great lump, with wisps falling down. Then, again, she saw Thomas. They did not recognise her. What Victoria told herself was. They don’t see me. Once, as Edward came striding along, no longer a boy, to Victoria’s eyes, but a man – he was sixteen – she was tempted to call out, Look, I’m Victoria, don’t you remember me? Then she told herself that if he and Thomas had grown out of what she remembered, then she must have too, tall for her age, shooting up, no longer in the junior school.

To her the most extraordinary thing was that the house, a dream, so far away she had never expected to see it again, was so close – only a short walk away.

In her aunt Marion’s flat she still slept on the day-bed in the lounge. On nights when her aunt was poorly, she pulled it into the bedroom so she could be there when the sick woman woke and called for water, or a cup of tea, or said in her frightened thick voice, ‘Are you there, Victoria?’ Victoria had broken nights, and was finding it hard to keep up with her lessons. Her aunt’s best friend, Phyllis Chadwick, Bessie’s mother, came to see how things went along: she was supervising Victoria, on behalf of the Authorities. Victoria did not resent it. She longed for help, from anyone. Sometimes Bessie came, and sat with aunt Marion while she went shopping or just to get out. In the day when she was at school, home helps or nurses dropped in. But really, Marion Stevens should be in hospital, she needed proper full-time nursing: it was what Phyllis Chadwick said, and what Victoria thought. ‘If I wasn’t here, they’d have to do something, but I am here and so they don’t bother.’

Now four years had passed since that night when the tall boy had been so kind – so the event stayed with Victoria, in her mind and in her dreams – and her aunt was really very ill. Cancer. There was no hope, Marion herself told the girl. The nurse who came from Jamaica too, had said to her, ‘There is a time to live, there is a time to die. Your time is coming soon, praise the Lord.’

Marion Stevens had always gone to church, but not to the same one as this nurse. Yet they prayed together often and Victoria had even heard them singing hymns. She was not sure about praising the Lord, with this dreadfully ill woman here in front of her eyes day and night. She enjoyed church, when she had time to go, because she liked singing, but now she had to stay with her aunt. The nurse said to Victoria that she would be rewarded in heaven for what she was doing for her aunt, and Victoria kept silent: the things she wanted to say were too rude.

It was so difficult, all of it, trying to get to school, doing her homework, when she was being interrupted every minute by her aunt’s, ‘Victoria, are you there?’ Sometimes the sick woman could not be left, when it didn’t look as if the home help would come: she often didn’t, they were overworked, with too many helpless people on their hands. And often the nurses didn’t stay, they checked pills or perhaps washed that smelly sick body and then they were off. ‘I won’t be a nurse, I won’t,’ Victoria promised herself. At school they suggested she could easily be a nurse, she could manage the exams. She was clever, they said. ‘It’s time to think what you want to be,’ they told her. Bessie was going to be a nurse. Well, let her, Victoria would rather die, so she told herself.

The teachers were proud of her: not so many children at that school were likely to be anything much – on the streets, more probably. When she couldn’t get to school at all, they forgave her and made excuses. They knew what her situation was, asked after her aunt and were sorry for her. One teacher offered prayers, and another actually dropped in to visit, to check on her of course, the girl knew, but it meant Victoria could go out to the shops. The home help never seemed to get things exactly right, though Victoria left lists on the kitchen table, in her neat handwriting, headed Food, or Medicines; and what had to be fetched from the chemist was longer than from the supermarket.

‘You’ve got to eat, girl,’ said Phyllis Chadwick, bringing her bits of this and that, some soup, some cake, but Victoria felt permanently nauseated from the smell of her aunt’s illness. Sometimes she felt she was slowly submerging in the dark dirty water, that was the illness, down and down, but up there, far above her head, was light and air and good clean smells. When she could no longer bear it, she told her aunt she would be back in a minute and she ran through the streets and stood outside the Staveney house and thought about what was inside. Space, room for everyone. She had understood by now what had been so confused in her mind, and for so long: in that house was one family, the fair woman, who was the mother, and Edward, and Thomas. She had never questioned that there hadn’t seemed to be a father. None of the families she knew had fathers, that is, real fathers, who stayed.

Her aunt Marion had never had a husband. When she had been well enough to be interested in her own story, she had said to Victoria that she had no man in her life but then she had no grief either. And that was as far as her explanations had gone. But if there had been a man around, Victoria thought, even an uncle, he could have helped her. She had to do everything, remember rates bills and the electric and the gas and the water, staying at home from school so the meters could be read, fetching her aunt’s money from the post office. ‘You’re a good girl,’ Phyllis Chadwick told her. ‘You are a very good girl.’

But surely she was getting too old to be told she was a good girl? She was nearly fourteen. She had breasts now. She was not a little girl, but she was sleeping on the day-bed, with her possessions, such as they were, in a suitcase that had a cloth over it to make it look like a seat, and her clothes on a rail in a corner of her aunt’s room. One day, prayed Victoria, I’ll have my own place, my own room. Her aunt would die and then she would move into her aunt’s room, and this would be her place.

For the last few weeks of her aunt’s dying Victoria did not get to school. She was simply there, by the deathbed, and so much identified with the illness that she even had pains in her stomach: stomach cancer. It was all a long dark bad-smelling bad dream, the nurses coming and going, medicines, making cups of this and that which cooled untouched by her aunt’s bed, while she cried with pain and Victoria measured out another dose of painkiller. Victoria said to Phyllis Chadwick, ‘Why can’t aunt go into hospital?’ but it was put to her that this wouldn’t happen until the very end, and meanwhile Victoria was being such a good girl. ‘And she gave you a bed and a place. Don’t forget that, Victoria. She did that for you.’

At last aunt Marion was in hospital and Victoria visited her, for most of the day, though it was doubtful if her aunt knew she was there. ‘But you never know,’ said Phyllis Chadwick, and the nurses agreed. ‘You never know these days if they are conscious of what is going on or not.’ These days referred not to a recently acquired capacity of dying patients, but to new ideas about patients, who could be suspected of knowing everything that was going on around them, even if in a coma or half-dead. Or even dead?

Aunt Marion died and it seemed it was Victoria’s responsibility to see to the funeral arrangements, supervised by Phyllis, though the actual signing of forms was done by a social worker, because Victoria was too young. She thought, If I’m too young to sign the forms, how is it I wasn’t too young to look after her?

Victoria was in the empty flat, and she opened windows to let out the smell of dying and of medicines. When everything was fresh again she would move into her aunt’s bedroom … there arrived a man who was consoling and respectful about aunt Marion’s death, and her being all alone in the world, but asked where she planned to go, and she said, ‘I’m staying here. In auntie’s flat.’

‘But you’re only fourteen,’ said this man. ‘You can’t be by yourself

Victoria was not really taking it in that she couldn’t have this flat, have her own place, until Phyllis Chadwick came to say she had better come home with her. ‘We’ll make some room,’ she said. ‘We’ll put you in with Bessie.’ She had three children already.

‘But I want to stay here,’ persisted Victoria, and she went on protesting, and then begging and weeping and refusing to leave until one day Phyllis Chadwick, who knew the officials concerned (she too was a social worker) arrived at the flat with a senior official, who was going to put a lock on the door, to keep it empty until someone the right age arrived to live in it.

And now Victoria was dumb. She was numbed by the injustice. She had looked after her aunt for years, had remembered to pay everything, remembered times for medicines, and kept the place clean. No one thought her too young for that. Now, just like that, she was being taken to the door, Phyllis Chadwick on one side, the man with the keys on the other, both holding her by an arm, while Victoria shouted, ‘No, no, no,’ and then went silent again, her lips tight closed. On the pavement outside the flats – she had to look up ten floors to see her auntie’s windows – they let her go, and Phyllis said to her, ‘Now, Victoria, that’s enough, girl.’ But Victoria hadn’t said one word all the way down.

She was frightening both these people: she trembled with rage and with the shock of it, it seemed she could explode. Her eyes were mad, were wild. ‘Victoria, surely you couldn’t have thought you’d be allowed to live by yourself – a girl of fourteen?’

But that is exactly what she had thought and was thinking now.

At last she went home to Phyllis Chadwick, and she was shown another pull-out bed in Bessie’s room, who was being nice, but was furious. She had only just achieved this room, a little one, but her own, and now she had to share it. This flat had three rooms, apart from the kitchen and the lounge, all small. The two younger children, noisy boys, slept in with Phyllis Chadwick, in her room. Another room was used by Phyllis’s grandfather, who was very old and dying of something or other. Victoria didn’t want to know. She had had enough of illness and dying. The two boys had been in the little room but Bessie was taking exams and needed quiet. It seemed Phyllis didn’t deserve quiet, and had to put up with the boys: it was this thought that persuaded Victoria to be grateful for what she was being offered. She reported back at school, and the teachers said she could stay an extra year, to make up. No more was said about scholarships and university – she was too far behind. She could go to commercial college and take book-keeping. She was good at figures.

Being too old for the class she was in isolated her. She was alone too because of her experience of illness and responsibility. The others in her class seemed like children to her, and the whole school had shrunk, as people and places do. The playground, which on that long-ago night had seemed to her a vast and dangerous place, with shadows full of muggers and knives, she now saw was a pathetic paltry place, so small that at break there wasn’t room for the children to play. Victoria knew now how bad a school this was. That playground summed up everything for her. Grey cement and damp old brick walls, you’d think it was where prisoners were let out to exercise. Good enough for us, she thought, bitter, and then, I bet Thomas and Edward don’t go to a school where the playground is like a prison yard. Yes, they were taken swimming once a week in the summer, but that was about it. Good enough for class 5 people. Good enough for the under class. That’s us. She got this language from Phyllis Chadwick’s pamphlets and social-working guides.

She knew she should be grateful to Phyllis Chadwick, who was a good woman. Without her, she would have been taken into Care. ‘You must think of us as your family,’ said Phyllis. ‘You must call me Auntie Phyl.’

Now, coming home from school, Victoria made detours to pass the Staveney house, and one day saw a tall, fair boy coming up the pavement and turn in at the gate. She thought: Edward, and yearned for that long ago kindness but saw it was Thomas. He did look very like his brother. He noticed Victoria, frowned, and went in. Victoria did not at all resemble the skinny little black girl, with her sticking-out plaits. She was tall and slender, and Phyllis Chadwick had sent her to a hairdresser, who was a friend, and now Victoria had a neat soft Afro round a pretty face that had a pointed chin and a full mouth that Bessie told her was her best feature, ‘Wow, now make the most of that.’ But Victoria thought her big eyes were her best feature.

Thomas had not been at their school for three years. He was at the kind of school people like the Staveneys would send their sons to: she knew enough to know that.

Now she buckled down to exams, and sometimes sneaked looks at the Staveney house, but she did not see Thomas.

She passed her exams well enough, but nothing like as well as had been expected of her, before her aunt’s illness. She at once found a job. Mr Pat, who had always liked her, said that his brother, who had a little dress shop, needed an assistant, and someone to keep his books. She would earn enough to give something to Phyllis Chadwick for her keep, but very far was she from a place of her own, and this was what she dreamed of, always. She was not the only one. Phyllis herself had two rumbustious boys in her room every night and, while sometimes they were separated for everyone’s peace’s sake, one sleeping in the lounge, and one beside Phyllis, the two of them could make the little flat sound like a fairground with noise. Bessie, who was going to be a nurse and needed space for her studies, used the table in the kitchen, where the light was good, but was always being interrupted by the boys. She and Victoria were friends, but Bessie knew that without Victoria she could have had a room to herself. The old man, Phylliss grandfather, occupied a whole room, with his little television and radio and piles of magazines. He had had a stroke and was part paralysed, and just as for Victoria’s aunt, nurses and home helps came in and out when Victoria and Phyllis and Bessie were out working. He sat in a big chair, his body dwindling away into cavities and lumps, under a great head that looked like a lion’s. Beside him on the floor was a flask always filled with strong-smelling dark yellow pee. There was a commode in a corner. His old thin knobbly legs stuck out in front, on a stool, and there were cracks in the black skin, which seemed to have grey ash in them. Phyllis oiled his feet and legs, but that didn’t help. Everyone secretly thought that it would be best if he died and took his miserable and unenjoyed life away, and then there would be a room, a whole room, where the boys could make their mess and noise and shut the door.

Bessie was good to the old man: she saw it as useful for her training. Victoria dutifully did what she had to do, emptying the urine flask, and sometimes the commode, but she hated it. Phyllis, who worked long hours, and had four youngsters and the old man to see to, was sometimes able to sit with him a little. He said that no one cared about him.

Phyllis said to Victoria, ‘We need a serious talk, girl, so when will that be?’

It would have to be Sunday, and on Sunday evening when the boys were getting up to mischief outside in the streets, with their gang, Bessie absenting herself behind a shut door, Victoria and Phyllis closed his door on the old man, who complained. ‘But it will be only for a short minute, Grandad,’ Phyllis told him.

Victoria had decided Phyllis was going to ask her to leave: there was not a reason in the world why Victoria should be here at all, adding to an over-burdened woman’s troubles.

‘Make us both a good strong cup of coffee, and then come and sit down,’ said Phyllis. She fitted her bulk into a sofa corner, and put her feet up. She seemed tempted to drop off to sleep then and there.

‘Victoria,’ she said, ‘I know you took that job in such a haste because you wanted to give me something, but it makes me sad, girl, you’re not doing as well for yourself as you could do.’

Behind this directive, which was delivered in the manner of one who has been planning words, in Phyllis’s case for several nights, lay a story which neither Victoria nor Bessie knew anything about. Not even her grandfather knew half of it.

Phyllis Chadwick’s grandparents came to London after the Second World War on the wave of immigrants invited to take on the dirty work which English labourers did not want. They came to streets they had imagined paved with gold and found – but all that has been well documented. A hard life, hard times, and the young couple had two children, one Phyllis’s mother, a lively rebellious girl who got herself pregnant aged fourteen, and had a botched abortion which left her, she was told, sterile, and she embarked on what she thought would be consequence-free sex, but became pregnant again, with Phyllis. Phyllis’s father, for she must have had one, never made himself known, and her mother kept the information to herself. The very young mother and child took shelter with parents who sermonised, but saw them fed. Phyllis did remember her as a shouting screaming mother, in fact a bit demented, who could disappear for days on some binge or spree, returning sullen and silent to lecturing parents, who had had to look after Phyllis. She got herself killed in a brawl. Phyllis was relieved. She was then looked after by her grandfather, who was now there, just behind that door, from where came loud television noises and radio (he often had both on at once) and her grandmother, who was kind but strict, because of the bad example of her mother. ‘You have bad blood,’ she was told, every day of her life. Phyllis worked hard at school, determined never to be drunken or vagrant or brawling, and was ambitious to get her own roof and her own family. She passed exams and then had a brief lapse from grace, as her grandparents saw it, telling her she was going the way of her mother, because she did not stick with one job, but took many, one after the other, from a feeling of power, of freedom. She was a large sensible girl, pretty enough, and worked at check-outs, sold shoes in an Oxford Street shop, served food at the big trade fairs in Earl’s Court, was a waitress in a coffee shop, and was having the time of her life. The money – yes, that was wonderful, it was fairy gold arriving in her hands every week, but what she was earning was the liberty to do as she liked. She stayed in a job just as long as it suited her, and then the best moment of all was the interview for the next: she was liked, chosen out of sometimes dozens of applicants. There was something about her employers trusted. While her grandparents grumbled and prophesied a feckless future and a disgraceful old age, she felt she was dancing on air, owned her self and her future. But then she met her fate, the father of Bessie, though not of the boys, and had to buckle to. She started on the lowest rung of the Social Services ladder, and in due time was given her own flat, this one. Her grandmother, who had in fact been more of a mother, died, and her grandfather became her responsibility. ‘He landed on my poor shoulders like the old man of the sea,’ she would say. But she was not only bound to be grateful, she was fond of the old man who, when you saw him naked, was like a dangling puppet, thin and loose underneath the big head and face that had all his history in it.

‘Victoria, my girl,’ says Phyllis. ‘What are you doing in that nothing job, and you are such a clever girl?’

‘What do you want me to do? What shall I do?’

What Phyllis wanted to say was, For the Lord’s sake! Get yourself out, make use of this time, because you’ll meet a man and then your number’s up. But she didn’t want to wake in Victoria the bad blood that was bound to be lurking there, and in any case the devil lay in wait for women, disguised in smiles and flattery.

She leaned forward, took the two young hands in her own and threw all thought of being a bad influence over her shoulder. ‘You’re only young once,’ she said. ‘You’re pretty, though handsome is as handsome does. You have nothing to weigh you down yet.’ Victoria noted that yet which was a giveaway about how Phyllis Chadwick saw her own life.

‘There are jobs you could do, Victoria. Unless you try for them you’ll never know what you can get.’ She suppressed: if I could get a nice little job, when I wasn’t even pretty, what could you get for yourself, with your face and figure? ‘You don’t want to limit yourself to what you can get around here, in this neighbourhood. You just get yourself down to Oxford Street and Knightsbridge and up to Brent Cross and pick yourself the fanciest there is, and walk in bold as brass and say you want a job.’ She went on to talk of modelling, which is what she would have liked best, but she was not built for it. ‘Why not? You’ve got a well-made body and a face to match.’ The best of the things she had done herself, and the ones beyond her, were being presented to Victoria. Phyllis Chadwick, the descendant of slaves, whose name, Chadwick, had been the slave owner’s, knew that she had been good enough to work in places that wouldn’t have let her parents through the door. All the time she was talking, a little nerve of panic was twitching: am I sending her into danger, am I doing that? But she’s so sensible, so cool, she’ll not come to harm.

She gave Victoria money, told her to go out and buy herself a bit of style but not be too flash.

Victoria took all this in, not least that she had been given a glimpse into her benefactor’s life that she would have to think over.

She fitted herself out, and, taking heart from Phyllis’s homilies, began at the top, in Oxford Street, for she did not yet know anything better and smarter. She worked for a while selling perfume and then, having learned that Oxford Street was not the empyrean, became assistant in a very exclusive shop indeed, but left that, when she became irked by it, for encouraged by Phyllis she was able to acknowledge imperfections even at the top. She hated selling beautiful clothes to women too ugly or too old, clothes that would have looked – did look – better on herself, and she found herself modelling for a photographer, not pornographic, but sexy enough to embarrass her, and then, proving herself as contradictory as Phyllis, who urged her on while counselling caution, she did nude poses for another photographer. All this time she was putting money aside, her nest egg, the entrance fee to her own place, her own, hers.

The nude poses seemed to have as their natural end sex with the photographer, so she left.

The grandfather died. The young ones saw from Phyllis’s grief that this had been much more than just a smelly old half-dead man, with his urine bottle, who had taken up space better used by the living.

Into the room went the two boys, and Phyllis told Bessie and Victoria that she had never in her life before this time had her own room. She was in her own room, and she actually wept tears of gratitude to life, or fate, or God, for it.

Bessie, a good-natured, easy-going young woman, said to Victoria, as they lay in their little room, talking into the dark, that she had thought the old man, the grandfather, her great-grandfather, a rough type: she had been embarrassed by him. ‘Yes, I was, Victoria, he used to get me really upset by some of the things he said.’

Victoria did not comment. She had a good idea of what raw materials Phyllis had made her life. She could feel for Phyllis in ways that Bessie didn’t. Couldn’t, rather: she had had it easy. She, Victoria, was closer to Phyllis than Bessie was.

Victoria had no idea how Phyllis yearned over her, fretted because of her, was afraid for her. She had lived as Victoria did now, dancing on the edge of danger, and while she urged Victoria on, and triumphed in the young woman’s successes, the sparkling new job, the compliment from an employer, or from a customer, she thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.

Oh, yes, older women understand why some people think young ones should be locked up! Good God, girl, Phyllis Chadwick might think, watching Victoria go off to work, looking a million dollars, you’re a walking catastrophe in the making, though you trip along so meek and mild not looking to right or left, you don’t sway your little hips and come on fast, you wouldn’t let that photographer go too far (Phyllis knew about the first but not the nude-poser), but all the same, girl, you’re playing with fire, and so was I, and I had no idea of what I was like. Sometimes I could shake and shudder at the risks I took.

‘Don’t you worry so much, Ma,’ said Bessie to her mother, after they had watched Victoria go off to work as a croupier in a gambling place. ‘She’s got an old head on her.’

‘I hope she has, my dear,’ and Phyllis thought how odd it was that this daughter of hers, whom of course she loved, since she was her daughter, was far away across a gulf of incomprehension, that generation gap that is the cruellest of all, between parents who have done it the hard way, to win ease and safety for their children, who then have no understanding of what they have been saved from. ‘But Victoria understands me,’ Phyllis thought.

Now Victoria was in a job she liked better than anything so far, a big music shop, in the West End. She had earned more in other places, but this was where she belonged. The music, the people who came in, the other assistants – all perfect, all a pleasure, and she told Phyllis and Bessie that this time she would stick.

One afternoon who should come in but Thomas Staveney: for a moment she again thought she was looking at Edward. She watched him wander about the store, at his ease in it, familiar with everything: he picked up tapes and put them down and finally bought a video of a concert from The Gambia. Then he arrived in front of her, and said, ‘You’re Victoria.’ ‘And you’re Thomas,’ she rejoined smartly. He was eyeing her but not in a way she could object to: of course he must be surprised: she knew what he was remembering. She stood smiling, letting him come to conclusions.

Then he said the last thing she expected: ‘Why don’t you come home with me and have some supper?’

‘I’m not free for another hour.’

‘I’ll come back for you.’ He sloped out. His style was one no one need notice in this place, more Jimmy Dean than Che Guevara; there was a hole at the knee of his jeans, and another in his sweater elbow.

When the two left the store, as it closed, they were an incongruous pair, for she was in a sleek black leather jacket, a black leather skirt, heels like shiny black chopsticks. Her hair was straight now, like black patent leather.

They took a bus, another, and were soon outside that house that had been inhabiting her dreams for ten years.

She was now nineteen, he, seventeen. They knew to the month how old each was. He looked much older, and she did too, a smart young woman, no girl, this.

As he went up the steps she lingered, to grasp the moment. She was here with the tall fair boy she had been dreaming of, yet it was like those dreams where a familiar figure comes towards you, but it is not he, this is a stranger; or with what delight you see across a room your lost sweetheart and she turns her head with a smile you don’t know. This was Thomas, and not Edward, and the theme of deception continued as she tripped fast up the steps to join him at the opening door: the hall which had stayed in her mind as a place of soft colours and lights was smaller, and the spring afternoon sent a cold light where she remembered a warm diffusing glow. She remembered a reddish-rose softness, and here they were, old rugs, on the floor and on the walls, but she could see white threads where the light highlit worn patches. They were shabby. Yes, pretty, she supposed: could not these rich people afford new ones? At once she put the remembered room, unchanged, into another part of her mind, to keep it there safe, and condemned what she saw as an imposter. Now they were in the enormous room she remembered she had been told was a kitchen. It still was – nothing had changed. A child, she had not taken in all the cupboards and the fridge and the stove, which could easily appear in a magazine that endorsed such things, and here was the table, large, yes, as she remembered, and the chairs around it, and the big chair where she had sat on Edward’s knee and he had told her a story.

Thomas had put water into the kettle and switched it on, and reached into a vast refrigerator. He brought out various items which he deposited on the table, and said, ‘But if you’d like something else? I’m making coffee.’

At Phyllis’s, coffee was drunk, often and copiously, so she said, ‘Coffee, please,’ and sat down, since he had not thought to suggest it.

If she could not stop herself sending glances of enquiry, and then confirmation, at him, he could not stop looking at her. She thought he was like someone who had bought something special at the supermarket and was pleased with his buy.

‘Where’s your brother?’ she asked, half afraid to hear what he would say, since the answer was bound to confirm that this was not Edward, nor ever could be.

‘He’s in Sierra Leone, gathering facts’, was the reply, and she could not miss the resentment that was supposed to be concealed by indifference. ‘Gathering facts as usual’ he added. And then, deciding that politeness needed more, ‘He’s a lawyer, these days. He’s with a lawyer’s outfit that gathers facts about poverty – that kind of thing.’

‘And your ma? Does she still live here?’

‘Where else? This is her house. She comes and goes at her own sweet will. But don’t worry, she keeps her distance.’

In this way her suspicion was confirmed that there was something clandestine about this escapade. After all, he was seventeen. He must still be at school somewhere. She was the prize got at the supermarket.

For all of Edward’s tumultuous decade of growing up, Thomas had been the very pattern of a younger brother. He belittled and he jeered and he mocked, while Edward championed this cause or that, filling the house with pamphlets, brochures, appeals and quarrelling with his mother. Yet Jessy supported Edward, on principle, and Thomas might go off with both of them to a concert of musicians from South Africa or Zanzibar. At one of these shows Thomas, aged eleven, fell in love with a black singer and thereafter went to every black concert or dance group that came to London. The secret torments of teenage lust were all directed towards one black charmer after another. He said openly and often that he thought white skins were insipid, and he wished he had been born black. He collected African music from everywhere, and from his room when he was in it came the sounds of drumming and singing, as loud as he could get it, until Edward shouted at him to give it a rest and his mother complained that her sons did nothing by halves. ‘If only I could have had a nice sensible girl,’ she mourned: this was very much the note of the women’s movement of the time.

Thomas had in a thousand fantasies come up those steps with some delectable black star or starlet and when he saw Victoria in the music shop his dreams in one illuminating moment came close and smiled at him.

Victoria asked if he remembered she had slept in his room that long ago night. He did not, but he grasped at this gift from Fate and said, ‘Would you like to see it?’

Up the stairs they went and into a room no longer like a toy shop, but full of posters of black singers and musicians. Never has an old sweet dream of something unobtainable turned so sharply to say: But I was not that, I was this all the time. She knew all the performers from their recordings, and now she sat on the bed to listen to music from Mozambique, staring around at the posters, while Thomas stared at her.

Victoria was not entirely a virgin, because she had only just escaped from the predatory photographer number two. Thomas was not pristine either, because he had managed to persuade a waitress – black, of course – that he was older than he was. But he was inexperienced enough, and nervous enough of this cool black chick, to delay and put off and then put on another tape, and another, until Victoria got up and said, ‘I think I should be getting home, it’s late.’

But he jumped up and grasped her arms and stammered, ‘Oh, no, Victoria, please, oh, do stay.’ So he gabbled, and she stood, helpless, because it was not Thomas just then, but Edward who held her. He began kissing her on her neck, her face and then, well, you could say it was inevitable, given that years had gone into the making of the moment.

Since both were so unskilled, they had to confess, and that made conspiring innocents of them, and so she stayed, while he begged her not to leave him, and stayed, and it was hours later that she crept down those steps, with his arm proudly around her, he hoping he would be seen, she hoping she was not. When she got home Phyllis accepted her apologies with a sigh, and she was saying to herself: So, that’s it, I suppose I should be glad she’s been safe until now.

It was a long summer, a warm good summer, and Thomas, who should have been studying for his final exams, was meeting Victoria at her music shop every day, and going home with her, and up to his room, where they made love to the sounds of music from most of Africa, not to mention the West Indies and the Deep South of America too.

Jessy found them at the big table, drinking strong black coffee.

‘Make me some,’ she told her son, and sat, falling back into her chair, eyes shut. ‘What a day,’ she said. When she opened them a large cup of strong black coffee steamed in front of her and she was looking into a face she seemed to know.

‘I’m Victoria,’ said Victoria. ‘You let me stay here one night, when I was little.’

Jessy had had children of all ages in that kitchen for years, and some had been black, particularly more recently, during Edward’s Third-World phase. Who was this frighteningly smart black girl? She was feeling a generalised warmth, reminiscent, even nostalgic: she had enjoyed that time of children, who came and went and slept over.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s nice to see you again.’ And having swallowed the coffee with a grimace – it was much too hot – she jumped up. ‘I’ve got to get to …’ But she was already gone.

You might be tempted to say that two people whose deepest secret fantasies had been made flesh in each other were in love, had to be, even that they loved. Never has anything been more irrelevant than being in love, or loving. Thomas was not Edward: this was a rougher, coarser-fibred creature – not a man, he was still a boy after all. And Thomas was not finding in Victoria the luscious sexy black charmers of his fantasies. She was a careful correct young woman, who walked as if afraid of taking up too much space, who hung her clothes on the back of the chair, folded nicely, before getting into bed. She was pretty, oh yes; he adored that warm brown skin against the white sheets; she had the nicest little face, but she was no siren, no temptress, and he knew that sex could be different from this – wilder, hotter, wetter, sweeter.

In short, no two people who have spent a summer making love most afternoons could have learned less than they did about each other’s minds, lives, needs.

The summer began to dim for autumn, and he would have to go back to school, and Victoria was pregnant.

She at once told Phyllis, who was neither surprised, nor angry. The boys were out, doubtless raising hell, Bessie was at her hospital. The two were alone: they did not have to lower their voices or watch for an opening door.

‘And is the father going to stand by you?’

‘He’s white.’

‘Oh, my Lord,’ said Phyllis, and her dismay was not so much for the weight of history she was managing to put into those three syllables, but for much nearer trouble.

‘Oh, Lordy-Lord,’ she said again, with a sigh from her depths. Then she summed up, ‘There’ll be problems.’

‘I don’t want him to know.’

Phyllis Chadwick nodded, accepted this, while she sighed and frowned – brows puckering, lips woeful – knowing what Victoria was in for: the girl herself didn’t. The end of her butterfly time – well, that had to happen, and it had been too short, but Victoria could have no idea how her horizons were going to tighten around her.

‘I can manage,’ said Victoria, and now Phyllis’s face showed some humour that was meant to be seen: Victoria would manage because Phyllis would help her. But the young woman had got further ahead in her thinking than the older woman knew.

‘As a single mum I’ll be entitled to my own place,’ said Victoria. She knew all about it because she had heard it from her aunt and from Phyllis: girls got pregnant because they wanted to escape from their families, most often their mothers.

‘I hope that is not why you let yourself get careless?’

Careless? Thomas used condoms and she had no idea if he had been careless or not. ‘No. But when I knew, that was when I thought I can have my own place.’

‘I see.’

‘I can work in the music shop till the baby. They like me there.’

‘And so I should think, that they like you. You’re such a good girl.’

‘And they said I can go back when the baby’s old enough.’ Phyllis was smiling, but there was something there that made Victoria slip off her chair and crouch beside the older woman like a child needing to be held. Phyllis held her, and Victoria began to cry. What she was crying for Phyllis could not possibly guess: if Edward, if that tall fair kindly boy, had been the father of this child, then Victoria would have told him.

‘We’ll start seeing about your own place,’ said Phyllis. ‘I’ll speak to the housing officers.’

There were waiting lists, but when the baby was three months old Victoria moved into a flat in the same building, four floors up. You could say she had a perfect situation. Phyllis, who would help with the baby, was so close. Bessie, a nurse, would be on hand too. The two boys, growing up fast, tearaways and bad lots, were delighted with this baby, ‘A penny from heaven,’ they said, and promised to babysit and teach her to walk.

When Mary was a year old, Victoria, again a slender pretty young woman, still not quite twenty-one, went back to work. There was a child minder in these buildings, one known to Phyllis. At weekends Victoria took Mary to the park and wheeled her around and played with her and there the two were noticed by a handsome young man, who turned out to be a musician, a singer in a pop group. He thought Victoria with her little girl the prettiest thing he had seen in his life, and said so. Victoria could not resist. Phyllis Chadwick had feared the man who would be Victoria’s doom; the unknown white progenitor of little Mary had turned out not to be him, but she had only to take a look at this one to know the future. Phyllis had told Victoria to hold out for a good man, who would stick; yes, there weren’t many of them around, but Victoria was pretty and clever enough to be worth one. This man, she told Victoria, would be all spice and sugar, but ‘You’ll not get much more out of him than that.’

But Victoria got her way and her man, for she married him and became Mrs Bisley. Now there were real difficulties because he moved in to live with her and the little girl, and there wasn’t room enough, and besides, Victoria got benefits as a single mother, which she now had to forfeit. Sam Bisley was out every night, playing gigs all over London and other cities, he came and went, and while Mary had a father, which was more than most of the other black kids did, she scarcely saw him. And he didn’t see all that much of Victoria either, working at his music seven days a week. Then Victoria was pregnant again and Phyllis mourned. She had not seen the man who had impregnated her with her two boys since the night the deed was done. ‘Now you’ve done it,’ she told Victoria. ‘Well, we’ll have to manage.’

And was this tragic sympathy really necessary? Yes, Sam Bisley was hardly the perfect husband and father, but she loved him, and knew the little girl did too. And when there was his baby, he’d be around more and … so she reasoned, trying to calm Phyllis.

Her job in the music shop must end, though they valued her. Two small children – no. She would stay at home for a while and be a mother, and then later … she did get money from Sam, if not much. She could manage. Her life had become the juggling act familiar to all young women with small children. She found herself a few hours a week working for Mr Pat and he was pleased to have her: he was getting on. She took one babe to the minder and another to nursery school, looked after other women’s children in return for their helping her, and knew that the real theme of her life was waiting: she waited for Sam, who was always coming back from somewhere. Sometimes he brought friends who had to sleep on the sofa and the floor. She cooked for them and put their clothes into the washing machine with Sam’s and the kids’. She could scarcely remember the free young woman who was a bit of a pet in the music shop, let alone the girl who had had all those glamorous jobs in the West End. But it all went on well enough, she was holding her own, the babies were fine – only they already were not babies, but small children, and Phyllis Chadwick was there, four floors down, always helpful, kind and ready with advice, most of which Victoria did take. And then Phyllis died, just like that. She had a stroke, a bad one. She didn’t linger on, as her grandfather had done. Now Bessie was responsible for the boys, and could not help Victoria as much as she had. Perhaps who missed Phyllis most was Victoria. ‘What’s wrong with you and your long face?’ Sam wanted to know, not unkindly, but he was not a man for the miseries. But he did go to the funeral, and the two little children stood between Victoria and Sam and saw earth thrown down over the woman whom they had called Gran.

Soon after that Sam Bisley was killed in a car crash. He was always on the road to and from somewhere, and he drove – as she had told him often enough – like a madman. She was afraid to drive with him, and when the children were in the car she begged, ‘Drive more slowly – for the kids, even if you won’t for me.’ He was smashed up with a friend, one who had spent the night sometimes, on the sofa, or on the floor, and for whom she had cooked plates of fried eggs and fried bananas and bacon.

Victoria took hold of herself, rather like picking up the pieces of a vase that has fallen, and sticking the bits together. There were the children to consider. They depended on her now, and she knew to the roots of her being what depending on someone could mean: the absence of Phyllis Chadwick was as if behind there had been warm rock, where she had leaned, and now there was space where cold winds wailed and whistled. Victoria had to beat down waves of panic. Bessie told her she would find another man. Victoria did not think so. She had loved Sam. Long ago Edward had marked her for his own, and then there had been Sam. Thomas had not come into it. For better or worse, Sam had been her man.

One afternoon she saw Thomas in the street. He had not much changed. He was with a black girl, and they were laughing, arm in arm. Victoria thought: That was me. If she had bothered to consider Thomas at all, she would have decided that he would go on with black girls. ‘I like black best,’ he had joked. She remembered how he had brought forth a photograph of her – by the second photographer – nude, posing and pouting, and had said, ‘Go on, Victoria, do that pose for me now.’ She had refused, had been offended. She was not like that. Maybe that girl there across the street …? A smart girl she was, not like Victoria now, who did not have time for doing herself up.

Thomas was walking towards his home with the girl. Victoria followed them, on the other side of the street. If Thomas did look up and see her, he would wave – but would he? He would see a black woman with two kids: he wouldn’t really see her at all.

And now she stopped dead on the pavement, and the thought hit her, but really taking her breath away: she stood with her hand pressed into her solar plexus. She was crazy! Thomas’s child was here, sitting beside Sam Bisley’s son, Dickson. So far and so completely had she shut out any thought of Thomas as a father, it was as if she was in possession of a completely new idea. She had made a good job of that, all right – cutting Thomas out of her mind. Why had she? There was something about that summer that made her uncomfortable. She knew she didn’t really like Thomas – but he had been a kid, seventeen: what was he really like? She had no idea. He wasn’t Edward; for all of the summer that had been her strongest thought. Now she bent to peer at the little girl who was the result of that summer: she didn’t look like Thomas. Mary was a pretty, plump little thing, always smiling and willing. She was a pale brown, lighter than her mother by several shades, and much paler than the little boy, who was darker than Victoria. Sam had been a black black man, and she had liked to match skins with him – in the early days, before they had got used to each other. He used to call her his chocolate rabbit … and then he would eat her all up. ‘I’ll eat you all up,’ – but she did not like to think of their lovemaking, it made her want to cry. Not thinking of Sam was part of her holding herself together. But here was little Mary, and there, walking rapidly away down the street towards his home, was Mary’s father.

She was so shaken by all this that she went home earlier than usual with the kids, made them sit quietly in front of the television, and thought until she expected her mind to burst. That little girl over there, staring at the telly and licking at a lolly – she was an extension of that house, that big rich house.

Victoria knew the Staveneys were famous. She knew now. That was how she categorised them, famous, a word that meant they were far removed from the undistinguished run of ordinary people where Victoria belonged. She had seen Jessy Staveney’s name in the papers, and had made enquiries: that woman with her golden hair – so Victoria still thought of her – was famous in the theatre. Victoria thought of a musical, like Les Misérables, which the first of the photographers had taken her to see. She remembered that afternoon as she did the Staveney house, a vision into another world, beautiful, but she Victoria did not belong: she had never thought of going to a musical or the theatre by herself or with Bessie. And Edward, the fair kind boy – Victoria could still feel the warmth of those arms around her – he had been in the newspapers because he was a lawyer and had returned from somewhere in Africa, and had written letters about conditions. Phyllis Chadwick had cut out the letters, and kept them, not because of the connection with Victoria, but because in her social work she dealt with people from there – Ethiopia, was it? Sierra Leone? – and she found what was in the letters useful, to fight some battle she was having with superiors about housing refugees. And there was more. Lionel Staveney was famous because he was an actor, and she had seen him on television. It had taken Phyllis to say, ‘Is that the same Staveneys?’ The truth was, Phyllis had always been more interested in the Staveneys than she had ever been. Until now.

And that too was so upsetting to think of, like something pricking into her side, or in her shoe, that she positively wriggled as she sat trying to rid herself – what had been the matter with her? What had got into her that she had cut the Staveneys so completely out of her mind? When Phyllis mentioned them she felt a sort of revulsion, and it was Thomas she had not wanted to think of. But surely that was unfair? An ordinary seventeen-year-old, pretending to be older, having his first real sex, and she had gone there most evenings for weeks. No one had forced her!

Now Victoria had begun to think, she kept it up. She thought about the Staveneys and looked hard at little Mary. You can’t go wrong with Mary, Phyllis had said. You can’t go wrong with the Mother of God. She was Mary Staveney. Not Mary Bisley.

She had a pretty good idea what the future of the two little children would be. The six-year-old, the two-year-old, would have to go to the same school she had, and she knew now what a bad school it was. Much worse now than when she had gone there. It was a violent school, full of drugs, fights, gangs, and these days the children who went to that kind of school were seen rather like wild animals who had to be kept restrained. It had been rough when she was there, she knew that now, though then she had not questioned anything. A good little girl, a star pupil, doing her homework – that was why they had made a fuss of her: she had liked to learn and do her lessons. Not like most. These days she would probably be wild and fighting, like the other kids now. And soon there would be Mary and Dickson, having to fight battles every minute, and they would come out the other end of it ignorant – worse even than she had been. She did know now how ignorant she had been, that pretty good little girl who owed everything to Phyllis, who had made her do homework, kept her at it. But in spite of the homework and the hard work, she had been ignorant. She was in that Staveney house most evenings for a summer and had not understood a thing. She had not been curious enough to ask questions. She had not known the questions to ask; not known there were questions to ask, and now, six years later, she could measure her ignorance then by what she had not asked or even wondered at. There was a father, Lionel Staveney, and so used was she to families that had mothers and no fathers, or fathers that came and disappeared again, she had taken it for granted there was no man around in the Staveney house. The truth was, she, Victoria, with her man Sam Bisley, had been better off than most of the women her age: he had not only married her but was sometimes there. A father; a father actually taking responsibility.

She did remember Thomas had said his mother and his father did not get on. She seemed to remember that Thomas said his father paid for school fees ‘and that kind of thing’.

And Jessy Staveney? She had never asked who Victoria was or what she did, was seldom there, and when she was accepted her presence, without a nasty word or look, though surely she must have sometimes wondered if she and Thomas … Retrospectively Victoria was a bit shocked. Surely Jessy Staveney should have said something?

Seventeen: that meant Thomas was now twenty-three or twenty-four. Victoria was twenty-six. Edward who had seemed so unreachably above her in age as in everything else, when he was twelve to her nine, was almost thirty. Edward wrote letters to newspapers, which were published. No one would ever print a letter by her, and nothing she said could be considered important or even interesting.

And these two children, Mary and Dickson, would emerge from school even more ignorant than she had been. Would Mary ever learn enough to be a nurse, like Bessie? And Sam’s son, if he didn’t have some music in him from his father, what would he be?

Thomas’s children, when he had them, and Edward’s, they would be writing letters to the papers that would be printed. And they might turn out famous, like Jessy and Lionel and Edward.

All these thoughts that should – surely? – have marched profitably through her mind years ago during that long lovemaking summer, were presenting themselves now. Now she believed that she must have been a bit simple, not merely ignorant, but stupid.

She had never then thought, Thomas has a right to know. Now she was thinking: But it takes two to make a baby, a favourite saying of Phyllis who had often to deal with paternity cases, ‘I don’t think the idea even knocked at the door,’ Victoria thought. ‘Why didn’t it?’ And if it had been unfair to Thomas, then what about little Mary who had a father in that part of society where people’s names were known, and they had letters printed in newspapers. And children were sent to real schools. Thomas had been at the same school as her, she dimly remembered, because the father – Lionel Staveney – had said his children should know how the other half lived. So Edward and Thomas had both spent some years with the other half’s children before being whisked off to real schools where children learned. If she, Victoria, had been at a real school, then … but children who go to real schools don’t have to nurse sick mothers and fall out of the race – fall off that ladder that goes up – and become girls working in supermarkets or posing for dirty little photographers. If they are pretty enough.

Suppose I didn’t have my looks? Fat Bessie could never have had that time in the West End, all those jobs I had, I could pick and choose. It was Phyllis who said to me, you just believe in yourself and just walk in, show you aren’t scared, and you’ll be surprised … and Phyllis had been right. But she, Victoria, was pretty. Luck. Luck – it was everything. Good luck and bad luck. What could you call it, that day, when they had forgotten her and her aunt was sick, and Edward had taken her home? Good luck – was it? She had lived for years in a dream, she knew that now, thinking about that house, all rosy golden lights and warmth and kindness. Edward. And Edward had led to Thomas. What sort of luck had that been? Well, she had got Mary from it, a solemn little girl with beautiful eyes – like her own. Mary was alive because of luck, a series of lucky or unlucky things happening because Edward Staveney had forgotten her that afternoon, leaving her alone and afraid in the school playground. And Thomas walking into the music shop? No, that wasn’t anything, he was mad about music from Africa and that was the shop for it. But he could have taken his tapes and stuff to the other girl working there that afternoon, black too, and smart and well-dressed, just as she had been.

Victoria seemed to herself like a little helpless thing that had been buffeted about, by strokes of luck, not knowing what was happening, or why. But now she was not helpless, at last she had her wits about her. What did she want? Simply that Mary should be acknowledged by the Staveneys, and after that – well, they would all have to see.

Thomas was with a black girl in his room when his telephone rang. He heard, ‘I’m Victoria. Do you remember me?’ He did, of course he did. These days, when he thought of her, it was with curiosity: he could make comparisons now. The girl he was with had said to him, ‘In my country we say, laughing together, for making love.’ This made Thomas laugh and they did laugh together. But he would never have said of Victoria, We laughed together. Now she was saying, ‘Thomas, I have to tell you something. Now, listen to me, Thomas, that summer I got pregnant. I had a baby. It was your baby. She’s a little girl and her name is Mary.’ ‘Now, hold on a minute, don’t go so fast, what are you saying?’ She repeated it. ‘Then, why didn’t you tell me before?’ He didn’t sound angry. ‘I don’t know. I was silly’ She had been expecting anger, or disbelief, but he was saying, ‘Well, Victoria, I don’t think much of that. You should have told me.’ By now she was weeping. ‘Don’t cry, Victoria. How old is she? Oh, yes, I suppose she must be …’ And he did rapid calculations, while Victoria sobbed. ‘Now here’s a thing,’ he said. ‘She must be six? ‘Yes, she’s six.’ ‘Wow.’ And then, since the silence lengthened, she said, ‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’

For a bit, he kept the silence going. She thought, Oh what a pity she doesn’t look like him. What is he going to see? A little brown girl called Mary. But she’s so sweet … ‘I go to the park’ – she named it – ‘most afternoons.’ ‘Okay. I’ll see you. Tomorrow?’

She left Dickson with the minder, and took Mary, in a pink frilly dress, with a pink bow in her hair, done into a little fuzzy plait, and met Thomas on a park bench.

He was humorous, he was quizzical, as if holding scepticism in reserve, but he was pleasant. In fact, they were getting on more easily than during that summer when their relations had been defined by the bed. He was easy with little Mary, and actually said to Victoria that she had her grandmother’s hands.

Grandmother? He meant Jessy.

He bought Mary a lolly, gave her a kiss and went off, saying, ‘I’ll be in touch.’ He had the telephone number now and the address.

Victoria thought: Perhaps that’s the last I’ll see of him. Well, I’m not going to court! Either he does or he doesn’t.

That evening at supper he told his mother and his brother that he had a daughter and her name was Mary, she was a sort of pale milk-chocolate colour. Did they remember Victoria?

Edward said no, ought he to? His mother said she thought so, but there had been so many in and out.

Edward was now a handsome man, grave, authoritative, and he was tanned and healthy because of just having returned from fact-finding in Mauritius. He was a credit to his family, his school, and his university, not to mention the organisation for which he fact-found. Thomas was still a younger brother at university where he was studying – reading – arts and their organisation: he proposed to organise the arts, specifically, to found a pop group. All his choices were because of his being the younger brother of a paragon. How could Thomas ever catch up with Edward, who was married, as well, and with a child?

When Thomas told them, ‘I have a daughter and I’ve seen her and she’s a poppet,’ it was definitely in the spirit of one catching up in a race.

‘I hope you’ve considered the possible legal consequences,’ said Edward.

‘Oh, hell, don’t be like that,’ said Thomas.

Jessy Staveney sat brooding. The yellow, or golden, hair of Victoria’s imagination was now a great greying bush, tied back by a black ribbon whose strenuous efforts to cope left it creased and greying too. Her face was bony handsome, with prominent green eyes delicately outlined with very white lids. She was staring out into perspectives bound to be fraught with fate, if not doom. Her emphatic hands were in an attitude of prayer, or contemplation, and on them she rested her chin.

‘I have always wanted a black grandchild,’ she mused.

‘Oh, Christ, mother,’ said Thomas, affronted not by the sentiment, but perhaps by the fact she could have done well as a ship’s figurehead, staring undaunted into a Force Eight – at least – gale.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Jessy. ‘Do you want me to throw you out?’

‘Well, Jessy’ said Edward, humouring them both with a well practised smile, ‘this could be blackmail, have you thought of that?’

‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘Money has not been mentioned.’

‘This is a classic blackmail situation.’

‘Of course we should give her some money,’ said Jessy.

‘No, of course we shouldn’t, not until we know it’s true.’

‘I’m sure it’s true,’ said Thomas. ‘You don’t know her. She’s not the sort of person who’d do that.’

‘There’s an easy way of finding out,’ said Edward. ‘Ask for a DNA test.’

‘Oh, God, how sordid,’ said Thomas.

‘It certainly does introduce a belligerent note,’ said Jessy.

‘It’s up to you,’ said Edward. ‘But this family could be supporting anybody’s by-blow, for years.’

‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘She’s all right.’ And then he added, coming out at last with one reason for the pride which shone from him: ‘Dad’s going to be pleased.’

‘If he isn’t pleased he’s not very consistent,’ said Edward.

‘You can’t expect consistency, not from Lionel,’ said Jessy. She never spoke of her ex-husband except with a careless contempt. This was partly because of the manner of their parting, and partly because of the feminist movement which she energetically supported.

Lionel, very handsome, irresistible in fact, had been so unfaithful that at last she had to heave him out. ‘Love you, love your infidelities,’ she had screamed at him. ‘Well, I won’t.’ ‘Fair enough,’ he had equably replied.

They met often, and always quarrelled, describing this as an amicable divorce.

Lionel paid the school bills, and, given the precariousness of an actor’s life, his payments for clothes, food, travel and so forth had been dependable. The parents had quarrelled violently, about the boys’ upbringing, but less now. He was an old-fashioned romantic socialist and insisted on both boys going to ordinary schools, as then was common among his kind. ‘Sink or swim.’ ‘Do or die,’ his wife riposted. Although Edward had emerged from the junior school, Beowulf – the same as Victoria’s – pale, thin, haunted by the bullying, hardly able to sleep, and stuttering badly, this had not prevented his father from insisting on the same treatment for Thomas. His prescriptions for them had borne fruits, though unequally. Edward had learned a compassion for the underdog, or the other half, that burned in him like a tormented conscience. ‘You’d think you were personally responsible for the slave trade,’ his mother might shout at him. ‘You are not personally responsible for people being hanged for a loaf of bread or stealing a rabbit.’ As for Thomas, he had learned to love black girls and black music, in that order. No one could ever fail to admire Edward, but Thomas? And now here he was, in his last year of university, a father, with a child of six.

‘I think the best thing to do is to ask her here with the child, to meet us all – Lionel included,’ said Jessy.

This being considered too much of an ordeal, Victoria and Mary came one Sunday afternoon, when Edward was there, and Jessy.

It was indeed an ordeal, mostly because Edward was being so grand, so aloof. He cross-examined Victoria as if he did not believe her. He sat at the foot of the table, in the vast room they called the kitchen, Jessy with her sad grey hair at the top, remembering to smile from time to time at Victoria and the child. Thomas, who seemed ready to flirt with her, he was so pleased with himself, sat opposite Victoria. The child, in a white dress this time, with little white boots and white bows, sat on a pile of cushions and behaved with painful care. She had been told she was going to meet her other family, but had not really taken it in.

‘Are you my daddy?’ she asked Thomas, her great black eyes full of the difficulty of it all.

‘Yeah, yeah, man, that’s about it.’ His American phase was useful to fall back into, at such moments.

‘If you are my daddy then you are my granny,’ said Mary, turning to Jessy.

‘That’s exactly right,’ said Jessy, encouragingly.

‘And what are you?’ she asked Edward. She did not miss the hesitation before Edward brought out, ‘I’m your uncle.’ He smiled, but not as his mother did.

‘Am I going to live with you?’ Mary asked.

Edward sent a sharp glance at his mother: was this a clue at last as to what Victoria was after?

‘No, Mary,’ said Victoria. ‘Of course not. You’ll be with me.’

‘And Dickson too?’

The Staveneys had only just managed to take in that there was another child, from another father.

‘Yes, you and me and Dickson,’ said Victoria.

Considering the difficulties, it all went off well, and at the end Jessy kissed Victoria. Thomas gave her a brotherly kiss, and Edward, hesitating again, put his arms around the child, and it was a good hug.

‘Welcome to the family,’ he said, nicely, even though it did sound a bit like a court order.

He had complained that all this was happening before anything had been clarified with the DNA test.

Victoria went home, not knowing what had been achieved, part regretting she had ever rung Thomas, and she wept, thinking of Sam, who had been such a strength when he was alive. It is not only in Rome that saints are created from unlikely material. If Victoria had been able to foresee a couple of years before, how she would be thinking and talking about Sam, after his death, she would have not believed it.

All this was being discussed with Bessie, every twist and turn, usually talking into the dark in Victoria’s bedroom. Bessie’s own flat – Phyllis’s – had become impossible. The two boys, now sixteen, young men, were out of control. Their mother had managed, just, to keep them in check, but they took no notice of Bessie. The flat was just as much theirs as hers, as they kept telling her, but she paid the bills for it. They stole cars and car parts to get money for their needs. Bessie might come into her home and find it full of young men, drunk, or stoned, the place a pigsty. She regularly had to clean it up. Her bedroom she kept locked, to stop her brothers and their friends stealing her money, but these were not youngsters likely to be deterred by a locked door. The police knew these lads and from time to time took one or two of them off. ‘They’re going to end in prison,’ Bessie said to Victoria, who did not contradict her. ‘Then perhaps I’ll get my flat back one day,’ Bessie might be thinking, but did not say. Phyllis’s death had left an absence that told them continually that some people are much more than a sum of their parts. Her influence had been enormous, in this building and beyond it. People were always coming up to tell Bessie how much her mother had done for them. ‘I wish she was here to do something for me,’ Bessie would think, but did not say. There was a laboratory technician from Jamaica she would have invited to share her flat and her life, had it been possible. He was a sane, sensible person of whom Phyllis would have approved – but he did not have a place of his own and neither did Bessie. That was why she and Victoria were sharing a bedroom again.

Bessie said to Victoria that she ought to arrange for a DNA test. Victoria had never heard of it. The two young women made draft after draft of a letter to the Staveneys, thought safe and correct by Bessie, but stiff and unfriendly by Victoria. The letter Thomas eventually did get had been written by trembling and weeping Victoria, surrounded by all the torn-up drafts. She went down to post it, at four in the morning, daring the dangers of the dark estate, thinking that any muggers or thieves she was likely to meet were bound to be Bessie’s lay-about boys or their friends.

‘Dear Thomas, I am so unhappy thinking that you are thinking I might be trying to put something over on you and your family. I can’t sleep worrying. I would like it best if you and Mary could have the DNA test, the one that proves if a child has a real father. Please write or telephone soon and let me know how you feel. I don’t want to impose.’ This letter too had been torn up more than once, because the first one ended ‘Love’, No, surely, that was a bit of cheek? Then she thought, But what about that summer, how can I put, With good wishes? Love and good wishes alternated and then, worn out with it all, she wrote, ‘With my very best wishes’, ran out to post the letter – and fell into bed.

As soon as Thomas read this, he rang Edward and read it to him.

‘So what do you have to say now?’

‘All right, you win, but I was right to warn you.’

Jessy read the letter and said, ‘Good girl. I like that.’

‘Do I really have to go and have that bloody test?’

‘Yes, you do. We’ve got to keep Edward happy.’

Thus she allied herself with her erring son. ‘A little girl,’ she said. ‘At last. And she seems such a sensible little thing.’

The test was made, but before the result came, Thomas had telephoned to ask what Victoria’s bank account number was. She didn’t have one. He then said she must open one at once, it would make things easier. ‘Things’, it turned out, was an allowance for Mary, of so much monthly, ‘and we’ll see how we all go along’. The money was from Jessy, but when Lionel was informed, he said he would contribute.

There was another afternoon tea, this time with Lionel. Mary was told she was going to meet her grandfather, and went along without fear, thinking of Jessy’s kindly smiles.

Lionel Staveney was a big grand man, in style rather like Jessy, who always seemed to take up the space of two people. He had a mane of silvery hair and wore a shirt of many colours, again like Jessy’s. They sat at either end of the big table, reflecting each other.

Lionel took Mary by the hand and said, ‘So, you’re little Mary. Very nice to meet you at last.’ And he bent to kiss that small brown hand, with a solemn face, but then he winked at her, which made her giggle. ‘What a delicious child,’ he remarked to Victoria. ‘Congratulations. Why have you kept this treasure from us for so long?’ He held out his arms and Mary went up into them, burying her face in the rainbow shirt.

So that was that afternoon, and soon there was another.

‘Here’s my little crème caramel, my little chocolate éclair,’ was Lionel’s greeting to Mary, and Lionel saw Victoria’s face, whose nervous look was because she was remembering Sam’s culinary endearments. ‘If I say I am going to eat you all up,’ Lionel said to Mary, ‘you must not take it as more than a legitimate expression of my sincere devotion.’

When Victoria and Mary had gone home, Edward said to his father, ‘If you can’t see why you shouldn’t call her a chocolate anything, then you are a bit out of step with the times.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Lionel, ‘dearie, dearie me. Is that what I am? Well, so be it.’

‘Lionel,’ said his ex-wife, ‘I think you sometimes scare her a bit.’

‘But not for long. What a little sweetie. What a little – I’m in heaven. Now, if we had a little girl, do you think we’d have stuck?’ he enquired of Jessy.

‘God only knows,’ said Jessy, giving the Almighty the benefit of the doubt.

‘Certainly not,’ said Edward, but this was as much a warning for the present as a judgement on the past.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘Happy families.’

‘I’m claiming visiting rights, that’s all. Aren’t grandparents encouraged these days?’

‘You’re welcome to visit,’ said his ex-wife. ‘But let’s not push our luck.’

Thomas telephoned Victoria to ask if he could take Mary to his swimming pool. Victoria said the child didn’t know how to swim, and Thomas said he would teach her.

Then it was the zoo, the planetarium and a trip on the river-boat to Greenwich.

Meanwhile Victoria was thinking, ‘But I have two children. What about Dickson? ‘What was happening was unfair. Yes, Dickson was still tiny, just three, but he knew his sister was getting treats that he didn’t.

Jessy had remarked that it was not right, when there were two children, if one got more than the other.

Edward said at once, ‘Don’t even think of it, Mother.’

‘Perhaps we could take him out sometimes with Mary?’

‘No. One’s enough. I’m sorry, but there are limits.’

Now Mary was in her first year at school and miserable. This made Victoria remember how miserable she had been, though she had managed it by being quiet, and keeping out of trouble and – frankly – sucking up to the big boys and girls. She told Mary to do the same, and suffered herself, knowing that the child cried herself to sleep at nights.

She speculated, amazed, how it was that the Staveneys could willingly submit their precious children to such nastiness, such cruelty – for she believed that the good schools, the ones children like theirs would attend, would be free of all that. In her most secret dreams, not shared even with Bessie. Victoria was hoping the Staveneys would send little Mary to a good school where she could learn and become somebody.

Then Jessy telephoned to ask if Mary would enjoy a matinée? Victoria thought of Les Misérables and said Mary would love it. Victoria took Mary to the Staveney house where off went Jessy and Mary in a taxi, to be returned, in a taxi, to the council estate. Mary was in a state of babbling incoherent delight. Victoria never came to grips with what the little girl had seen. But the next time she was whisked off to that other land, the Staveneys, Mary asked Thomas if she could go to another ‘matney’. ‘A what?’ It turned out she thought matney was the name for a theatre. She went to another matney with Jessy and then to the zoo with Edward and Edward’s wife, and their three-year-old. And then, having begged, to another matinée, of a show Lionel was in. She returned to say that her grandfather was a funny man but she liked him. ‘He likes me, Ma,’ she confided in Victoria.

Whenever this grandfather was mentioned grandfathers whirled dolefully in Victoria’s mind. She was being reminded that she must have had a grandfather, but as a fact he had simply disappeared. It was Phyllis’s grandfather she thought of as grandfather, a generic progenitor, an old man with his smelly urine bottle. But – she could not dispute it – Lionel Staveney was her little girl’s grandfather, and when Mary said, ‘She told me I was her grandchild and so I must call her grandmother,’ Victoria felt the earth shaking under her feet. When she confessed how she felt, Bessie reasonably said, ‘But what did you expect, when you told them?’

Well, what had she expected? Nothing like this. It was the thoroughness of the acceptance of Mary that was – well, what? It was all too much! Bessie told her she was ungrateful, she was looking a gift-horse in the mouth. Victoria at last came out with: ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d be so pleased to have a black grandchild.’

‘She’s not black, she’s more caramel,’ Bessie pronounced. ‘If she was my colour I bet they wouldn’t be so pleased.’

About a year after she had first telephoned Thomas, Jessy wrote a letter to say the family were taking a house in Dorset in the summer, for a month, and people would come and go. Would Victoria agree to Mary’s joining them? Edward’s Samantha would be there for the whole month. Victoria was not invited, and she knew it was because of Dickson. Mary was sweet, lovable, biddable and friendly, but Dickson, now nearly four, was a different matter.

The question of colour – no, it couldn’t be evaded – though Victoria could be pardoned for thinking that the Staveneys, except for Thomas of course, had never noticed that colour could be a differentiator, often enough a contumacious one, believing that whatever had happened – regrettably – in the past, was no longer a force in human affairs.

Dickson was black, black as boot polish or piano keys. Somewhere long ago in his family tree genes had been nurtured to cope with the suns of tropical Africa. He sweated easily. Sometimes sweat flew off him as freely as off an over-hot dog’s tongue. He roared and fought; at the minder’s he was a problem, making trouble, causing tears. Mary was able to calm and charm him, but no one else could, certainly not Victoria, who often found herself weeping with exhaustion over Dickson’s brawling and biting. Bessie adored him, called him her little black imp from hell, her hell’s angel, and sometimes he would allow himself to be held by her, but not often. By now he knew that he was excessive and impossible and everyone’s headache, but that made him worse in behaviour and worse in effect, for he acquired pathos, saying things like, ‘But why am I impossible? Why am I a headache, why, why, why, I’m not, I’m not,’ and he would kick out around him until he fell sobbing on the floor.

He could not possibly be an easy guest in any family, black or white. The Staveneys had scarcely seen the child. It seemed they had enquired of Mary if she would like Dickson to be invited, but Mary had replied, gravely, in her responsible little way, that Dickson would quarrel with everyone and would scratch and bite Samantha. ‘I told her – Jessy – that he would grow out of it,’ Mary told Victoria she had said. Quoting Bessie. ‘Don’t worry, Victoria, he’ll grow out of it.’

But here was a real turn of the screw. Little visits here and there, a matinée, a tea party, but to go away by herself, for a month – they were asking her for a month? Yes, they were. The politician a mother has to be – let alone an economist – told Victoria that the Staveneys wanted Mary because of Samantha. Mary was good with small children. At the minder’s she was commended for it. Victoria thought – and it was bitter – Mary’s going to be a nurse for Samantha. Bitter and unfair and she knew it. Mary loved Samantha. An unanchored bitterness, ready to become suspicion, floated near enough to the surface in Victoria to be dangerous – she pressed it down. Wasn’t this what she had wanted for Mary? The little girl was being so lucky, and Victoria should be giving thanks for the blessing of it.

This was what Bessie, who was taking to religion, called it. ‘It’s a blessing, Victoria. That family – they’re Mary’s blessing from God.’

Now there was the question of clothes. Samantha’s were different, and Mary knew exactly what she needed. Victoria found herself being taken to a shop, by her little daughter, and instructed on what to buy. So this was what Samantha wore? Cheeky little clothes, and the colours were gorgeous – and it was all so expensive. But there was money in the bank for Mary’s clothes, put there by Thomas, and this was when she must spend it.

Victoria was thinking, I am losing Mary to the Staveneys. She was able to contemplate this calmly. She did not believe Mary would come to despise her mother: she was relying on the child’s kind heart. She was thinking, as mothers so often seem to do, How is it possible that these two such different children came out of the same womb? A little angel – the minder’s name for Mary – and a little devil. ‘Never mind,’ said Bessie. ‘They’ll both grow out of it.’ And Victoria found she was thinking about her daughter as Phyllis had thought about her. The terrible dangers that lie in wait for girls … the traps, the snares, baited by the devil with a girl’s best qualities – Bessie had just had an abortion. She wanted the baby, but she would have liked a father for it, and while she had a flat to put it in, she didn’t have a home.

Off went Mary, wild with excitement, with the Staveneys. She rang her mother most days, for Victoria had insisted, and kept saying that it was lovely, oh, it’s so lovely, Ma. And then Victoria was asked to go down for a weekend. She arranged for Dickson to stay at the minder’s and took the train, two hours, into England’s green and pleasant land. But Victoria had hardly ever been out of London. It seemed to her she was being smothered in green, a wet green: it had rained.

She stood on the platform of the station, in her hand her new suitcase full of her best clothes, and waited until appeared Lionel, with Mary on his shoulders. Mary slid down her grandfather to get to Victoria and kiss her, and the three went off, linked hand to hand, to the old car. Lionel’s mane of hair had a leaf in it and Mary’s new dungarees, bright purple, were patched with mud. She was fatter and sparkling with happiness.

Victoria was in the front seat by Lionel, with Mary on her knee. The child smelled of soap and chocolate. Lionel kept up a banter with Mary, a chant of bits of nursery rhymes, references to things Victoria did not recognise, and Mary giggled, sitting on her mother’s lap but watching the big man’s mouth, from whence spilled words like spells. ‘Contrary Mary, smooth and hairy, the spider beside her big and scary …’ ‘That’s wrong, that’s wrong,’ the child shrieked. ‘You’re mixing them all up.’ ‘But Hairy Mary, did not scream, she ate up the spider with curds and cream.’ ‘I’m not hairy, I’m not,’ the child protested, dying of giggles.

‘Mary as smooth as silk, drank up all the milk, none left for her mother, her mongoose and her brother, she …’

He kept it up, while Mary squirmed in Victoria’s arms, and as for Victoria, she was longing for the thing to end. They were driving fast through lanes where the wet green was heavy overhead, splashing down showers of wet around the car. She felt she could not breathe. Soon, soon, they would reach the house, which she imagined rather like the Staveneys’ town house, but they had stopped outside a little house all by itself with the trees growing close, and a great squash of garden, where a big tree leaned over a patch of lawn. On the lawn chairs and a table stood waiting. The house seemed to Victoria a nasty little place, not worthy of the Staveneys. What were they doing here? But Mary was out of the car, and tugging her mother out, by the hand. It seemed no one was about.

All Victoria wanted was to lie down. Lionel told her to make herself at home: there would be tea in half an hour. Mary tugged her mother up tiny slippy stairs and into a dark little room that had windows broken up all over into patterns, letting in thin light. There was a big high bed with a white cover, and on this Mary was already bouncing, ‘Oh, it’s lovely, it’s a lovely bed.’

Victoria wanted to be sick. Mary showed her the bathroom, which was tiny, with thatch showing through the window, where things were flying about. ‘Look at the bees, Ma, look, look.’ Victoria was discreetly and tidily sick, and retreated to her room.

‘Where’s your bed?’ she enquired, falling into the big white one.

‘I’m with Samantha. We sleep in a room by ourselves.’

Told that her mother felt bad – a headache – Mary kissed her, and ran out.

Victoria lay flat on her back, and saw the ceiling had a crack across it. In the corner of the room was a spider web? Was that a spider’s web? – Victoria fell asleep, just like that, but perhaps it was more like a swoon. She was shocked deeply, painfully, to her core. How could the Staveneys … and when she woke, Jessy was just putting down a cup of tea on the bedside table.

‘Sorry you’re not feeling too good,’ she said. ‘Come down when you’re better.’ And she left, the big tall woman, who had to bend her head at the door.

Victoria lay and watched dusk invade the room. That meant it must be getting late. She should go down, shouldn’t she? Cautiously she slid from the bed, careful that her feet would not encounter – well, what? She imagined something soft and squishy that might bite. At the window she stood, careful to touch nothing, and looked down. Under the big tree, which had birds in it, making a noise, an assortment of people, not all of them Staveneys, sat about drinking.

If Victoria went down, she would have to descend those stairs, find her way out, join all those people, who would have to be introduced. She could see Mary sitting on her grandfather’s knee.

Just as Victoria had got up courage, she saw the company rise, variously. Some people went off to cars parked outside in the road. And then the Staveneys came in to the house and she heard them just below. The house echoed. It was a noisy house. And it was then that she saw, just beside the window, a great spider, making its way – she knew – towards her. She screamed. In no time Thomas had appeared, identified the trouble, and having taken her towel off a chair he enveloped the beast and shook it out of the window. It would climb back!

‘Well, Victoria, how are you, you look great …’ How could he see? It was dark in here. ‘Are you better?’ He kissed her cheek, and laughed, a tribute to their past. ‘Come down and have some supper.’

Victoria wanted to say she would get into bed, put her head deep under that wonderful white counterpane and not come out until it was time to go back to London. Instead she began opening her case to find something to wear.

‘Oh, don’t bother about that,’ said Thomas. ‘No one bothers here.’

And off he went and she heard him bound down the stairs.

She followed. A big table almost filled another smallish room. Around it already sat Jessy and Lionel, facing each other, from the head and the foot, Thomas, with a chair opposite him for Victoria, Edward and a sharp observing young woman who must be Edward’s Alice. A chair piled with cushions accommodated Mary, near to her grandfather.

Wine bottles stood about, and plates of cold meat and salad. Friday night, she was told: this picnic had been bought, but tomorrow she would see better things.

Jessy had been here for most of the month, which was nearly up, and Lionel had come every weekend. ‘I can’t keep away from your daughter,’ he announced, ‘she’s my lady love.’

Thomas had been several times. Edward not at all (this was his first time), because he was too busy. Alice had come to visit Samantha, who was in bed, young for late nights.

Alice was eyeing Victoria, who felt criticised. In fact it was Alice who believed she was at a disadvantage. She had been brought up in a provincial lawyer’s family and was sure the Staveneys criticised her. They were so travelled, worldly, liberal and generous, often in ways that shocked Alice. She thought worse of the Staveneys for letting the little dark girl call Jessy and Lionel granny and grandfather. She did believe she was in the wrong to feel like this, but could not change. When Mary attempted uncle for Edward, he had told her, ‘No, call me Edward,’ and Mary did so; she was already calling her father, Thomas. If Edward was Mary’s uncle that meant that Alice must be Mary’s aunt, but the little girl had sensed Alice wouldn’t like that.

Victoria was not jealous of Alice. Her Edward, the kind boy of long ago, lived in her mind, unchanged, and the Edward of now she did not much like. In fact these days she thought Thomas was nicer than Edward.

It was a slow sleepy meal. Jessy kept yawning and apologising, and that made it easy for Victoria to say she was tired too.

‘Normally,’ Thomas said to Victoria, ‘we spend the evening in healthy parlour games, but tonight we’ll skip all that.’

Victoria went with Mary to her room, where Samantha was prettily asleep in a little bed. Mary had a big bed, like Victoria’s. Mary put up her arms to kiss her mother and smiled and fell asleep.

Victoria went to her room, looked for the spider, did not see it, dived into bed, and pulled up the white cover. In here, she was safe.

Friday night. Two more nights to go – she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, she hated it all. She could hear an owl hooting. Didn’t that mean death? It was in the big tree. The garden was full of horrors. At supper Lionel had said to Mary that she mustn’t forget to take crumbs out for the toad.

‘It’s dark,’ Mary had said, comforting Victoria with this sensible protest. ‘Toads can see in the dark,’ said Lionel. ‘It’s a perverse toad,’ Jessy had said. ‘I don’t expect they see many wholemeal crumbs in their usual diet, so why they like ours, I can’t think.’

‘We’ll find him some worms tomorrow,’ Lionel had said.

Victoria did sleep at last and woke early to find Mary had come in the night and was asleep near her, on top of the coverlet. For a long time Victoria lay on her elbow watching her child sleep, rather as she would a ship sailing away over a horizon – if she had ever seen a sea that was not on television or in a film. Behind those tight smooth sealed eyelids was already a world that Victoria did not share.

In the morning Victoria tried to find something in her case that would match Lionel’s old sweater that had a hole in its sleeve, or Jessy’s slacks and grey tweedy skirt. She did not have the right shoes either. They talked of walks and of Mary and Samantha going off on ponies with some other little girls.

Victoria stood at the door of the house and felt that she was surrounded by jungle. She knew all about jungles, the way we do, from the screens, big and small: they were dangerous, full of wild animals, crocodiles, snakes and insects. This jungle had none of those but nevertheless was filled with hostile creatures. If she could just leave, leave now – but she didn’t want Mary to be ashamed of her.

When the long breakfast was over – she drank some tea, and had to listen to Jessy lecture them all on the importance of a proper breakfast – she watched while they all went off to walk in woods that were near, and very wet. She said she would stay sitting under the tree, which was bound to be full of creatures that might drop on her, and tried to find haven in a room they called the sitting-room. She sat in a big chair with her feet drawn up, so that nothing could crawl up on them.

Lunch over, they all piled into cars and drove off some miles to a famous tea-room, where they parked, and everyone went walking again, but Victoria and Mary, who insisted on staying with her mother.

‘Poor Ma,’ said Mary, acutely, and her eyes were full of tears. ‘But I love you always.’

Supper was the same. This time Jessy had cooked stew, which Victoria liked and a big fruit tart had been bought at the tea-room to bring home.

Saturday night. Another night to go. By now Victoria was feeling like a criminal. They knew she was not enjoying herself, though had no idea just how much she was hating it, how she feared it. The spider was back on her wall and it had fled when she stamped her foot at it, into the crack, where it bided its time. She tried to keep her eyes on it, but moths had flown in, before she shut the window tight. A big moth crouched on a wall, making a shadow. She had last seen that hooded shape, a frightening shadow on a wall, in a film about Dracula.

Next morning she went down early, with her suitcase. She did not know how she would get to the station but somehow she would. She found Alice, already up, drinking tea.

‘Do you hate it?’ Alice asked.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I’m sorry’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I wish I could live here for always, never leave.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Victoria feebly.

‘Yes, it’s true. Edward can’t leave London yet but we will buy a house in the country and then we’ll live in it.’

‘A house like this?’ Victoria looked incredulous.

‘No, bigger. More comfortable.’ She looked kindly at Victoria and said gently, ‘Don’t mind them. I know they are a bit overwhelming.’

‘It’s not them,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s this place.’

Absolute incomprehension: Alice frowned and was perturbed. Victoria seemed about to cry.

‘I wish I could go home,’ said Victoria, like a child. And then, as an adult, said, ‘I would, only I don’t want Mary to be ashamed of me.’

‘She wouldn’t be. She’s a nice little girl, if there ever was one. Samantha adores her. I tell you what. I’ll drive you to the station and I’ll tell them you don’t feel well.’

‘That’s not a lie,’ said Victoria.

And so Victoria got into Edward and Alice’s car and was driven through the early morning countryside to the station.

Victoria had never driven, had never had to, and the skill and speed of Alice was depressing her. She was actually saying to herself, ‘But there are things I am good at.’

At the station, Alice took the bag and went before to the booking office, bought a ticket, said, ‘There’ll be a train in half an hour.’

The two stood together, waiting. Victoria had understood that this young woman, who so intimidated her, meant her well, but – did that matter? What mattered very much was that she liked Mary.

‘I feel a real fool,’ she said humbly. ‘I know what the Staveneys will think. I ought to be grateful – and, well, that’s all.’

‘Poor Victoria. I’m sorry. I’ll explain to them.’ And as the train came in she actually kissed Victoria, as if she meant it. ‘It takes all sorts,’ she added, with a little pleased smile at her attempt at definition ‘I don’t think they’d ever understand you don’t like the country.’

‘I hate it, hate it,’ Victoria said, violently, and got into the train that would carry her away – for ever, if she had her way.

Mary came home a few days later. Victoria saw the child’s bleak look around the little flat, criticising what Victoria had greeted with such relief: a bare sufficiency, and what there was, in its proper place. And then Mary stood at the window looking down, down, into the concrete vistas and Victoria did not have to ask what it was she missed.

Mary kept saying, rushing to embrace her mother, ‘You’re my Ma and I’ll love you always.’ Bessie and Victoria exchanged grim-enough smiles, and then Mary forgot about it.

Thomas took Mary to concerts of African music, twice, but she thought they were too loud. Like her mother, she wanted things to be quiet and seemly.

Then Victoria was invited to an evening meal at the Staveneys, ‘preferably without Mary – and anyway it will be too late for her, won’t it? ‘This, from people who had her up to all hours in Dorset. ‘Without Dickson’ could be taken as read. Victoria put on her nicest outfit, and found herself with a full complement of Staveneys, at the supper table. Undercurrents, some well understood by Victoria, others not at all, flowed about and around Jessy, Lionel, Edward, Alice and Thomas. Lionel at once opened with, ‘I wonder what you’d think if we suggested Mary went to a different school?’

This was Lionel, who had insisted on both his sons going through the ordeal of that bad school, Beowulf.

Victoria was not afraid of Lionel – she was of Jessy – and did not find it hard to enquire, ‘Then, you’ve changed your mind about schools, is that it?’

At this Jessy let out a snort, of a connubial kind, meant to be noted, like putting up your hand at a meeting to register Nay.

‘You could say our father has changed his mind,’ said Thomas.

‘Yes, you could say that,’ said Edward.

‘I’m not saying I was wrong about you two,’ pronounced Lionel, flinging his silvery mane about while he speared roast potatoes judiciously on to his plate.

‘You wouldn’t ever admit it,’ said Jessy, confronting him, while the concentrated exasperation of years of disputation flared her nostrils. ‘When have you ever admitted you were wrong about anything?’

‘Isn’t it a bit late for this altercation?’ enquired Edward.

‘For better or worse,’ said Thomas. ‘But the birds in your nest couldn’t agree.’

‘Oh, worse, worse,’ said Jessy at once, ‘of course worse.’ But from her look at Thomas it could be seen that what she meant was her bitter acknowledgement that his highest ambition was to manage a pop group. ‘As for agreeing, no, we never agreed about that, never, never!

‘Okay,’ said Thomas, ‘I’ll accept your verdict. I am the worse and Edward is the better.’

‘At least the gap between you two was wide enough for you not to quarrel – that really would have been the last straw.’

This spat ended here, because Edward was pouring wine for Victoria, which she didn’t much like. She put her hand over the glass, and then, since a few drops had splashed, licked the back of her hand.

‘There,’ said Lionel. ‘You do like wine.’

‘You should have some, it does you good,’ said Jessy. ‘The Victorians knew their stuff. At the slightest hint of wasting away or brain fever or any of their ghastly diseases, out came the claret.’

‘Port,’ said Lionel.

‘Best Burgundy,’ said Edward. ‘Like this. Best is always best. If I had been asked – for after all I wasn’t given a choice, was I, father? – I’d have said no. I do not have pleasant memories of that school. It was your school, Victoria, I know …’

At this reminder to her that he did not remember the event which was so present and alive in her mind, tears came into Victoria’s eyes.

She made her voice steady, and said, ‘Yes, it’s not a good place. And it’s worse since I was there. Since we were there,’ she addressed Thomas.

‘There was a stabbing there last week,’ remarked Jessy, aiming this at her ex.

‘Which brings me to my point again,’ said Lionel, addressing Victoria. ‘Suppose we send Mary to a good school? I have to say that there is disagreement in the ranks …’

‘When is there not?’ said Jessy.

‘Some of us think – I, for one – that Mary could go to a boarding school.’

‘A boarding school?’ And now Victoria was shocked. She knew that people like the Staveneys did send their children, when they were still little, to boarding school. She thought it heartless.

‘I told you,’ said Thomas.’ Of course Victoria says no to a boarding school.’

‘Yes,’ Victoria bravely said, smiling gratefully at Thomas, who smiled back, ‘I say no to a boarding school.’ For a tiny moment the current between them was sweet and deep, and they remembered that for a whole summer they had felt two against the world.

Alice broke in with, ‘I was at boarding school and I loved it.’

‘Yes, but you were thirteen,’ said Edward.

Who then of the Staveneys, would agree to Mary being sent off to the cold exile of boarding school? Alice and Lionel.

‘Very well, then,’ said Edward. ‘No boarding school. Well, not yet. Meanwhile there’s a good girls’ school, not far, it would be a few stops on the Tube and a short walk.’

Victoria was thinking, She’ll have a bad time. She’ll be with girls who have money and the things the Staveneys have, and she’ll come home to … it would certainly ask a lot of Mary’s kind heart: two worlds, and she would have to fit in to both of them.

Victoria said to Lionel, who was the author of this plan, which in fact fulfilled her dreams for Mary, ‘I couldn’t say no, how could I? It will be such a big thing for Mary’ And now she dared to turn to Thomas, reminding them all that he was after all the child’s father. ‘What do you say, Thomas? It’s for you to say, too.’

‘Yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘Yeah. That’s exactly right.’ Here his belligerent look at his father, and his brother, told them that he was feeling – as usual – belittled. ‘Yeah, it is for me to say too. And I say, Victoria should have the deciding vote. Providing Mary doesn’t go to Beowulf, that’s the main thing.’

Victoria said, ‘If I say no, I could never forgive myself. But I’d like to talk it all over with – she’s not my sister, but I think of her as.’

Bessie heard what Victoria had to tell her, nodding and smiling I told you so. She said, ‘They’ll get Mary away from you, but that’s not how they’ll see it.’

A central fact was there, out in the open, still unvoiced, with its potentialities for pain and gain. Mary had spent a month with the Staveneys, and that experience had made it urgent for her to be rescued from her environment and be sent to a good school.

‘Well,’ said Bessie, ‘she’s going to come out the other end educated. Which is more than can be said about Beowulf.’

‘You went there and you do well enough,’ said Victoria.

‘You know what I mean.’

They were back at what was not being said. For one thing, it was Mary’s way of speaking, which was very far from the Staveneys’. Thomas might speak badly, his phoney American, or his cockney, as he called it, but she had never heard a cockney – who were they when they were at home? – talk like that. And the Staveneys spoke posh, and Thomas too, most of the time. Mary’s voice was ugly compared to theirs.

‘She’ll have a hard time of it,’ said Bessie. ‘There’s no pretending she won’t.’

‘I know,’ said Victoria, thinking that she had had a long hard time of it, and yet here she was, she had survived it. Bessie had had a better time, because of Phyllis being her mother, but she was having a hard enough time now – and she would survive it too.

She wrote to Thomas, asserting his rights, ‘Dear Thomas, I agree to your kind suggestion. Please tell your father and your mother thank you for me. It won’t be easy for Mary but I’ll try and explain it all to her.’

Explain what, exactly? And how?

Mary must be thinking many things already that she might not want to say to her mother. She was kind – that was her best quality: she had a good nature. And she wasn’t stupid. Victoria could easily put herself back into herself at Mary’s age. Kids always know more than adults think, even if they know it the wrong way around, sometimes.

And Victoria knew more than the Staveneys about the future.

Mary would go to that good school where most girls were white. She would have many battles to fight, of a different sort from the rough-housing of Beowulf. The Staveneys would be Mary’s best support. Probably, when the girl was about thirteen, the Staveneys would ask if she, Victoria, could consider Mary going to boarding school. Neither they nor Mary would have to spell out the reasons why Mary must find things easier, for she would no longer have to fit herself into two different worlds, every day. Victoria would say yes, and that would be that.

There was another factor, which Bessie was reminding her of. Victoria was an attractive woman, not yet thirty. She was going now every Sunday to church, because Bessie did, and there she enjoyed the singing. She had been noticed. She took the lead in some hymns, was no longer just one of the congregation. The Reverend Amos Johnson had taken a fancy to her. Her dead Sam, who with every year became more of a perfect man in her memory, could not be compared with Amos Johnson, who was twenty years older than she was. The incomparable lustre of Sam made it possible for her to consider Amos. She had visited his home, full of God-fearing and sober people, and while she was not particularly religious, liked the atmosphere. She had always been a good girl, Victoria had – like Mary now.

If she married Amos she would have more children. Little Dickson, the child from hell, as he was known generally around and about the estate, would calm down, with brothers and sisters.

And Mary? To match the Staveney world with the world of Amos Johnson – she even laughed about it despairingly, with Bessie.

Yet if she married Amos she would be binding the two worlds together, even if both were careful never to get too close. And Mary, poor Mary, in the middle there. Yes, thought Victoria, she will be pleased to get out of it and into boarding school: she’ll want to be a Staveney. Yes, I have to face it. That is what will happen.

THE REASON FOR IT

Yesterday we buried Eleven, and now I am the only one left of The Twelve. Between Eleven and One in our burial place is an empty site, waiting for me, Twelve. All gone now, one by one. The night Eleven died I was with him. He said to me, ‘While The Twelve have been dying the truth has been dying. When you come to join us no one will be left to tell our story.’ He grasped me by the arm, pulling all his strength back into him to do it. ‘Tell it. Call The Cities together and tell it. Then it will be in all their minds and cannot disappear.’ And with that he fell back into dark and the Silence.

His mind had gone, otherwise he could not have said, ‘Call The Cities.’ It is a long time since that has been possible. But the substance of his message has been burning inside me. Not that it is a new message. What else have we Twelve been talking about these very many years, always fewer of us. How long is it since we could have said: Let us call The Cities together? Nearly half my lifetime, at least.

When I left Eleven I came home here and sat where the scents and sounds of a warm starry night could come wafting over me from the gardens and splashing waters, and I was challenging the indolence in myself, which I have always known was my worst enemy. You could call it – I have called it – many more flattering names, prudence, caution, the judiciousness of experience, even my well-known (once well-known) Wisdom: they call me – they used to call me – The Sage Twelve. The truth is it is hard for me to act, to gather up my energies behind a single focus and simply do. I see too many aspects of a situation. For every Yes there is a No, and so, through the long years, while The Twelve have one by one vanished away, I have thought, Is this the time to do it? Do what! I have never known, we, The Twelve have not known. We always ended by sending DeRod, our Ruler, yet another message. I remember right at the very beginning of his rule we jokingly called him by our nickname for him, The Beneficent Whip. Long thought, worry, have always ended in the same thing: a message. This was correct, was protocol, no one could criticise us, criticise me. At first casual, almost insultingly casual, messages came back. And then silence. It has been years since he replied, either to me, who am after all a relative, or to The Twelve.

The Ruler he might be, but he has a Council, and in theory at least it is a collective responsibility. But so much has been theory that was meant to be substance and reality. Many times our cautious approaches to DeRod have seemed to me cowardice, but there was more: to feel the conviction that leads to good action means you must first believe in your efficacy, that good results may come from what you do. As the silence from DeRod persisted, and things went from bad to worse, there was a deadening of hope, of our hopes, which I secretly matched with the darkening mind of The Cities. A paralysis of the Will, I remember we called it in one of our gatherings. But we have met in the ones and twos of special friendship, as well as in the collective, we have met constantly – after all, we have known each other since we were born – and what have we always discussed, if not something which we refer to simply as The Situation. What we have slowly come to see as a kind of poisoning. What has been the constant theme of our talk, our speculation? We have not understood what was happening. Why? I suppose that word sums up our years-long, our decades-long preoccupation. Why? What is the reason for it? Why was it we could never grasp something tangible, get hold of fact, a cause? It is easy to characterise what has been happening. There has been a worsening of everything, and we have seen it as a deliberate, even planned, intention.

That word, analyze … one of our sobriquets (The Twelve) was The Analyzers. It is some time since we would have dared use it, for fear of mockery. And so much have I (until so recently I could have said we) become infected by the time, that I confess that to me now the word has a ridiculous ring to it.

Yet what have we always done, except try to analyze, understand? And since I wrote the above that is what I have been doing and as always coming up with a blank. My instinct is to send another message to DeRod. What is the use?

Something must be done. And by me …

When Koon, or Eleven, spoke last he said soon no one will be left to tell our story. That is how it seemed to him as he died. A story has an end. To him the story was finished. The story: well, our history was something told and retold – when we were still telling our history. And now as the familiar disinclination to do anything invades me I wonder if it is only a symptom of the poisoning. Poison? That was only one of the words we have used. But has our history all been for nothing? The excellence? The high standards? The assumption once shared by everyone in The Cities that the best was what we aimed for?

It is now seven days since Eleven died. I might die in any breath I take. So much I can do: record, at least in outline, our story.

Six lives ago we were conquered by The Roddites, from the East. We. But that we has changed. Who were we before the Roddites? Along this shore were scattered villages, of poor dwellings, each thinking of itself as a town. But they had no proper sanitation, or paved streets, or public amenities, had nothing of what we (we of after The Roddites) take for granted. They were fisherfolk, and the fishing is good, and a great many coveted our fishing shores. The Roddites were desert people, strong, hardy, disciplined, with bodies like whips, and their horses were feared almost as much as the people who rode them. They were taught to trample with their hooves and bite flesh from whatever enemy was before them. Their neighing and roaring and screaming was louder than the shouting of the soldiers or the sound of the trumpets. The Roddites and their horses swept easily over the sea villages, and soon had the fishing and the shore and the boats.

The leader we called Rod, but that was because their system of nomenclature was so convoluted and difficult for us. No one was simply Rod, or Ren, or Blok, or Marr, but to the core name was attached a multitude of suffixes and prefixes: To the Rod, of the Rod, by the Rod, with the Rod, from the Rod; and Rod with its start-sounds and endings could mean ‘Rod who is the third son of so and so has just arrived and is all powerful and commands …’ It seems that the first Rod’s names, with its history and his situation and the honorifics, took a day to recite – so the old joke went. Whatever else, that Rod was a strategist of genius. Not that it needed much more than strength and will – and the horses – to make short work of the shallow little towns, but then he used his victories to build them into a whole, and call them The Cities. Flattery served him well. He made his wild desert raiders into an army that was feared by all the lands we had heard of, and many that we hadn’t, and so, where once we had been at the mercy of every raider or band of thieves, The Cities were safe. This Rod was more than a conqueror. He created a rough but adequate system of laws. An Eye for an Eye and a Tooth for a Tooth was the spirit of it. If The Roddites learned from their defeated enemies how to catch fish, prepare it and eat it, The Cities who before then had owned a few goats, now learned the care and the breeding and uses of sheep, cattle, asses and horses.

So that was the first of the Roddite dynasty, Rod, and his son EnRod succeeded. He lacked his father’s wild energies. He was a consolidator, a preserver, one who sees a potential and develops it. He did away with nothing of his father’s rule, but he made vital changes. The law became gentler, and women were given the same property rights as men. The Cities, which so recently had been crude and primitive, an assembly of villages, were spreading, joining, and by then it would have been more accurate to call them The City. It was felt a mistake – EnRod did – to abolish the identity of places, when each prided itself on an individuality. The old names were kept and the idea of a multiplicity of cities was preserved. It was learned that the nearest city over the mountains, which we heard tales about from travellers, was smaller in area than our city, The Cities. Which was governed as if it were a whole, single, of a piece. You could walk half a day and never leave our streets, while crossing streets that announced, ‘Here begins the village of Ogon.’ Or Astrante. Or Ketasos. Whichever fishing village it once had been.

The rule of EnRod was beneficent. Already people were saying, My father, my grandfather, came with the Roddite invasion.

EnRod’s son was almost at once called by the populace, The Whip, and that characterised him well. He was cruel, easily enraged, arbitrary, and would have destroyed everything made by his father and grandfather. The Cities were saved by his bride, who came from the East, from a tribe kin to The Roddites, a beautiful girl who it was said had not wanted to leave the life of horses and desert and the songs for which they were famous, but it seemed that it had been put to her that it was her duty to marry a savage, The Whip, and civilise him. But in fact that would have been beyond her. The Whip was mad. He died. How fortuitous. Not really, she had him poisoned. The arts of the desert people in poisons and medicine were and are famous. The populace rejoiced. Of course there were mutters and threats, but as the rumours flew about that this smiling gentle beauty was a murderess, the people applauded. Everybody knew what they had been saved from. There were tyrants in other towns in the peninsula and we heard news of them. Because of the laws introduced by EnRod, she could assume the throne on The Whip’s death and she did so. Soon The Whip was remembered only in tales and songs. The rule of Rod was remembered in epic style, thundering verses like horses’ hoofbeats, all bravery and fine deeds, while his son’s reign, so salubrious, good for everyone and for peace, for progress, was less celebrated. Unfortunately a quiet competence is not as attractive a subject for a story or a song as conquest and heroism. Stories about The Whip gave rise to some uneasiness, for in those wiser days it was known that tales and songs could change minds and hearts.

It is from The Whip’s short reign that a whole genre of stories came, and songs too, of cruelty for cruelty’s sake, of torture, of the screams of people from pits deep under the earth, the screams of horses, of animals, of demons whose task it is to torment people, of witches and witchcraft.

The new ruler was Destra, and it was she who first tried to ban these cruel and perverted tales and songs which created cults among the populace, who used them as a justification for wrongdoing. So I heard, so I was told: Destra was old by the time I was born. I can testify to the power of storytelling: I could never see her as anything but a young and beautiful and kind princess from the desert, because of the tales about her, in her youth. Destra soon put right what had been made bad by her husband. She reinstituted EnRod’s laws. She did not change the management of the army, which The Whip had made strong. She merely gave the soldiers long leaves, very long, she said for the benefit of their families. The army remained a worry to her. She had to have one. Rival cities after all flourished, and wars did go on: The Cities were covetable. But during the reigns of Rod, EnRod, The Whip and then Destra there had been no actual fighting. Marches, manoeuvres, rallies, all kinds of parades and shows of strength, but no actual fighting. There were jokes that if we were invaded our soldiers would scarcely know how to act.

Destra created a College of Storytellers and another of Songmakers.

There were already stories and songs, but she wanted something specific, the story of our people, from the time we became one, under the first Rod, Rod the Progenitor. You can imagine that there was plenty of material, opportunities for every kind of tale, legend, song. Many were, frankly, instructional. Destra wanted what she called an instructed and informed people, and a good part of the songs and tales were for the purpose of teaching. The reign of EnRod, which had been so little of an inspiration, now became a source of all kinds of instructional material about peacetime arts. For instance, the management of herds, or building, of the new practice of crop rotation, and how to control rivers, springs, water generally. From the ruler least used by the tale-makers and the singers, he was the best. EnRod became a synonym for good government, just as The Whip was execrated.

In this short summary of Destra’s encouragement of the arts, I can give no idea of the wealth and complexity of our treasury of songs and tales, but I hope to amplify it all, before I die.

Destra was already old when she called us The Guardians of the people. That was our first and primary name, and afterwards came The Analyzers, The Watchers, The Recorders, and so on. I was among them because my mother was a friend of Destra, from one of the families from which Destra chose administrators, governors, generals. There were then twelve or so families. Who knows, now? Then, it was easy to say, Those are the governing people, but now? Families that were famous for their probity and their good sense are now dissolute and their offspring are worthless. The Twelve were at first in fact thirteen, because one of us would succeed Destra. DeRod of course, as Destra’s son, was among the thirteen. We used to call him The Beneficent Whip, as a joke, when he showed signs of petulance and wilfulness and might sulk. But we all had nicknames. When my comrades laughed at me, it was The Sage.

But I am getting in advance of my tale. I am telling it as if it is a tale, just that, and the fact I am makes me uneasy as if I were rolling something up into a ball and throwing it from me. Done. Finished. I want to leave a record. I must. How quickly things do change. Anybody would have thought that the Rule Destra set up must last: it seemed so solid, so efficient, so easily built upon and extended. How easily and well things happened. For instance, it was then enough to say to one of our talented storytellers: ‘make a good song about the terrible horses of the first Rod’, and you would soon hear the song in the inns and the guard houses and the public gardens where the festivals were held. Or Destra would say, ‘Some travellers brought this grain to sell us, they knew we don’t grow it. Take it out to the gardeners and get them to make a trial plot. We must have it here, too.’

It has all gone. What has? For one thing, the simplicity of it all. Once – then – it was all easy and pleasant. Now, nothing is. Even if I don’t know why, I can at least say, This happened.

The events which I described earlier were once known to everybody in The Cities. Each child was taught the core tale, and around that all the tales, repeated them, made his or her version of, let’s say, The Terrible Horses, or The Wise Ruler who Changed the Law from Revenge to Kindness. Destra has been dead almost as long as I have been alive, and I have been alive as long as she was. In that stretch of time, two long lifetimes, Destra’s creation of storytelling and songmaking as a means of instruction, refinement, something which lifted up our whole population to a height of culture not matched anywhere else that we knew of, this wonderful education began, grew, reached perfection, held it for a while – and then … But what happened I do not know. None of The Twelve did. Simply, Destra’s adopted son, DeRod, destroyed it. Why did he? How often have we all – all The Twelve that is – tried to understand and failed. And it was not possible simply to ask our old friend and playfellow because he ignored us.

The name DeRod means something wonderful in the language of the desert tribes, but we called him Benny, short for Beneficent Whip. I think we soon forgot how ‘Benny’ began. He was one of those chosen when we were still infants to be instructed by Destra herself. She was a wonderful teacher. She taught us good behaviour, how to make decisions, how to think, how to put the welfare of The Cities before anything else. All this by means of tales and songs. She had tutors to teach us the art of numbers, weights, measurements. The instruction took place in Destra’s house, The Big House, the populace called it. It is the largest of the big houses, but not by very much. The Cruel Whip was going to double it in size but Destra silenced him before he could. If she did.

There is a large room, open on one side, where there is a screen of reeds if there is rain or dust, and there we were educated. Thirteen, who always knew we would be a Council of Twelve. DeRod was taught with us. We were equals. There was never a suggestion that as Destra’s child he would be favoured. And there was the girl, Destra’s adopted daughter, DeRod’s sister, Shusha, later my wife who, if DeRod should die or be killed, would be Destra’s only progeny, brought up as if she were in fact Destra’s daughter. I think we all forgot those two were adopted. It was never assumed that DeRod would be ruler after his mother. On the contrary, Destra told us, and from our earliest days, that from one of us a ruler would be chosen, and that The Twelve would be advisers.

And so it went on, a time of such happiness, and I am sure this is no flattering memory, for it was shared by all The Twelve and we often spoke of it, saying that this was how every child should be educated. And yet none of our children had anything like as good. Perhaps such an education needs someone like Destra to make it work.

When we were all fifteen years old, or near that age, Destra was ill and was carried into our instruction room, which was usually filled with sunlight and the shadows from the great trees that surrounded The Big House, and so it was that day. Destra told us that she would soon die, and now we must choose her successor. She was sitting up, cushions piled behind her, a tiny old woman with her white hair down around her face, her black eyes burning with urgency – like the urgency I feel now – and with fever. It was a surprise and yet not one. We all knew, had always known, that this day must come. We knew that Destra was very old, and that she was ill. And yet we were taken by surprise and were uneasy and afraid for the future.

I remember we stood about in that room, which was as much our home as our own homes were. We stood about looking at each other, not liking that now we would have to make a choice.

Destra sat up there, with a woman on either side of her, watching us, waiting. And still we did not speak out.

Then she did. ‘Just because DeRod is my son, it does not mean he should be chosen. Nor should Shusha, just because she is my daughter. You must choose the best one, the one you all agree would be best. You must have made your choice. You must have discussed it.’ Well, we hadn’t much. That was the trouble. The trouble was perhaps, we had been discussing it too long, expecting it. We knew our qualities and our deficiencies. Some of us were out of the question as rulers. Shusha was one. This was not because she was a girl – five of us were female. She said herself it wouldn’t suit her. She was a smiling, modest, careful girl, who liked looking after the house animals and tending plants. Later she became responsible for agriculture and the welfare of children. Others had long ago judged themselves to be unsuitable, and so we had not considered them. The others had been discussed, DeRod too. We told him that if he could cure his tendency to sulk and to go off in little fits of petulance, he would do well. I think we were all a little bit in love with DeRod. There was nothing much about him to dislike ever. Perhaps he was too eager to please, always, to fall in, to agree. He was such a beautiful child, and then as beautiful a youth. He was tall and slight, with dark eyes that compelled, and brooded, and with a gleam in them that we joked was because of his desert inheritance: Destra had those eyes too. When we discussed him as a possible Ruler we always joked that he would be all right with us to keep an eye on him. I would say now that five or perhaps six of us would have done well as Ruler. I know that there were those who thought that I would. There was a time, being young and conceited, when I would agree with them – but I know better now. Well I did have some of the qualities. I thought easily in terms of how to govern well, looking at The Cities as a whole; I knew how to manage people, bringing out their good qualities, never demeaning them. I knew the Story of our people better than anyone: that is why later they made me Chief Official Memory. But they didn’t choose me. Nor any of the other good ones – and believe me, I have often imagined one or another in DeRod’s place, and wondered. We chose DeRod. This was, perhaps, a foregone conclusion. So I think now, looking back. He was after all Destra’s heir, in the line Rod, EnRod, Cruel Whip, Destra. There is pleasure in that, a fitness, a pattern, as if you are guarding some inherent order. We chose him though we knew Destra was sincere in saying we must choose the best. We knew absolutely how she would judge the best: she had been telling us for all those years. She had told us tales often about tribes and peoples who, on the death of a ruler chose a successor by vote, sometimes passing over elder sons, more than once choosing a daughter when there were sons. No, we could not blame Destra, for us choosing DeRod. And in fact he was surprised, and we realised he had not expected we would settle for him. He was so pleased. And we took such pleasure in his pleasure. When we said, almost unanimously, ‘DeRod’, he seemed to shine and swell, he stretched out his arms in a movement like a bird about to fly. He then made some little dance steps, first because he had to, and then in jest, laughing at himself and at his pleasure. His eyes were full of tears. He embraced us then, one by one, and as it were as a group. For a few moments we were standing in a sort of heap, with our arms around each other, hugging and laughing, and DeRod there in the middle shouting in triumph. Then he pushed his way out, ran to his mother in that quick wonderfully graceful way he had, and kissed her hand. And then it was we remembered Destra, and that she had been waiting for us to choose. We would have gone to kiss her hand but it was too late. She was already being carried off. I remember she was breathing heavily, a harsh and awful noise. She did not make any sign towards us though we were waiting for one.

I remember how we all stood about, waiting, feeling most terribly let down. Feeling perhaps, too, that Destra’s refusal to acknowledge us then meant she was disappointed, or even angry. In the end DeRod clapped his hands, jumped about in the way he had, as if he were younger than he was, and said he could command a banquet. A funny way of putting it we thought, not Destra’s style at all. And a big banquet there was, and DeRod announced as Destra’s heir. We drank the wine that by now was being grown by us in The Cities, and we all got drunk and – were as happy as I can remember. I would like to be able to say I felt foreboding, or uneasiness. If I had, at the very beginning, by then I had suppressed them. DeRod was so delightful with us that day of the banquet, so simple, and, we could see, grateful. It was a day that marked the end of our instruction: fifteen years of learning and listening and taking in, of preparing ourselves. And now this was it, when Destra died we would begin to use what we had learned.

And now I must wrench myself away from these pleasant memories and decide what I should do. I have at least begun by making a record – an over-simple, very short one, but a record – of the beginnings of The Twelve. I can fill it all out later if there’s time … and perhaps there isn’t: I had not expected Koon, or Eleven, to die. And why not? He was as old as I am. I would like to have the time to write down the wealth of tales and stories that seem to have been lost. How could they have been lost? I have lived now for nearly a hundred years. For at least half that time the tales and songs were on everybody’s lips. And yet now only old people – my son can be described as old – remember them.

What am I to do? In the past, when in doubt I took myself to the house of one of The Twelve, or asked them to visit me here. I have decided to visit the place where only days ago we buried Eleven. ‘We’? Mourners who had no knowledge of him, or of us, mourners who weep and wail for money.

I stood for a long time at the edge of the great Fall of water, where I have been so often, for the pleasure of watching how the water bounded or crept or frolicked from the top of the Fall to the bottom, its antics measured and ordered by our clever Nine – the water engineer. And then, the pleasure of deciding whether to climb up its course to the top where it gushed over natural rocks, and then over the hill and through the buildings and squares of our public life, or down to see how the water fled into channels for the irrigation of the market gardens. This Fall was created early in Destra’s Rule, over steps like a giant’s stair, so that when I was born the Fall was already a wonder known to everyone and visited by travellers, some of whom had come to The Cities for the purpose. It was much later that The Twelve made a great pool at the foot of the Fall, where the waters crashed down but soon spread out into a great wash always in movement because of the cascade, but so shallow the smallest child could paddle in it. This pool, Shusha’s inspiration, was for children, who had to be under six years old; and for small children a more delightful place has never been. The charming ripples from the Fall were of course waves to them, the spray that greened the low bushes around the pool was part of their fun, a mere breath of freshness on the hands and faces of adults, but for the little ones a source of delight because of the way the breezes blew this way and that, unexpectedly dousing them, so that they screamed with delight. This was one of my favourite places. Was.

This morning I stood a long time, remembering that it was on this spot I encountered DeRod for the second time after we had chosen him and celebrated with the banquet. The first was when I married his sister Shusha (Seven). Because Destra was recently dead it was a simple ceremony, and that suited us both. DeRod surprised us. I thought he was in mourning, but perhaps … he was all courtesy, formally officiating, kindly, pleasant, but distant. This was our friend DeRod, whom we had known all our lives. Both Shusha and I made excuses for him. We confessed that we could not remember a particular closeness to his mother that could justify a real grief. And this although he was always saying, ‘My mother and I …’, ‘We …’, meaning Destra and him, ‘I and Destra …’. No. The fact was, Shusha said, putting into words what I had only felt until then, he was not a loving person. He was affectionate, yes, in a pretty playful way that suited him, as a child. ‘He never loved me,’ I remember Shusha saying then. ‘What? What do you mean?’ ‘I think he is a really cold person,’ she said, to my discomfort, and I seem to remember I put it down to brother and sister rivalry. What a fool I was.

Destra did not die for a year after the day we chose him. During that time we did not see him. This day, by the Fall, when I came on him standing there watching the waters, it was some four years after his accession. During that time he did not come to the meetings of The Twelve, was pleasant if he met us in the streets, but was always in a hurry, ignored the usual invitations to suppers or family reunions. When we did meet there was always between us the familiarity of our childhood knowledge of each other, and that was why The Twelve were confused when we asked ourselves and each other, Why? What is it?

What was he doing? Reports came from The Big House, mostly from servants. He played with his zither for hours. A girl from the town, not one of us, or from any of the leading families, was his companion. He often visited the army and took part in its exercises.

We simply got on with our job, which was to do as well as we could for The Cities. Those early years after Destra’s death, building on what she had created, were as successful as any in our history. None of it was owed to DeRod. He was simply not available to us.

I remember when I caught sight of him on that day, standing by the Fall, the rush of old affection I felt for him. There he was, the old DeRod, as handsome as ever. How potent a spell good looks do impose. I don’t think I ever thought of that as a weakness until I was forced to think about DeRod’s effect on us. Seeing him there, brooding, moody, apparently deep in thought, I forgot that for four years every thought of him caused me – caused us all – pain.

And it was from the old ease with him that I walked up to him and embraced him, while he, after a moment, frowning with shock, turned and embraced me. ‘DeRod,’ I complained, ‘why do we never see you?’ Now I was close I could have a good look. He was a man, no longer a boy.

He nodded and said with a frown, ‘But I hear you are all doing very well without me.’

Now that was an odd false note to strike, surely?

I said, ‘But DeRod, that sounds as if you are not one of us.’

He made an impatient movement, frowned, ‘I’ve got things to do.’ He was glancing up at the top of the path, expecting someone.

I felt more and more that this conversation did not – fit. He did not make sense. ‘But DeRod, we miss you. We talk about you. We wonder why you never …’

At this he shrugged me off, us off, brusque, rude, but he felt the rudeness himself, and having already walked off a few paces he stopped and said, half-turning, ‘I’ll see you. Yes … soon.’ At the top of the path a woman had appeared. Presumably his town girl. Nothing much to say about her: she was a nice enough looking woman. But she stood there waiting for him, not looking at me at all. He was hurrying up to her, and the noise of the Fall made it useless to call after him.

And we did not hear one word from him. Not for years. Then it was always messages putting us off. And, always, there was about this communication, if you could call it that, something unexpected, discordant. We couldn’t make sense of it. What was he doing? He had become obsessed with his army. Instead of an institution that we saw as a useful way of keeping young men out of mischief, and discouraging greedy people who might be tempted by the riches of The Cities, it had become a major part of our economy. It glittered and excelled, it was marched and drilled and exercised out of its wits – the soldiers actually complained. He invented new clothes for them, using extravagant colours, scarlet, blue, gold. To stand on one of our little hills watching our army at their exercising down there on the plain – what a spectacle. And for what? He did not go to war, he did not threaten or even use it for his own prestige. He was nominally Commander-in-Chief – a title we knew had not been used before with us – but he did not interfere in the actual exercises and manoeuvres. And this went on. And it went on. We began to be alarmed at the way our wealth was being drained off into the army. And then there was a change, which we would have thought impossible.

But I am describing my visit to the burial place, and here I am still standing on the edge of the Fall, remembering. I walked down the path beside the Fall, hardening myself for what I would see. The pool for infants and small children was now a playground for the youth. It had become the fashion for them to assemble there, day and night, sitting around the edge, lolling in the shallow water, eating, drinking, smoking and – much else. For longer than most of the time these young ones had been alive, small children had not used this pool. It was now the property of The Young Hawks. Their name for themselves.

I walked by, at a small distance, because the noise was horrible, remembering the happy cries and shrieks of the little children’s play. The Hawks took no notice of me. What they were seeing was a very old man, in the brown garment of The Twelve. Whom they had forgotten, and their parents had too. Sitting on the edge close to me were some girls and boys, about the age I think of when we became The Guardians, as always eating and throwing food about. A girl shouted at me, ‘Hey, old thing, what’s that you’ve got on?’ I went a bit closer, and said, ‘This is what The Twelve wear.’ I heard, as I knew I would, ‘The Twelve? What’s that?’ Then another girl said, ‘Hey, let me look. Would it suit me, do you think?’ Then she laughed and said, ‘I’m only joking, don’t worry.’ ‘You could easily make it,’ I said, knowing that none of them knew how to use a needle. And she boasted, ‘I wouldn’t know one end of a needle from the other.’ Her companions were all laughing and applauding. Clearly, she was some kind of leader.

‘You take a length of cloth,’ I said. ‘You cut a hole for the head. You sew up the sides, leaving room for the arms. You can wear it as it is in hot weather, as I am now, or put it over others if it is cold.’ She was straining to listen, to understand. They know no crafts, have no skills now. They are dependent on the Barbarians. Because she was interested I went on. ‘When Destra chose The Twelve it was thought best that we should wear the simplest garb available. In cotton.’ I omitted to say that this was partly to encourage the use of cotton, which we had just begun to develop.

‘Who’s Destra?’ she asked smartly: she had decided to entertain her comrades by baiting me. ‘And who are The Twelve? I thought you were all dead long ago.’ Well, she had at least heard of us, if not of Destra.

She began turning it into a song. ‘Twelve old men, they keep it – neat. They wear old sandals on their feet.’

‘Men and women,’ I said.

But she only grimaced, prettily, and began splashing the boy next to her with water.

I said to a youth near her, ‘Did you know this pool was once only for small children?’

He frowned. ‘Really? Oh – shame.’ He began clowning, ‘The Young Hawks have taken the little kids’ pool.’

Much laughter and then some horseplay. These were bored youngsters looking for an excuse to have some fun, as they would put it. The violence in The Cities is growing, and I had no intention of becoming a victim.

They saw themselves as hawks: now that was painful. They were a good-looking crowd, true enough, but they were soft and fatty.

‘Goodbye,’ I said, and walked on, thinking that the girl had been prompt in making up rhymes and singing them: not all of Destra’s legacy had gone.

I walked along the irrigation ditches that run out from the pool, and along the edges of the fields which grow our vegetables. There were people at work, men and women, all Barbarians. Our young despise this work, bending and tending, their hands in earth.

What do they do, then? A good question. Nothing much. They like to dress each other’s hair, tend each other’s bodies, create new kinds of food, new clothes. We are still so rich, though these days it is what we loot from others. We are rich because we don’t make war. We raid and steal and our victims are afraid of us, and do not fight back. Over the mountains that are like a barrier between us and the cities on the opposite edge of the peninsula, they fight each other and are poor. I wondered if their young people call themselves Young Eagles. Panthers, perhaps? Mountain Lions? These sour thoughts took me part of the way up the hill, approaching the burial ground. When I reached the big trees which I saw planted as saplings, I began walking cautiously: there were young people there, among the graves.

It is a beautiful place, surrounded by a triple ring of trees, mostly oaks. In the centre the eleven graves ray out from an empty space, long mounds of yellow earth, each covered with a slab of our dark grey stone. Eleven’s grave, a few days old, still does not have its stone lid. Inside the ring of trees, the soft yellow earth of this hillside is allowed to grow the sparse grass of the region, a mat that keeps the soil from blowing. There are always birds in the trees. The tree shadows move, mass, thicken, grow thin, as the sun moves. A young couple leaned against a tree, embracing. A youth was digging soil from the heap over Eleven. I stood where my grave would be, and said to him, ‘Just a minute, young man, show some respect.’

He was a burly, unappetising youth, wearing an outfit that seemed wrong on him.

He stopped, looked up, and said, ‘Whadyewmean?’

‘That is where an old friend of mine is buried.’

There was a knife in his belt, and his hand went to it. But he was frowning, apparently thinking: I reminded myself that these days they need some time to take in facts.

I repeated, ‘A friend of mine was buried there a few days ago.’

He looked down at the now damaged mound. I saw that he was imagining how just beneath him … he jumped away from the grave, brushed his hands free of soil, and said, ‘Right, then.’

‘What do you want the earth for?’

‘My house is letting in water. This makes good clay, this soil up here, mixed with a little of the fine chalk near the shore.’

‘Why don’t you make yourself a stone house?’

‘My house does well enough. It needs some patching.’

He yawned, stretched, sat down on a grave. Nine’s. The water engineer who had created the Fall. He pulled some dried meat from his garment and began eating. Over in the trees, the couple were copulating. These days they couple any place they feel like it. The youth sitting on the grave saw them and shouted: ‘Go to it!’ He laughed. Then he said to me, sobering, ‘Oh, go on, it’s only a bit of fun.’

I had remembered what his clothes were. The desert people under the first Rod had worn tunics belted over loose trousers in sandy colours, and these had become a fashion, which must have looked well on those lithe quick people. On this hulk of a youth, with his bulging stomach, they were wrong.

‘So, you’re one of Rod’s warriors?’ I teased him.

‘What?’

I explained. He was interested. ‘That’s green,’ he said. ‘Did you know Rod?’

‘It was getting on for four hundred years ago.’

Again the frown of incomprehension. He shook his head, dismissing it all, stood up. The two copulators, having finished, strolled over, dishevelled but not discomposed.

‘Got your earth?’ asked the young woman.

‘Go on, take some,’ I said. ‘When they come to fit on the slab they’ll have to tidy it all up anyway.’

‘No … no … actually we just came up for a laugh, and then I saw this soil just lying here.’

The three turned, to go off down the hill.

I said, ‘One day I shall be put here, just here, where I am standing.’

This embarrassed them. ‘Is this a special place?’ asked the youth who had his arms around the girl.

‘You could say that, I think,’ I said.

‘Green,’ said the girl.

I saw that green was the new in-word.

The two young men gave a kind of salute, but it was a joke, the girl made a joke curtsey, and off they went, running down the hill.

I sat myself down on the stone that covered Shusha and looked at the graves, one after another, thinking of my friends. Then at the lacing of vigorous grass over the yellow soil. Then at the enormous trees around this circle. Here was my life. All my friends, my wife, all gone under the earth.

How much I wished I could just lie down in my place and be done with it. I did not want to stand up, with the creaking effort it costs me these days, walk slowly down the hill, carrying such a load of doubts, fears, sorrow. Everything I had worked for had vanished. There had been that wonderful time, that excellence, which seemed like a dream, it was so far away, so done with. And the future was not anything I cared to think about.

I lay down on my place, on the rough grass, and folded my arms, as they will be, soon. The sun was striking low through the tree trunks, and black spokes marked the grass, the graves. Straight above me the blue air dazzled. I closed my eyes and dreamed.

Twelve youngsters were dancing in a ring that matched the encircling trees, and the almost complete circle of graves. They tripped and stepped and sang, cram-full of the energies and hopes of the very young. There we all were, The Twelve, not much more than children, just about the age we were when Destra died. There I was, too. The sun shone on our hair, on our bare brown limbs, and the happy shouts and singing rose up into the air like birds. I was both one of them and sitting on the grass, supporting my old weight with my hands. I wanted to call out to my younger self, but could not. And then, it seemed, the light dimmed, the sun darkened, and one by one my young companions turned to smile at me over their shoulders as they ran off into the trees, going out like sparks or like fireflies. Each one, the quick flash of a smile, teasing, mocking, affectionate, and then he or she was gone, Shusha too, and I among them. Twelve. But where was DeRod? – and then there he was, strolling along near the trees, not a boy, or even a youth, but a grown man, as he had been long ago that day near the Fall. He was not looking about him, was self-absorbed. Or absent – yes: as if he did not know where he was. He stopped, urinated near one of the graves. This was done so casually, almost absently. He was thinking of something else. He walked off down the hill as the spray of urine came on the breeze to my face. I woke; the dew was falling; and night was falling too. The great clearing was filled with the blueish dark of twilight.

I stood up, trying to loosen my limbs from the stiffness of lying still for what must have been quite a time. I wanted so much to weep. My throat was sore from the tears that choked it. Oh, how brilliant is the Dreamer that lives in us all, how witty, and how well it uses the events of a day for its purposes. What an apt depiction of my situation. Standing there in the half-dark I saw again how each of my old comrades and my young self turned to send me the fleeting, half-mocking goodbye smile and then – out, gone. And DeRod. There was something in that dream of him that said to me: Pay attention. I am telling you something. It was not contempt that he was using, when he urinated almost on the grave of an old friend, no, it was carelessness. You could say indifference. It did not matter to him, that was the point. That was the point. And what a contrast between how we all had been seeing him, talking of him, wondering, speculating: he had come to assume in our eyes the demeanour, the stature, of something not far from that old fabled Whip, who had been so cruel. We had spoken of him more and more as a tyrant, a monster of a ruler, deliberately destroying everything that was good. But the DeRod of my dream was not like that, commonplace, he was; someone you’d not look at twice. A pleasant fellow. Matching him with our years-long deliberations – such complicated and sometimes far-fetched explanations we had found for his behaviour – we had even laughed at ourselves. They nearly always focused on arrogance, on the distortions of sense that come from the loneliness of power. And there was always something that did not fit our thoughts of him. We knew that he lived as simply as his mother had done, that his children were not more privileged than anyone else’s, and that he occupied himself with … and that is what I must now record.

When I was able to move comfortably, I found my clothes too damp for comfort, and imagined I must have wet them with my tears. Though I had not wept, I had been thinking too hard about DeRod. I kept seeing him, indifferent, careless: and now to my memory of the dream I added something else, his smile at me as he turned to go, almost embarrassed, almost irritated, as if at someone importunate, demanding too much. How painful, and how informative that dream had been, and my thoughts about it afterwards.

I walked through the trees and down the hill into the thinly scattered lights of the city which stopped on the edge of the dark of the ocean. I went past the pool, which was still full of youngsters. All around it flared the torches which we, The Twelve, had ordered to be kept always burning. We had imagined, when the infants and the little children and the women who attended to them had gone off to bed, how the flames from the torches would move and shine on the water that was never still, or would sometimes drip fire on a windy night, so that it would be hard to tell if the little waves on the pool were fire or water. Now it was a noisy drunken scene, and it was easy to walk past in the half dark, unnoticed. The girl who had asked about my garment was lying half in, half out of the water, one of a group who it seemed were all copulating together like a tangle of snakes in spring.

A youth on the other side of the pool was trying to grab a girl: she was very young, not more than a child. He was shouting at her, half-singing it, ‘New girl in the pool, fears the push and fears the shove, Come to me, I’ll give you love …’ I was able to recognise this as a debased version of

New lamb on the hill

Fears the snow and fears the storm,

Bring it down and keep it warm,

Mend the cracks in barn and shed,

The lamb will pine without the ewe

The ewe without its lamb pine too,

Keep them warm and keep them fed …

These days when the wind blows cold across our hills no one brings the lambs and ewes down for safety, and the white patches that are dead lambs look like the last shreds of snow on the grass, or like white flowers spattered everywhere.

I came into my house in the dark and sat in the dark, alone. My house? It is a long time since I could think of this spreading house as mine. In the middle of my life, half a century – almost – ago, my son Bora came to me and said that he had a wife and three children and needed more space than he had, in a smallish house in one of the cities from the old time, which meant, in a rough area. There was much more to this than simple practicality. I would not say we were estranged, but for a long time we had not had much to say to each other. My house – poor Shusha had died – is in the part of The Cities where the elite live. I put it like that, simply, without evasions or the usual justifications, because, well, I am too old for all that. I, The Twelve, were a governing elite, but for a long time we have not been. People like my son went in for a lot of vilification and even when The Cities were doing very well indeed. ‘The powerful oligarchy which rules us.’ That kind of thing. But young people vociferous in this way usually end up standing where the vilified elders stood. For him to move up here, to this house, was a statement to all concerned and we both knew it. A wing of four rooms was built on, and here I moved, the house servants easily accommodating themselves to balancing my meagre wants with the family’s. Our relations were cordial enough. We didn’t see each other sometimes for weeks. And then in his turn my son Bora found he was being faced with – in his case – a daughter-in-law, saying, You don’t need all that room. And he built a wing on the other side of the house, to let my grandson and his wife and children move in. They were prominent in DeRod’s circles and I would have liked to joke with someone about this new elite – but these days I have no one to enjoy jokes with.

And now I must record the worst thing that happened to us, the most unexpected, and still the most puzzling. A message came from DeRod that he was abolishing The College of Storytellers and The College of Songmakers. It was not possible to console ourselves by saying it must be a mistake. DeRod’s agents had requisitioned the two buildings. This was not long before Shusha died and my son moved in. Shusha was beside herself. She was responsible for the education of the young and the two colleges were what she relied on. For a while we sat together, doing what so often resulted from an order from DeRod: we were trying to understand how he was thinking, why he did what he did.

For a good while after Destra’s death and DeRod’s accession The Cities were at a height of brilliance. A golden age. Our festivals of storytelling, our song festivals, our entertainments, followed each other through that cycle of the sun from a grand climax on the day when it is coldest, but we know it will get warmer, until the generous blaze of the day when we know that from now it will get colder, and that was the other big festival. Mid-Light. People were coming from far-away cities all over the peninsula. People still do come, but they are different people and bring with them strife and disturbance, and their enjoyment is expressed in a raw jeering laughter that was never heard in our time.

DeRod did not take part in these festivities, or not much. Always affable and obliging, he might appear at a festival, but it was as if what was after all the pulse and beat of our communal life did not touch him, had nothing to do with him. He preferred his armies. He had even made up a song for them, catchy, full of a patriotic fervour we had not associated with The Cities until then. It was popular, and sung not only by the soldiers. Just how far this army song was in spirit from our music was shown when it was sung by a young aspirant at a song competition. The audience laughed at it – at the song, not the singer; in those days to mock a performer would have been thought unkind.

The festivals were held not in one place, but in several, in public places everywhere: we were still trying to make sure ancient rivalries were not being fostered. For several days, at these times, you could not walk down a street or enter a garden without finding yourself part of singing, dancing, or some enactment, which might be the joining of the old towns at the time of the birth of The Cities, or perhaps the short reign of The Cruel Whip. But we discouraged the kind of music he introduced, the violence and the crudity of it, though we could not deny it attracted crowds. From small seeds big trees may grow. As we often say but perhaps we do not think often enough about the meaning. The Cruel Whip’s effusions and effluences, discouraged by Destra and then by us, have grown into a nasty poisonous flood.

The message from DeRod, ending our prosperity – though at the time we had no idea how thoroughly and soon the end would come – arrived at the height of our happy festival culture.

Shusha said she would go and see him, and went off then and there. After all, her brother, whom she had scarcely seen for years, lived a short walk away. She returned looking as if someone had hit her. Shusha was always a sensitive soul, too much so, for her own good, as she knew, and as I often warned her. And the story, when at last she was able to tell it, did not seem at once to justify such pain. DeRod at first did not recognise her, and then apologised by saying it was a long time since she had visited. She had to swallow indignation: she had once made every kind of attempt to see him. But he did not seem to see that she was angry. It was a family occasion, the room full of people. His children were like my son, with families of their own. Shusha was only just able to put names to the men and women who must be DeRod’s progeny, and there were a lot of children. A long table was loaded with food. Plentiful, reported Shusha, but not very elegant. And this was the note or tone of what she saw: she was puzzled by it and surprised. She said they were a crude and ordinary lot, and you’d never think they were anything more than a gathering of the kind of people you might find in a low-class eating house or inn. ‘I kept thinking, This is Destra’s son, he was brought up by Destra,’ she said, sorrowful, and with that unfailing note of bewilderment that had to accompany our discussions of DeRod. She was introduced as an aunt, to some, who said it was nice to meet her and as a great-aunt to others. They offered her food but she said to DeRod that she wanted to talk to him, even for a minute. ‘Well, talk away’ he said, as if it did not occur to him that she might have a special reason for needing to talk. ‘It’s about the festivals,’ she said. ‘Why are you abolishing them?’ She said she felt like some idiot, the way they all looked at her. ‘What makes you think I am abolishing anything?’ DeRod enquired, impatient with her. ‘You’ve just taken over the colleges, you’ve taken our buildings.’ ‘Oh, have we?’ said he, not impudently, but as if hearing the news for the first time. ‘Well, never mind, I’m sure you can fix up your festivals.’

Soon she excused herself and came home, weeping.

The Twelve sent him messages of all kinds, and visited him in delegations of twos and threes at his house. He greeted us with his usual affability, making it clear by his manner that we were an irrelevance; he might offer us a cup of wine, but the most we could get out of him was, ‘I’m working on something, I’m sure you’ll like it.’

On my visit to him, with Eleven and Nine, I said to him, ‘You are destroying the very essence of what we are, the soul of The Cities. We are admired for it by everyone. Why are you doing this?’ I remember his look – I’m not likely to forget it! How often I have recalled that look, to see if there was something there I had missed. His look at me, at us, was not angry. Not discommoded. It showed nothing of the discomfort of one who feels inferior. There was a little embarrassment, not on his own account, but on ours. ‘I didn’t say I am doing away with music,’ he repeated. ‘There are plenty of different kinds of songs and music’

‘And the tales? Our story? The history of The Cities?’

Did he shrug? Well, as good as.

‘We teach our children,’ I said. ‘It is how they learn their skills. They learn from them an enquiring habit of mind, how to think, how to make comparisons. How are our children going to be taught?’

How well I remember his long preoccupied stare, at this. He frowned, he fidgeted, his eyes wandered and then returned, he leaned forward to stare at my face, into our faces, and then sat back. He sighed. He must know what he was destroying: he must. And yet he did not seem to.

The festivals were cancelled, and The Cities began to fall into disorder. There was a sullen, angry mood, and that was when began the outbreaks of public violence. As for us, The Twelve, we were as if he had hit us in the heart region: the way fighters do, to disable an opponent. Some of us became ill. Quite soon Shusha died. I knew it was because of shock, of grief.

Then the new thing began. A Festival was announced, and it would be organised by the armies. When it took place, people who were used to the old ways were uncomfortable. It was all military, to do with army exercises, marching, army life, and even fighting, though that was a rather abstract affair, more like games, and it would be hard to associate blood and death with them. Above all, the spirit had gone, the old spirit. Everything was trivial and unimportant. Hard to imagine the ceremonies of our festivals, which insisted on the deep seriousness of our lives, our responsibilities for each other and for The Cities. The choirs of DeRod’s armies sang wonderfully: after all, many had been trained at our schools. But what were they singing! You could imagine that not very clever children had written these songs, children who had no idea that anything better was possible. They were pompous, or bombastic; they were silly and jokey – the kind of jokes small children like. The audience showed their disappointment. This did not last. A new generation arrives quickly on any scene, and soon the children were youngsters who became adults, and when they said Festivals they meant DeRod’s and ours were not much more than a memory insisted on by their parents.

The nastiness of The Cruel Whip came back. Some of the new songs I could hardly bear to listen to, they were so vulgar, so crude, so full of incipient violence.

We, The Twelve, were not surprised that DeRod was threatening the nearest city to ours, over the mountains, with invasion. The strength and reputation of The Cities saved us: the endangered city succumbed at once to DeRod and sent a tribute of slaves.

So, with the next city he decided to master. Soon half the peninsula owed tribute to us, and not a real battle had been fought.

That was the picture not long after Shusha’s death, at about the time of my son’s coming to live in my house. He was employed by the armies as an administrator, and while of course he had been brought up by myself and by Shusha in the old days, it was as if all that had slipped away from him, gone. I used to marvel that a young man who had had such an upbringing could now see nothing of value in it. His look at me when I tried to remind him that there had been better times was like DeRod’s: it was I, it was we, who were out of place, out of step. And so it was with all the children of The Twelve. The new spirit in The Cities had wiped their memories clean.

When that rich feast of tales and music had so suddenly been silenced, all kinds of superstitions sprang up, and new gods flourished. Our tales and songs had not celebrated Deity, not more than the basic truth of our interconnectedness, under the Sun, our Creator. Now there was a moon cult, and with that ceremonies of a bloody kind which even now I don’t know much about. My son Bora doesn’t either, but my grandson is an initiate. Bora told me, ‘He’s into some weird stuff, I can tell you. Better not be out at night with that lot around or you’ll find yourself with your throat cut and stretched out on a stone to please the moon.’ He laughed. You could think he admired that sort of thing. It was the violence he admired. That he does admire.

At the inns and drinking houses the songs were like wails or howlings or battle cries, and where the gentle tones, the subtleties, of our songs had been, was now, louder than anything, a loud drumming, like the heartbeat of a criminal. When I walk past such a place I hurry, because I can feel my whole self being aroused to anger, threat, even murder. And yet our people can now spend all evening in such places, with that loud thumping in their ears, drinking, sometimes dancing. It is hard to believe that some of them must remember a different, gentler time.

I missed and miss more and more, the sounds of the games and songs that once you could hear everywhere, as you went about.

There was a skipping song that went like this:

Make a hole

As deep will go

The long wing feather

Of an old black crow.

Water and grain

Go in together.

Cover it well.

Watch the weather.

Now make new holes,

Two feathers span

Four points around

The first, and so

The field is covered

With a net of grain.

The seeds will sprout,

Their roots in mud.

But if there’s drought,

Reluctant rain

The sprouts will die.

Begin again.

Make a hole …

All the little children used this song in their games, and then, a little older, found themselves in the fields, knowing exactly how to plant. It was wonderful to see their delight, as they realised they had so quickly and simply become part of the world of work, contributing their share. There were hundreds of such songs, some simple like this planting song, increasingly deep and more difficult, to match the growing into understanding of the child.

And always The Twelve met and asked ourselves and each other Why? Why? How many ingenious reasons we did find. We imagined far-reaching policies, sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent. We credited him with amazing powers of foresight, but this was when we were seeing him as Destra’s son. But he was also The Cruel Whip’s offspring – and perhaps he had inherited his father’s qualities? Why, why, why? What did he want to achieve? What was his aim? Surely not to dominate the whole of the peninsula, become despot over all its cities? Why destroy something as perfect, as harmonious, as The Cities? What was, what could be, the reason?

Somewhere along the dolorous road we did consider the possibility that Destra had hoped we would not choose her son. We did not like this conclusion. We had chosen the monster who was destroying everything his mother had created. It was our fault … but it was too painful to think like this. Because it was painful we refused to see the obvious.

I do not want to give the impression that from the moment DeRod became Ruler everything went wrong. On the contrary. For a while everything got better, on a momentum of success. And The Cities were so beautiful then, so prosperous. I remember walking up from the shore one evening with a flaring sunset behind me and thinking I could imagine I was approaching trees and gardens. But I was approaching the most populous part: the dark grey stone from our quarries that made our heavy and solid houses – made them strong against earth-shakes – was absorbed into the green and the colours of the flowers. You walked up thinking that a garden would open in front of you but as you turned a cunningly-placed bend in the path you saw a house or a group of houses. And all this is still true, even if the houses and gardens are not so well-maintained. Suppose – fancifully – we were able to sweep like birds low over The Cities surely what we must see would be the heavy crowns of trees, massed bushes, flowers, and then, half-concealed, our houses.

It was in that period when in fact everything was going wrong, something like fifty years ago, that we, The Twelve, made the great pool at the foot of the Fall for the small children. We were making new farms and forests, and ponds for fresh-water fish. We built silos for the safekeeping of grain, or rather grains, for we were always acquiring new kinds: when DeRod sent off his raiding parties we quietly approached some soldiers and ordered them to bring back any seeds of crops we did not already grow. We created a lake from a river that ran into the sea near The Cities. We imagined Destra was watching us and approving. DeRod did not seem to care what we did. He never commented, whether to approve or not.

About the time my son took my place as head of our household, we, The Twelve – by then eleven, and soon to be ten – decided to undertake the biggest challenge yet. We were going to transform the oldest part of The Cities, where the first villages had been along the shore. It was the poorest area. There were still some shabby buildings – huts, really – of wood and reeds. Some people, believing themselves to be more sensitive than the rest, find them attractive. But it was – and is – squalid. When there are bad storms the seas rise and the whole area can flood. We planned to build a sea wall of our wonderful and accommodating stone, to keep out the sea, and to straighten the streets, make good sewers and a new public park. It would take years. We were all elated, delighted with the plans, and then, at the height of our achievement, when we sent down overseers to arrange for the labour we found they had already been contracted. There was no labour. Who was to blame? DeRod. We sent messengers, asking him why, for by now we were unwilling to face him ourselves, for he had assumed such an intensity of arbitrary destructiveness for us. Never before had we faced a situation where we could not carry out a plan for lack of labour. His reply was, ‘he had use for the labour force’. We sent another messenger asking for explanations, and he said he had plans. We should not worry, he said, he was thinking of raiding the cities across the mountains for slaves. That confounded us. We could not believe it. Never had The Cities made captives of free people. Even The Cruel Whip had not done this.

The lower suburbs on the seashore remained at risk from flooding, stayed in their squalor, and we heard that DeRod was building a wall. He planned a long strong tall wall that would run from one arm of the sea to another, several days’ walking long, cutting off The Cities from the outside and accessible only through armed gates. He had made his raids, and his captives were in camps guarded by soldiers, and they had begun working in the hills to fetch boulders to break up for the wall. This force was not badly treated. They were prisoners but adequately fed and not overworked. Some, we heard, were pleased to be here, part of the most powerful state in the peninsula, no longer subject to the extortions of The Cities, no longer liable to be snatched from their families to become part of DeRod’s work force. Already there was a strong movement among them to get DeRod to bring their families. And DeRod was listening. After all, the young women could work, if they were not breeding. And there were all kinds of skills we, The Cities, did not yet have. We wondered if he had thought of the problems of feeding all these new people? If he had considered that there must be overcrowding, with space limited by his wall?

And soon there were shortages of food. So many of our workers on the fields and with the animals had been conscripted either for his armies or for the wall our food supplies were suffering. Our silos, for the first time, were half empty. Again we sent messengers, and his reply was to send us women, the wives of the new captives, to work at growing food and with animals. They were mostly pregnant and had families. DeRod was encouraging them to have children. These new people had no skills for agriculture, and it was hard to teach them, because our old ways of teaching by tales and songs and narrative poems were being forgotten. It hurt to compare the standards of husbandry to be seen in our fields now, with the past. These were comparatively barbarous people, coarser, clumsier, ignorant compared with – well, with our people in the past. We had to say that, at least to each other: compared with us, but in the past.

This was the moment of evident, apparently irreversible, change, when DeRod decided to build his wall. After that, the falling off was swift and in every possible way.

About that time there was a confrontation between me and my son Bora. That is how I remember it, but I am sure he would not particularly remember it, or think it important. I wanted him to comment on the pleasure garden we had made on the river that escaped from the dam into the sea. How absurd it is, this need of the old for approval from their children. I noticed it among my friends – I used to, when they were alive. Bora had never mentioned the Fall, the pool, the silos, the gardens – nothing of the things we had done, and I am sure I was always hoping for him to say something.

The day of the encounter I saw him walking up the path and hurried to fall in beside him. I came straight out with, ‘Have you seen the new river gardens yet?’ When he only nodded, I persisted, ‘What did you think?’

‘Oh, we always do things well.’ This took me so aback I actually stopped, but hurried after him. ‘Bora, come into my quarters, I want to talk.’ He agreed. Amiably enough. I felt it as a kind of indifference. And while we walked to my verandah that I had built to overlook the gardens and the sea, I thought what that ‘we’ could mean.

We sat, I clapped my hands for refreshments and I looked for signs of impatience in my son and thought that I saw them. It was some time since we had talked. Years, I think. This was because when we did talk I always felt I was knocking on a locked door.

‘Bora,’ I said, ‘there will be no more gardens, or projects for buildings, or anything at all. You must know we have been denied labour, except for field work.’

At this he turned on me eyes which seemed puzzled. He even scratched his head, an oafish gesture he had certainly never learned from us, his parents.

‘But we are building the wall. That will be a fine sight, when it’s done.’

‘But the wall won’t make fields and gardens and dams. There is need for labour for maintenance. The silos are dilapidating. The roads are too.’

‘Well, we’ll attend to it.’

That we again.

‘Bora, DeRod has never repaired anything, mended anything, planted so much as a tree.’

Again he seemed to be working something out. ‘But Father, everyone admires DeRod. When we had the Feast of Praise for him all the armies were singing about the new garden and the new silos too.’

I understood. It was such a blow to my sense of probability: Bora believed – they all believed – that DeRod was the originator of wonderful accomplishments.

‘Why didn’t you come to the ceremony? It was noticed. You and the old gang never do come.’

‘Were we sent invitations?’

And now he was openly irritated. ‘Since when did the old ones need invitations.’

‘The Twelve,’ I said. ‘The Council of Twelve. The ones that look after The Cities.’

‘But you are family,’ he said. ‘You are part of The Family.’

I had not heard that term.

‘Now, listen to me,’ I said. ‘It’s important that you should understand.’ And I listed our achievements over the past few cycles. ‘This is what we did. The Twelve. Not DeRod. And now we cannot get on with the work we should be doing.’

‘Well, it’s all part of the same show,’ he said at last.

I did not know how to counter this, how to explain. Instead I saw the heart, the very heartbeat, of our complaint. The festivals of songs and tales. Bora would remember all that. He would have to. He was brought up with it. I did not often talk to his wife, who was a decent enough woman, though without any depth to her, because when talking about anything but the children or practical things I met with incomprehension. Bora did not meet me with the perfect understanding of shared experience. But it was not with her ignorance, her blankness.

‘When DeRod abolished the old festivals,’ I said, knowing my voice was full of bitterness, ‘he killed the heart and soul of The Cities.’

‘But we have festivals,’ he said. ‘There was a big army rally and there were some fine songs.’ And on his face appeared a grin, as if he were laughing with some accomplice I could not see. ‘We’ve got some great new songs.’

‘Bora,’ I said, ‘don’t do this. You must remember. It was different then – wasn’t it?’

He screwed his face up, he leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, as if about to jump up and go off. He gave me glances he was not trying to conceal. He knew what I was talking about. I could see that at some time, probably when offered a job in DeRod’s armies, he had come to some accommodation with his conscience, if not his memory.

‘I don’t see the point of that,’ he said. ‘But that was then. And the old gang did it well. I’m not denying it.’

‘The old gang – your grandmother, the great Destra, and the Council of Twelve.’

‘But DeRod was part of all that, wasn’t he?’

He did not know just how painful a question this was. How often had I tried to remember just how much DeRod had been part of it. I could remember him singing. Not the storytelling, though: he had no aptitude for that. To what extent had he been part of it?

Bora got up, ending it.

‘I don’t see what you are worrying about,’ he said.

It was shortly after that he too built himself a wing to retire into and my grandson, his son, became head of the household. This young man brought disgrace on the family, which was after all DeRod’s too, because he chose a wife his father, Bora, told him he would not acknowledge. She was a Barbarian from one of the cities over the mountains, captured as loot. She was beautiful in their wild immodest way, and had been a dancer in one of the taverns. My grandson was wild, mocked his father and mother, and earned his living buying and selling the unwanted babies of the new immigrants, the Barbarians. He did until DeRod heard of the marriage, and that his father had disowned him. DeRod gave him a job as supplier to the armies, where he makes his living still just on the edge of legality. Bora does not speak to either his son or his daughter-in-law.

This new woman, Raned, has achieved what every Barbarian girl wants, marriage with a citizen, and, in her case, into the leading family. If my grandson had not been such a poor type of fellow he would have aimed higher, perhaps at one of DeRod’s descendants. When challenged – by me – he babbled and boasted about love. In my experience love doesn’t come so cheap, though I have to say she is a beautiful thing. And there is more. She had none of the manners used by us – I should say, once used by us – and is free and easy with everyone, and thinks nothing of running up to me as I wander in the gardens to show me some garment she had acquired or made for her children – my great-grandchildren – or to tell me in her pretty voice that seems to sing some of the gossip from the lower town. I knew I could easily be in love with her myself. I thought her too good for my grandson. One day she came laughing into my wing of the house, her arms full of branches, and began setting them about in vases, saying it was the Festival of the Wall.

She said there were some fine songs but she thought that they – her city – had better. And she told me a story which had originated from us, from The Cities. I could recognise it though it had become distorted and lost its humour and its subtlety. Its humanity, too. It was the tale of a beautiful princess, captured to marry a barbarous ruler, but she had killed him to secure succession for her son. This was how the story of Destra had changed. I asked if this princess had become a good ruler, but Raned only laughed and said she was beautiful, wasn’t that enough? I said to her, complimenting her, that Beauty is always enough. She liked that, though I meant something different from what she thought I did.

I asked for other tales and heard more of ours, similarly transformed and debased, but recognisable. The Cruel Whip had become a magician who filled his coffers by selling magic tales, wicked tales, of power. And they certainly were wicked and cruel: she told me some.

I asked if she would like to hear some of our old tales, and she brought in her oldest child to listen. She enjoyed them, and so did he, but I thought the kinder aspects disappointed her. She liked the brutality of the magician’s stories. She had not learned to hear anything but the simple and obvious.

She asked me how I knew all these tales, and I said that they were in my mind, but a few had been written: by then I had begun to record them, afraid they would be lost when I died.

The idea of writing excited her: she had never heard that one could make letters, then words, then whole stories. She asked to be shown. And I had the pleasure of taking out the scrolls of reed with their smoothed inner skins ready to take the ink. I set out the sharpened reed, for writing, and the bowl of ink. She was awed. I have never seen such an admiring young woman. She wanted to know how I had learned. I said that in the old days a few of us had been taught to write, to keep the skill alive, but now there were only three still alive, myself and two of The Twelve who were then still living.

Would she like to learn? I asked, for not the least of my anxieties was that soon no one would be left to teach youngsters the art. DeRod, like all our commercial managers, used notches on sticks to measure and count.

She was tempted, I could see, but laughed, and said she was too stupid, she was just an ignorant woman. I told her that if she wanted to fit in to The Cities she would not talk about women as inferior. I saw from the look on her face that she did not understand me, or thought I was ill-informed. The women of The Cities are not as free as once they were. The change had been slow, and at first not noticed. It was the armies, you see: a military state is all hierarchies and ranks and steps of achievement, jealously guarded, and where did women fit into all this? Not only ordinary women, but the singers and the storytellers were not the independent, graceful, skilled women of the old days, under EnRod and then Destra. They do not impose or expect respect or admiration.

I asked Raned if she would like one of her children to be taught to write. ‘Or all of them,’ I said. She liked that idea, very much. She said they were too young but she would think about it, and look for signs of aptitude in that direction. That made me laugh: what would one look for in a small child to indicate an innate gift for the art of writing? She rebuked me, politely, saying that if one of her children – she already had three – seemed to be quieter and more noticing than the others, then she would bring this paragon to me. ‘Surely,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t expect a child who is good at running about and fighting to have the patience for this.’ And she picked up one of my pens, as if it were a snake or a lizard that could bite.

This was not so long ago. And now I am the only one left who has the skill of writing and I am more than ever anxious because soon there will be no one. After all, while we know that north there lives a people with a whole class of scribes who have their history, their transactions and their tales kept on their reed-rolls there is no reason why we should expect another wanderer from their mountains to come our way. That is – was – one of our tales, how this ragged starving man appeared and taught us the art of writing in return for protecting him. He had run away to avoid some punishment for a crime we were careful not to ask him about.

I again asked Raned to let one of her children study with me, and she said she thought two might be suitable. They will start with me soon. They had to be prepared to accept the idea of writing. When I was young, under Destra, the men and women who could write were admired. It was a great day for me when I was chosen. Some people used to say that there was no need for the new skill, writing, because we had all our knowledge, our history, our tales, in our memories, and every child knew it all. Writing was a clumsy and cumbersome thing compared to that. I am sure no one then could have believed that our heritage of songs and tales could be lost, could disappear, and in such a short time. Now only old people remember.

If I still had the power to do it I would call all The Cities together and ask the old people who did remember to come forward and tell everything to young people enough interested: surely there must be some left?

What a weight it all is, this anxiety, this sorrow. I do sometimes wonder why old people bother to keep alive, it is such an effort. Being old is a tedious business. How I love watching Raned’s young ones skip and dance about, the ease of it: above all, that is what one loses, the pleasure in simple movement.

And yet I mean to make sit down at least two of them, immobilising them long enough to learn their signs, that will open the world of The Word to them.

I sent out to find people who know the old skills of preparing reeds for writing, and a very old woman came up the hill to me, and I gave her money to teach others to do it, before she dies. She was so pleased to hear of anyone who needed her skills that she wept. She at least remembers how things once were.

‘It is so ugly now,’ she whispered, glancing about for fear of unfriendly listeners – and that, too, is a new thing. ‘Why is everything so loud and so ugly? Sometimes I sit and sing the old songs to myself, but I find a time when the youngsters are not about because they laugh at me. They say the old songs are insipid.’

‘I understand very well,’ I said, and so we went on, as the old do, remembering, until the servant came in, and we stopped talking. I know that my son asks his servants what I am doing and who I am seeing. He sends doctors to me when I am quite well. It is all meant kindly, I expect, but it makes me feel imprisoned.

And now I have reached the present. I wrote the word ‘imprisoned’ last night.

Bora remarked yesterday that DeRod was not well: people were speculating who would succeed. This took me aback. I know it will seem ridiculous and even impossible, but I had not been thinking of him as an old man – my age, in fact. My mental image of him has been for a long time of something not far off The Cruel Whip, supplanting memories of a charming handsome fellow – one of those people who, when you think of them, make you smile. An old man. Well, of course he must be … I sent him a message that I would like to see him, exactly as if nothing of the sort has happened for such a long time – getting on for half a century. Is that really possible? Well, yes, it must be nearly that. No reply. Did I expect one? Yes. This is because since the death of Eleven my mind has been filled so much with memories of us all, mostly of us as young things. I was so full of affection for the past, for us all, DeRod too, as he was.

I waited. And then, today, I simply took my stick from its place where it leans in the corner, and set off. Not far. Walking distance, even for me. I have never used the new chairs that are lifted and carried by porters. Partly because I don’t need them and partly because among the young they have become a sport: they race each other, as if the porters are animals, whipping them along. I think this shameful, but know that in this new spirit that reigns in The Cities my objections would seem merely another example of an old man’s whimsy.

It was a fine afternoon. My way went up to the top of the hill, by the Fall, and then through the public squares and places, and then through a wood, which we, The Twelve, had planned and planted. Fine trees now, and spacious shady places where in summer you can find coolness and shade.

I had been walking in my now slow careful way for as long as it took the sun to drop a level in the sky, striking direct through the trees, when I heard the loud laughter and jeering that these days means the youth are near. A gang of seven young men appeared, running up through the trees towards me; they saw me, and then with cries of excitement, as if they had glimpsed a running animal, came towards me. I stopped and faced them. They stopped, a few paces away. Each face was distorted into that sneer which is obligatory now.

‘What have we got here?’ said the leader.

I knew him, I was sure, right from that first moment.

‘Look, an old beggar,’ said another boy. Beggars, once impossible with us, are now common.

‘I like his fwock,’ said the first. This is the new fad among them: they lisp, and put on effeminate airs.

They were wearing a fashion derived from the Barbarians: leather trousers and jerkin, showing their shoulders and chests. I was wearing, as always, my old brown robe.

‘Give me your fwock,’ said the leader.

I stared. I could not help it. Those faces, they were familiar to me anyway, because they were not the now so familiar Barbarian face, which is sharper, bolder, strongly incised, often beautiful, or handsome, where our generic face is broad, frank, open, honest, the face of a perhaps not over-subtle people, but one you trusted. On this face, one so likeable, the sneers and jeers were like a mask which did not fit, and the raucous derision of their style of speaking did not suit their voices either.

Who was he? Who could he be, this boy?

He snatched my stick away, so that I stumbled and nearly fell, and then used it to lift up the bottom of my robe far enough so they could admire my ancient sex: what they were seeing, what I saw every day in the bath, was something like a lump of dried mushrooms. They pointed and sneered and sniggered.

Then I remembered: I knew that face so well. It was part of my oldest, dearest memories: I said, ‘Are you Rollard’s son … grandson … great-grandson?’ I amended.

That face, born to be pleasant and agreeable, returned to this condition for just a moment, then he went deep scarlet, and dropped the stick.

‘Green,’ he muttered. ‘Good green, he’s got the Sight.’

They clustered around me, mouths open, awed, staring.

‘I knew your great-grandfather well,’ I said, and my voice was unsteady, and my eyes wet, seeing that loved face there, before me. He, Rollard, had been one of The Twelve.

They turned and sped off, on one impulse, like birds or fishes. I stood alone in that glade in the wood, and wept, thinking of Rollard, thinking of us all. I picked up my stick, and went on, carefully, through the leaf litter, to DeRod’s gate. There two armed men stood forward, to stop me. I said to them, ‘Stand aside, this is one of The Twelve.’ My emotion had given me an impatience with them, and the unfamiliar words did seem to link up with some chord of memory. They stepped aside, and watched me toil up the path, to the house where appeared to stand watching me a tall striking woman, obviously a Barbarian, who as I arrived in front of her said, ‘I know who you are.’

‘Tell DeRod I am here,’ I said, understanding that he had not received my message. She hesitated, then went inside. I followed her. She did turn to stop me, but there across the room, staring at me, was a very old man, who lifted his stick to point at me and said, ‘Oh, it’s you at last. Why did it take you so long?’

This knocked the stuffing out of me.

He is a jolly old thing, with puffs of white hair at his ears, a bald pate, and his eyes were full of tears, like mine.

I sat, without being asked.

‘I sent you a message,’ I said. The woman was standing close, hands folded in front of her, watching me.

‘I didn’t get it,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘They take very good care of me, you see.’

He did not seem to be particularly feeble, let alone ill.

‘What’s this about your being ill?’

‘I did have a bit of a turn.’

‘He must not get over-tired,’ she said.

I said to her, ‘I am sure he is capable of deciding when he is tired.’

I don’t think anyone had spoken to her like that for some time. She seemed to gather herself in a movement like a snake about to strike, then resumed her watchful pose.

I said, ‘I would like to talk to DeRod alone.’

Touch and go … Then, ‘Yes, leave us.’

I could see this was not a tone he used to her. Her look at me was pure enmity. But she turned and went.

Who was she? I knew that his wife, ‘the town girl’, had died long ago.

‘That is my new woman,’ he said. ‘She is good to me.’ And he giggled.

This was the fearsome, feared DeRod; he was a giggling old man, an old buffer, naughty, like a child.

‘I’ve come on serious business,’ I said.

‘Of course you have, dear boy. You wouldn’t come just for fun, dear old Sage.’

‘DeRod, as I walked here I saw the Fall is running low. That means the water channels are silting up. There are big cracks in the silos and the rats are getting in. The irrigation ditches need attention. The roads are going into potholes.’

He could easily have giggled, become a child, called for that woman, but he looked harassed, even annoyed, and said, ‘You know how labour is now. They are lazy and irresponsible and incompetent.’

‘But DeRod, what do you expect? They get no training, they haven’t done for a long time.’

‘That’s why we use the Barbarians, they are used to work.’

Again it seemed as if he simply wanted me to keep quiet … go away … stop bothering him. Yes, that was it, he was like someone irritated with an importunate or pestering person.

I went on. ‘DeRod, when you put an end to the instruction, to the teaching, when you ended the storytelling and the songs – obviously this was going to happen?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When your mother died she left behind her a system of education, of training … you ended it.’

Again, he stared, and, there was no doubt of it, was surprised.

‘Don’t you remember, DeRod?’

And that was the moment I understood. Oh, all kinds of enlightenment came flooding, rather late, but there it was, right in front of me. It was not that he had forgotten. Not that he had deliberately destroyed what was good. He had never known it was good. He had never understood. He had seemed to be part of it all, but he, Destra’s son, the graceful and charming and delightful DeRod, whom we had all admired, had been a blind person among us. From some spirit of emulation he had gone along with it all, as children do, but he had understood nothing at all.

Oh, yes, the scales were indeed falling from my eyes.

I sat there looking back over my long life, and thinking how we, The Twelve, had not seen the first most obvious thing. We had deluded ourselves with all kinds of imaginings and resentments and suspicions: we had seen this man here, DeRod, as a villain, a scheming, ambitious, unscrupulous scoundrel. The truth, had always been – he was stupid. That’s all. We had never seen it. But clearly, his mother had … and that was something I had to think out.

When that formidable woman, his jailor, came in, I got up and said to her, ‘Thank you. You must take good care of him.’ And to DeRod, ‘Did you know I am the last of The Twelve?’

‘Are you? No, I didn’t know. No one told me.’

‘Who are The Twelve?’ she asked, suspicious.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ And to him, ‘Eleven died a few days ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and it sounded as if he really was. ‘We had good times, didn’t we?’ he said, the tears starting. ‘Do you remember our games in the teaching room?’

‘Yes, I do remember.’

‘It was such fun.’

‘Yes, it was.’ And as I turned to go, ‘I have arranged with some youngsters to teach them how to write and read. They are my great-grandchildren.’

‘Oh, are you?’ He seemed puzzled and I saw he had forgotten about writing. Then he said, and I remember he said it in the old days, ‘What use is it, when we’ve got Memories who keep records of the past, and all that?’

‘I don’t think many people now know about our history. Or only in a distorted kind of way.’ And then I could not help adding, ‘Your mother, Destra, is remembered as a sort of clever courtesan.’

At this the woman came in with, ‘She was a bar girl. She was a singer in the bars. What’s wrong with that?’

So, I knew what her past had been.

‘Nothing wrong. But she would have been very surprised to hear that she was a bar girl. Destra was a great woman,’ I said, knowing this woman would have no conception of greatness. Then to DeRod, ‘She was a great woman and a fine ruler and there is nothing left of what she created.’

I turned and left, not wanting to see his face, though I expect it didn’t show any real comprehension.

And I walked home slowly through the wood, almost dark now, and dangerous, but I did not see anyone there.

That was last night. I did not sleep. The old are familiar with how memories can shift and change their meanings. A scene from childhood that you have often visited can suddenly say to you, ‘No, you’ve been wrong. This is what was going on.’ But now it is not a question of a scene, a day, but a lifetime, and it will need more than a night or two of sleeplessness to understand it all.

It is Destra, first of all, who commands my attention. When she first came to us all those years ago we knew no more about her people than a few rumours could tell us, so far away did everything seem that was not The Cities. But since then the other cities of the peninsula have come close to us, because of DeRod’s raids, and we know a great deal about peoples and places, and Destra’s story is well known. Her father was a minor chieftain of the Roddite tribe, with several wives. Destra did not marry as the other daughters did, obedient to custom, going to a husband’s clan as early as ten or eleven. Destra was eighteen when she came to us, old, according to her people’s ideas. She refused many suitors. She was headstrong, wilful, and very beautiful. Why did she at last agree to marry? She must have known something of The Cruel Whip’s reputation, but the fame of EnRod’s reforms had travelled everywhere: Destra wanted to live where women were as free as men. Not everyone admired these reforms! Through all the cities of the peninsula and further, where the Roddite tribes live, people were saying that women given their own way must bring ruin on everyone. Or perhaps it was that she saw The Cruel Whip as a last chance for a husband. Whatever she expected, what she got was a drunken, brutal man who beat her – and worse. Free she was not. And then – fortuitously, he died. Let us give her the benefit of the doubt. I know what I believe; and The Cities were well rid of him.

From being a nuisance of a girl in a minor tribe, she had become ruler of a powerful state. I think that we all of us know, even if it is only an inkling, what we could be capable of: I am sure Destra exulted. She knew her capacities. She at once set about putting right what The Cruel Whip had done wrong and making plans for prosperity, success, achievement. She planned not only for her time but for the future. And here she found her difficulty and it was one that could ruin everything. She had had no children. To whom could she entrust what she was creating? She adopted two children from among the Cruel Whip’s illegitimate progeny. There was plenty of choice: DeRod was a delightful baby: he was always a charmer: that was his quality. And my Shusha was always sweet, kind, loving, smiling at everyone. I think I fell in love with Susha when we were both not much more than infants. Destra watched the two, watched and waited. Remember that Destra had been brought up surrounded by children and infants, had learned early to judge, knew that a child shows its nature from the first breath. Shusha could never be a ruler, she did not have the iron that it takes. And DeRod – well, Destra must have watched, and waited, and hoped – he was the most attractive little child: I remember him. He did not have the sweetness of his sister, her warmth, but he did have a brilliance of good looks. One year, two years, three, four … An empty brilliance. One had only to compare him with his sister. Well then, Destra must have hoped, if not lovable and kind, then clever, quick, intelligent.

She must have seen pretty early that DeRod was – he was feebleminded. I have come out with it though it hurts even to think it. We have many words for this condition and most are unkind. He was an idiot. But there are degrees of the condition. Put him in the army as a soldier, obeying orders, it would not matter. He reminds me of a certain idiot to be seen around the streets, good-looking, and smiling, so that you do not at once realise he has little intelligence.

The poor idiot often sits near a little pool fed from a crack in the dilapidating wall of the Fall. He plays with leaves and bits of rubbish. He puts a leaf on a stick, or a stick through a leaf, until he has a little army of – to him – people, and he makes speeches at them, his audience. He sounds like DeRod, and that means he is at two removes from Destra who would begin a speech, ‘I am going to explain what we are doing …’ DeRod, sounding like Destra (though people who never heard her wouldn’t know this) will begin, ‘I am going to tell you …’ He does not continue as you might expect, but goes off with,’ Have you seen the new army? Have you seen the new bit of wall … they say five thousand bits of stone, now that’s a fine thing, five thousand, Wow. Oh, yes, we are something to be proud of, I can tell you, there isn’t a city in the peninsula that doesn’t fear DeRod …’ And so he rambles on, sometimes for half a day, to anyone who will listen. And they do listen, that is the astonishing thing. Yet he doesn’t make any more sense than the poor idiot playing with his bits of straw and sticks and leaves. ‘I’m going to explain to you, yes, hear me, it is Fenga talking. I’m going to make an army out of you and we’ll go across the mountain and capture some slaves …’

I am seeing again something from that long ago meeting with DeRod by the Fall. How he kept looking up to the top as we walked, and how his face went slack with relief when the woman appeared, and how he ran up to her – exactly as a child runs to its mother, for safety.

Somebody has been advising DeRod, guiding him. His town girl? Other women, when she died? His present one is his jailor. It is possible that all these years he had not been getting our messages.

Imagine that poor idiot who amuses himself in the puddle made by the leak from the Fall, in DeRod’s place. He would play with his armies, make up simple songs, and speeches beginning, ‘And now I am going to tell you …’

We have been getting information for some time now from the other peninsular cities, and very eagerly did The Twelve listen to accounts of their rulers. I would say that the word for most of them is – incompetent. We have the comparison with Destra: we know what competence is. You would easily think some of them were idiots, so stupid are their decisions. A stupid person, or an idiot, in a place of power provided he (she only in The Cities, no one else has our laws honouring women) has an attractive personality, can compel eyes, make people smile, may easily not be seen for what he is. DeRod has always had that. There were times when you simply had to watch DeRod, the child, the boy, the youth, so winsome, up to a hundred charming tricks, charming us – and knowing that he did. But not his mother, no.

The idiot by the pool is nice-looking, and a lot of people don’t seem to see that he is simple. ‘He’s a bit eccentric, you know’

Destra must have been frantic with despair. She would not marry again, not after her experience with her first husband. Of course not. She might have considered adopting another cleverer child. But we have all seen what a chancy thing that can turn out to be. She quietly made her plan: the Council of Twelve. She would choose children from the ruling families, which could be expected to try and oust her if she ever showed weakness. This would disarm them. She made it known from the first that these children would administer The Cities, and one of them, not necessarily her daughter, or son, would become Ruler. It was Destra who introduced the word, and the idea, of Democracy, building on what her father-in-law EnRod had done. There would be thirteen children, brought up and taught by her, in her home, and at the right time they would choose the one most suited to be Ruler. Who better than those who had known each other all their lives, to choose right? She must have thought her plan foolproof, but it was not. I look back now on those days, in Destra’s house, and at us all there. What a delightful lot of children we were. And among them two, both so pretty, Destra’s children. I remember DeRod, a bit of a show-off, but so charmingly eager to please, to be liked: yes, and even then it was easy to contrast him with his sister. Well, we did, of course. But the fact was we were always a bit dazzled by DeRod. Beauty is a terrible thing. When it is matched with a fine nature, a mind, then certainly it is something to bow before, to hold out one’s hands to, in supplication. But that beautiful empty boy, so pleased with himself, his charm was a poison. And surely Destra must have laid awake at nights, fearful for him and for us. But among us, as it were supported by us, his emptiness did not show. I remember we were hurt on his behalf if he did not do well in some lesson, or did not understand: we all rushed to help him, explain, make him one of us. I remember so well that smile of his, wondering, a little embarrassed, his always-on-the-watch eyes, trying to understand, to be as good as we were. And so it went on, that charmed childhood of ours, which was presided over by Destra, whom we loved. We did not ever see her as anything but something like our Sun, unfailingly bathing us with light and warmth. We took that effulgence for granted, never questioning, or making judgements for ourselves. In a sense, we were Destra, as we do become what we admire.

In some of the cities across the peninsula they pay allegiance to a female deity, so we hear; she goes under various names. We in The Cities have always scorned such backwardness, worshipping, as we do, The Sun, our progenitor. We know that our view of things is the true one. But were we so different, with our uncritical love for Destra?

Beauty is a terrible thing: but it is dangerous too for a person to be seen as the sum of his or her admirable qualities. What is left out, the shadow, has to be understood. But there rises a question, not without relevance here: if Destra had been too good, too noble, to get rid of The Cruel Whip, our affliction, the result would have been her continuing wretchedness and our misery as The Cities fell into ruin under him. Well, they have fallen into ruin, under his son, who is stupid. But The Cities enjoyed more than a hundred and fifty years of prosperity, high public morality and culture. Of course, a lot of people are satisfied with the crude raucous violent times we have now, because we eat well – most do – and enjoy the plunder from the Barbarian cities. And we have all our dirty work done for us, by the captured Barbarians. Good times: ‘We are having a good time,’ you often hear people say.

So, which of us would Destra have liked us to choose? Looking back now, it is easy. She was always gently, tactfully, drawing attention to one of us, citing his good qualities, but not in a way that would make us look bad in comparison. It is easy to see now: I think we spent our childhood in a state of unconditional love: we were dazzled, eyes blinded. She would have liked the one who became our water engineer. Nine. And she was right: he would have made a fine ruler. Why did she not ever say, This is my choice? She did, as openly as she could. But if she had said, I want this one to succeed me, then the other families would have complained, made an alliance against her. Then they would have fought among each other to make sure their own offspring succeeded. A civil war – that is what would have happened. But to arrange things so that all of us were chosen to choose, meant that our families would be responsible with us. I cannot now remember what was being said in my family: the truth is, memories of my family life are dim and dull compared with Destra’s home and her lessons. I am sure my family were excellent people, but they did not matter to me. Destra was my mother. She was our mother.

I wonder if she was anxious about our affection for her son, about how we always supported and helped him? It was natural to behave like that, with kindness; she had taught us kindness.

When she was ill, at the very end, and was carried in on the day that we had to choose, how she must have suffered. I do remember her face, though I see it now differently from how I have all these years. She was ill – that was all I saw. But she was also ill with anxiety. She lay there, held up on her pillows, and watched us choose, thoughtlessly, gaily, her silly son, her charming, delightful silly son – and now I see her face, that old grim face, set hard. She knew what was to come.

And now it is easy to see why we, The Twelve, never did like to call things by their proper names. We complained of DeRod, feared him, speculated Why, but we never said, ‘We, The Twelve, are responsible for everything that has happened because we chose him, and we didn’t have to.’ Any one of us would have done better than DeRod. None of us was wicked, all of us revered Destra, and would have done what we thought she would have wanted. Even I, slow and lacking in resolution, would have done better.

We let her down. It was our fault. We are responsible. The famous Twelve, so busy with our efforts on behalf of The Cities, proud of our accomplishments, we, and no one else, were the cause of The Cities’ downfall. And, very likely, of breaking Destra’s heart, before she died.

Before sealing this away I have to record one more thing, a strange thing. There have been rumours from across the mountains of strong earth shakings, that have brought down whole cities. We know that rumours always exaggerate, and so we await confirmation. And at the same time, came news that workmen, building a new section of DeRod’s wall, found the ruins of a buried city. We do not yet know how extensive these are. They are at the depth of about two ordinary pickaxe handles. The construction of the buildings is different from ours, more elaborate, and they used very small stones in different colours as pavements and floors and ceilings. This is a craft we know nothing of. We hear that DeRod is wild with excitement and has ordered all other work to cease, so as to dig out the city. ‘All of it,’ he ordered. ‘It will be a wonder people will come to see.’ Meanwhile our people have reacted with forebodings. They are remembering that among the tales from the old part of The Cities are some that speak of earth vomiting, rivers swallowing mountains and changing their courses, the sea inundating coasts. Strange to see the old tales, scorned by this sensation-loving people who want only the new and the exciting, coming back into favour, but only because they match with new anxieties. ‘Once there was a fine city here, under where we are now,’ they say. ‘And what is to stop it all happening again? Look what is going on on the other side of the mountain.’

Note to the published manuscript, by the Archaeologist

The site we are excavating is certainly not less than seven thousand years old. Over it is a layer of pumice and ash. We have not yet unearthed anything similar anywhere in the world. This is a civilisation of a type new to us. The manuscript is of inestimable value in reconstructing the ordinary life of that time. We have taken due note of the fact that under this city, which is still only part exposed, is another. In due course we shall reach that too.
This manuscript was found in a recess in a thick wall, which had been partly toppled. The script was unknown before a group of experts found that there are in some places analogies with cuneiform – enough to unlock the rest. The translation has been made for our easy reading. Words such as ‘time’ would translate as ‘that which is passing and which carries us from birth to death on the rays of the sun’. A year: ‘a cycle of changes in the colours of the vegetation, matching the sun’s movement from hot to cold’. A stupidity: ‘that which is missing from the nobler parts of the mind’.
Our usages, less picturesque, are at least speedier.
We have been labouring over this excavation for four years now. What we see, what we work with, is rock, rocks, hard grey stone, a type of granite. Rock and stones. But what is described by the author in this manuscript are gardens, trees, water, and above all the Fall of water over great blocks of stone which we at first, before the finding of the manuscript, described as a great ceremonial ascent of steps to – we expected a temple or something on those lines.

A LOVE CHILD

A young man descended from a train at Reading and his awkwardness swung the suitcase in his hand so that it nearly clipped the face of a youth who turned, putting a hand to his head to add force to a protest, but then his scowl vanished and he shouted, ‘James Reid, it’s Jimmy Reid,’ and the two were shaking hands and clapping each other about the shoulders in a cloud of steam from the shrieking engine.

Two years ago they had been schoolboys together. Since then James had been taking a course in office management and accountancy, greeting news that Donald was ‘doing politics’ with ‘Fair enough, they’ve got money’. For Donald had always been able to take advantage of treats and trips and opportunities, whereas, he, James, was kept watching pennies.

‘I’m afraid we have to watch the pennies,’ was what he heard at home, far too often, and, he now believed, often unnecessarily.

Donald had shone in debates and the dramatic society, and started a magazine called New Socialist Thought. James had had no idea what he wanted to do, provided it wasn’t sitting from nine to five at a desk. His mother had said, ‘Just get the certificates, dear, they’ll come in useful.’ His father said, ‘Don’t waste time at university, you’ll learn more in the school of life.’ But they couldn’t have afforded university.

Now Donald said, ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I’m off home.’

‘You do look glum. What’s up?’

With Donald, this affable person whose round and smiling face invited frankness, with the guarantee of understanding, it was easy to say what he could not remember even hinting to anyone else, ‘Isn’t that reason enough?’

Donald laughed out loud, and at once said, ‘Then, come along with me. I’m off to the Young Socialist Summer School.’

‘But I’m expected at home.’

‘Ring them. Come on.’ And he was already on his way to the tea-room where there would be a phone.

James remembered that Donald always assumed everything was easy, and so for him it was. To ring home and say, I’ll not be home this weekend, was for himself a big deal, something to think about, plan, steel himself for, consider the ifs and buts, but here he was at the telephone, while a waitress smiled at the two youths, Donald grinning encouragement. He said to his mother, ‘Will it be all right if you don’t see me till Monday evening?’

‘Yes, of course, dear.’

He knew she thought he should get about more, make friends, but it had needed Donald. The two got on a train returning to where James had just come from, but now, instead of the dismalness of, Oh God, another day pen-pushing, they were off on an adventure.

So began the wondrous summer of 1938 that changed everything for James. That weekend summer school for which Donald wangled his attendance – it was booked out, but James knew the organisers – was about the war in Spain, but as far as James was concerned it could have been about the conditions of tin-miners in South America (a later lecture). He was dazzled by this largesse of new ideas, faces, friends. He slept in a dormitory of a college that catered for summer courses and schools, and ate in the dining-room, with young men and women from all over the country, in a cheerful argumentative atmosphere that accommodated every conceivable shade of left-wing opinion. Defining one’s exact nuance on everything from Spain to vegetarianism was an essential duty to oneself. The weekend after it was the pacifists, where Donald was speaking to provide opposition. For Donald was a communist. ‘But I’m not a joiner, I’m with them in spirit.’ He felt it his responsibility to combat wrong-thinking everywhere. His duty was politics, but his pleasure was literature, particularly poetry, so James found himself at a weekend of ‘Poetry as a Weapon in the Struggle’, and another of ‘Modern Poetry’, then ‘The Romantic Poets as Precursors of Revolution!’ He heard Stephen Spender speak in London and recite his own poetry in Cheltenham. And so the summer went on, ‘The Communist Party for Freedom!’ ‘American Literature’, which meant Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, meant Waiting for Lefty, and Studs Lonigan. ‘Whither the British Empire?’ ‘India’s Right to Self-Government’. And it was not just weekends. After his day at the business college he would join Donald somewhere for an evening’s lecture or debate, or study group. He was going home to pick up clean clothes, have a bath and tell his mother where he had been. She listened all interest, and there was no end to her questions. A year ago he would have been irritated and evaded her, but he was beginning to understand the indigence of her emotional life and was learning patience. His father listened – James had to suppose – but did not comment more than a grunt or a snort at what he disagreed with.

James seemed to be meeting only vivid personalities who made him feel lack-lustre and timid, and the girls were unlike any he had known, talkative, free with their often alarming opinions, and with their kisses too: he was at first surprised they did not mind his approaches to them and even teased him for his hesitations. Easy with kisses, but parsimonious with everything else: this reassured him for he certainly did not believe in Free Love, the subject of one of the debates. He was not only living in a dream of companionship and quick friendships, but above all he was seeing himself in ways that surprised, shocked or shamed him. Chance remarks, overheard, a sentence or two from a lecture on ‘The Fascist Threat to Europe’ or ‘The Working Conditions of Miners’ left him with ears throbbing with what he had heard: for they seemed sensitised to hear words that might have been designed for him personally.

At a pacifist weekend he had his childhood put into perspective as neatly as in a cartoon: ‘The soldiers from the Great War, they either can’t stop talking about it, they’re obsessed …’ ‘Like my Dad’ came from the floor, ‘… or they won’t talk about it at all’ – ‘Like my father,’ contributed another.

James’s father, a survivor of the Trenches, wounded at the Somme, was one who never opened his mouth. Not about the war, and not much about anything. A large man, a rock, with shoulders and hands surely too powerful for what he did – he was in the office of an engineering firm – he could sit silent from the beginning of a meal to its end. Most evenings he went to the pub, to meet his mates, and James had often seen them, all old soldiers, sitting in a group around the fire, not saying much. James had grown up with silence. His mother could not talk if his father didn’t, but once, going home for a weekend for the sake of good feeling, he saw her at a social that followed the summer fête, animated, flushed, a glass of sherry being generously replenished by Mr Butler, the local vet, and … was she flirting? Actually flirting with him? Surely not; it was just that James had not really noticed her as a woman that could talk ten to the dozen and laugh. ‘I’m a bit tipsy,’ she remarked, walking home, her flush of social animation already gone.

He did remember through his childhood sometimes being secretly ashamed of his mother’s animation at public occasions, so unlike was she to her self at home. But now he thought, My God, being married to my father, to be married to a man who never speaks unless you put a question direct, and not even then! And she’s not like him, she’s good fun, she’s … but this was his mother, and an impulse of violent pity suppressed thoughts that were unbecoming about one’s mother. What she must have suffered all these years: for that matter, what had he suffered, the silent child of a man who had known such horrors in the Trenches that he could be himself only with other soldiers from that old war.

This uncomfortable view of himself and his family was only a beginning. He learned at ‘The English Class Structure’ that Donald was middle class and he lower middle class. What had he been doing at the same school as Donald, then? He had got a scholarship, that was it, though he hadn’t thought about it much before. His mother had wangled the scholarship, writing letters and then pulling strings, wearing her best dress. He knew now his mother had good taste, in simple dark dresses and her little string of real pearls, where other women were in loud florals and too much jewellery. She had impressed – well, who? – with the urgency of her son going to a good school. His mother was a cut above his father, so he could see now. He had been in a daze and a dream about all this sort of thing until Donald had woken him up.

He went home with Donald for a weekend and found a large house crammed with family and friends. Two brothers, older; two sisters, younger; a noisy fun-loving lot. The mother and the father argued – in his home it would be called quarrelling – about everything. The father was a member of the Labour Party, the mother a pacifist, the children called themselves communists. Long loud abundant meals: James thought of the frugal decent meals his mother cooked, with the Sunday joint as high point of the week; but it was a small joint, for it wasn’t right to waste money. In Donald’s home a large ham stood always ready on the sideboard, with a fruit cake, and bread, and a slab of cheese and a pile of yellow butter. They played games in the evenings. The two girls had boyfriends and were teased, not very nicely, thought James, but his ideas were changing and he wondered if it was right to be shocked. Surely he was shocked too often?

‘Good to have you home, son,’ said his father, on the weekend when James attended the Sunday joint (two potatoes each and a spoon of peas), and this so surprised both son and mother they exchanged glances. What could have got into the old man? (His father was not yet fifty.)

‘And so you’re getting into politics, are you?’

‘Well, I’m listening, mostly.’

The big man, with his large red face, moustache cut close (trimmed every day), short grey hair neatly parted (cut weekly by his wife), his big blue eyes that were usually abstracted, as if concentrated on keeping his thoughts in their place, now focused fully on his son, and he was certainly taking him in, judging.

‘Politics is a mug’s game. You’ll find that out for yourself.’ And he returned to the business of loading his fork with beef.

‘James is only finding things out for himself, dear,’ said Mrs Reid, as always conciliatory, surely too much so, as much as would justify a secret fear her husband would one of these days explode and demolish her and everything in their life.

‘That’s what I said, wasn’t it?’ said Mr Reid, presenting an angry face to her, and then to James, chin forward: he might have been expecting a punch on it. ‘Crooks and thieves and liars.’

This was a fierce choking cry, in a voice the son did not remember ever hearing. Had his mother? He saw her lower her eyes, play with a bit of bread on the tablecloth, then knead it with her knuckles.

James thought: this has been going on all my childhood, and I never noticed. And now it was the pain he felt for both of them that took him out of the house, as much as his fascination with this brave new world of politics and literature.

Donald was lending him books which he was reading as if literature were food and he was starving. The books were in a pile on the hall table. He would take one up to his room to read, then return it to its place and choose another. He saw his mother stand by the books, then open one. Spender.

‘“I think continually of those who were truly great”,’ he said, sharing with her something of the richness he had discovered; and he thought that this was the first time he had let her in to his private self. She nodded, smiling. ‘I like that,’ she said. There were books in a bookshelf, but he did not remember her reading them. They were mostly war books, and that was the reason he had not touched them. They were his father’s and shared with him the aura of Don’t Touch.

Now his mother said, ‘“I saw a host of golden daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” I learned that at school.’

He said, lowering his voice – his father was in the room next door – ‘“It seemed that out of battle I escaped”.’ And she looked over her shoulder, and said, in a whisper, ‘No, don’t, don’t, he wouldn’t …’ And she walked quickly away.

When his father had gone to the pub and his mother was upstairs, James knelt by the bookcase and pulled out the books one by one. All Quiet on the Western Front. And Quiet Flows the Don. The Battle of the Somme. Passchendaele. Goodbye to All That. An Old Soldier Remembers. If They Should Die … If They Should Ask Us … Three shelves full.

In spring 1939 James was called up, with the young men in the age group 20 to 21. His father said, ‘That’s right, that’s what young men are for.’ And he got to his feet with emphasis and went to the pub.

Donald had been called up, and when James went to visit he found that boisterous house clamorous with argument, even more than usual. The two older brothers assumed they would be next. The girls were in tears because their boyfriends were in the same age group as Donald and James.

‘There can’t possibly be a war, it would be too terrible,’ said the pacifist mother, and one daughter. ‘We have to stop Hitler,’ said the father and sons and the other daughter. These were the points of view to be heard on the wireless, in the newspapers, exchanged everywhere. ‘With the weapons there are now, no one could be stupid enough to go to war.’

The two young men actually about to be shovelled into the army, smiled a lot and went off together to a debate in the nearby town: ‘Is It too Late for Peace?’ Donald spoke passionately from the floor that Hitler must be stopped now, otherwise we would all be slaves. A woman in the audience stood up to say that her fiancé and two brothers had been killed in the last war, and if the young ones present knew what war was like they would be pacifists like her. A man of her age, that is to say one presumably schooled in war, asked her sarcastically if she believed her fiancé and brothers would have liked the idea of living like slaves under Hitler, and she shouted at him, ‘Yes, yes. Better alive than dead.’ An old woman said that it was time they remembered the white feathers that were handed out to cowards in the last war: that was how she felt. The arguments grew so loud and bitter the platform had to call for order, and then ask the ushers to escort out a youth who said the white-feather woman should be shot, she was disgusting.

His father told James, ‘They’re going to lick you into shape. That’s what they call it. They’ll make a man of you. You get yourself made an officer. You’ll have it easier that way. You’ll be officer material, with your education.’

James and Donald went together to the call-up centre in Reading. James had run and played cricket and football for the school, and expected to be told that he was a hundred per cent fit. He was, with the proviso that he must watch out for an old football injury, a torn ligament in his knee, which now could be seen as a thin white scar. Donald was told he was overweight, but the army would cure him of that. All day they were in a large hall, in a mill of sweaty, smelly young men, many from homes that had no bathroom. All the same age: Donald joked that they had reached the age for the slaughterhouse, like lambs or calves. He sounded cheerful about it. The same age, but far from the same shape. Many were thin, and most were short: Donald and James were taller, and their bones were well-covered. Their assiduous attention to the facts of British life had taught them that the working classes subsisted on bread and margarine sprinkled with sugar, and bread and dripping, with cups of very strong tea, full of sugar. ‘Sugar is food.’ Here were the results, these pallid, undersized men. Some were being discarded because they had rickets, many sent to the dentist because of rotting teeth.

Plans were made for another visit to Donald’s, but the summons came first. The war was boiling up while people still talked pacifism, it heated debates and the contents of the News, it seethed in people’s veins and in their minds, and it ejected James and Donald out from ordinary life into camp.

James spread his uniform on his bed, and fitted bits of it to himself. His room, usually a quiet, unassertive place, was littered with martial reminders in khaki.

James was a tall, slim young man, quick and alert, everything about him fine and nervy. He had a thin nose, a long curved beautiful mouth, too often made narrow with the tension of determination. His eyes were long, a luminous blue, and his hair was a pale shining brown. His brows were delicate, glistening. He had about him the sleekness of a healthy animal. But when he at last had got the uniform on himself, he was made dull and awkward. He looked at himself in the long mirror on the landing and thought that the girl at the Socialists for Justice Summer School who had said, ‘But you’re lovely, you’re like a film star,’ would not say that to him now. He went downstairs, saw his mother sitting under the lamp, with a magazine, the radio jiggling dance music. She glanced up, and her hand flew to her mouth and she said in a gasp, ‘Oh, no.’ Then she stood up, all apology, and said, ‘Darling, you look very nice, it was the shock, that’s all.’ And she tried to embrace this soldier, but the thickness of the cloth he was inside absorbed the embrace, negated it.

His neck was already being chafed and his boots were too large. They were blocks on his feet. She said she would try to soften them, and she warmed them in the steam from the kettle, and rubbed fat into them, while he stood in his socks, his long feet curled towards each other like creatures trying to escape their fate. She warmed and rubbed for an hour or more, and he tried the boots on and said they were better. His feet were narrow, that was the trouble.

Next day he put the uniform on ‘for the duration’, joking with the new phrase that made people who used it feel full of fortitude and modest courage.

‘But perhaps there won’t be a war,’ said his mother.

‘Yes, perhaps it’ll all come to nothing.’

His father said goodbye, barking at him that he mustn’t believe them if they said it would be over by Christmas. ‘They’re full of their own nonsense.’ Meaning? The War Office? The Government? His eyes were mad with the anguish of the old war.

‘Bye, Dad,’ said James, gently, and went to the gate and turned to see the parents standing together, his mother’s arm through the old soldier’s, patting it. Like a postcard, he thought, defiantly refusing pathos. ‘Off to War.’ He was thinking, as he had done pretty often during the last year of ferment and discovery that it would have been better if his dad had been killed in the Trenches. Well, wouldn’t it? What a misery his life had been … wouldn’t he himself say so? But at least his mother had got a husband, which was more than could be said for many women. No one can imagine themselves not born. With his father dead in the last war, then James would not be marching along the pavement in his painful boots. His derisive mind was commenting, Cannon fodder for the next war. Funny how many phrases out of stock he had used all his life, but never thought about them.

He met Donald at the train and they travelled together in a carriage full of young men in new uniforms, and then in two buses, soldiers with civilians, whose faces told them they were now in a category apart. Feared? Disliked? Pitied? Wary faces, and some eyes reminded James of his fathers. Twenty years: some of these people had been through the last war. Then they were at the gates of a camp where a couple of corporals stood, to wave them on. The youngsters walked in ones and twos, straggling along to a large hut, where they gave their names, and new numbers, and were directed again through lines of Nissen huts, set out as regularly as the squares on a chess board. At a junction in lanes between huts, Donald had to go in one direction and he in another. This was a blow to James, but he knew not so much to Donald, who went off with a bunch of young men he had never seen before as if they were all old friends. It seemed that the alphabet was dividing them, ‘An R and an E – never the twain shall meet,’ James tried to jest. He went alone to a hut that would hold twenty men. Ten beds on one side and ten on the other, with a kind of cubicle or cubby-hole for the supervising corporal. Like school. The young men were moving about, standing about, constantly looking around, like animals in a new place who do not yet know from what quarter danger will come. Corporal Jones was giving them time to settle in, with only mild instructions about kit and the proper maintenance of their bunks, when a sergeant arrived and behaved exactly as expected, shouting directions at them which might just as well have been given in an ordinary voice. Then supper, in a big shed: too large to be called a hut. The first shift, a couple of hundred young men, the food not to their liking, or too much of it for anxious stomachs: a lot was left on the plates, and a sergeant, standing with his hands on his hips, yelled at them that he would personally see to it that soon they would be so hungry they’d not be leaving anything on their plates.

In the hut twenty young men tried to combat the dismay of unfamiliarity, their equipment and clothes all over the place, while the corporal threatened them with the imminent appearance of the sergeant.

The youths were complaining they were not used to sleeping so early, when the sergeant arrived to say he would overlook their crimes tonight, but from now on if he saw such a scene as this they’d all be for the high jump. That was his first message to them: the second was that they were not so much as to think about asking for sleeping pills if they slept badly, because it would be his happy duty to see to it that they would be so tired from this day on they would sleep as their heads hit their pillows.

All this was as expected, for most of these young men had fathers or relatives from the last war, who had instructed them in the ways of the army. ‘Their bark is worse than their bite,’ most of them had heard.

Now the corporal retired to his kennel and the men talked in low voices, grumbling about the hard bunks and pillows, and James knew that, never mind about the school of life, the school of school was turning out to be a blessing. One youth, Private Jenkins, said that anything would be a picnic after boarding school: in this way James located the other person in his hut who might turn out to be officer material. They took each others measure in some facetious remarks, and the silence that followed told James that this scene might be put into a lecture on Class Structure. Most of these young men could never have dreamed of the amenities of boarding school. ‘Nice work if you can get it,’ summed up the youth, Paul Bryant, in the bunk next to James, but without hostility. It turned out that James and Private Jenkins had little to say to each other: whereas this Paul, whose father delivered coal to the cellars of Sheffield, became his friend.

Next day the men from this hut and four others, one hundred of them, met in a building that had been a village hall and took lessons in equipment and how to look after it. From the windows they saw the spreading camp, whose severity of regularity nevertheless gave an impression of the improvised, the impermanent. It was raining so hard in gleaming rods that water was jumping up white and frothy to knee height: the knees of a platoon marching through it on their way to somewhere. All that day instruction went on, and when James confessed his boots hurt, hardening himself for blows of contempt from the sergeant’s tongue, he was ready to hear that he had better get the right fucking boots this time because he wasn’t going to hear any fucking excuses about sore feet tomorrow, when drilling would begin.

The equipment corporal took trouble over him, lifting down from shelves boots and more boots, saying, ‘You’d better get your feet right, because if feet are not right then nothing is.’ James’s feet were difficult, all the boots were too wide. He was going to have to wear two pairs of socks. He felt like a penguin he had watched walking with its feet apart along the edge of a pool, as if its crotch were sore, as his was. Everywhere the thick uniform rubbed and chafed.

Then the drilling began, two platoons from this hut, and the young men were made one because of the intensity of their exhaustion, their anger against the sergeant; and James’s discomfort in his uniform and his unhappy feet became absorbed into a general torment. But, deeper than that, he was sustained by a pride that he was sticking it out. As were they all.

Ten weeks. He drilled with his platoon, then with the company. He ran at straw sacks representing human beings with his bayonet, and came to know his equipment so well his rifle was – as the sergeant told them it would be – his best friend. All this, while a quietly derisive private commentary ran in his head, which he could not share, because it was in the language of his education, and he could not match the half-inarticulate communications of his fellow soldiers, all obscenities and the ritualised angers of the common soldier.

Twice he offended, once by not cleaning his boots properly, and once by not standing quickly enough to attention, which crimes he expiated by peeling potatoes for a day, and doing guard duty at night.

Towards the end of this endurance test his knee played up, and it was strapped tight, like a mummy’s. A bloody ligament was not going to get in the way of Sergeant Baxter’s intention to turn him into a soldier. And so they emerged, a camp full of young men, several hundreds of them, licked into shape, made men of, made one, and they were informed they were off to another camp, west, while their training camp accepted another batch of recruits whom James’s lot looked on with compassion and ritualised jeering for form’s sake. ‘They don’t know what they’re in for, poor sods,’ etc, while they were marched off to buses and trains.

Before that there was a weekend leave at home, which James hated. He knew his father did, and suspected his mother did too. He tried to imagine what it could be like, seeing your precious young that you’ve fussed over for twenty odd years sent off to war as cannon fodder; but like many thoughts about his mother, he could not persist with them. They did not fall into the category of the mockeries that accompanied his days and nights at the way things were managed, the jeers at Authority – the soldier’s necessary offset to obedience. His mother’s life – oh, no, he didn’t want to think about it. He saw her on those evenings at home, sitting under the lamp, the radio jiggling or crooning away at her elbow, knitting a sweater. For him, he wouldn’t be surprised. Her eyes were lowered to her work: she didn’t knit automatically, as some women do, their hands apparently able to read patterns by themselves while their owners chat or even read. Or perhaps his mother kept her eyes hidden so people couldn’t see what she was thinking. What thoughts? And she looked defenceless, sitting there alone, her husband in the pub with his war pals, waiting up for him. It made James angry, but angry with what? This was not like being angry at the army or the sergeant. For twenty years his mother had sat there under the lamp knitting, alone. Then his father would come in, smelling of beer, go and wash his face and brush his teeth, because she hated the smell, and the two went off to bed. Being angry with his father was hardly the point. But he could have taken a bayonet and stuck it into someone – who? Gone shouting about the streets, No, no, no, no.

Instead he kissed his mother goodbye, gave his father’s obdurate shoulder a friendly and filial clout, and went off to the West Country.

There, several hundred young men exercised and drilled, but not as obsessively as in the first camp. It was boring. In between the drills and exercises he lay on his bed and read poetry, and so did Paul Bryant. He had become for Paul what Donald had been for him. This man, who had left school at fourteen, took to poetry as James had done. He had more difficulty, though: long words were a problem. But James relived his own final intoxications with words when he saw Paul Bryant’s eyes shine, thanking him for the loan of a volume.

‘I like this one,’ he would say. ‘I do like this one …’ What the coalman’s son who had scarcely been out of a town liked was poems about the country.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough

or

I went out to the hazel wood
Because afire was in my head …

‘Have you got any more like that?’ he would ask, shy, but determined, in a way that reminded James of his younger self, of a couple of years back.

They and a few others were luckier than the majority, who were bored, bored. There was nothing to amuse them. Not enough girls, and beer ran out in the pubs, when there were evening passes. Bored and frustrated young men, hundreds of them, but then began the war, which at first dawdled and delayed, but at last there was the first invasion of France, and off they went, to end on the beaches of Dunkirk. James missed it all. His knee had swelled up and he was in hospital, having it drained.

Of his platoon five were killed and two wounded. His platoon was merged with another, similarly diminished. His unit – his family – gone. And Paul, his friend, was in hospital with a head wound. James heard that Donald was wounded while in a boat coming back from Dunkirk. He got weekend leave to visit Donald, whose head was bandaged, and so was his arm. He looked pretty bad, but before James had even entered the ward the nurses told him that Donald was the life and soul of the place. ‘He keeps us all cheerful.’ People came in to Donald’s room to joke, to have a laugh, and a youth was there when James arrived, and was there when he took his leave, sitting on a visitor’s chair watching Donald, bemused with admiration. James thought: that was me. Donald needs his acolyte, he needs someone to educate, well, fair enough.

He stayed as long as visiting hours permitted, watching his younger self, and admiring Donald, to whom he owed everything – so he reflected, while admitting that probably Donald never thought of him at all. But as James left, Donald did give him books and pamphlets.

The Battle of Britain began, Churchill made his stirring speeches, but things were not much improved in the camps of the West Country: the fighting was going on in the skies further over towards Europe. James could have gone into the airforce. Why hadn’t he? It was because his father had been a soldier, and it hadn’t occurred to him. If it had, he would probably be dead by now, or would be soon. Those fliers in the RAF were his age. By now he would have bought it over the sea, and been lost in the drink; he might have pranged over land and burned in a pyre of flesh and Spitfire. The RAF slang was now pervading language: a form of homage to dead heroes.

Because his father had been a soldier, he had become one. Because his father had not been an officer, he had refused to go to Andover to take the War Office Selection Board examination to find out if he was officer material. He had not wanted to leave his platoon, his mates, particularly Paul. It occurred to him that he must have been lonely, to feel that if he left his platoon he would be leaving his family.

James’s company, much changed from since before Dunkirk, heard a rumour they were to be sent off out of Britain into action, and home leave was announced and then cancelled. Instead of North Africa – not that they knew then North Africa was where the fighting was to be – they were despatched to a camp in Northumberland. The trouble was, too many men had been called up. Not knowing how the war was going to shape ‘They’ had overdone it. Hundreds of thousands of young men were in camps ready for action. The sergeants and corporals shouted that they didn’t know their luck: they could have been sent down coal mines. Would they have liked that better, perhaps? Had they fancied a career at the coalface? Well, then, count your blessings. Boredom. They were so bored that some believed they were ill. Boredom in some undefined and undiagnosed way undermines, slows minds, and skews thinking. Rumours, even the most stupid, flourish like newly evolved viruses.

Concert parties came to cheer them up. Vera Lynn’s voice solaced them from the radios in every hut. An Education Officer organised all kinds of useful lectures and everybody went because it was something to do. Again, there wasn’t much for them in the local town, when they were issued passes. In the half-a-dozen pubs, the beer was always running out. The cafés offered dubious sausages and scrambled eggs made out of dried egg from America. Some food was better, because of vegetables and fruit from the local towns: the countryside was close here. Paul would have liked that, but he had been posted to another company. Meat and eggs went to London, where rich people danced and ate in restaurants in which rationing was unknown. So they all believed. There were few girls. James’s first sexual experience was standing up with a landgirl against a wall in an alley. He hated it, the girl and himself, but this nasty little event made him dream more than ever of the real girl, his girl, who was waiting for him. He silenced his ever-ready mocking voice when it threatened his dreams of tenderness, and of a love that could not be anything like his parents’. Nor like the noisy combative marriage of Donald’s parents. No, like every soldier in that great camp of hungry young men, his girl was going to be different.

James had sometimes drunk a beer with his father or a sherry with his mother, but now he tried to drink to get drunk, and hated that too. ‘Not everyone is cut out to be a soldier,’ jeered his inner interlocutor, while he observed his mates drinking themselves sodden, and taking anything they could get from the too few girls.

There was a pleasant interruption in the boredom. From the camp, soldiers who volunteered went to the local farms to help with farm work at harvest time. James always volunteered and wondered if his destiny was to be a farmer. He actually managed a few hours’ lovemaking with a farmer’s daughter who was sighing with remorse all the time because her fiancé was in North Africa, fighting. ‘I love him, I do!’ The harvest ended. Germany invaded Russia and Japan attacked the States. Things were looking up, so the pundits said, though one could be excused for thinking they were at their worst.

‘You’re being saved for the best,’ jested the sergeants, more matey now, perhaps because they were as bored as their charges. James spent any spare hour on his bed reading. He read the books Donald had given him, the usual mix of poetry and real literature with pamphlets. ‘The Second Front – Now!’ ‘Let India Go!’ Through these he merely leafed, feeling guilty, his mind freezing with boredom, but livening to

When our two souls have left this mortal clay,
And seeking mine, you think that mine is lost –
Look for me first in that Elysian glade …

Beautiful, bleak Northumberland: perhaps this would be their final resting place, perhaps they would die here forgotten by humanity and the War Office. Why should they ever leave it, if they hadn’t yet? Such are the slowed mad thoughts of people who have had to be patient too long.

And then, for no apparent reason, it was over. They all believed they were off to yet another camp, because of the law that what is seems as if it must always be. Their regiment had been forgotten. ‘Someone had blundered,’ is the soldier’s perennial thought.

But no, they were going to India. Not that they were told it was India: careless talk costs lives, but they could figure it out. The Japs were coming closer to India, and the Indian army was set to fight them. Anything, anywhere, just get us out of this place, waiting, drilling for hours every day to keep fit.

James put his things in his kitbag, with his precious books of poetry. He knew that if he hadn’t had poetry and books during the last months – no, years, now – he would have found himself in the bin. And he had Donald to thank for it, thank for everything. That summer, just before the war, it shone there in his memory, as strong a dream as his dreams for a future of love and peace, peace and love. He thought, ‘After the war, it will be like that.’ Meaning, like the happy months of summer schools, friendly debates, unbitter argument, the frank and fair exchange, all hope and excitement and promise. What was this war for, if not to create that, a world of generous friendship and comradeship and generous girls, among whom would be his girl, the one girl.

He went to say goodbye to his parents. His father asked if he had had the chance of being an officer, and he replied yes, but he hadn’t wanted it. ‘Then more fool, you,’ said his father. His mother, weeping, told him to take care of himself.

The great ship in its camouflage dress, designed to make it look from a distance like a blur or a cloud or perhaps a school of flying fishes, at any rate something ephemeral, now seemed solid, sinister, even furtive, standing there in the dock, and those who had known it as a luxury ship of the famous Union-Castle Line, in peacetime always decked in bright holiday colours, would not now have owned it. ‘That the Bristol Castle!’

Five thousand soldiers, with their attendant officers crammed the dockside and backed up into the surrounding streets, waiting to board. Of these it is safe to say the majority had scarcely seen the sea, except perhaps for a day’s outing (the Thirties did not run much to holidays for the poor) nor had they seen ships and shipping. Luxury ships had not occupied their imaginations as even remote possibilities for themselves, seen only on newsreels or as headlines in newspapers. ‘The Queen Mary arrived in New York this morning, bands playing to welcome the Duke of …’ a film star … an opera singer … a boxer.

Five thousand soldiers and their officers would fit into a space designed for 780 passengers and crew, and they were embarking on a seven-thousand-mile journey to Cape Town and then on, thousands of miles, to – where else? – India.

The Bristol Castle had no name now, just as their destinations had none.

She stood in her tiers, or decks, a neat symbol of the society they were defending, the two top layers, the best, where their officers would go, with the ship’s officers, then down, down, down, deck after deck, until a mass of soldiers would fill the worst parts of the ship. Just like the world, if it comes to that – to be tedious.

Up the gangways they stepped, while their sergeants and corporals stood above, watching, barking directions, which they had been given by the ship’s officers, for they knew as little about the geography of a ship as their charges.

James Reid was at the tail end of the embarking, with his platoon, their corporal beside them, as dismayed as they were. Corporal ‘Nobby’ Clark (soldiers called Clark are always Nobby), eyes on the watch for error, a fleshy man often in a perspiration with anxiety, was one of those who find organisation difficult, and have to overdo it. His men put up with him: they had had plenty of time for patience in those months and months of waiting. Beside James was Rupert Fitch, a farmer’s son from Kent. He was a lean flat-bodied young man, a horseman, with bold fine features, lightly freckled, and pale hair already receding from a high forehead. James, still dreaming sometimes of perhaps finding himself (how?) a farmer, felt towards Rupert something of the wistful admiration that Paul Bryant had felt for himself, and he, long ago (three years), for Donald. Rupert Fitch never had to be told the why or how of anything: it was as if the army was an extension of his young life planting and reaping. ‘Permission to speak, Corporal,’ he would say to a corporal or a sergeant as an equal, familiar – at ease. ‘Wouldn’t it be better, Sergeant, if we …’ took that direction, instead of the one ordered; suggested to Supplies that such and such a dubbin – for boots – would be better than what they had. Certainly officer material, but like James, he had refused. ‘Not my style,’ he had said. On the farm he had mucked in with the men, and that was what he liked.

A tall stooping dark youth, with hot defensive eyes and a way of clenching his fists like a boxer expecting attack, was Harold Murray, who worked in his father’s shop, selling men’s cut-price clothes. Johnnie Payne sold vegetables with his father from a stall in Bermondsey. He had been taking lessons from James in bookkeeping, which would come in useful after the war. These five men knew each other well, but the other five of B Platoon were new, moved in some reshuffle ordained from above that the soldiers could see no reason for.

Corporal Clark at last shouted the order to march, to his platoon, and on to the ship they went, low down, E Deck, just above the water line. Then down a ladder, and they were in their quarters, a space that had a table wedged between bulkheads, and a cupboard with china, and another where their hammocks were. The space not filled with the table accommodated the ten of them standing up with a few inches between them, as it would when they would be lying down horizontal in their hammocks. Their gear piled up against a wall seemed to take half of what room there was. ‘Up on deck’ came the order, and B Platoon, with hundreds, thousands of men, watched England slide away, white cliffs and all, while the gulls squawked around the ship. Waves were already sending up spray. The light was going. An obscured sunset stained a brownish sky red. On E Deck a minute flicker of light showed the steps going down. And down they went again, into stuffy darkness smelling of paint and new wood. Dark. In peacetime this ship blazed light as it moved, gilding and silvering the sea. Once these ships had taken a month for a voyage, but the time shortened to three weeks, and then the aim of two weeks was in sight – but why not dawdle, take your time, in a ship designed for pleasure? Now no light was supposed to show, the ship was blacked out, like the homes in England, like England, and down in their quarters B Platoon took in the fact that there was a single dull yellow bulb.

The holds were stocked with the food of wartime England, worse than they had been eating in camp. Supper was bread and a stew, mostly potatoes. Already the strong tea was slopping about in their mugs, which were sliding despite the little ledges designed to keep them from sliding. Not one of these men had ever suffered seasickness, and now they wondered if they had caught something, and Johnnie Payne said he wanted to get his head down. ‘You’re queasy,’ said Corporal Clark, who wasn’t feeling too good himself. ‘Better sling your hammocks.’ Jokes and jollying traditionally accompany the first time anyone slings a hammock, but the ship was beginning to swing. The lavatories, they already knew, were insufficient: queues were forming. Corporal Clark, who had never known defiance from his men, now, having told them to get into their hammocks, saw them bolting up to the deck, to lean over the rail. Since they were there, he joined them. All along the railings were men being sick.

Up here with the wind on them they felt better, but they were staring out into the dark unknown. They could hear the waves hissing but see nothing. They knew how much danger they were in. This was not a convoy, which has to travel at the pace of the slowest vessel. Troopships, full of precious soldiers, enormous, must dominate the convoy, presenting themselves as targets. This ship was travelling with two destroyers to guard it from U-boats, but it was a long way to Cape Town, and they must stop at Freetown to refuel and restock, and submarines haunted both ports, and roamed about the Atlantic. Ships had been sunk recently. All this they knew. No one had told them, no one could have told them, yet they all knew. And to stand here at the dark rail, on a dark deck, looking into blackness – no, better downstairs, better below deck, and up and down the tiers of that enormous edifice men were making that decision: below deck was the illusion of safety, with the walls of the ship around them.

So they were thinking, that first night.

To sleep in a hammock takes practice. It was not a comfortable night. On the table where they would have their meals stood basins where, having tumbled out of their hammocks again, some were being sick; they scrambled back into hammocks, falling, cursing, bruising themselves.

The morning was grey and cold; they were in the Bay of Biscay. Corporal Clark, fussy with worry and indecision, and because he was feeling sick, told them to have breakfast. He did not know if this was the right thing: the sergeants were on the deck above, with some of the lieutenants, and he knew, having gone up to see, that many were in their bunks.

James and the farmer’s son ate some porridge and wished they hadn’t.

Orders came for attendance on deck, for inspection, but Corporal Clark went up again to the sergeants. Most were ill, but Sergeant Perkins, feeling fine, came down, and saw that the men were not up to it.

The Bay of Biscay was doing its worst. From top to bottom of the great ship, the men were ill, and the smell anywhere below decks, or in the cabins, was foul.

In their hammocks the constant swaying, so bad that the hammock of one man knocking another could set off the five in that row, was unendurable. Out of their hammocks, trying to sit at the table, there was no relief. Up on deck, surrounded by a grey tumult of water, was as bad. By the evening of the second day it was evident this was a ship of the sick, except for a minority who were apparently immune, and who volunteered for mess duty, where they could eat as much as they liked, but were ordered for cleaning duty, which meant swabbing fouled cabins and fouler decks.

Below the layer where B Platoon was, which they had felt must be the ultimate hell-hole, was a deeper layer of crammed humanity. When the ship had been fitted to take troops, attempts had been made at ventilating these depths, but in those commodious spaces, which had once housed the luggage of the rich, or foodstuffs designed for peacetime menus, the air was bad, and everyone was sick down there. On the third night, men on E Deck heard screaming from below them: this was how they became aware they were not the lowest depths of suffering. Claustrophobia, they knew at once; for they themselves were in danger of breaking and screaming. It was not only the press of the ship’s walls about them, but knowing how the great dark outside went on to a horizon they knew must be there, but could not see: no moon, no stars, thick cloud, dark above and dark below.

On the fourth night, ignoring the corporal, who followed them, not even expostulating, they were on deck, where at least the air blew cold. They lay along the walls of a deck, keeping their eyes shut, and endured. Rupert Fitch, the farmer’s son, was better off than most. He sat with his back against a wall, his head on his knees, and hummed dance tunes and hymns. The great ship ploughed on into the dark, with a deep steady swaying motion. In the morning nothing had changed, but the deck was crowded with men, some from the lower depths. Corporal Clark, the shepherd of B Platoon, was lying like them, rolling a little as the ship did, face down, head on his arms.

There came tripping down the companionway Sergeant ‘Ginger’ Perkins, a short compact-bodied man, with bristly carroty hair, and a belligerent stance cultivated for his role. He might have intended to impose order on a shocking scene, but while he did not suffer himself, he had spent days now surrounded by the suffering. His nature was such that his impulse had to be a bellow of ‘Pull yourselves together!’ but he was silent. Some of the men were in pools of vomit, and diarrhoea had made its appearance.

‘Corporal Clark!’ he shouted, and the corporal tried to sit up, but the change of position made him retch. This sergeant was famed for his strictness. ‘Hard but just’, was what he aimed at, but the formula did not apply today. He went down into B Platoon’s sleeping quarters – the nearest. Crockery from the cupboard was lying smashed in the vomit on the floor. The smell was horrible. He stood hesitating: his responsibilities were on E Deck, were here; he had no charges in the ship’s depths. But up on D Deck, where the sergeants had their being, reports had arrived about what was going on in the ship’s dark bowels. The corporals, those who were still functioning, had come up to say something should be done. Sergeant Perkins decided to take a look for himself. Down several ladders he tripped, and stood in a large space, so dimly lit he couldn’t see the further walls, and heard moans coming from some hammocks, though most were empty: the sufferers had taken themselves up to D Deck. Against orders! Against anything permissable! This was pure anarchy, and he felt licensed to make a decision. He himself would go up to C Deck and tell any officer on his feet and responsible that if anarchy was to end, then orders should go forth that the wretches still down there in that stinking dark must go up into the air.

Sergeant Perkins returned to E Deck and his level of duty: a hundred men, but who could say which of these poor wretches lying everywhere on deck, most face down, heads in their arms, were his? He turned his back on the scene and stood at the rails, and regarded the heaving grey sea. Sergeant Perkins had paddled in rock pools as a child, taken a crab in his pail to the boarding house, been told by his father to go and put it back. That had been his sea. As a child he had not taken in the desolation of the ocean’s vastness, not seen much more than a pool in rocks, a beach where waves ran in over his feet while he jumped and screamed with laughter. Now he looked out, hardly seeing where the sea ended and the sky began, and he thought of the submarines somewhere down there, and he was afraid. A peacetime sergeant, he had not before this voyage had occasion to feel fear.

He turned, slowly, giving thanks for sound stomach muscles – under strain, today – and announced to anyone capable of listening that the weather would improve. He had heard that it would from an officer descending to D Deck from C Deck. ‘It can’t go on like this,’ he mused, in his private voice, which was an all-purpose cockney, modified or strengthened according to the person he was speaking to. In his sergeant’s voice he said, ‘Corporal, when you’re feeling better, report to me.’ No reply. Along the deck one of the bodies in a knot of them – A Platoon, he believed – was moaning, ‘God, God, God.’

‘God is about it,’ thought Sergeant Perkins, smartly ascending the ladder to D Deck, and then up again to C Deck where, having asked permission to speak, he said that what was going on in the bottom of the ship was a crying shame. ‘We’d be prosecuted if we kept animals in those conditions, sir.’

When badly seasick, as most of us may remember, death seems preferable to even another ten minutes of this misery – death even by U-boat, some of these men might have agreed. And then, just as Sergeant Perkins had promised, the sea was calm, and men were slowly coming to themselves, sitting up, trying to stand, staggering to the rails and seeing the sea properly, possibly for the first time since they embarked. It was now a quiet grey-silk sea, flecked occasionally with white, and under a blue sky frilled with white cloud.

Corporal Clark sat up. Sergeant Perkins appeared; a squad detailed to restore order was hosing down the decks, and if soldiers’ legs were in the way, that was too bad.

Water was certainly what they needed. They and their uniforms were filthy. Off with their clothes, and lines of naked men moved up to where they were issued with soap that would lather in sea water, were told to put on their hot weather uniforms, and deposit their dirty ones in a heap to be washed. Soon piles, each many yards high, rose on the deck, and another squad was bearing them off, to be washed.

On every deck lines of barbers – which is what they had been in civvy street – stood behind chairs where the men came to be shaved and have their hair trimmed.

On decks newly scrubbed men who a few hours ago could hardly sit up, were put through their drills by sergeants who, most of them, had been as sick. Well, almost: their ventilation was better. Then, back to their quarters which had been hosed, swabbed, and now smelled of soap. There was food. Tender stomachs sulked at the hunks of bread, margarine-smeared, the stew, the rice pudding. James ate a little; the farmer’s son more; no one did well. They were all tired.

Up on the higher decks similar ablutions and tidyings went on. The highest deck had a swimming pool, and there the officers – so they knew, Sergeant Perkins had told them – in relays of twenty were in the water – salt – and then out at once to let in the next twenty.

The Captain and the senior officers went to bed every night fully dressed, with their boots ready beside them.

The sergeants and some lieutenants were in cabins designed for two but fitted for eight, four bunks on each side.

Some senior officers were four or six in cabins meant for two. But of course the cabins up there were bigger.

‘And before you say it I’ll say it for you,’ said Sergeant Perkins. ‘Life’s a bugger. But no one on this ship is on a luxury cruise. Right? Right. Now, form fours.’

Well out of the Bay of Biscay, they were on their way to Freetown, that ancient slave-trading port, now prospering out of the ships that went to refuel, restock. But Rupert Fitch told James they were not heading south, but west. ‘Look at the sun.’ Other farmers’ boys were telling town boys ‘Look at the sun.’ This spread unease throughout the ship. Were they not going to Cape Town, then? Or Freetown?

And then, it was hot. Men who had known only English summers, with their rare really hot days, were sweating and ill with heat. Not enough shade on E Deck for the hundreds of men, lying, sitting, or even standing, and there were already cases of sunstroke. Sergeant ‘Ginger’ Perkins, with his fair skin, was scarlet when he addressed them, his neck and arms mottled with heat rash, ‘Too hot to drill, lads. Just take it easy. And don’t get carried away with your water ration – it’s running short.’

Fresh water, short; but all that sea water lapping and rippling down there. A few men, ignorant, tempted, let down their mess tins and brought up sea water, and while admonished by Corporal Clark, drank. They were sick. The staterooms set aside for sick rooms were filling. It was known that some of the officers on the second level of the ship, B Deck, had had to double up again.

When the men changed their uniforms for those washed in sea water, they found that their sweat, enhanced by the salt in the cloth, stung, and the stuff of their shorts and shirts chafed them.

The ship was still going west. Rupert Fitch stood at the rail. He watched how the sun moved, as he had done all his life, how its path on the glittering sea changed, and said that now they were headed south-west.

It was too hot to eat. They wanted only to drink, but a second warning came from above, about using restraint until they reached port.

‘Cheer up, lads,’ said Sergeant Perkins. ‘There’ll be water a-plenty in Freetown. And fruit. There’ll be fruit. We could do with a bit of that, we’ll be eating like kings. What do you say?’

They were saying very little.

Awnings were fitted up all along E Deck and there was a thin hot shade, where men with sun-reddened skins sat or lay dreaming of water gushing from taps, of pools, ponds, streams, rivers; looking, when the dazzle allowed, with eyes used to gentler light, on to the ocean that was calm and seemed to oil and slide, beaten flat by the sun. Shoals of porpoises and dolphins could have entertained them were they not so hot and thinking of U-boats. Flying fishes leaped, and hit the sides of the ship and slid back down into the sea, dead or not, or a high-flier assisted by a breeze landed on the deck among the men, who threw it back.

Harold Murray, the cut-price clothes salesman, rose from the deck, and stalked unsteadily to the ladder going up. He climbed, while Corporal Clark, shouting at him, clambered after him; then another ladder, while the stout man (not quite so stout now) puffed and strained to keep up. Harold Murray reached B Deck, where he saluted a surprised Commander Birch, and said politely, ‘I’m fed up, I am. I’ve ’ad it up to ’ere. I’m going ’ome.’ He was taken to join the madmen.

Every day the men lined up for their salt-water douches, which now fell stinging on reddened skins, some of which were breaking into blisters. Newly shaved faces burned.

The heavy food, bowls of stew, reconstituted soup, scrambled eggs from dried egg powder, the milk puddings, was hardly touched, at mealtime after mealtime.

James sat with his back to the wall of the ship, Rupert Fitch beside him, looked at the sea and believed that each porpoise or dolphin was a U-boat. Every man on the ship well enough stared at the sea and saw U-boats. In those days, submarines had to come up into the air: now they may circle the globe with their load of weapons and never surface. Then … ‘Look,’ a man would shout, ‘look there – a periscope, sir.’ ‘No, that’s a fish.’ Fish there were, the ship was moving through a sea of fish. The ship spewed out its rubbish and the unconsumed food, and the waters behind rioted with competing fish of all sizes, while above seabirds screamed and squawked and mewed, diving to snatch booty from the leaping and mouthing fish. A spectacle. All the decks at the stern were crowded with men well enough to enjoy it, mostly the ship’s officers, whose apparent immunity to the sufferings by sun and sea was to the men an affront.

The destroyers that were protecting them seemed to be everywhere, in a different position every time they looked, in front, behind, alongside, their guns slanting down, their searchlights ready to switch on if a submarine were spotted. On their own ship there were guns on the top deck, and anti-submarine guns and waiting searchlights.

Rupert Fitch said they were going east now; they were back on course for Freetown. And for danger, for subs lurked at the entrances to Freetown harbour. James sat with his eyes closed, imagining how the U-boats were moving about down there. He was thinking, If they get us now, if we sink, if I die, then I’ll not have found my girl, the one meant for me. I’ll never have known real love. He remembered the farmer’s daughter in Northumberland and tried to persuade himself that had been love, and that she was dreaming of him. But, if the U-boat got them, it was love that would be extinguished. His love. ‘Do you have a girl?’ he asked Rupert Fitch, who replied, yes, he was engaged to marry, and showed photographs of his girl: he knew she would wait for him.

Then, at last, the ship that was blistering with heat, its camouflage paint fading, was sliding towards Freetown, and every soul on board listened for the thud of a torpedo. But they made it, they got safely in. The soldiers were not granted shore leave but they watched batches of officers going ashore, and then containers of food, and above all, of water, coming aboard, borne by bare-footed blacks in clothes not far off rags. Water. Inexhaustible water from the taps and in barrels standing on the deck. They drank, could not stop drinking, and some, trying not to be seen, poured this fresh water over their heads, or their sore and blistering bodies, and, particularly, hot and inflamed crotches that did not like sea water at all. Two days in Freetown. The food was at once lighter, better, with chicken and fish; and fruit arrived with every meal. They ate this fruit they had not heard of, many of them, let alone seen, as if they had been craving pawpaws and pineapples and melons and plantains, and not pears and apples. Some bad stomachs resulted.

And now they would run the gauntlet again: they were leaving Freetown and would be on their last leg, the thousands of miles still to go, to Cape Town.

The former Bristol Castle, in her coat of blights and blotches, slid out with a destroyer in front and one behind. Now the soldiers could see the crowds of white-clad men – ‘They’re navy types, they’re used to it,’ – on the decks under the guns. Salutes back and forth, and melancholy hoots of greeting. Then the destroyers were on either side. Not to anyone’s surprise, the ship was going west again. This was to fool the U-boats who would expect them on a southerly route. ‘But,’ said the soldiers, ‘wouldn’t they expect a double bluff – us going south?’ ‘There are probably U-boats in both sea lanes.’ If you could call this tossing and tumbling grey-blue waste of water that was empty in front of them, all the way to South America, with rapidly-retreating Africa at their backs, something able to accommodate even the idea of sea ways, sea paths, sea lanes, routes.

So they jested, these soldiers, up and down the ship, in their many voices and accents, staring out, ready to spot a periscope, the emerging dark shape of a U-boat, the dark running shape of a torpedo coming towards them. They joked because the plenitudes and safety of Freetown were still in them, but it was hot, it was so very hot, and soon they were in the same state as before, filling the decks that were sun-lanced under awnings that went up everywhere, reed matting taken aboard at Freetown. And then it was night, their saviour. Through the long angry hot hours they thought of the night to come, moonlit or dark, it was the same to them, just the beneficent cool of it. Or rather, cooler, not the chill they longed for, but at least not the misery of the day. They still went west. The soldiers felt better going south, their proper direction, faster, they would get there sooner. Heading west it was into the unknown, to Rio de Janeiro, was it? Buenos Aires? They tried to joke, but then joking was over, because the sea rose up again, not heaving and rolling but rearing in explosions of foam, battering the ship’s sides. At once Rupert Fitch succumbed. His fair skin, well flecked with freckles, disappeared under blisters, and his temperature shot up. He was escorted up to the doctors. James was left lonely, as well as sick and hot. ‘That’s it, I won’t see him again, I suppose.’

No soldiers were left in hell-holds now. They were on deck. The sergeants, those who could stand, Sergeant Perkins among them, had made their way to the top of the ship, found their officers, made urgent requests. A couple of officers came down, saw the deck so crammed with hundreds of men that it was not possible to step between them; the order went forth that a suitable number – it would have to be hundreds, to make the difference – would go up to the deck above, which housed the sergeants and some junior officers. James was one who moved up, with his platoon. There they saw the sergeants’ cramped conditions, eight in the space for two, but they had bunks, at least they could lie on something hard that wasn’t the deck: they didn’t have to fight with hammocks, and they had open portholes.

To preserve proper order, and niceties of the hierarchy, the starboard side was for the sergeants and young officers, port was for Other Ranks. In the mornings port got the sun, in the afternoons, starboard. Not that it made such difference. Still they sailed west, the destroyers moving around them, but hardly visible now because of the waves. And then there was a storm. The soldiers were informed this was a storm, but they could not have said there was a difference between the pounding roughness of before and now. Sergeant Perkins came down to tell them, ‘Cheer up, a ship this size has never been sunk by the weather.’ So that left U-boats.

Hundreds of men lay on the decks, burning up with heat, and heaved, and retched, needing to be sick, but they were not eating. In the mornings they were ordered to their feet, and crowded to the rails, holding on to them and to each other, while a unit of the lucky ones who were not sick hosed down the decks, and they shrank back from the stinging sea water. And at once they lay down or, rather, collapsed.

Water was short again. From this they deduced that it had not been planned that they should take such a long detour west. And that meant they were taking a detour to avoid something. So they were being dogged by a U-boat or by more than one. They were thirsty. Oddly, though it was so hot, some shivered, while they burned: heat stroke, and up they went to the sickbays.

To endure the unendurable, what that needs is to cling to time, which must pass: another hour, another, another, no I can’t, no I won’t, I simply cannot bear it, no one could, the pounding knocking headache, as if a load of dirty water were loose in your skull, the nausea, the aching bones, the stinging skin. Some men bled from raw skins and bursting blisters – up they went. Squads appeared twice a day, to locate the worst sufferers, but the ship was swinging so that they could hardly keep on their feet, but staggered among the men cramming the decks, or held to a rail, trying to see from there who was bad. Bruises and blisters were easy to see, but there were broken bones.

Day after day; night after night. And then they noticed – someone did, and the word went around – that they were going south-east. Long ago – so it seemed – the misery had been absorbed into the hopelessness of the long suffering. Why should this end? If it has gone on as long as this, then it may go on for ever. Going east, were they? Then what was to stop the boat turning again to go west? No, they didn’t trust good news.

It was becoming noticeable that the sun did not strike down so hard and direct. It was not so hot. The storm was past, so they were told, but they still swung and rolled. And then, while they could hardly stand, they were ordered on to their feet. Drilling was out of the question, but they were going to present themselves in Cape Town at least shaved and in clean clothes. The barbers again sat in rows on the lower decks, deep cans of fresh water sloshing between their knees, and they shaved whoever came forward. Some refused: their faces were too raw. There was no man who did not wince as the steel touched burned skin.

The order was that the rationing of fresh water for drinking was over. Clearly, a longer time of dodging about the Atlantic had been envisaged, and the water had been saved for that. Nothing that these men had heard for weeks heartened them more than the ending of water rationing. Yet, only for drinking, mind you, there was not enough for washing themselves, let alone their clothes.

They must put on their clean, salt-water-washed uniforms, and all other clothing must be piled again to be washed in Cape Town. Again the heaps of dirty, sweaty, sick-soaked, urine-soaked uniforms mounted high.

The order came that now the sea was calm – was it? Really! Was this what they called calm! – to eat what they could of a light supper. Fresh eggs taken on at Freetown had mostly succumbed to the storm, but there was chicken and bread, which they tried to eat.

That last night on board, except for those in the sickbays, except for the poor madmen who were being kept doped in what was once the Second Class Writing Room, everyone was on deck, watching for the first sight of land, blessed land, as sailors and sea travellers have done for centuries after a bad voyage, longing for the fair Cape of Good Hope.

It was dangerous, all knew, approaching port, for where else would U-boats be lurking if not here? The two destroyers were everywhere, behind, in front, taking off apparently at random, and back again, and then it was light, and the seas around them were tumbling and running but not heaving up into the monstrous mountains that had seemed ready to engulf the ship. They were ordered to eat breakfast. ‘Get to it, lads,’ ordered Sergeant Perkins who remained solid flesh, unlike his thin and haggard charges. Tea and bread and jam was not what shrunken stomachs wanted.

Back on deck, they saw that a low line of cloud on the horizon marked land: that was Table Mountain they were seeing. So it really was over … no, not yet, the rumour went around that a U-boat was known to be in the area.

Sergeant Perkins stood in front of his hundred men with their corporals, and said to them, ‘Right, lads. It’s over. Time and the hour runs through the roughest day. Yes. Nothing was ever better said than that, eh, lads?’

Of the men there looking at him perhaps two or three knew how to attribute the quotation, but every face showed how the words described what they had been through. As for Sergeant Perkins, he had seen them on a calendar, long ago, and they had so perfectly said what he needed at a bad time in an unsafe adolescence that he had used the philosophy offered to him, and indeed, on many occasions since.

Now, as they watched, he reflated himself with the stuff of command and shouted, ‘Right, that’s it. Playtime over. No more fun and games. Private Payne, your belt’s askew. God, what a load of shirkers. Attention. Now, take your turn behind A Platoon for disembarkation.’

Two young women reclined on deck-chairs on a verandah high on a slope of Table Mountain where they could overlook that part of the sea where the troopship would arrive, today or tomorrow. They were positioned so that the pillars of the stoep did not obstruct their view: ships when they appeared could be mistaken for a mote in the eye, a whale, even a seabird. They knew the troopship was coming because their husbands, both at the base in Simonstown, had told them. They had not been told the name of the ship or its destination. They had not passed on the enticing information. But surely the maids and the men who looked after their gardens would have noticed food arriving, not to mention the wine and the beer?

Both women were hostesses, known for their parties and their largesse. This would not be their first troopship, nor, it was certain, the last. Cape Town, for the period the troops were on leave while the ship was refuelled and restocked with food and clean water, was not itself, was transformed into a city of soldiery in search of food, drink, and girls. Of course black or brown flesh was out of bounds, but this is not to say that the rules were kept.

The women, Daphne Wright and Betty Stubbs, had plans for festive days, at the very least two, with luck four or even five.

Under a tree in the garden the Coloured nanny sat with a pretty child of about eighteen months, who began to grizzle. ‘Okay, bring her to me,’ called Betty, and the nanny, a big brown girl in a pink dress and a white apron, came to deposit the child on her mother’s body, where she lay sprawled, and at once fell asleep. The nanny returned to her place under the tree, where she could watch for when she would next be needed. She began to knit.

Daphne watched the scene from under the hand that shielded her eyes from the glare, and said, ‘I’m getting as broody as hell, Bets.’ She stroked her flat stomach. She was wearing a scarlet skirt and white shirt and with her yellow hair looked like a girl on an advertising poster for a happy holiday.

‘Hell, give me a break, eighteen months is too soon. We’ll start together and keep each other company.’

‘Joe doesn’t want us to start until after the war.’

‘That could be years.’

‘He says he doesn’t want me to be a widow with a kid. I say I’d like something to remember him by.’

Both husbands went off on hush-hush trips to various bits of Africa, and the wives suffered till they got back.

‘Bertie told me that Henry …’ – her husband – ‘had to make a forced landing in the bush last month. They nearly pranged. It was a close thing,’ remarked Betty.

‘Henry didn’t tell you?’ Daphne knew, because her husband had told her, but not knowing if Betty had been told, was careful not to mention it.

‘No, he didn’t. I always say it’s a lot worse, when he doesn’t tell me.’

‘There’s a lot they don’t tell us.’

Betty was stroking her little child’s soft back, exposed by a scrap of white shirt, and Daphne said again, ‘But I am broody, I’m broody as hell. I think I’ll get pregnant and then he’ll have to like it.’

‘Of course he’ll like it.’

They resumed their watch on the innocent-seeming sea, where submarines might be lurking at that moment. No sign of the troopship, not a ship in sight, only the blue plains of the sea.

‘If it’s three nights, we’ll be broke for months,’ said Betty.

‘And if there’s a fourth we’ll run out of food and everything.’

‘We can drive out and see what we can get from the farms.’

‘And the petrol?’

‘I’ve got a little stashed away.’

This exchange, on a comfortable grumbling note, had sent Betty to sleep. She lay, her infant on top of her, her long brown arms, long brown legs, extended, her dark hair loose across her face.

Daphne raised herself on an elbow and looked at the charming scene. Tears were not far off. She did want a baby. She had lost one in a miscarriage and now greeted the regular appearance of her monthlies with a feeling that she was a failure: yet they took precautions, or, rather, Joe did: yet they both wanted a baby.

She thought that Betty was the only person among a pretty large circle of acquaintances she could ‘really’ talk to. They knew everything about each other. This happy state of affairs had begun from the moment she, Daphne, had arrived in Cape Town to marry Joe.

Daphne had been an English girl, in an English country town, when handsome Joe Wright arrived to visit a school friend. He was on leave from Simonstown in South Africa. It was 1937. They had danced all night at the Summer Ball, and he had swept her off her feet. ‘He swept you off your feet.’ Well, he had. ‘Marry me,’ he said, or commanded, and she followed him on the next Union Castle ship to Cape Town. The Stirling Castle.(Perhaps the same ship that they were expecting now.) There was a fancy wedding. Joe was one of an old Cape family. Daphne, with her narrow experience, could have been overwhelmed, but she was not. The girl who arrived in Cape Town was not the Daphne who had embarked. On board were a group of South African girls returning from good times and trips around Europe. At first she had been shocked, and then envious. They were different in style from English girls, free and easy, loud, assertive, and wearing clothes she had at first thought showy. She had overheard one say to another, about herself, ‘She’s English, you know, baby-blue English. Little Miss Muffet.’

Daphne, a blonde, with blue eyes and a pearly complexion, did wear baby blue a lot. ‘It is your colour.’ She wore charming dresses in crêpe de chine with lace collars and little buttons down the front; she wore hats and little white gloves. ‘A lady is known by her gloves.’ Now she knew herself to be insipid and timid.

No sooner had she arrived in Cape Town, than she jettisoned her trousseau and wore strong colours, and her pale gold hair with its little puffs and tendrils became a heavy yellow chignon; her voice loudened and she lost the shy soft ways she had been taught. She bloomed into a Cape Town hostess, gave parties that were written up in the gossip columns and was generally a credit to her husband.

And what did he think about all this? He had fallen for her because of those qualities she had discarded. A refreshing change from the South African girls, he had said, playing with those girlish pale gold wisps, commending her English skin and her rosebud mouth which she now kept slashed with red lipstick. In fact she out-did the South African girls who had despised her; she was more daring than they. Joe protested once or twice during the transformation, ‘Come on Daff! Isn’t that overdoing it a bit?’

Did he mourn that timid girl-bride? But they were good pals, that’s what he told her and everyone. How could he not be proud of her, overtopping the wives of his fellow officers, for dash, style; and, too, she was funny and brave in everything.

Betty, the South African wife of Captain Henry Stubbs, lived in a house similar to this one, next door, was the same age, twenty-four; the two husbands were the same rank: they were Simonstown wives. That they should have ‘known’ each other had been inevitable, but they became friends. Real friends. Only friends. Best friends.

Daphne lay propped on her elbow watching that friend of hers, lovely Betty Stubbs, lost to the world with her infant spread on top of her, both mysterious in sleep, and she thought, feeling cold and frightened, that she had her good pal Joe and her good pal Betty beside her in this alarming continent, but apart from them she was alone, without them she would be adrift. Alone, far from home and with a war on. ‘There’s a war on.’ ‘Don’t forget, there’s a war on.’ Funny how people liked saying that; no one was likely to forget, were they?

If I had a baby I’d have something of my own, she thought, forlorn and vulnerable and as if she were a bit of flotsam washed up at Cape Town all the way from England. A ‘baby-blue’ English girl with a bold front who had learned to enjoy shocking people. Just a little, just enough.

‘I’m in a mood,’ she thought, lying back, but turning her head so she could see the two faces, the woman’s and the babe’s. She did get moods. When she had her first, and wept and shivered, Betty told her she was homesick and the housegirl made her strong coffee and said, ‘Poor medem, you are far from home.’ Yet she thanked her luck daily that she was not in Britain, where they were having such a bad time. Yes, she did miss her mummy and her dada and her little brother but she was now so different from that Daphne who had been a daughter and an elder sister. A young man who had been besotted with her had told her she was like a trembling flower. She had laughed at him, but now she thought, well, trembling flower will do for me today.

‘But I do want a baby, yes, I do, I do,’ and she allowed tears to trickle down and lose themselves in the mass of her chignon. ‘I’m going to talk to Joe again.’ And she, too, fell asleep. When the two young women woke, because the infant had let out a yell, the nanny was bending to take the child, and indicating that a big ship was coming fast towards the shore.

‘There’s the ship, medem,’ said she. ‘So now we can have a nice party.’

As the ship docked, alien in its camouflage, lines of cars were already creeping down the hilly streets towards it. All had been issued with an extra petrol ration, because this cause, giving the British troops a good time, overrode the need to save petrol. Daphne was in her car, and behind her Betty was in hers. Both women were known to the welcoming committees, who trusted them to entertain as many men as hospitality would stretch to. The sad truth was, there were too many men, not enough hostesses, and a lot of women whom normally these Cape Town matrons would not look at were being smiled at today. Somewhere a little band was playing but the bustle and sounds from the ship and the shouting of orders were too much for it.

Joe had telephoned Daphne to say, ‘They’ve had a rotten time, I’m afraid. And a sub nearly got them but they don’t know that. They deserve everything we can give them. Tell Betty her old man’s down with the Welcome Committee. And we’ve got to get a couple of hundred of them into hospital – see what we can do in four days.’ ‘Oh, so it’ll be four days?’ ‘Yes, but don’t spread it abroad. And don’t you get sick, because the hospitals’ll be full. Every spare hospital bed for miles … Don’t expect us home tonight.’

When the soldiers began to descend the gangplank, it was evident they had had a bad time. They were more like invalids than soldiers. They held on to handrails, they stared about, they were gaunt and unwell. The first of them had their hands shaken and had to stand unsteadily at ease while speeches of welcome were made. On they came towards the waiting cars, hesitated, and then, invited by welcoming waves and opening car doors, piled in, as many as could cram. Officers first. Last troopship Daphne had entertained officers, and had told Joe that this time she would take what came. And on they did come, no end to the lines of soldiers, and the ground was clearly unsteady under them; one man actually fell and had to be helped up. Daphne opened her car door to non-commissioned officers, who got in the back, five of them, and then she saw a tall lanky, awkwardly moving soldier who was reaching out his hand as if he wished there was something to hold on to. She opened the door to the seat beside hers, and he turned and blundered towards the car, held on to the door’s edge to steady himself, and collapsed into the seat. He was sweating and pale.

‘It’s been a bit of a rough voyage,’ she heard in a familiar accent from the back seat. That was a West Country voice.

‘So we’ve heard,’ said Daphne, feeling that her clean and sweet-smelling self must be dismaying these men who stank, that was the only word for it. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be sick. From this young man beside her – he seemed a boy, no more – came wave after wave of smell.

‘If there’s a chance of a wash?’ came from the back seat.

‘Or even a bath?’ came a voice from Scotland.

‘Can do,’ said Daphne, driving smartly up towards her home. On the steps stood her two maids, and the man who did the garden, and on Betty’s stood her maids and gardener. From their faces could be seen what they felt, looking at these ghosts of men.

The boy beside her woke, stumbled out of the car and up the steps and fell on to the deck-chair she had been sitting in that morning, where he crouched, his head on his knees, his arms enfolding his head.

‘Baths,’ she commanded. ‘And a lot of towels.’

On Betty’s steps was the same scene.

‘We haven’t anything to change into,’ said one of the men.

‘Get all the dressing-gowns you can find – anything you can find,’ Daphne told the maids.

She looked through Joe’s clothes for something they could wear, these survivors, and one after another they emerged clean from baths and the shower, in her husband’s dressing-gowns and one in an old wrapper of hers. Normally there would have been jokes about the big man in a Japanese kimono of pink and mauve flowers. They were served tea and cakes and coffee, it being teatime. Meanwhile the young man who seemed worse off than any of them lay in a deck-chair and seemed disinclined to move.

A big party was planned for tonight, here. These men were not in any state for a party. She asked them and they said they would be happy to sit still and let the earth stop swaying. Besides, there would be four days.

She left them while she telephoned to stop events going forward and went to the sick youth. He seemed in a daze or a trance. She knelt beside him and asked his name.

‘I’m James,’ he said.

‘Well, James, how about a bath and we’ll get your clothes washed.’ He tried to sit up, and she put her arm behind him and felt the pressure of thin bones.

‘You need to put a bit of flesh on you,’ she said, trying to heave him up.

‘We were sick most of the way,’ he said, in a normal voice, smiling. She had got him up, and now stood holding him. She progressed with him to the bathroom. There it was evident he was not up to a bath.

‘Your mates seem to be in a better state than you.’

‘They’re sergeants,’ he said.

This meant nothing to her yet. She ran the bath and asked the housegirl, Sarah, to help him into the bath and wash him. She could have done it herself, but for some reason was reluctant. While he was being washed, she thought about how to get clothes that would fit this starved young man. She telephoned her husbands brother’s house and asked if there were any clothes for a tall thin man. The brother, who was in North Africa fighting Rommel, was thin, and tall.

A maid brought over an armful of clothes.

She handed them in through the bathroom door, and after a few minutes the youth came out, supported by Sarah, in clothes that fitted, more or less.

Now Daphne had to get these piles of stinking uniforms clean. She set the maids to work: on the lawns in front of Daphne’s house and Betty’s the four maids knelt on sacks to scrub the uniforms with scrubbing brushes on wash boards. Foam flew everywhere.

Beds were then made up all over the house. Supper was served with wine and beer, but the men were nervous of the alcohol. The frail boy, James, sat at the table with the four sergeants. Rank was abolished for the duration of this stay, the sergeant from Devon said. They were looking at roast pork and vegetables. ‘Come on, lads,’ said the Scottish sergeant, ‘we’ve got to build ourselves up.’ They did try, but the big bowl of fruit salad went down better.

It was still early. The men sat about the living-room listening to a radio news made anodyne by censorship. There was a troopship in, was allowed, but nothing was said about for how long. Did she mind if they went to bed? Off they went to their various beds, but James sat on.

Joe telephoned to find out how things were going on. She told him and he said she should ask their doctor to come up and look over the lads.

James was staring at her.

‘You’re like a vision. You can’t imagine … you forget there are lovely women, when you’re with all those men, on the ship.’

‘And so it was very bad?’

‘Yes. It was.’ The impossibility of communicating it to her kept him silent, and then he put out his long thin hand, in the sleeve of Joe’s brother’s blue shirt, and touched her hand. ‘You’re real,’ he said, frowning, ‘I’m not imagining you.’ He peered into her face, serious, then smiled. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he concluded.

The maids were standing around, ready to serve coffee.

Daphne said to them, ‘Okay, that’s it, no coffee tonight.’

She went to help him up, but he managed by himself and without holding on to anything followed her to the stoep, where a bed had been made, with plenty of blankets. He sat on it and said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Daphne,’ she said.

‘Of course, a goddess’s name for a goddess.’

‘Not a goddess, just a little ordinary nymph.’

‘Don’t go changing into a laurel tree,’ he said.

She was impressed, though she had been hearing jokes about the laurel tree all her life.

‘No pyjamas,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ He slowly took off his trousers and blue shirt, and stood in Joe’s underpants, which hung on him like a loincloth. He slid into bed where he lay, looking at her with the same smile, as at a marvel.

‘You’re English,’ he said.

‘Yes, like you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to be all right?’

‘I’m in a dream,’ he said, and reached up with both arms and pulled her down. He held her. He was strong, after all. He turned his head so his face was in her neck and her hair, and said, ‘Your hair smells so wonderful.’

‘You’re going to have to let me go,’ she said.

‘Why?’ he said.

This absurdity made her laugh, and she freed herself, but he found her hand and held it to his cheek.

‘Heaven,’ he said. ‘I’m in heaven.’

And then he fell asleep and she went in, shaken, oh, yes, badly shaken, though she could not have said why. A poor half-starved waif of a boy, but smelling now of his proper smell, of man – and her heart was pumping. She sat by herself in her living-room, smoked a cigarette, another, and then rang Betty.

‘My lot are all asleep,’ she said.

‘So are mine. They are in a bad way.’

‘We’ll feed them up.’

‘Then back on the ship again. It’s a shame.’

‘What price the party tomorrow night?’

‘We’ll have it, and they can join in or not as they like.’

Next morning she was up early as usual, and wandered in her wrap through the house where her charges were all lost to the world. Tom, Dick and Harry, she was calling them in her mind, for she was tending to confuse this lot with the last, of a few weeks before. She went around the garden, which tonight would be festive – it was already decked with lanterns and lights. Festive and crowded. She rang the base and got her husband and said the party would be tonight and tomorrow too, and he said he was sorry, ‘Things aren’t too … no, I’ll tell you when I see you.’

She ate her breakfast, fruit and coffee, alone. Then she was in the kitchen planning for tonight with the maids and the gardener. This was their third troopship, and the four were like old campaigners.

Not till mid-morning were there signs of life, but at last Tom, Dick and Harry – Sergeants Jerry, Ted and John – emerged yawning. She sat with them as bacon and eggs and fried tomatoes disappeared: they had their appetites back. Because of what Joe had said, she noticed they all had rough and reddened skins, in patches. They exposed torsos and thighs to her, red and rashy, and in some places beginning to suppurate.

‘I’ve called our doctor.’

Next she went to where James was still asleep. He woke with a cry, then sat leaning on his elbow and smiling. She was sitting at a safe distance.

‘How’s your skin? The doctor’s coming.’

Again she was looking at patches that were like measles or a heat rash. And his knee: it was swollen, with a scar in a puff of white flesh. And his feet were swollen and red.

‘We didn’t get our boots off much.’

He took her hand and held it to his cheek, eyes closed, his face grave, lips trembling.

‘James,’ she said, as grave as he, ‘I have a husband.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

This was certainly not the jest of the seducer, but a fair statement of the position.

‘But you do have to see the doctor.’

He kissed her hand and let it go.

One after another, the doctor examined the young men, and pronounced them all in poor shape. Libations of cold water would cure their skins: but soon they would be on the ship again. One had a cough. One had swollen glands. All had bad feet, and bruises where they had knocked themselves as the ship bucked and swung. ‘I take it you didn’t keep much down, from the look of you?’

And he ordered them to walk a couple of streets to his surgery, for various treatments.

Meanwhile Betty arrived and said to Daphne, ‘What’s up with you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t look yourself.’

‘I’m not myself.’

A confession from one and a warning from the other were preempted by Sarah in the kitchen calling, ‘Mary, Mary, where have you put the chickens, hey?’ And Mary answering, ‘Where have I put them – when they haven’t been delivered yet?’

‘There isn’t going to be enough food,’ said Daphne and they got into Betty’s car and drove out into the countryside to any shop or butcher or bakery they could find. But others had had the same idea: shop after shop had been cleaned out. At last they found shelves still stacked with bread, and a butcher with a sheep’s carcass. They returned, with this booty, to find their charges, all ten of them, under the tree in Betty’s garden, sprawling on rugs, being fed ham and chicken and salad by the maids.

‘We could drive you to see the sights,’ said Betty.

‘We could take you up Table Mountain,’ said Daphne.

The young men agreed that nothing could be better than sitting here, looking down on their enemy, the sea, which today spread out glimmering like a peacock’s tail, looking like anything but what it was, a submarine-haunted killer.

The two women and the baby sat near them on the grass, both with that maternal smile which is as good as a chastity belt. But this lot, unlike previous invasions off the troopships, looked too beaten up to be a threat. Daphne felt the gaze of the young man on her, saw his haunted hungry eyes, and then glanced at Betty, who of course would notice. He was already better, they all were: these young men were recovering as they breathed, and ate, and ate, and demolished piles of grapes. The air was heavy with the smell of liniments and ointments, there were dressings here and there on sore skins, but you would not think these were the scarecrows who had come off the boat yesterday.

Then they confessed for a need to sleep, and all went off to their beds. It was early afternoon. All over the two gardens that were being made one by that night’s party, trestles were being set out, with piles of cutlery and plates and glasses, and smells of cooking meat came from the kitchens. Not only here, everywhere through the city, went on preparations and already men in uniforms were roaming these upper streets. There would be hundreds of them, hoping to be lucky, hoping for a welcome.

The organisations that dealt with incursions from the troopships asked for volunteers for these parties, knowing that only the incapacitated would hold back. The lucky ones were chosen by lot: names taken from a pail. For days and weeks to come slips of paper with the names of Captain E.R. Baker, Sgt. ‘Red’ Smith, Corporal Berners, Rifleman Barry, Private Jones, hundreds of them, were all over the city, in gutters, clogged on windowsills, fluttering about as the winds blew, Tom, Dick and Harry’s names were everywhere, while they were on their way to – but it had to be India.

Betty and Daphne had each put down for four hundred, knowing that the unlucky and the uninvited would be wandering up to stand like poor children at a shop window, looking in at festive gardens. And then they would be invited in: who could turn them away?

The young men woke at five or so, and sleep had taken them another step towards their healthy selves. Their uniforms were clean and ironed now, and they were shaved and brushed.

At six o’clock Betty went off to her house to dress and Daphne looked over the evening dresses in her long crammed wardrobe; she and her Joe had gone in for dancing, when she first came, the two couples had gone dancing often, and here were evening dresses pressed and ready for action.

She took out the one she thought of as her cleverest, though it could be described, simply, as a white dress. It was of white silk piqué, stiff and glossy, but a world away from the white dress she would have worn as her English self: she could see it, limp white chiffon, with pink embroidery. She put on her white armour, described on the pattern as ‘a gown of classical simplicity’. She smiled at herself in the long mirror. She shone, gleaming shoulders, the glisten of the white stuff, her hair, her eyes. She snapped on shiny jet necklace and bracelets, her grandmother’s, a mourning set; jet for mourning but just look how it set her off! And now her hair, down it fell, her yellow triumphant hair, achieved by perms, not to wave it, but to make it heavy and straight. And she peered close into her face that was enclosed in the yellow frame, and then she was saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ She was trembling. ‘I’ve gone mad,’ she said to her reflection, but probably addressing her friend Betty. ‘Yes, I have.’ She pinned the hair up into the chignon, ageing herself by ten years into a young matron. Nothing like Ginger Rogers now (they said she was like Ginger Rogers, with her hair swinging about). Now she was the hostess, nothing more. Beside her was the English rose in her white chiffon, her invisible alter ego, the chrysalis she had discarded. A rosebud mouth smiled mistily: Daphne took her scarlet lipstick and obliterated it. Well defended, she went out, meeting Betty coming over. The two of them made a picture, and they knew it. ‘You do make a picture!’ And, ‘The dark and the light of it.’ Betty wore her dark brown silk dress. They had made their evening dresses from Vogue patterns, running them up on Singer sewing machines, side by side at a table in either house, as they felt. They were proud of their creations. ‘Dior, out of my way,’ ‘Norman Hartnell, here we come,’ they would sing to their own and each other’s reflections. Betty’s dress had lacked its finish, at first. They tried on it diamanté or ‘cluster’ brooches in strong colours. ‘Vulgar,’ they pronounced. ‘No, that’s not it …’ Daphne remembered that her English-rose self had a little necklace and bracelets of white daisies, that could have been made to go – or rather, go against – the formality, of that stiff brown gown, so apt that the two had fallen about laughing, pleased with themselves.

Two young women, so recently girls in their fathers’ houses, had found themselves in their own houses, with indulgent husbands and servants. Time and space to spread themselves, then to discover that what was strongest in them was an appetite for accomplishment. They transformed rooms with colour and texture, changed their gardens, came upon new talents every day, were like conquerors in new lands, but what they liked best was transforming themselves, with the aid of their sewing machines. Often as they flung lengths of material about, or draped themselves, they broke into fits of laughter and collapsed into chairs, helpless. ‘Just as well no one can see us, Bets.’ ‘They’d think us lunatics.’ ‘Perhaps we are.’ And the giggles broke out again. These exuberances of healthy vitality, these festivals of self-discovery, innocent because of the flagrant enjoyment of their vanities, ended with Daphne’s miscarriage and Betty’s getting pregnant. The zest had gone and two sober young matrons looked back on giddy girls. Now they made baby clothes and shirts for their husbands. But in their cupboard hung the results of their early intoxications, and when they arrayed themselves in this dress or that, the other would signal: ‘Oh, Bets, that was a morning, wasn’t it!’ ‘Daphne, we were inspired that day.’

Now they gave each other the swiftest of once-overs and got on to the serious business of the night. Already cars were delivering soldiers to the two houses, and to the others in the street, and groups of soldiers wandered up, clutching bits of paper with addresses. The gramophone, with its stacks of records, was on the stoep and beside it was the gardener, ready to wind it up and change the records. Dance music came from every house, music and voices.

Daphne checked that the furniture in the living-room had been pushed back, leaving a clear floor, and that the drink was flowing. Betty went back to her house, and both women stood on their steps waving up men and girls: all the girls in the city were available tonight, for dancing at least, each worth her weight in gold. ‘You girls are worth your weight in gold.’ ‘Call your friends, everyone, we must have girls.’

As she stood there, James came, put his arm around her, and they set off, on the stoep, cheek to cheek.

‘It’s all very well,’ she protested, trying to pull herself free.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he crooned, to the music, pulling her to him. And on and on they danced, and when she was interrupted, to be hostess, he came after her, and led her back again to the dance. Everyone was dancing: all that is, who had partners.

The gardener had positioned himself and angled the gramophone so that he could stand and look over to where on Bettys stoep Lynda, her maid, was in a parallel situation by the gramophone. He had been pursuing Lynda, without success, and found ‘The Night is Young and You’re So Beautiful’ a perfect expression of his feelings. He put it on again, again, ‘The Moon is High and You’re so Glamorous’, and when some dancer complained there were other tunes, he did put on something else, but returned as soon as he could to ‘The Night is Young …’ Lynda, who told him she didn’t trust him (‘You say that to all the girls,’), played as often as she could get away with it, ‘Boohoo, you’ve got me crying for you, and everything that you do …’ He might riposte with ‘Oh, sweet and lovely, lady be good, oh, lady be good to me …’ And she ‘You left me in the lurch, you left me crying at the church …’

This flirtation went on all evening.

The evening was a triumph, as it was bound to be. Eight hundred? The two gardens between them and the street outside had held a good thousand. The drink held out, if the food didn’t. It was two or later before the cars that were taking some men back to their billets stopped swinging their lights up into the trees, and the shouts and the singing of soldiers died as they descended towards the sea.

In the Wrights’ house the soldiers went off to their beds and Daphne to her room. The white dress had done her proud she told herself, full of the vainglory of an imagined victory. ‘My God, it’s as good as armour’ – stripping off jetty baubles and stepping out of the skirt which collapsed in white puffs and puckers around her legs. She went naked to bed, turned off the light, and then James arrived beside her, which she had known he would, while persuading herself he wouldn’t dare.

In the very early morning she told him to go back to his room, and he said, ‘I won’t. I can’t.’

‘The maids will be here soon.’

He did leave, and went to his bed on the stoep where already the sun was warming the glass of the bottles rolling about there. He woke to the sound of clinking glass, as the maids cleaned around him.

Down in the garden, under the tree, Daphne was standing with Betty. They were wearing flowery wraps, and James thought he had never seen such lovely women. He told himself that after that voyage, that hell, he’d think any woman an angel, but he was not in the mood for common sense. Those two women in their gowns, in the greenery of the garden, they were a vision. And he stared, as long as they stood there, consciously storing it up in his mind, a picture he could look at later, keep, and hold.

Betty was saying to Daphne, ‘For God’s sake, watch it.’

‘Is it really that obvious?’

‘Yes, it is. Of course, people were noticing.’

‘I can’t help it.’

‘But Daphne …’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Is there going to be another bloody party tonight?’

‘Of course there is. You know that. And tomorrow night too – if it’s four days.’

‘That’s what Joe said.’

They looked down to where the great ship, ominous because of its associations, stood offshore, waiting.

‘Why don’t you take him off to the pondokkie?’

‘I had wondered if I should.’

‘You’ve got to get yourself out of sight.’

‘Yes.’

The pondokkie was a little house, not much more than a shed, a couple of hours drive away, by the shore. Daphne went there with Joe, for weekends; Betty and her husband used it.

‘Where am I going to get petrol?’

‘I’ve still got a bit.’

‘And then there’s the party, these men, what shall I say?’

‘I’ll tell them you heard someone was sick. We’ll all manage. Don’t worry.’

‘I’ll get James up.’

‘Is that his name?’ said Betty, bitterly. ‘Suddenly, there’s a James. Who is James? If Joe finds out? Someone will tell him, you know.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Daphne again.

‘I’ll say James has gone into a clinic for a couple of days. Well, he looks as if he could do with one. For God’s sake, Daphne, he looks like the walking wounded.’

‘Yes, I know.’

The gardens were already being tidied for that night’s festivities. Soon, the stage would be set, again; the trestles scrubbed, the mounds of plates and cutlery gleaming. The skeins of paper lanterns in the trees were being re-hung and the scorched ones taken down.

The soldiers, both Daphne’s lot and Betty’s, were asleep, but James was sitting on his bed when Daphne came to say: ‘Get on your civvies, leave your uniform, come with me. Yes, now, before anyone wakes.’ He did not argue, but obediently put on Daphne’s husband’s brother’s trousers and shirt. She put on slacks and a shirt and let her hair fall on her shoulders: this was like a statement of defiance, but to whom, she could not have said. In the kitchen they drank hasty cups of coffee, ignoring the maids. Daphne put some things into a box, and they set off in her car along the coast.

Betty watched them go, from her windows. She was in a seethe of conflicting feelings but most of all she felt as if her friend had been struck by lightning. Black lightning – if there was such a thing.

The streets ran smooth and citified through the suburbs, then they were on a rough road, the sea on their right hand, and what looked like farmland on their left. Vines and oak trees, a fair and smiling scene, but soon the land was unworked, with only a few scattered sheep. But James looked only at Daphne, until she put out a hand and touched his face with her knuckles. ‘Stop it, you’re making me nervous.’

‘I can’t help it,’ he said, as she had earlier. She smiled and he said bitterly, ‘It’s not just an amusement for me.’ And then, ‘Stop the car, stop it now.’

She drove until they were on the edge of a little bay where waves frisked among low black rocks. He moved up to put his arm round her. His face … it frightened her, and he was trembling. Not many cars came along this road, but now she saw one approaching.

‘James, wait. Let’s just get there.’

‘Where?’

‘You’ll see.’

She put the car in motion again. She saw his face staring down past her at a postcard sea, gulls swooping, sea noise, bird noise, and the sunlight a moving glitter to the horizon. No ships.

‘I hate the sea,’ he said. ‘I hate it. It’s out to get us. And it will.’

‘Don’t look at it.’

So he looked at her, shifting his head a little, but past her head was the glare of the sea.

They turned inland. There was a broken gate. Scrubby unkept land: you’d never guess the sea was a couple of hundred yards off. Then a turn towards it, through low bushes, and ahead a shack or shed, with the bushes growing close all round it.

The car stopped. She lifted out the box of provisions, gathered from the party leftovers, and a big enamel can of water, which he took from her. She went ahead along a faint path, the bushes seeming to want to clutch and bring her down, to a door which she opened with a large key. Inside was dark, till she pulled down shutters. Light showed, first, a wide high bed, piled with all kinds of covers, then shelves around wooden walls, with dishes and plates, and a small wooden table in the middle on a plank floor, with two wooden chairs.

‘Our holiday home,’ she said. ‘Do you like it?’

James might have said that he seemed to spend his life now in sheds or huts – this one was called a pondokkie. What’s in a name? A little house, like one in a fairytale, in the woods. But they were scrubby bushes, smelling of salt.

The sea was a murmur, not too far away, with an occasional splash as a wave broke on a rock. The two stood looking at each other. The feverish state that had enclosed them since his arrival in the setting of fine house and gardens might have dissolved here and now, but it didn’t. They sank on to the two wooden chairs, and, holding each other’s hands across the table, stared, serious, quiet – and oddly, with bitterness, directed, not at each other, but at Fate, the war, something not themselves. She stroked his face with a hand that had pearly pink nails. He thought, those nails wouldn’t survive long if she really lived in this pondokkie, a rough hut. This clean and shiny sweetly-smelling woman, this was just where she played … and was he what she was playing with?

‘Wipe that bloody lipstick off.’

She opened her bag, found a handkerchief and he took it from her and carefully but thoroughly removed the scarlet lips.

‘There now,’ he said.

She said, ‘Let’s go and look at the sea. The tide’s out.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

Gravely, he took her hand and led her to the bed. Through the open window, came the smell of salt-stung vegetation. Silence except for the murmur of the sea. Their lovemaking, trembling and hungry, seemed to celebrate not love but tragedy. They fell asleep and she woke to find him screaming, his hands over his ears.

‘What is it?’ he shouted.

‘The tide’s in.’

It seemed that the ocean was rolling in to focus on just that stretch of shore so close to their shelter that the next wave would rear and crash down on it, dragging them out to sea. The little house shook, the earth shook, crash crash and then a thundering withdrawal: it was as if they were deep under the sea, buried in it.

His face was in her breasts and he was crying, not like a child, oh, no, a deep choking sobbing, and he was clutching to her as if they were helplessly rolling in deep surf.

‘It’s like this when it’s high tide – this must be an unusually high one.’ Her voice was like a hush within the pounding tumult. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you here. I didn’t think.’

‘But I’m with you,’ she heard, as another wave crescendoed and crashed.

‘We’ll get up and go and look at it. You’ll see, it’s quite a way off, fifty yards at least.’

‘No, no, no.’

‘All right, then, get up and we’ll have some supper.’

‘I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to waste the time.’

She slid out, standing naked to smile at him, gravely, for this was the note that had been struck from their first moment, but there was something there, what? – melancholy? Well, that was in order, but surely not this edge of bitterness?

‘What is it?’ he asked, a too-ready suspicion flaring.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, defeated, turning to set out bread and butter and ham. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I am trying to laugh at us.’

‘At me!’

‘Never you,’ she said. ‘Two days. Two. And I feel …’

‘Well, tell me, yes, tell me. I want to know … am I the first bloody soldier you brought here?’

‘Well, thank you. If that’s what you think. I think we should leave.’ She was crying; he sat on the edge of the bed, and was about to get up and go to her but then he crouched down with his hands over his ears as a wave crashed, seemingly just above them.

‘Why me? Yes, why me? But I don’t care. You’re wonderful – and that’s enough.’ And he ducked down as the little house shook.

‘I care,’ and she sat down, laid her head on her arms on the table and wept.

He left the bed and sat opposite, stroking her hair, watching her cry.

Then he put out his hand, got up, took her hand and said, ‘This is ridiculous. Let’s get back to bed.’ And he led her weeping on to the bed, and lay down beside her.

‘This little house, this pondokkie of yours, I won’t go back on the ship, I’ll just hide here, and you can come and visit me.’

After the wedding of Joe Wright, bachelor, and Daphne Brent, spinster, they had taken a week of conventional honeymoon in a smart hotel up country, famous as a haven for newlyweds, and then he had brought her here. It was not likely that she failed to think, ‘I bet he brought his girls here when he was a bachelor.’ This did not make her jealous. She rather liked the idea of this frail shelter, that seemed always about to dissolve into the sea, as a place for lovers. In this very room she and Joe, naked and happy, had made love and eaten picnic food and then run exultantly shouting down to the sea at low tide. And now she was here with this man, but she was in a different dimension with him. If Joe walked in now he would come from a sane and healthy world and she would look at him from this dream she was in – a nightmare, was it? – and then disappear, with a shriek, and he’d think he had seen an apparition from a nether world. Such pain, in this young man and in her, and she did not know where hers had come from: she had never envisaged unhappiness in her blueprints for the future. She had not experienced it. She did not know this youth: he was a stranger and this element where she found herself with him was alien. And yet, knowing that soon she would lose him, made her want to do something primitive and brutal, like pulling out her hair, beating her breasts with her fists, sit swaying, sick with grief, a black cloth over her head.

Soon she was lying with a sleeping man in her arms – if he were asleep, and not in some kind of trance: he trembled, or came to himself in little shuddering spasms. She lay with her eyes shut, holding him, and lived through a memory of something that happened soon after she came to South Africa. She and Joe, Betty and Henry and another couple had driven off into the mountains, following little roads known to the South Africans from boyhood rambles. They stopped the cars, not in a campers’ site, but where baboons had made a cliff their own. All up the face of the cliff, from rocks and holes that were the openings to ancient caves, the baboons perched and clung and barked at them. The humans took no notice. A few yards from the cliff, in the middle of a little plateau formed by slabs of rock split by heat and cold was a little tree. It was dead, a pale spectral thing growing from between the rocks. Dead. It was midday and strong light made the dry leaves hang whiteish, sketched in air, with heat waves shimmering around them like the volatile oils made visible. Bread and wine and fruit were set out, and the women cubed some meat. The men set light to the dead tree. The idea was, it would fall and they would use it as fire for their meat. The tree flared up, it was at once a torch of white-hot flames. The baboons on their cliff barked their fear, the humans fell back, the tree was a river of flame, a rush of white sparks. Daphne was standing too close. The quick flare took her by surprise; she could feel the hairs on her arms frizzle. She was struck by the intensity of the fire into an immobility. She cried out, and Joe leaped to her and pulled her back out of the heat that was now shimmering and oiling for yards around the tree.

That was how she felt now.

‘Too close,’ she was murmuring, eyes closed, holding a naked man lost in his dream. ‘It’s too close.’

When the light came, the waves began to come close again, and roar and pound, and they held each other, and listened, until the noise abated, and she said, ‘Now, I want you to come out and look.’

‘I told you I wish I need never see the ocean again.’

‘I know, but come on.’

It was late morning. The sea was in retreat. She took him through the push and clutch of the salty bushes to a little patch of sand, still wet, but drying pale on its surface, and beyond were tall black rocks, where seaweed clung. The sea was rough today, jumping and leaping about among the rocks.

‘Do you ever swim here?’ he asked.

‘Over there is a pool in the rocks. It’s safe, when the tide’s out.’ She stopped herself asking if he’d like to go in, just in time.

They stood with their arms about each other allowing themselves to be hypnotised by the sea’s noise, but she could feel him tense, discouraged.

‘It’s only sea,’ she said, though she knew he was rejecting the moment, and probably, her. ‘There it is, kept in its place, it can’t get us.’ And wished she could unsay it; she had forgotten he would be back on the ship.

‘When the war’s over I’ll never go near a ship again.’

She began to cry. She was forlorn and rejected. Why was she? She did not know herself. Her emotional extremes, sorrow, exultation, grief, passion, were leaving her rather like that fish she could see, flapping in the sand. That James should hate the sea so much: she could not bear it. She had often thought that when she came to marry Joe, it was to the sea she had come, the ocean surrounding her always, never out of sight, or out of mind. Joe’s gift to her had been the sea, so she had told him she felt.

He said, ‘I’m not going back on that ship, I won’t.’

‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘you don’t love me.’

‘What?’

Why had she said that? She felt as if she had tripped a switch, moved a gear, was in an uncoordinated helpless condition, and anything she said must come out inept, tactless, even brutal.

She clutched him by the shoulders and saw him wince: she let him go. His singlet, which he had put on to leave the hut, was stuck here and there in ruddy patches.

‘Oh, God,’ she said.

‘The sea spray,’ he said, ‘it’s getting to me.’

She should not have brought him out here, she should have thought, everything had gone wrong.

‘Come on, let’s go in,’ he said.

The tide was turning, beginning to thunder and crash; she felt he was estranged from her; he felt he had failed her.

She took his hand and led him back to the hut. As they went through the bushes, a Coloured lad came with a note in his hand. He was from the local shop a mile away where there was a telephone.

The note said: ‘Daphne, he’s got to be back on board by tomorrow, midday. Betty.’

She said to the youth, whom she knew, from previous trips here, with her husband, ‘Come to the hut, I’ll give you some money.’ This was done. He was giving her odd looks, as well he might: would he think this money a bribe?

Then she said to James, ‘Deadline for you – twelve tomorrow.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘We’ve got another afternoon and night.’

‘We’ve got all our lives.’

Back inside the hut, they were together again in feeling: the emptiness that had claimed them by the sea had gone.

‘I’ll come for you, after the war.’

She held him close, her head on his shoulder, and felt the rough skin under her cheek.

‘You don’t believe me,’ he said gently, tenderly, as to a child, ‘but it’s true.’

The afternoon and then the night went past, while the tide came in, and thundered over them, and went out, came in. It was low tide when she got off the bed and began packing up. She was afraid he was not going to move, but at last he did.

‘We should have something to eat.’

‘I suppose so.’

They sat with some bread and jam between them and looked at each other.

‘I’ll think of you like this. You’re like a little girl, your hair all over the place. And your face needs washing.’

When they walked back through the bushes to the car, clumps of white spume were flying in on a cold wind, and spattered the bushes.

She drove in silence. He watched her all the way; she received that long look like a prolonged embrace.

At the house, Betty came running. ‘Our lads have gone. I took them down. They’re already on the ship.’

Her two maids, and her gardener, Daphne’s maids and her gardener, stood on the respective steps, watching, as the soldier went in to Daphne’s house, Daphne staying outside, by the car. He came out in his uniform.

‘I’ll take you,’ said Betty. ‘No, you stay, Daphne.’ Daphne was not fit to drive down to the docks: she was trembling, and had to hold on to the car.

Betty ran back to her house, drove her car to outside Daphne’s, hooted and sat waiting.

Daphne and the soldier stood face to face, not touching, looking. Betty hooted again. The soldier broke away, and ran, pulling his kitbag bumping along behind him. From the car he sent one look back and then, oddly, saluted. He got in. Betty’s car shot off down into the town.

The scene broke. Daphne moved slowly up to the stoep and sat on the end of a wicker lounger as if she might fall through it.

The four maids went back to their duties, the gardeners to their plants.

Mid-afternoon. The great ship stood in its nest of white frills. From here would be seen the activity of embarking; ants crawled everywhere over the ship.

Daphne did not move. Sarah came from inside the house with a tray of tea, which she had not ordered. When her mistress took no notice, Sarah poured a cup of tea, sugared it, held it out to Daphne and said, ‘Your tea, medem.’ Daphne shook her head. The black woman lifted Daphne’s limp arm, and put the cup in her hand.

‘You must have some tea, medem.’

Daphne sat still, her eyes on the docks, and then at last she did drink.

‘That’s right, medem.’

The maid left the tray and went in.

Late afternoon. Betty’s car was nosing up the street, and then she was beside Daphne. ‘He made it. Just.’

Daphne motioned leave me with her hand.

Was the distance between the ship and the dock widening?

‘Joe rang. I told him you were ill.’

No reply.

‘He said the ship was leaving so as to get out of Cape Town while it is light – in case there’s a sub about.’

Daphne let out a cry and then slammed her fist against her mouth. She said, ‘I’m a very wicked woman, do you know that? I don’t love Joe. I never did. I married him under false pretences. I should be punished for that.’

‘You had better lie down.’

Daphne began to cry. She stared down after the ship, her hands tugging at her hair tangled with salt spray and wind. Her face had forgotten make-up: her husband would recognise that English girl with her baby mouth, now woeful; as she looked now she would not easily be recognised by her admiring guests. Dreadful, deep sobs, and she was swaying as she sat.

‘Do you have any sedatives? Daphne?’

Daphne did not move or respond.

Betty went to call Sarah, who was in the room just behind, keeping an eye on what went on. ‘Help me get Mrs Wright to her bed. Then I’m going to the chemist for medicine.’

It took the two of them to lift Daphne: she did not want to go in till the ship had disappeared. The three women stood, the maid and Betty holding Daphne, while the ship dwindled over the horizon. They walked her to her bed, laid her down and Betty said, ‘Hold the fort, I’ll be quick.’ And in a few minutes she was back. Daphne lay on her bed, staring. Betty put an arm around her, lifted her, and made her swallow two tablets.

Daphne collapsed: her eyes closed.

And now Betty and Sarah stood together: slowly, carefully, their eyes met, and held.

When Daphne had arrived in South Africa she had criticised Betty, the South African born and bred, for behaving in front of her staff as if they did not exist. One day Betty had come out of her bathroom naked and walked across her bedroom in full sight of the gardener who was at work just outside the french windows. She had stood there and talked, brushing her hair, and turned about, as if the man were not there, and when Daphne told her off, she realised for the first time that her servants had become as invisible as mechanical servitors. They were paid well – for this was liberal Cape Town (‘We pay our people much better than they do in Joburg’), fed, taken to the doctor, given generous hours off. But they were not there for Betty, as human beings. Remorse, if that was the word, had adjusted her behaviour and her thoughts, and she became noticing and on guard, watching what she did and what she said. But she could not think of anything apt for this situation. The four maids, hers and Daphne’s, were friends and knew the other maids along the street: this went for the gardeners. By now all of them would be discussing Daphne and the soldier. Any one of them might tell Joe.

‘Mrs Wright is very sick,’ said Betty at last, knowing she was blushing because of the feebleness of it. And it had sounded like a plea, which she didn’t like.

Sarah said, ‘Yes, medem.’ Compassionate, yes: but no doubt there was derision there, a forgivable allowance, in the circumstances.

‘Yes,’ said Betty. She was in the grip of the oddest compulsion. Like Daphne, she could have tugged at her locks with both hands; instead she passed her hands across her face, wiping away whatever expression might be there – she didn’t want to know. And now, she couldn’t help herself, she let out a short barking laugh and clapped a hand across her mouth.

‘Yes, medem,’ said Sarah, sighing. She turned and went off.

‘Oh, my God,’ said Betty. She took a last hopeless look at her friend who was lying there, struck down. Somewhere over the horizon, that soldier was on his way north into the dark of the Indian Ocean.

Betty went to her house, sat on her dark steps, and in her mind’s eye persisted the sight of Daphne, lying white-faced and hardly breathing.

‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no,’ said Betty wildly, aloud, and sank her face into her hands. ‘No. I don’t want it. Never.’

Sometime later Joe’s car came up, Betty went to intercept him. At once he began talking. ‘Betty, Henry won’t be back tonight, he asked me to tell you, it’s been a real dingdong these last few days, you’ve no idea, getting in enough supplies and everything, it’s not been easy – for the ship, you know, the one that’s just left.’ He was talking too loudly, and walked past her up his steps, and turned. And stood talking into the garden, where she stood. ‘We lost a ship – the Queen of Liverpool – no, forget I said that, I didn’t say it. Five hundred men gone. Five hundred. It was the same sub that was chasing the – the ship that’s just left. But we got her. Before she sank she got the sub. Five hundred men.’ He was now walking about, gesticulating, not seeing her, talking, in an extreme of exhaustion. ‘Yes, and the ship that’s gone, they left us twenty-five. They’re in a bad way. They’re mad. Claustrophobia, you know, stress. I don’t blame them, below the water line, well, they’re in hospital. They’re crazy. Henry saw them. When he gets home, he’ll need looking after himself. Five hundred men – that’s not something you can take in. Henry hasn’t really slept since the ship got in.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘So, you must make allowances. He won’t be himself. A pretty poor show all around, these last four days. And I’m not myself either.’ And he went striding towards the bedroom.

‘Daphne’s not well. She’s taken a sedative.’

‘If there’s any left, I’ll take one too.’

Betty went with him into the bedroom.

The sight of his wife stopped him dead.

‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

‘Probably some bug. Don’t worry. She’ll be all right tomorrow I expect.’

‘Good Lord,’ he said again. She took pills from the bottle by the bed, gave them to him, and he downed them with a gulp from Daphne’s glass.

He sank down to sit on the bed. ‘Betty,’ he said, ‘five hundred men. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ He stood up, pulled off his boots, first one, thump, then the other, thump; walked around to the other side of Daphne, lay down and was asleep.

Betty went to tell the maids that no supper would be needed. ‘Go off home. That’s right.’

‘Thank you, medem.’

Betty returned to stand near the bed. Daphne had not moved.

Joe lay there, beside his wife, Good-fellow Joe, everybody’s friend, rubicund and jovial, but there he lay, and Betty would not have known him. He kept grimacing in his sleep, and grinding his teeth, and then, when he was still, his mouth was dragged down with exhaustion.

Betty switched off the light. She returned to her house over dark lawns and sat for a long time, in the dark. Four days. There had been so much noise; soldiers with their English voices, telephones, cars coming and going, dance music, the same tunes played over and over again on the gramophone, while feet in army boots scraped and slid, but now the noise was subsiding, another voice that had been speaking all the time was becoming audible, in an eloquence of loss, and endurance. Four days the troopship had been in. A long way off, on the other side of a chasm, of an abyss, smiled life, dear kind ordinary life.

Down the gangways they came, between the guns that had been ready to defend them all the way from Cape Town, lines of men, hundreds, to form up in their platoons and companies on the quays, where James was already standing at ease, though at ease he was not, for his feet hurt like, it is safe to say, the feet of most of those young men, some of whom had been there for over an hour, under an unwelcoming sun. These soldiers were not in as bad a way as getting on for a month ago, in Cape Town. Beneficent Cape of Good Hope had loaded the ship with food, and above all fruit. Poor boys who had scarcely tasted a grape in their lives had consumed luscious bunches until the bounty ran out. Three weeks this time, not a month, and the Indian Ocean had been kind except for a four-day storm halfway across, when conditions had been similar to those in the Atlantic. James stood narrowing his eyes against the glare, holding himself so as not to faint; and he watched the great ship and, if hatred could kill, then it would have sunk there and then and be gone forever.

It was very hot. The air was stale and clammy. Thin dark men in loincloths hurried about being told what to do by dark men in uniform, who were being supervised by white men in uniform. No smell of sea now, though it was so near, only oil and traffic fumes. At last the endless lines did end, while men were still forming into their companies. Some had already moved off, to the accompaniment of the barking sounds of the sergeants, which James now found soothing, being reminders of order and regularity. James’s company were marched to a barracks, where they were fed, and showered off the seawater which on some skins still festered. Hundreds of naked young men, but while they were in nothing like as bad shape as in Cape Town they were still the walking wounded, patched with red rough skin and fading bruises. They would be sent to the train tomorrow, which would take them to their destination: unnamed. The name, its harsh alien syllables was whispered about through the hundreds of soldiers who were already thinking of it as a haven where they would at last keep still, lose the sway of the ship. Camp X was what they had to call it. The smell in the barracks was enough to make them sick, despite the showers.

Authority on this second stage of the voyage, remembering the twenty-five madmen they had left behind in Cape Town, the dozens that had gone into hospital to be patched up, and the shocking physical state of the disembarking men, had chosen not to notice that more and more slept on the decks, and, disregarding regulations, simply did not turn up for the ritual of the seawater douches. All that voyage had been very hot. The sickroom was full of cases of diarrhoea, and again officers had to double up so as to provide accommodation for another sickbay. There were always queues for the ship’s doctors. That fruit in unaccustomed stomachs, the feasting and drunkenness at Cape Town, added to the queues for the latrines. If an epidemic broke out – and why not? – what was to be done? Five thousand men, most already run down, many coughing: it was a poor show, and no ship’s officers had ever been more relieved to see a port appear at last.

In the barracks that night the soldiers lay on top of their bedding and cursed, and sweated. The attendant corporals and sergeants, as sick as their men, dismayed and homesick, advised patience, in raucous voices. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll fucking well be patient,’ shouts Sergeant Perkins.

As for James, he did not divide the voyage into two stages, England–Cape Town, Cape Town–Bombay. It had been one long suffering, consuming him, body and soul, interrupted by four days of heaven.

Through the three weeks of the Indian Ocean James, sick and sore, sat with his back against a cabin wall and dreamed … It was a dream, that place, with its mountain spilling cloud like a blessing over its lucky inhabitants. A dream of big cool houses in gardens. He held in his mind that scene of two young women, one dark, one fair, in their flowery wraps under a big tree, that scene; and the nights with Daphne, and one memory in particular, Daphne seeming to shine in the lamplight, her yellow hair spreading on white shoulders, holding out her arms to him. And dancing cheek to cheek. And how the sea had thundered over them, deep in love, crashed and banged and sucked, but then retreated, harmless.

A dream of happiness. He would hold it in his mind and not think of anything at all, only that, until this bloody war ended.

Meanwhile he was in a barracks with fifty men, cursing and scratching and calling out in their sleep, if you could call that sleep, and in the morning he marched with the others to the trains that would take them to Camp X, which it turned out was two days’ travelling away. The conditions on the train matched those on the ship for discomfort but at least a train goes straight, more or less, it doesn’t sway and lurch about. James watched the landscape of middle India go past and hated it. The Cape wasn’t alien, with its oaks and its vineyards and its fruit, he had felt at home in a landscape where nothing said: You don’t belong.

When they at last reached Camp X, somewhere in the middle of India, and marched in their companies on to the parade ground – the maidan – half the camp was of new shiny huts, or sheds. In other words, Nissen huts, and white tents covered the rest of the ground. There was a race, everyone knew, though no one had told them, to get the huts up before the monsoon started. Under their feet as they marched or stood at ease was a powdery dark dust, that puffed up and fell in drifts. The smell, what was the smell, wood smoke and pungency and much else, and the soldiers sniffed and tasted the air, this dusty foreign air, while a sun like a brass band blared down on them.

In lines and in queues the men waited at Medical. Rashes and bad feet, eye infections, stomach disorders, coughs, these soldiers were more fit for an infirmary than for fighting, and James’s knee was up again, like a lump of uncooked dough, with a scar stretched across it. His feet were swollen.

A couple of hundred men were taken to hospitals in the region and the rest were told they would be given two weeks’ leave. If they had nowhere to go – and most would not – they would stay in camp and provision would be made for their relaxation. It seemed there were clubs and bars in town that were prepared to entertain Other Ranks. James was told he was among those invited to stay with a certain Colonel Grant and his wife, to recuperate. That is, he was in a category not bad enough for hospital, but not fit enough for drilling and exercising.

He and nine others were driven off to a big bungalow in a garden full of heavy dark trees that were spattered here and there with pink, red and white flowers. The smell, the smell, what was it? – a heavy flower smell but the other, pungent, hanging in their nostrils like a reminder of their foreignness. Unknown birds emitted unfamiliar noises. In a garden a black man in a white shirt squatted doing something to a bush. This one had a twist of cloth on his head, but in Cape Town the gardeners in the young women’s gardens wore cast-off good clothes, and old canvas shoes.

Colonel Grant was Indian Army Retired, and a friend of the colonel in James’s regiment, and was now waiting for the war to let him go Home to England. The Grants’ war effort was to entertain soldiers needing a respite. The men did not know each other, though some faces were familiar because of the weeks on the ship. These were all soldiers, Other Ranks, and this was because of a decision by Colonel Grant, since it was always officers who were asked out. James who had been Other Ranks now in various places for two years, had ceased to notice that his way of speaking marked him apart. The sergeants had sometimes picked him out for sarcasm but there was something about how he took this attention that took the fun out of it for them. Here was this quiet, obedient young man, obviously straining to keep up, to hear what was said, to do his best, but not too painfully: James was not victim material. He did not notice now that he was the odd man among these ten soldiers but the Grants did. And he had brought books in his kitbag. The supper was at a long table, once used for formal and probably grand occasions, but now accommodating men not used to them. The food was English, heavy and plentiful.

Mrs Grant was gracious, she was trying hard. A large, red-faced woman, she was uncomfortable in her skin, for she was sweating, and kept holding her face up to the draughts of warm air – not cool but at least moving – from the punkahs. She had patches of dark under her arms, and her pleasant, or at least trying-to-please face smiled conscientiously as she made conversation.

‘And what part of Home do you come from?’

‘Bristol …’ in a strong West Country voice, ‘I’m a plumber by trade.’

‘How nice. How very useful. And do you – I’m afraid I didn’t get your name …?’

Then it came to James, who sat preoccupied, apart from the others in spirit, which showed on his abstracted face that was frowning with the effort to be here, to be part of things, to behave well, ‘And you, forgive me for not remembering … where are you from?’

‘Near Reading. I was still at college when the war started.’

‘How nice. And what were you studying?’

‘Office management and secretarial.’

Here, Colonel Grant, who had exchanged glances with his wife, because of this more refined voice among the other rougher ones, said, ‘You’ll all have a full day tomorrow. The Medicals will be here early. We start things early here – because of the heat, you know …’

‘It doesn’t matter how early we start, you can never get the better of the heat,’ fretted Mrs Grant.

‘So, I suggest you all get your heads down early and tomorrow we’ll see.’

‘I am sure you would all like some coffee?’ Mrs Grant said.

Now the men hung about, exchanging looks. James said he would like coffee, but Colonel Grant said, ‘Probably you’d prefer a good cup of tea. Yes, well, that’s easy. When you are in your billets just clap your hands and ask for chai.’

The men were disposed in cottages in the gardens: except for two. One was James: he found that his name, down for a cottage, had been without explanation changed for a guest room in this house.

No explanation needed, when you thought about it, and now he did. He was uncomfortable, but consoled himself that his fellow house guest was an electrician from Bermondsey, who said he fancied a cup of tea if they didn’t mind and shot off into the dark towards the cottages. That left James, drinking coffee with the Grants, who told him to make himself at home, borrow what books he liked, and play the gramophone.

James lay on his bed in the dark, too hot between covers, and saw bats swoop past the window gauze. The smell, had there been a characteristic smell in Cape Town? He didn’t think so. Only the scent of Daphne’s skin and hair … and so he drifted off to sleep and if he woke and cried out there was no one there to hear.

Next morning a couple of young women in the uniform of some nurses’ voluntary service arrived to check them over. Again James’s knee was strapped. All ten soldiers sat about in the cottages with their feet in strong-smelling potions, all had their sore skins medicated: all were on their way to recovery.

Now, a problem: nine men already half-mad with boredom, and here they were in this refined and subdued household and what they wanted was some fun – precisely, to get drunk.

But the Grants had thought of that. In the town was a club which would welcome them, and a short walk would take them there. Better wait until evening until it cools down a bit.

That left James, who didn’t want any club, other soldiers, distractions from his private thoughts. He wanted to sit on this verandah and watch the birds and think about Cape Town. That meant Daphne, but not exclusively. He was thinking, ‘Imagine, we could have been stationed there – couldn’t we? But instead we are here.’ The enormity of Chance, or Fate, preoccupied him, and he sat for hours, a book open on his knee, thinking so deeply that the Colonel’s approach was not noticed until the old man coughed and sat down.

‘I hope I am not disturbing you?’

‘No, no, – of course not, sir.’

On James’s knee was Kipling’s Collected Verses. Kipling had not been offered in the summer schools of that year which now seemed so long ago. Kipling! What would Donald have said?

The bookshelves of the Grants’ living-room were full of red leather volumes tooled in gold – and many of them were Kipling.

The Colonel leaned forward, took in the title, leaned back. He said, ‘A good lad, Kipling. Though he’s out of favour now.’

‘I haven’t read him before, sir.’

‘I’d be interested to hear what you make of it. Your generation … you see things differently.’

Outside this bungalow, beyond the tree-shaded garden, on the dusty road, groups of Indians went past in their many colours.

‘What’s that bird, sir?’

‘Crows. Indian crows. Not like ours, are they?’

‘They sound as if they’ve got sore throats. Like mine.’

The Colonel laughed: clearly, he was relieved to laugh. James’s pale intensity disturbed him.

‘We’ve got all kinds of germs. It’s the dust. Filthy. But you’ll get immune, with luck.’

‘And do you get immune to the heat, sir?’

The Colonel looked at the patches of dressing on James’s arms and legs, below the uniform shorts; he knew there were more dressings, where they were invisible. The redness on James’s neck was prickly heat. ‘No, you don’t get used to that, I’m afraid.’ A pause, ‘I’m afraid my wife takes it hard, after all these years. She spends as much time as she can in the hills but at the moment she wants to do her bit, so she’s here, and she’s not made for it. You must have noticed.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And where are your comrades?’

‘They’re exploring the town.’

‘Poor lads, not much for them to do.’

‘We’re all pleased to be off the ship, sir.’

‘Yes, I heard you had a bad time.’

He got up, nodded, and went off. But he took to dropping in to join James on the verandah, for chats that were brief, but as James saw, not without purpose.

‘Didn’t they offer you a commission?’

‘Yes, I turned it down. Now, I wonder why?’

‘You might have had things a bit easier.’

‘I thought so on the troopship, yes.’

‘Yes.’

And another time, looking at the red volume on James’s knee.

The tumult and the shouting dies,
The Captains and the Kings depart.

‘They don’t seem to be departing, sir. Far from it.’

‘That’s what they want us to do. The Indians. Depart. You might have noticed.’

James had now been in India for a week and he had not done more than glance at a newspaper.

‘Riots.’ ‘Free India.’ ‘India for the Indians.’ ‘The British Tyranny.’

Months of socialist indoctrination, which of course had to include ‘Free India’, had slid off James. He thought, Well, India for the Indians: that makes sense.

‘The lot before you. The previous regiment. They’ve gone to Burma.’

‘Yes, we know.’

‘Before they left they were suppressing riots in … pretty close to here. They put down quite a nasty spot of bother. What do you think about that?’

James thought that if you were a soldier you did what you were told, bad luck.

‘Mine is not to reason why, sir.’

The Colonel laughed. ‘Very wise!’

‘Are we going to Burma, sir?’ James dared.

‘I don’t know. No, I really don’t.’

‘And if you did you wouldn’t tell me.’

‘And if I did I couldn’t tell you. But as you know, the Japs are threatening to invade India and free it from our tyranny. And they’re getting closer all the time.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And some troops will be kept here, in case of that.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes, it looks like that.’

And another conversation, towards the end of that visit, which James was hardly to remember later, so little impression did it make on him, compared with the vividness of Cape Town.

The Colonel had come on to the verandah, his boots loud on the wooden floor, and he stood looking at the soldier, who was lost to the present and staring, his mouth a little open.

‘James …’

James did hear, after a pause, then smiled, stood as the Colonel sat down. He sat down again himself.

The Colonel said, ‘You know, this isn’t an easy country for some of us – well, some do seem to flourish like the green bay tree. Not many. It takes it out of you.’ Now he hesitated, trying to think of the right thing to say. He shifted his lengthy legs about in the cream linen trousers which had a shine on them from someone’s iron. With one thin sunburned hand he rubbed his chin, while he stared thoughtfully, not at James, but into the garden.

‘Are you sleeping – may I ask?’

‘Not too well. It is so hot.’

‘Yes, it is, things’ll get better when the monsoon comes. Not long now.’

‘The monsoon, everyone talks about it as if it’s some kind of magic wand.’

‘Well, it is. Yes, that’s what it is. James – if I’m talking out of turn, then forget it. But I want to say … you mustn’t take things too hard. Bad idea anywhere, but in this country … it tips people over the edge, India does, if you don’t get a grip of yourself. We aren’t made for this climate. It does us in. I’ve seen it … I’ve been here forty years. Too long. I’d be Home now if it wasn’t for the war.’

If James had taken this in, it didn’t show on his face; he didn’t move, or look at the Colonel.

‘Think about what I’m saying, will you? Try and take things a little easier.’

‘Yes, sir. Yes … it’s that ship, you see. I don’t think you can have any idea …’ One does not say to an old man that he hasn’t an idea, not about anything. ‘I mean … I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean …’ And then, angry, white-faced: ‘It was terrible. It was …’ And he brought two clenched fists frustratedly down on his chair arms. His book fell, and the Colonel picked it up, sat turning pages. He read aloud:

‘Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.

I often recite that to myself when things get rough.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A sense of proportion, one must keep that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you do forget, you know, one does forget.’

‘I will never forget, sir, never, never.’

‘I see. I’m sorry.’ And the Colonel moved off.

On the day the cars came to take the Grants’ guests back to their camp, the air seemed full of rubbish. A wind was busy in the trees, whirling leaves and even small branches out into the roads where people scurried into doorways and holes in a jumble of shops and little houses, and shopkeepers struggled to put up their shutters to save their goods being whisked into the air. Mouths were dry. Eyes stung from the dust.

The cars passed a platoon, accompanied by their corporal, returning from some jaunt associated with the two weeks’ leave. Their eyes were screwed up, their mouths clenched tight, against the sun and the dust. This made them look indignant. Ten expostulating men with the dirt running off them as they marched, and the dust in clouds as high as their knees. The two cars passing raised the dust even more and looking back, the passengers saw a ghostly platoon vanish in a dirty cloud.

The men went to report their return, and James was told that ‘it had been suggested’ he should take a commission and then join Administration. Who had suggested? It could only be Colonel Grant, who was a friend, he had said, of Colonel Chase. ‘Nine to Five,’ thought James, ‘It’s my fate.’

‘Get to Medical tomorrow and then report back.’

James was in a long hut that housed twenty, rather like the hut which was his first home as a soldier getting on for three years ago. None of the men he had been with in Britain were here, but some were fellow sufferers from the ship. On twenty beds, ten to a side, young men sat, listening to the wind fling dust at their shelter.

‘Christ, what a country.’

No one disagreed.

They began exchanging news about their two weeks’ leave. All grumbled: nothing to do, a couple of ‘clubs, so called’ making a favour of admitting Other Ranks, a few Eurasian girls, anyone fucking those bints was asking for it, again a shortage of beer, the heat, the heat, the heat.

Then one said to James, ‘We hear we’re going to have to salute you, sir.’

This was unfriendly. James who had listened to routine criticisms, amounting to hatred, of the officers, realised he was now on the other side.

‘So it seems,’ he said.

A soldier gave him a mock salute from where he sat.

‘Enough of that,’ said the corporal.

‘Yes, Corporal.’

‘Administration,’ said James. ‘Pen-pushing.’

‘Better than square bashing.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said James.

‘And how was it at your Colonel’s?’

One of the men in the hut had been among the ten, and now James said, ‘Ask Ted, he’ll tell you.’

‘Fucking awful,’ said Ted, ‘And she’s …’ he screwed his forefinger at his forehead.

‘Suited me,’ said James, annoyed at the ingratitude, ‘I needed a bit of quiet after that voyage.’

‘Quiet,’ said Ted. ‘I’d like a bit of action.’

‘Perhaps they’ll move us on,’ said someone.

‘And perhaps not,’ said James. And he told them what Colonel Grant had said: some regiments were to be kept in India in case of a Jap invasion.

Groans and curses.

‘Roll on the bloody peace.’

In the night, the monsoon arrived and rain battered so loud on their roof that few slept. In the morning the dust of yesterday was in deep chocolate pools where foam scudded as the wind blew.

The men got to breakfast wet and hot. They went to Medical – hot and wet.

‘How’s that knee?’

‘Better,’ said James. It was a lean healthy knee again,

‘I see you play cricket. I’ll get your name put down.’

The doctor prodded James here and there, and said, ‘And now your feet.’

James took off his boots. Liberal applications of a strong-smelling liquid.

‘And your sore throat?’

James had mentioned his sore throat to no one but the Colonel.

‘It’s not too good.’

‘Let’s take a look … yes, I see. It’s the dust. But now the rains have come, it’ll clear up.’

And how did he know? All the personnel, from the Colonel down, were new to India. All were dismayed by it. ‘You’ll acclimatise,’ said this young man, who had read in his textbooks that one did.

The rain stopped. A clean and well-sponged sun appeared.

Hundreds of young men marched and drilled, drilled and marched, the sweat running under the khaki while the sergeants shouted at them that they had gone soft and useless, but don’t worry, we’ll see to that.

James was sent that day to Supplies to get a Second Lieutenant’s uniform, spent time on new boots, and then was in a hut with one other Second Lieutenant, Jack Reeves, who was fitting books into a shelf when he arrived – so, that boded well.

James now said to his new comrade that he had no idea how to behave as an officer.

‘Don’t fret,’ said Jack Reeves, ‘I told the corporal the same and he said, “Just repose on the bosom of your sergeant-major and he’ll see you right”.’

‘Some bosom,’ the rejoinder had to be.

And now both young men were in Administration, with fifteen others, under a Captain Hargreaves who in peacetime had been trying to beat the Slump with a chicken farm in Somerset. The war had saved him from bankruptcy. He was a rather loud, blustering sort of fellow, but competent enough. Every morning he arrived in Administration, took salutes, saluted, and then allotted tasks like someone dealing cards. They dealt with supplies of food, of uniforms, of medical supplies; with the movement of men and with transport. Admin knew everything about the camp and its dispositions, and there was in this an agreeable feeling of power, if James’s temperament had permitted. But his real life, his secret energies, went into waiting for a letter from Daphne. Almost the last thing he had said to her was, ‘You will write, won’t you? Promise.’

But had he actually given her his number? Even his full name? Had she ever called him anything but James?

The measure of his disassociation from reality was that it had taken him weeks to realise that he didn’t have her full name, and certainly not her address. He could not write to her, but she would somehow find out where he was and write. He trusted her to find a way. It had taken the ship three weeks to get from Cape Town to Bombay. Allow a week – well then, two weeks – for delays; he could expect a letter any day now.

No letter. Nothing.

So he had to write to her. But all he remembered of that four days of paradise was stumbling off the ship into Daphne’s arms – that is how it had seemed: a radiance of bliss. A wonderful spreading house on a hillside in a street of such houses, and a garden. A little verandah from where you looked down at the sea, the murdering sea, and where he had danced with her, all night, cheek to cheek. Then that little house in the bushes that smelled of salt, and the waves crashing and thundering all around them.

But no address. Not a number, not the name of the street. The women who organised the hospitality when the troopships arrived, they didn’t take account of the name of this or that soldier: they simply despatched soldiers to willing hostesses. How could he find out her surname? The base at Simonstown? Write and ask for the names of the hostesses who had been so kind when the Troopship X was in? … Careless talk costs lives. He could not put it in a letter. The censor would have it out.

What was he to do? Never mind, she would write and then there would be an address. Meanwhile he wrote long letters to her, saving them carefully, numbered and dated.

He dreamed of her with an intensity that was like an illness. What he remembered of Cape Town – and with every day the scenes he dwelt on became sharper as he polished them, relived them – was clearer to him than this ugly place full of bored young men. This camp! – what a cock-up (so the men grumbled) – even now not all the huts had been built. Some men were still in tents that had been glaring white but now were stained and brownish, where watery mud lapped around the bases and seeped in through ground sheets. Even now gangs of thin little brown men in loincloths – surely cooler at least than thick khaki? – were hoisting up sheets of roofing or running around with hods of bricks. Everything had a look of impermanence, of improvisation. Everything was difficult: food and water, and basic medicines which had to be rushed, if that was the word, by train from Delhi.

There was grumbling over the food. Curries were making their appearance, but what the men wanted was the roast beef of old England, and that made all kinds of problems. The Hindus didn’t eat beef, and their cows wandered about, skinny and pitiful but sacrosanct, and beef came from the Moslems. Water was the worst: every drop had to be boiled, or otherwise was supposed to have purification tablets, but sometimes the men forgot. There had already been an outbreak of dysentery and the little hospital was full.

In the intervals between storms of rain the dust dried, but what dust … James took up handfuls of it, sifted it between his fingers, a powder as fine as flour. ‘The spent and unconsidered earth,’ he murmured: that is where Kipling got his line, from the lifeless, fine-blowing soil of India. This soil wouldn’t be able to grow the tiniest weed, it was so spent.

He passed requisite time in the Officers’ Mess, and its rituals, he was not negligent. He was determined not to be thought an oddity.

And yet he knew he must be, because he sometimes didn’t hear when people spoke to him. He was happiest with Jack Reeves, in their hut, reading, or talking about England. Jack was homesick and said so; James was sick with love, but did not confide in his friend. No one could understand, he knew that.

No letter came from Daphne. Letters from his mother, yes, with messages from his father, heavily censored, but Daphne was silent.

In his position in Administration he learned that another troopship was arriving, not destined to discharge its load at Camp X but at Camps Y or Z; fifty men would arrive here, to replace the twenty-five taken off at Cape Town and the casualties since. There had already been funerals; the Last Post had sounded over Camp X. Some sick men would never be fit for duty and would have to wait until the end of the war to get home. As Colonel Grant had said, India took it out of you.

This camp was so charged with homesickness and longings that it could have lifted up into the air and got home to England without the benefit of ships, or even of aeroplanes – which were for the VIPs. So Jack jested with James: it was a fantasy that was enlivening the camp for a while.

The new arrivals off the unnamed troopship had spent three days in Cape Town: bad luck would have taken them to Durban, but it was Cape Town. James spoke to one, and then another, until he found one who had been a guest, but did not describe anything like the houses and gardens James remembered. Then at last James did, by diligent pursuit, hear that yes, he had got lucky. The man had been whisked off to a house on a hill, with a garden and …

‘What was her name?’

‘Betty, she was called Betty. And what a party, the food, the drink …’

‘And was there another woman there? A girl with fair hair?’

‘There were a lot of girls, yes. What was her name?’

‘Daphne, her name was Daphne.’

And now at last James heard: ‘Yes, I think there was. Yes. Yellow hair. But she wasn’t there much. She was pregnant. Must have popped by now.’

And no matter how James pressed and urged, that was all he could find out.

Pregnant. Nine months. It fitted. The baby was his. It had to be. Funny, he had not once thought of a baby, though now he felt ridiculous that he hadn’t. Babies resulted from lovemaking. But that was a bit of an abstract preposition. His lovemaking, with Daphne, what did it have to do with the progenitive? With baby-making? No, it had not crossed his mind. Now he could think of nothing else. Over there, across all that sea, beyond the appalling Indian Ocean, was that fair city on its hills, and there in that house was his only love with his baby.

He tried again with his informant. ‘What was the address? Where was the party?’

‘No idea. Sorry.’

‘What was the fair woman’s name?’

‘I thought you said Daphne.’

‘No, her surname.’

‘No idea.’

‘Did you get the name of your hostess, the dark one, Betty?’

‘I think it was Stubbs.’

‘No address?’

‘Sorry, I never thought to keep it – you know, they just drove us up there and then back again.’

‘Is she going to write to you?’

‘Who?’

‘Betty, Betty Stubbs, is she going to write you letters?’

‘No, why should she? There were dozens of us, she isn’t going to write letters to every poor sod she invited to a party.’

But James was better off by one name. He had had Betty, and now he had Stubbs. Her husband was a captain at Simonstown and a friend of Daphne’s husband.

Bringing himself back from his world of dreams to reality (‘what they call reality’ – he knew how his state would be criticised, if anyone guessed it) he decided that he could not write to this husband of Daphne’s friend Betty and say, ‘Please give the enclosed to your friend and neighbour Daphne.’ After all, Daphne did have a husband. She had said so. But she could have had two or three husbands and they would not affect the secret life he shared with Daphne and which he knew – she must – share too. No one could have lived through that time and not for ever be changed – that he knew. But he did not wish to harm her.

He wrote: ‘Dear Captain Stubbs, I was one of the lucky men who disembarked for four days at Cape Town some months ago. I was the guest of Daphne, who lives next door to you. I would be grateful if you could drop me a line with her address. Sincerely. Second Lieutenant James Reid.’

This innocuous letter, giving nothing away – he was certain – was sent off, through the usual monitored channels. The very earliest he could expect a reply, even if everything went perfectly, was a month, let’s say six weeks.

The six weeks passed.

In the intensity of concentration of his dream James hardly noticed that the rains had stopped, the earth was parching, the heat was beating. Outside his hut someone had thrown down a mango pip which had rooted and was already a vigorous six inches of growth. So the soil of India might be unconsidered but it certainly wasn’t spent.

James sent another letter to Simonstown. After all, letters went astray, ships sank, his first letter to Simonstown had been like a paper dart with a message on it thrown into the dark.

Months passed. A letter came. It read:

Dear James,

Daphne has asked me to write. She says please don’t write again. She is very well and happy. She is having another baby, which will be born by the time you get this, I expect. So she will soon have two children. Joe is named after his father, and if it is a little girl – Daphne is sure it will be – her name will be Jill.

She sends greetings.

With our best wishes,

Betty Stubbs. Daphne Wright

Greetings! She sent greetings! James dismissed the greetings – that is not what she meant, it is what she had to say.

To his intimate memories, little pictures, the two lovely women in their flowery wrappers under a tree, Daphne in a hundred different guises, all of them smiling, he now added Daphne with a little boy, a fair pretty child, absolutely unlike the dark babies with their golden bangles on chubby wrists that he saw on their mothers’ hips, on the roads, in the shops, in doorways. When the war was over he would go to Cape Town and claim Daphne, claim his son. He knew he rejected all these pleasant Indian babies because their mothers weren’t Daphne.

War is not a continuum, but long periods of inaction and boredom interrupted by fits of intensive activity; that is to say, fighting, danger, death, and then boredom and quiescence again. So the news has always come from the fronts. ‘How was the war for you?’ ‘God, the boredom, that was the worst.’ ‘But I thought you were at Dunkirk … Borodino … in Crete … in Burma … the Siege of Mafeking?’ ‘Yes, but the bits in between, my God, the boredom, I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ In Camp X boredom was like an illness, one of those diseases where a virus lays your immune system low. Boredom alleviated by a fever of rumour-mongering.

Rumours in wartime: now that’s a theme. Prognostications that have the sheen of dreams, bred of terror and loneliness and hope from unlikely places in the human mind, seethe and simmer and then spill out in words from the mouth of some careless talker in a pub or barracks, and then they fly, fly from mouth to mouth, until in no time, a day, a week, the truth is out: ‘We are being posted to Y Camp, no, to Z camp, to be nearer when the Japs attack.’ ‘They’re going to attack next week, that’s why the 9th Empire Rifles are going up there.’ ‘We are being sent to Burma – the Adjutant told Sergeant Benton.’ ‘This camp is too unhealthy, it’s going to be closed down and we’ll be sent to the hills.’ ‘They’ve hushed up an outbreak of cholera. Keep that under your hat or we’ll have a riot.’ ‘They’re putting sedatives in our food to keep us quiet.’

Boredom and rumours.

The Japs were closer: they swarmed over Asia, but it was not James’s regiment sent to fight them. James’s regiment in Camp X, where James dreamed and had his being, was sent nowhere. Life went on, day by uncomfortable day, the hot winds blew about, saliva tasted of dust and the eyes stung and then the monsoon rain … the third. 1943. The soldiers saw how Indians came running from their houses and shops and held up their arms to the rain and turned themselves about, singing. No soldiers ran from their huts to stand in the rain; it was their job to give an example, to behave properly, preserve decorum.

Colonel Grant and his lady had invited James to the odd weekend. The Colonel had taken a shine to James, whose diffidence diagnosed things thus: I suppose he likes having someone to talk to about Kipling.

A conversation had taken place. Mrs Grant said to her husband, ‘I don’t want any more of these Other Ranks. They don’t behave. Last time there was vomit all over the place.’

‘You exaggerate, my dear.’

‘No. They’re not of our class, and they don’t really enjoy coming to us.’

Colonel Grant suspected this was true, but he said, ‘They’re having a thin time of it out here. We should do what we can.’

‘I’m putting my foot down, only officers, I’m simply not having it.’

There were hinterlands here. Long ago Colonel Grant had been a clever poor boy who got a rare scholarship to Sandhurst, which, as he progressed up the hierarchy, was proved amply justified. His had been a fine career. But he had not been of his lady wife Mildred’s class, not to start with. That is why the Grants had always invited Other Ranks. Not any longer. Mrs Grant was putting her foot down.

‘I don’t mind that boy, what’s his name, James something, he knows how to behave.’

‘He’s an officer now, my dear.’

‘Well, there you are.’

Ten young officers, James one of them, had spent a long weekend with the Grants and behaved well enough, though they, like the earlier guests, took themselves off into the town’s clubs.

James did not.

Colonel Grant said to James, while they sat companionably on the verandah, a tray of tea between them, ‘James, tell me, what is the talk in camp, about things in general?’

‘You mean, being kept here in India, doing nothing?’ This was direct, and it was bitter, and not only on his own account.

‘Yes, what are they saying?’

Now the Colonel must know what ‘they’ were saying, since his friend Colonel Chase heard it all, in the Officers’ Mess. Had he forgotten James was no longer with the ordinary soldiers?

‘When I was in with the men, there was a lot of grumbling. They don’t like it. But you know, the men grumble about everything.’ Yes, the Colonel did know, he hadn’t forgotten. ‘It seems to me, sir, that the men dislike officers as a matter of form … but is that what you were asking?’

What Colonel Grant was asking came from many levels and motives in him. He and Colonel Chase had sat together, talking intemperately – for them – about disaffection, and feeling that they were out of touch.

‘In the Officers’ Mess – is there bad feeling? Dangerous bad feeling?’

Since Colonel Chase heard the kind of thing said, this must be a question of interpretation: and James was startled.

‘I don’t like politics, sir, I never did.’

To say that, straight out, wasn’t something he would have done in the mess.

He had, at the beginning, said, ‘I’m not interested in politics,’ as he might have said, ‘I don’t take sugar in my tea.’

He could have said he was Conservative, or – daringly – that he intended to vote Labour, but not, that he was uninterested, any more than in the time of, let’s say, Luther’s Theses, someone might have said, I’m not interested in religion.

To be not interested in politics: that meant he was callously indifferent to the fate of humanity, at the very least misinformed. On that early evening a dozen young men set themselves to inform him. And so he had evolved some polite ways of indicating interest without committing himself.

But this explosion of interest in his lack of proper feeling had made him think back to the glorious days of 1938. Now he knew that the intense political feeling of that time had not been the nation’s usual condition. Mostly left-wing feeling. There had been a boiling up of political thought, because of the Spanish Civil War, because of the Slump and the poverty, because of the threat of the coming war and so there had been all those politics, mostly left-wing. He had gone through it listening, but reading poetry.

In the Officers’ Mess most of the young men were left-wing, in various ways, but the talk was – loudly – about India. The young officers, not the older ones. The whole sub-continent was effervescing with talk of freedom, freedom from Britain, and here, in Camp X, their main task was to suppress it.

What had Colonel Chase said to Colonel Grant? He would have talked of troublemakers, Bolshies, even communists. About the Fifth Column, and possibly there might even have been talk of courts-martial.

‘You may not like politics, James, but I don’t imagine you can avoid them.’

James said truthfully, ‘I never think about it.’

Now the Colonel protested, in an old man’s aggrieved voice, ‘Does what we’ve done here in India mean nothing to you? We’ve built all these fine railways, we’ve built roads, we’ve kept order …’ He had to stop. Order was not the word for what was happening now: agitators everywhere, the Congress, people in prison. Then, ‘Does the British Empire mean nothing to you, James?’

‘The Captains and Kings are going to have to depart, sir, that’s what I think.’

‘I see, and you don’t care.’

James might have said that if he were in Daphne’s arms the whole bloody British Empire could sink into the sea.

He said, ‘Well, sir, I don’t imagine what we think about it will make much difference to what happens.’

And now his voice was full of trouble. One reason why he didn’t like to think about politics was that if he did he had to think about the war, and that meant being engulfed in horror, an incredulous, unbelieving, protest that this war was happening at all. He knew that he dreamed about it, the enormity, the weight of it.

Colonel Grant looked sharply at the young man, whom he had been ready to convict of unfeeling. But no, that was not it, there was real pain there, and those blue eyes, which the Colonel thought of as English, were unhappy.

The Grants asked James and some others, one of them Second Lieutenant Jack Reeves, at the height of the hot season, for a week in the hills. They took the long slow train up into the hills and found themselves in a little cottage, that had English flowers in the garden. The winds blew cool and fresh and there was no dust. The villas and houses were called Elm Place, Wisteria Lodge, Kent Cottage, Hollyhock Close. Mrs Grant, no longer flushed with heat, though the neck of her dress showed a raddled red vee, revealed herself as an unremarkable, non-complaining hostess, but with a tendency to fuss, perhaps because she was feeling guilty. ‘James, you really must take care, I heard you coughing again last night. And you too Jack, here’s some linctus.’ The Colonel, evidently and touchingly relieved by his wife’s return to normality, could be seen looking at her with – was that actually affection? Concern? Love? The young observe their elders’ marriages with politeness and a secret resolve never to marry; or, ‘if I do it won’t be to anybody like that old bag’.

The walks up here were pleasant. There was riding. James didn’t ride but the others did. Simply to sit and breathe clean air was a treat. Down in the plains, in the heat, at Camp X, they were sweating as they stood, and it was impossible to sleep. Soon, too soon, these four soldiers would be back down in it, but in the meantime …

James sat on the little verandah with a book and sometimes the Colonel sat with him. There was a wistfulness about him now that James, schooled by long observation of his father, had to recognise as regret, ‘It is a sad thing,’ the Colonel observed, more than once, ‘to have spent your life doing a job you thought was worthwhile and then you find you’re not valued.’

Colonel Grant was lonely: that was James’s discovery on this holiday. But he had a wife, didn’t he? Well, yes, he did, but … Presumably he had cronies? Now James thought of his father and knew he was lonely: he came to his father’s loneliness by way of Colonel Grant’s. Yet there were the old soldiers’ evenings in the pub, and he did come home to a wife – with whom he did not talk. What would Colonel Grant like to say, if he could, and to whom? Was his trouble only a need to grumble about not being appreciated? No, there was something deeper there and James knew how to respond, in his thoughts at least: after all, he could never speak to anyone about his real self. And his father: what thoughts was he holding safe, in his silences?

Even when the Colonel was not there, James was not alone. In the bungalow (‘Butler’s Lawn’) was a young English couple with a child, a little boy, just walking, or rather, staggering, with his ayah always on the watch. This little creature had taken a fancy to James, perhaps because of the young man’s interest in him, and from the verandah of his house he watched James, who was standing watching him on the verandah of the next house. The ayah took to bringing the infant over, to play his new games of crawling, and sitting, clambering up and sitting, while James, tucking his long legs well aside so as not to impede the child’s efforts, was as ready as the nanny to prevent harm. The child did not like sitting on laps, but he did like standing in front of James, legs apart, and then sitting, thud, on his padded bottom, and laughing, and getting up, assisted by James. All this the Colonel watched and so did Mrs Grant. Not usual for a young man to bother with an infant.

‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ enquired the Colonel.

‘No, I was an only child.’

‘Perhaps that accounts for it … that child really does like you – look, Mildred.’ And Mrs Grant stood in the door, briefly, to commend the young man, who could have done without the attention. He would have liked to be alone with this little creature, roughly the same age as his child, far away in South Africa. He wanted to persuade the little boy to sit on his knee, so he could look close into those blue bright eyes and perhaps hug him, feel the warm energetic body – hold this child and think of his own. But the ayah never let him out of her sight.

The Colonel sat with his old legs stretched out, his old hands trembling a little, a glass of whisky beside him, watching the young man and the child. His sons were grown up and were about the world, soldiers, one in danger in Burma. The Colonel was perhaps remembering his own children as attractive imps of promise, contrasting them with what they were now, as the old tend to do, when he saw this little lump of love, clutching at James’s knees as he fell back, to save himself, laughing and crowing with delight. On the Colonel’s face the tenderest smile. And on James’s face too.

‘When the war is over it will be your turn,’ said the Colonel to the young man.

It is my turn already, exulted James privately, while he said, ‘Yes, sir, I hope so.’

Time passes … well, it does, one has to acknowledge that, but it does not pass evenly, and that quite apart from the everyday phenomenon of the different pace of time at three years, thirteen, thirty, sixty, ninety, which we all experience. Time moves differently in different places: in Camp X it crawled.

Colonel Grant, appealed to (tactfully) by James as to whether there would ever be a prospect of being sent somewhere more interesting, replied only that ‘They had to be always ready for trouble wherever it appears.’

‘Trouble’ was already not only evident, but increasing, even if you didn’t read the papers or listen to the wireless. ‘Troublemakers’, as the Colonel put it, were increasingly at their work, and ‘disaffection’ was everywhere like a heat rash.

Companies from Camp X were sent to ‘deal with it’. James, too, more than once. He did sympathise with the soldiers grumbling openly that they were expected to fight an enemy, not to ‘put down’ Indians. Jack Reeves, too, said he was a bit of a Red, but was even more so now he was seeing the Raj at work.

A song was being sung everywhere in Camp X, not only by the Other Ranks:

What did you do in the war, Dad?
I kept the Indians down,
Yes, we kept the Indians down …

Complaints and grumbling at Camp X were alleviated in one way by the arrival of an Entertainment Officer – Donald Enright, now Adjutant Enright – but exacerbated in another because Donald was an open and proselytising Red.

That these hundreds of bored young men needed entertainment no one could deny.

Donald was pleased to see James, but surely not as much as deserved a year of companionship? Well, he had had acolytes since. He was now a large, assertive, extrovert young man, full of bonhomie and goodwill. Wherever he went he was in the centre of a loud group. He moved about the camp collecting admirers like – well, like a politician.

He at once organised a concert party, using an impressive number of the troops, but the audience was bound to outnumber performers by many times to one. James was roped in: he was a girl, but this did not bother him at all: not for him the protests and bad jests obligatory at such moments. In his mind he often embraced the loveliest woman in the world, and he was the father of a delightful boy child. He surprised himself and the audience with his vigorous interpretation of a coy maiden. Jack showed a talent for this kind of thing and was soon writing sketches for Donald. Then Donald put on Priestley’s They Came to a City, that play which during the war more than any other embodied idealistic and perfervid dreams for a better life. He ventured on Shakespeare and Twelfth Night. The soldiers went to see it because there was nothing better to do, but were persuaded that they enjoyed it. Some did.

They Came to a City sparked a demand for debates. The first was: ‘A Socialist Britain’. A noisy success. Soon Donald had lectures and debates going as well as concert parties. He organised a library – how, no one seemed to know. He begged and borrowed books, failing to return them; he went into the town’s clubs and posted up notices begging for books. When there was a demand for a book on a socialist economy, and no such book was in the camp library, he actually wrote a thick pamphlet himself and got it cyclostyled in fifty copies – there was a paper shortage, so he scrounged and probably stole paper.

At all debates and lectures a Political Officer was present, taking notes. The debate, ‘Quit India Now’ (Now being somewhat hypothetical: ‘There’s a War On – didn’t you know?’) was the theme of a letter to the camp newspaper, which Donald seemed to have taken over. When people complained that he was running a one-man show, he said, ‘Right, then, why don’t you muck in? Come on – start a camp newsletter, we could do with one.’ The complainer did start a newsletter, the gossip of the camp, but it languished and soon Donald was running that.

Donald was summoned by Authority and told that there were limits and he was testing them. No more lectures on the political situation in India – understood?

‘How about a series on the history of India?’

‘Fair enough,’ Authority agreed.

But did not history include the British contribution, he argued, blandly, when taxed about the titles of the last three lectures: ‘Clive of India: The Flag Follows Trade.’ ‘The East India Company’ ‘The British Empire: Gain or Loss.’ Once again, standing to attention in front of a bench of senior officers, he argued that he had been given permission for history, hadn’t he? He was sure he had. Captain Hargreaves, who had said in Administration that he thought the India lectures were just the ticket, he could do with more of that, supported Donald, who asked why was it not in order for British soldiers who were fighting for democracy to hear the arguments on both sides? So he argued, pleasantly, the model of earnest willingness to serve.

The lectures went ahead, the Other Ranks making an issue of it, attending them in force: it turned out that two of the lectures were being given by senior officers who were experts on this very subject. And at the question and answer sessions Donald stood up to say that it was not for them to reason why (the poem had appeared in his newspaper): they might listen but on no account could they express their thoughts.

This was an impertinence so finely honed that Authority was at a loss what to do, but around the camp flew the rumour that severe punishment was being planned, using the extreme penalty for sedition.

Real rebellion, if not sedition, did simmer. Years of boredom and the appalling heat were raising everyone’s moral temperature, and even without Donald’s inflammatory presence, all through the soldiers’ huts, Other Ranks were arguing about their own role in all this, the role of the British Army.

Donald put on As You Like It. Who would have recognised in this flirtatious not to say winsome Rosalind the serious unsmiling young man whom everyone tended for some reason to leave alone. He didn’t drink much; he didn’t shine at the Officers’ Mess; he did play cricket well enough; when it was his turn to be camp librarian he was helpful, full of information. He was friendly with Other Ranks, who seemed actually to like him. And here he was, being applauded as Rosalind.

From the Sergeants’ Mess came a little bouquet of flowers with a card, ‘To Fair Rosalind’. And the obligatory obscenities. If the sergeants played their traditional barking punishing role on the parade ground, they were tending toward good humour and even behaviour that could be described as avuncular, off it. The long ordeal of Camp X was wearing them down: ‘Like a mother to us,’ jested some young officers, for, no longer under the rule of the sergeants, but their nominal superiors while obeying their advice in everything, they could afford to jest. This jest reached the ears of Sergeant Perkins, who came into the hut occupied by James and Jack, saluted, and said, ‘Right, then, if I’m your mother, then I have to say the condition of this hut is a crying shame. Better clean it up before Captain Hargreaves gets to hear about it.’ And, saluting, he went out.

The senior officers were in a dilemma. They knew all about the sedition that was brewing, even if it was sporadic and disorganised, and they knew that Donald was a focus. But boredom was the parent of this mischief and Donald combated boredom. Without him things would be worse. It was a question of balance. When the senior officers attended debates and lectures, it was not – as the paranoid soldiers believed – to spy on them but because the officers were as bored as they were. ‘The Atlantic Charter Unmasked’, ‘Whither Egypt?’ ‘Imperialism Past and Present’.

In James’s desk was a calendar where a big red cross marked the birthdate of his son, Jimmy Reid. He had worked out the babe’s probable entrance to the world. He secretly celebrated the child’s first birthday and then his second. Another visit to the hills, with the Grants, allowed him to see the two-year-old, an explosion of charm and mischief. He adored that little boy and when he left the hills he had to hide tears. It is not possible to feel the pain of loss unchanged for ever. James’s grief had mellowed; it was there, but no longer was able to lay him low at a sound, a voice, the colour of the evening sky, a line of poetry, a bird’s call. He had not realised how much this cherished love, or grief, had diminished, but leaving that child it all came back, and Colonel Grant was reminded to say again, ‘Easy does it, James. Take it easy.’ And Mrs Grant, ‘How nice it is to see a young man taking an interest in children. Well done.’

Those of us who have lived through such a time, the interminable time that need have no end – so it seems – know that what is left behind of the three, four years of endlessness is fear of being trapped again. But what is to be done about war? – tangling people in nets of circumstances. Nothing. Soldiers in India – who would have thought it, let’s say in 1939, as the war was being adumbrated in rousing speeches, that one of the results would be hundreds of thousands of young men, stuck like flies on a flypaper in India – not to mention Rhodesia, South Africa, Canada, Kenya, defending the bad against the worse. No one in 1939 wrote a poem beginning, ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’. Donald Enright actually managed a lecture, ‘Defending the Bad Against the Worse’, and was reprimanded. ‘But we’re fighting for democracy!’ he beamed at his superior officers, who frowned at him, uneasy, as unwilling to grasp this problem as they would be to take up a fistful of hot coals. He was a wonder, this Donald Enright, with his concert parties and his Shakespeare and his lectures. Who could deny it? ‘We told you before, you’re sailing too close to the wind.’ ‘Yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir. I was rather thinking of a debate on “Problems of the Peace, Socialism or Capitalism?” Would that be in order, sir?’

You could look at Camp X, stuck there in the middle of India – looking with a non-military, un-imperial eye – as an arbitrary aggregation of hundreds of young men, united only by a uniform. Which is how at times they saw themselves. Take this ditty, emerging somewhere from the collective unconscious of the camp:

There’s a war on,
You tell us they say there’s a war on,
But where’s the war, the bloody bloody war,
Clean your boots,
Check your kit,
Stand to attention,
Stand at ease,
Mind your Q’s, mind your P’s,
There’s a bloody war on.

Several hundreds of young men kept together by the uniform and the merest framework of discipline, the prescribed measures of saluting, the Yes Sirs, the No Sirs, the drills, and meanwhile months – no, years, now – of the upper ranks and the Other Ranks too made equal (almost) by a hundred non-military occasions, the concert parties, the theatre shows, the lectures: surely this must have frayed the fabric of discipline into ineffectiveness? Not so. First, the rumour: We’re being sent north-east to fight the bloody Japs. At once it was as if the whole camp snapped to attention. Then, the hard fact. It was true. Camp X fizzed with elation, they might be going off to a festival, not certain danger and possible death. At last, they would justify themselves, the whole bloody lunacy of their being here at all would make sense. James, too, as excited as the rest, but then, brought down: his name was not on the lists: he was not going.

He sat in Administration behind his desk, all other desks but one deserted. At each desk a typewriter, folders, loose papers stirring in sluggish air from a dozen ceiling fans that chug-chugged like motors, and James’s mouth was a hard ugly line and he looked as if he hadn’t slept. Captain Hargreaves was here to calm and to defuse, because it was in Administration that faces like James’s were to be expected.

Second Lieutenant Reid and Captain Hargreaves were on Jimmy and Tommy terms except for sometimes, like now.

‘Tommy,’ began James, still sitting, but saw his superior officer’s monitoring frown and he stood up. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘it isn’t fair.’

Captain Hargreaves merely smiled, but James persisted. ‘It simply isn’t fair, it isn’t good enough – sir.’

Why me? could have come next, but shame suppressed it.

‘Someone has to stay and keep things going, you know that, Second Lieutenant. We can’t just march off and leave the place empty.’

James was quivering with the arbitrary injustice of it all.

His senior officer went on, ‘There will be ten of us left in Administration, and some for Other Duties.’

James remained at attention.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ offered the captain but went red because of the bathos. He stood up.

‘Are you going with the rest, sir?’

‘Yes. As it happens. I am.’ And he escaped.

Later, walking across to the Officers’ Mess, James encountered Major Briggs, who saw from the young man’s state that he must stop, so he stopped.

James saluted.

‘I know what you are going to say, Lieutenant. But someone has to stay. And you are good at it. You can blame yourself if you like.’

This joke fell well short of its target. James knew he was good at it. Pen-pushing and Admin: that’s what he was good at.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait … but you won’t be doing much of that. You’ll be working pretty hard, I’d say.’

‘But perhaps they don’t serve so much, sir?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’ And the major put an end to this miserable conversation, because he knew how he’d feel, left behind in Camp X. James saluted. He saluted. That was that.

Off went the division, in long trains and many lorries. Camp X was nearly empty. Those left behind to hold the fort drank bitterly in the various messes, and talked bitterly about their luck.

James sat alone in Admin, with all the fans going and dust swirling about outside.

‘Darling. My darling Daphne. If you only knew how I rely on you. If I didn’t have you to think of now, with what has happened to me, then …’ And he described his situation. ‘And so I’m stuck here and the division has gone off, and my regiment. I often wonder, what was the point, all that time training in England, and then I missed the first Normandy invasion and Dunkirk, and we weren’t sent to Africa, and I might just as well have faked an excuse, my knee would have done, or gone down the coal mines. I sometimes think that would have been better. But then I wouldn’t have met you and that is what matters, the only thing that matters.’ And he repeated the refrain of his love for a page or two. Then, as always, he told her what he had been reading, ‘I found a lovely poem. Of course you must know it. It is called “Deirdre”. By James Stephens? It makes me think of you. “But there has been again no woman born/Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful/Of all the women born.” Deirdre and Daphne. And you are a queen. My Queen Daphne.’ And so he raved on for a page, then another, until it was time to go to the Officers’ Mess for dinner and the News.

Their regiment was in the thick of it, up in Manipur and Kohima. There had been casualties.

Weeks passed and back came the soldiers, not elated now, all that had left them, but they had been through it and looking at each others faces could see how they had all changed.

Jack Reeves was wounded and in hospital. Again James lost his friend. Sergeant Perkins would be decorated for conspicuous gallantry. A few killed. ‘Reasonable casualties for what was achieved; we threw the Japs out of India.’

But it did look as if the war was coming to a close, in Europe, at least. There would be an end. Soon. In Northern Europe it is when spring is on the horizon in the shape of longer days and earlier dawns that people subside into depression or think of suicide. Similarly now, with peace actually coming nearer every day, Camp X seethed and boiled with discontent. ‘So near and yet so far’ was the title of a poem in the camp newsletter. With the refrain, ‘So near to them, so far to us’ – them being the senior officers, who so often were to be observed taking off in Dakotas for Home. Officers and VIPs.

Donald put on Romeo and Juliet, and James was Romeo, a male part at last, astonishing everyone, and added several letters to his pile of them to Daphne, which he would post when censorship was over.

He also gave a lecture on Modern Poetry, while Donald sat proudly listening, for he was remembering how much James was his creation. And James said so: ‘I owe you a good deal,’ he said, ‘don’t think I’m ever going to forget it.’

‘Oh, jolly good show,’ said Donald.

The end of the war in Europe, so now they could go home – but when? Oh, no, not now, don’t think it, the ships will be full for a long time yet, you must take your turn, it’s not only you, but the RAF boys from all the far-flung parts of Empire, so many impatient young men, not enough ships, wait, wait, you’ve stuck it out for nearly four years, haven’t you? Just be patient a bit longer.

Not all could, or did. In two other camps, where they had been told they would be kept here, in India, to ‘maintain order’ to ‘contain unrest’ to ‘combat sedition’ to ‘preserve the British Empire’, disaffection broke out. ‘We didn’t join up to do the dirty work of the British Empire.’ ‘We joined up to fight Hitler.’ ‘You were called up and you will do as you are told.’

Speeches, real riots, and the camps were a-boil.

A couple of soldiers, ‘hot heads’, ‘incendiaries’, were court-martialled, but the Authority had listened, had taken heed. In Parliament at Home, questions were asked and speeches being made. And so the soldiers were going home.

Some, who remembered the bad time they had had on the ship coming to India did not look forward to the sea voyage home. But this time it would not be around the Cape, the long long journey, but through the Suez Canal.

But James had dreamed of making landfall at the Cape (though luck might just as well have taken him to Durban), and finding Daphne and his son and … there his thoughts became hazy. Yes, of course she had a husband, but she loved him, James, and there was such a thing as divorce, wasn’t there? The main thing, what he had to hold on to, was his child. His son – there could be no doubt about it, a love child, there could never have been more of a child of love than his and Daphne’s. Jimmy Reid, now four years old.

Hundreds of young men who had seen no more of India and the Indians than what they observed of life on the roads, in the bazaars, or the networks of amenities that surrounded the army – servants, Eurasian girls who were spoken of by the sahibs and memsahibs as if they were so much dirt, or the Indian soldiers in the army who intermeshed hardly at all with the white army, or the cleaners at the camp – these young men left India without regrets, at best thinking that the war had given them a glimpse of what travel might be. They filed on to the ship that was to take them away from a continent they saw as thoroughly unwholesome and unsavoury. But this voyage could not be as terrible as that other; only half the length, and they were going home, Home, which shortened the distance. It was rough, and hot, particularly through the Suez Canal, and in the Bay of Biscay, as was to be expected, the waves chopped and churned and tossed them about and they were sick, but home was in sight – and there they were, at last, the white cliffs, as Vera Lynn had promised.

‘How was your voyage?’ asked his mother, and James, ‘Oh, not so bad, could have been worse.’

On a dirty and rattling train James travelled through a land without light, so it seemed, a thin drizzly dark and faint blurs of light, and then in his home town, the street lights were dim and the windows, if not blacked out, showed parsimonious glimmers, and he was watching his feet as he walked. When he switched on the light on the stairs his mother said, ‘Please, only when you have to,’ and on the landing a faded notice said, ‘Save Electricity – Don’t Switch It On’. His old room, where he dropped his kitbag unopened, to get down faster to his parents, was small, well, it always had been, but it was so dingy. The supper was in the kitchen because leaving the oven door open heated the room; once his mother had made a point of eating ‘properly’ in the dining-room. The three sat around the table which had a vase of autumn leaves on it, and Mrs Reid boasted that she had got ‘under the counter’ liver from the butcher, in honour of his coming home. She served three thin lengths of brown meat like leather straps, with onions and potatoes. James had told himself, having grown up, that his father was not an old man, but though he was not much over fifty Bill Reid was an old man now, with a fuzz of white hair around a red face. James’s mother was polite to him and smiled all the time. Her embrace when he arrived seemed embarrassed rather than warm. ‘You have filled out,’ she said. But she could not stop smiling and tried to blink away tears when he noticed them. His father, silent as ever, kept pushing the dishes of vegetables at him, nodding Help yourself, but while his eyes were moist too, he could not talk, even say, ‘Thank God you’re home,’ so the dishes of vegetables had to do instead. ‘Have some potatoes,’ said Mrs Reid. ‘At least we’ve got plenty of those.’ In the dim kitchen the three sat eating and smiling, and felt so powerfully for themselves and for each other that it was a relief when James said he was tired. He left his mother sitting under the light, the radio switched on, crocheting something, and his father went to the pub.

‘He’s got to tell his mates you are home,’ she said.

James stood at his bedroom window and looked down at the darkened town. In India lights glared and blared, shadows moved blackly as the sun did, defining the hours. He had returned to a lightless land.

He at once got a job at the Town Hall, but not starting at the bottom, because of his years administrating Camp X. It was a good job. He stayed in his room a lot, reading, ate the meals that were less even than the meagreness he had been brought up with: rationing suited his mother’s nature; she enjoyed eking out the bacon ration and making the meat ration stretch. The drear and dark of post-war England – well, he was home, and that was all that mattered. He thought of India and did not like his memories. Except for Jack Reeves, with whom he had exchanged addresses, and Donald, and Colonel Grant – and of course, the little child of those two visits – he did not care to remember India, which was not so much a place as an emotion of holding on, sticking it out.

Alone in his room, the door locked, he read his letters to Daphne. It took hours. He did not see how he could send them: suppose they were intercepted? Suppose her husband … no, he would give them to her himself. When? Just as soon as the war’s enormous damage had been absorbed and everything had settled down.

He met Donald, who was already well up the ladder that would take him into politics. He visited Jack Reeves, and Jack came to him for a weekend. He joined a club and played some modest and likeable cricket. And he married Helen Gage, who had been a landgirl and enjoyed it: he could see, when he told her how he had longed for the end of the war, she did not understand, though she said she had too. She was a pretty, healthy young woman, tough and strong after her years of hard labour, and his mother was delighted. She had been afraid he would not marry, or marry late, she had not known why, but that had been her secret dread. She had been afraid of another silent man thrown out by war, a man who could not speak of what he had known. James was not communicative: he did not have much to say about India. But in the ordinary affairs of life he was easy enough – normal. His wife would not have to wake in the night beside a man thrashing about in a nightmare.

He told Helen that he had had a fling in Cape Town and that a child had resulted. She was married. When travelling was easier, he was going out to see. In fact, he had gone up to London to ask about travelling within a week of getting home. There wouldn’t be air travel for ordinary people for some time, or only for people who could pull strings: did he have strings to pull? No, so he would have to wait. It was not only the soldiers and airmen who were still coming home as the ships became available but everybody was on the move or wanted to be, after years of being stuck because of the war, or because of new jobs abroad. He could reckon on a good wait. Months, no: years, more like it.

It had already been years. He had learned how to wait. Love like theirs would keep, existing as it did out of time. There would be Daphne’s white arms welcoming him and the years in between would be forgotten.

Helen asked him how old his love child would be by now. Generous of her to use the word, and he kissed her for it, before telling her the exact age: years, months, days. Helen had had no cause until now for so much as a moment’s doubt: this was her first shock and it was a bad one. She had touched something deep and dangerous, and she knew it: this was like one of those doors you carelessly open in a dream and find a house, a world, a landscape, wider, larger, brighter or darker than the one you know. Almost, she broke off the engagement then and there. His face as he told her was one she had not seen before, set, inward-looking, into a world she was not going to share. This moment put in high relief other feelings she had had about James, not easily articulated. She did not try now. She thought, But I’ve got him, haven’t I? She hasn’t. He says he loves me. And she certainly was very fond of him. She had had her adventures too. Wartime is productive of ‘flings’, not to mention broken hearts. Her heart had not been broken, or anything like it, but one of the men she had loved, if briefly, had been killed in Normandy. She knew she had got over it, but while she confessed to James, she broke down, much to her surprise, and wept, finding herself enclosed in his arms. She was weeping not so much for a man but for lost men, her lover, her brother (lost at sea), a cousin (at Tobruk), and then there was a friend, a fireman, killed in the Blitz – unlived lives.

He comforted her, she him, but she knew that something was biting at his heart she was not going to know about. How old? ‘Nearly six – five years, eleven months, ten days.’

A wedding, restricted by post-war shortages.

They did everything right. Every Sunday they went to lunch with James’s parents, and they visited her parents, who lived far away, in Scotland, for holidays. They had a child, a girl, named Deirdre, because of James Stephens’ poem about the Irish queen. Helen liked this poem but joked that it was asking a lot for their little girl to be as beautiful as that. But Deirdre was pretty enough.

Eight years after the war ended James told Helen he was going to South Africa. He could have gone before, but that would have meant a ship, and he would never set foot on a ship again – never. It had to be the air, and when they could afford it. She knew there was no point in minding. He never mentioned his other child unless she asked, but then he promptly told her, ‘He is seven years, three months, ten days,’ or whatever it was. Sometimes she checked just to see if that invisible calendar was still running there, in him, marking … but she did not know what. This was not merely a question of a child’s exact age.

James’s plane descended at Khartoum, Lake Victoria, Johannesburg, with leisurely time at each for refuelling, restocking. This cumbersome trip seemed to him miraculous, when he remembered that other voyage. Then Cape Town, spread out over its hills, surrounded by sea. He found a modest hotel from where he could look down at the sea, the now innocent sea, full of ships, one being a passenger liner sparkling with new paint. Then he put a thick paper parcel under his arm and walked up through streets he remembered not at all to what he did remember, the two ample houses side by side in a street of gardened houses. On the gate where there should have been the name Wright, was the unknown Williams. The gate post for next door was still Stubbs. He retreated across the street to stand under an oak, and he looked for a long time at Daphne’s house, which in his memory lived as zones of intensity, the little room he had been given, Daphne’s bedroom, and the stoep, all else being dark. On to the verandah – the stoep – came an old woman, with a book. She sat in a grass chair, put on dark glasses, and gazed down at the sea. There was no sign of other life. Then he as carefully examined Betty’s house, of which he remembered only the garden. He could see movement through the windows that opened off the verandah. A maid? A black woman with a white headscarf. But he couldn’t see her properly. He moved across the street, cautiously pushed open the gate, and stood under the tree which he remembered spreading over trestles, full of food and drink, and a crush of people – soldiers. The companion tree in the other garden would live in his mind for ever because of the two beautiful young women, one dark, one fair, standing in grass, under it, wearing flowery wrappers.

Someone had come on to the Stubbs’s verandah. A tall woman. She shaded her eyes to peer at him and came slowly down the steps towards him. He did not know her. She stopped a few paces off, let her hand fall, and looked forward to have a good look. Then she straightened and stood, arms loose by her side, in a pose it did seem he remembered. A tall thin woman. She wore a short well-fitting blue and yellow dress in small geometrical patterns, with a narrow gold-edged belt, and some little gold beads. Her face was thin and sunburned and her dark hair was waved in neat ridges. On one thin wrist hung a gold bangle. Yes, now he knew – it was the bangle – this was Betty. She spoke: ‘What are you doing here?’

This question seemed to him so absurd he only smiled. He thought that the stern face – she was like a headmistress, or the manager of something – almost smiled in response, but then she frowned.

‘James – it is James? – then you must go away.’

‘Where is Daphne?’

At this there was a pause, and then a quick expulsion of breath – the sigh of someone who has been holding it. ‘She’s not here.’

‘Where is she?’

She came a step closer. He was thinking, already afflicted with anguish, that this tall dry uncharming woman had been that lovely creature he remembered as all dark flowing hair and loose soft gowns.

‘I must see Daphne.’

‘I told you, she’s not here.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She doesn’t live here now.’

‘I can see that. It’s on the gate. Is she in Cape Town?’

A tiny hesitation. ‘No.’

So, she was lying. ‘I could find out where she lives.’ This was not a threat, but a reminder to himself that he was not dependent on her for information.

She was agitated now, she actually raised those brown thin forearms, pressing the long dry hands to her chest. ‘James,’ she said, urgent, appealing, afraid. ‘You mustn’t do this. Why are you doing this? Do you want to ruin her life? Do you want to break up her marriage? She has three children now.’

‘One of them is mine.’

She did not seem inclined to dispute it. ‘You just turn up like this, turn up, as if it’s nothing, you just arrive and …’

‘I want to see my son. He’s going to have a birthday, his twelfth birthday.’ And he recited his son’s exact age, years, months, days.

She closed her eyes. Her lids were white against the tan of her face. She was breathing deep: she was shocked. He waited until she opened them. Betty had deep brown eyes, he remembered, brown kind eyes in a smiling lightly tanned face: he had thought of her as ‘a nutbrown maid’. Well, there were the eyes, and there were tears in them. Not unkind, no, they were still kind.

‘James, do you want to ruin Daphne’s life?’

‘No. I love her.’

‘That’s what you’ll do if you go on with this.’

‘I want my son.’

‘But you must see …’ She stopped. That sigh again, almost a gasp. Oh, yes, she was frightened all right. But she was on guard, fighting: she was protecting her friend.

‘Do you still see her?’

‘Of course. She’s my best pal.’

He produced his great lump of parcel: the letters. He held it out.

‘What is that?’

‘My letters. I’ve written to her, you see. I’ve always written to her. In the war there was the censorship. Then I didn’t want to – cause trouble. So I brought them.’

She didn’t take them from him.

He stood obdurately there, holding out the parcel: the force of his demand caused her hand to come towards it. She hesitated, then took it. ‘Will you give them to her?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Do you promise?’

They stared at each other, then her gaze lowered to the parcel.

‘Yes, I promise.’

‘My son,’ he urged, ‘It’s my son. I think of him … yes, all the time. Perhaps he will come and visit us in England?’

‘You’re mad. Yes, you’re mad. Yes, you are.’

But she held the parcel against her chest.

‘You’ve promised,’ he said.

She backed a couple of steps, then turned and ran for it, but over her shoulder she said, ‘Wait, just wait there.’

He waited. He did not look at all at the verandah where the old woman now read her book, the dark glasses pushed up to her forehead.

After a good twenty minutes, the maid emerged from inside the house, white apron, white headscarf, a worried face. She stopped in front of him and held out a large envelope. There she stood while he tore open the envelope. She was peering to see what she could. From inside the house came a voice from the invisible Betty. ‘Evelyn, Evelyn, I want you.’

Taking her time, her eyes never leaving the envelope, the maid turned and went off, sending back slow thoughtful looks over her shoulder.

Inside the envelope was a sheet of writing paper and scrawled on it, ‘Please, please, go away. Go away now. Please. Don’t hurt her. This is your boy.’

A photograph, a decent size for a casual snap, of a boy of about eight, standing by himself, legs apart, smiling. This picture was like one of himself, James, at about the same age. Black and white of course, so you couldn’t see what colour his eyes were. But if the rest was like James, then why not the eyes? And Daphne had blue eyes.

He took his time putting the photograph back, and then the sheet of paper. He stood smartly to attention and saluted the invisible Betty, who was watching him, he knew. He went off down the street, slowly, keeping in the shadows from the trees, as he had learned to do in India where the heat struck and burned, was not kindly, as it was here.

It was late morning, a fine Cape day, and over the famous mountain thin loose cloud lay, white and shiny. The famous tablecloth. Down he went, sending distracted looks to the sea shimmering peaceably there. He walked clumsily, people were staring. He sat on a bench in some public place but then got up and walked on, found another, sat down, pulled out the photograph and looked at it, for a long time.

He could not stay still. He began aimless fast walking, and found himself in some kind of market, where under trees long trestles were laden with every kind of dried fruit: peaches, apricots, pears, plums, apples, yards and yards of them, every trestle with its attendant woman, who was black or brown, at least, not white. Fruit pale yellow, burnt umber, purple, black; fruit red and pale brown and gold and rosy and green. Some was crystallised, colours glowing though a frosty white crust. A vision of plenty. He picked up a greengage, put it in his mouth, heard a shout from the vendor, realised he had to buy, and bought a couple of pounds of mixed crystallised fruit. ‘Helen will like this,’ he thought.

Off he walked, went up streets and down them. They were full of people, but he did not see them. He sat on benches and looked at the photograph of the boy who might just as well be himself, at that age, put back the photograph, walked on. His feet had the devil in them, he could not keep still. Dusk came. He was in streets that smelled spicy and hot: it was the Malay quarter, but Cape Town in his mind did not define itself in areas, it was a spreading smiling city, a Cape of Good Hope, radiating welcome, like the stamps he had as a child. He saw a stall, bought a sticky bun, ate it, standing up, while the Coloured man told him he had to pay for it. Oh, yes, that must be Afrikaans, he supposed, and gave the man a fistful of money. Then it was dark and he was in a public garden and he saw a bench and at once fell on it and bent sideways in a tight clench of his whole body. Pain had finally overcome him. He was afraid of crying out, and of people coming, so he stayed not moving, aching all over because of the tension of his position.

He was thinking of Betty, in her unlikable smart matron’s dress. That scene was already in the past, gone, and if he did not choose to remember it, it was non-existent. Why was that realer than the one he loved to see in his mind’s eye, the two beautiful women under the tree? Because it was more recent? Both were bright scenes, whose every detail he could recall: one of them, to him, was the truth. And he was thinking of Daphne, somewhere in this city, perhaps not more than five minutes’ walk away. Yet nothing and no one could be more distant. Nearer to him were his memories of her.

He became aware that someone else was on the bench. He did not look up.

She, however, was looking at him: Annette Rogers, who had finished her shift at the Fairview Hotel, a good hotel, and was interrupting her progress home as she did every evening on this bench. Her situation at home was to say the least unsatisfactory, and before she could face it, she needed to strengthen herself. This man here, was he ill? His face was white, his lips pale, from compression, his eyes were closed, and everything about him was tense and awkward. ‘He must be stiff in that position,’ she thought, and leaned forward and said, ‘Hey, excuse me, I don’t want to butt in, but are you ill?’

He shook his head, not opening his eyes.

She moved closer and lifted his tense hand which went limp in hers. It was cold. It was a fine warm evening. She continued to hold his hand, trying to take his pulse without his noticing. But he did notice and said, ‘I’m all right.’

All right he evidently was not.

Unhappiness was something she was used to: you could say she had a talent for it. She began examining him for clues. His clothes were good: now, that was a really smart jacket, it must have cost a bit. His trousers were of fine cloth. His shirt – no, he wasn’t short of enough for a meal. But his face, it was simply awful, perhaps it was a death, if it wasn’t money … she moved closer and put her hand on his shoulder. Then something about him licensed her to put her other arm under his head. She was cradling him, hardly knowing how it happened. She was now getting anxious on her own account. Her jealous husband – suppose he chanced to come by and see her holding another man: she could count on a few bruises to pay for that. But she continued to cuddle this unknown man, and said, ‘Hey, listen, don’t let yourself go like this, it only makes it worse.’

He opened his eyes: blue, a strong blue even in this dusking light.

He said, ‘You see, I’m not living my own life. It’s not my real life. I shouldn’t be living the way I do.’

This complaint may be made, or thought, by all kinds of people; demands on Fate, or on God, that are everything from the reasonable to the preposterous; (‘Oh, I wish I’d never been born!’ ‘I wish I’d been an aristocrat in the eighteenth century.’ ‘I wish I hadn’t been born a cripple.’) but the most frequently heard is the one instantly recognised by Annette Rogers. It made perfect sense to her. Her life certainly wouldn’t include a violent husband, a senile mother, and two out-of-control teenage children. Her life – but she had several variants of her dream – her favourite life was a little house right on the edge of the sea, like those you could see if you took a trip out of Cape Town, and she would live there with a man whose features she did not specify, though she knew he was kind. A kind man, and they would live there quietly, in good humour, and eat fish, grow vegetables and have fruit trees.

‘To know you’re living the wrong life, not your own life, that is a terrible thing.’ And now he began to weep, dry sobs, while she sat holding him together. She had to get herself back home, she had to, otherwise she was going to catch it, oh, yes, she could count on that. But she did not desert her post.

Annette was a tall stout woman, with dry fair hair in a roll on her neck – Betty Grable; her husband ordered her to keep it like that. She wore sensible shoes, which she needed for work, managing a whole floor of the Fairview, which kept her on her feet all day.

Now she hauled up this man, using strength, because he was stiff from sitting in that twisted pose. She put her hand into his arm and steered him through bright cheerful streets to his hotel. The Seaview. Surely he could do better than that, with those clothes!

He had left his parcel of fruits behind on the bench, which would be found later by a tramp.

She stood with him while he composed himself, and pushed the door open and stepped into a poorly lit and dingy lobby. She approved of his self-command, which was taking him to the desk for his key, and up iron stairs which would not have been out of place in a warehouse. She knew he would not turn and smile, or indicate he knew she was there: he was too deep inside, dealing with whatever it was that was eating him. ‘I’d give a good bit to know what’s eating him, but I never will!’ She caught a last glimpse of a wretched face.

And she went home, two hours late.

As for him he had no picture in his mind of the kind unknown who had, so he felt, held him together. His memory of Annette Rogers was of arms holding him: the haven of an embrace.

James and Helen continued their exemplary life. He was now in charge of a department at the Town Hall, and the wellbeing of a good many of his fellow citizens depended on him. She was prominent in all kinds of local charities. He played cricket. She taught gym and modern dance. They were members of a Ramblers Club and went for long hikes with their daughter, who was doing well at school.

James’s father died. His mother at once turned off the radio, put her knitting and crochet into a drawer and let her house. She took trips all over the British Isles and then to Europe. With a group of merry widows, she went on long sea cruises or to exotic isles, by plane, sending postcards back to James and Helen. He had a carton full of them.

Not a letter came to their house without his quick glance at it. Helen knew what he was waiting for. She let him know she understood. He tried to be first at any telephone call. He had shown her the photograph of the boy who was as real to her as the ones she had seen of her husband, as a boy.

There was another trip to Cape Town and she said she would go with him. He did not demur.

Deirdre had changed, it seemed overnight, from a friendly and sensible girl into a vindictive, spiteful, cruel creature they did not recognise. ‘Hormones,’ murmured Helen. ‘Oh, dear!’ Deirdre was invited to go with them to Cape Town and said she would rather die. ‘I want you out of my life,’ she shouted, in one of the formulas of 1960s’ teenage rebellion. ‘I’m going to live with my friend Mary.’ Judging that this stage might have passed by the time they returned, James and Helen set off without her, relieved.

By now the planes flew to Salisbury, then Johannesburg; the two glamorous stops in between had gone.

In Cape Town they were in a good hotel: James insisted on one high enough for a view of the sea.

Helen was enchanted by the Cape, for who is not? They drove up the coast, the incomparable coast, they visited gardens, and climbed Table Mountain and drove about through vineyards. James took her where he was pretty sure he remembered trestles full of fruit of all kinds, of all colours, but could not find it: stern hygiene had intervened.

She saw how he looked carefully at every face, in gardens, in the hotel, in streets; and she did too, she was looking for a younger version of James. He would be a young man now, a very young man, like the photographs of James, in uniform.

Day after day: and then James said they should go to the university. It was term time. And they walked about everywhere, looking at every youngster who passed: Jimmy Reid, James the younger, walking towards them, or in a group, or with a girl. That was one day and then James wanted to go again, for another. After that, it would be time to leave Cape Town.

Helen said to him, ‘Look, James, you mustn’t give up. One day there’ll be a letter, or a telephone call, or we’ll open the door and there he’ll be.’

He smiled. She didn’t know of that thick pack of letters. He was certain Betty would have kept her promise: she had promised. Daphne would have read those letters to her which contained the best of himself, his essence, his reality, ‘what I really am’. She must have read them. But if she had told her son, their son, then by now there would have arrived that letter, been that phone call, the ring at the door. He was twenty. Twenty and so many months and days. If he knew, he was old enough to make up his own mind.

‘You’ll see,’ said Helen, ‘It’ll happen one of these days.’

They were lying in bed, and she knew what he was thinking, because he was staring, as he so often did, into the empty dark.

He put his arm around her and drew her to him, in gratitude for her kindness, her loyalty to him, her love. But he was thinking, a deep, secret, cruel thought: ‘If you want to call that love.’

About the author

DORIS LESSING, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain’s Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetimes Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.

Reviews

From the reviews of The Grandmothers:

‘These four thought-provoking, vigorous short novels … differ in style and setting, but strong themes braid them skilfully together … These novels show us what fun romantic love is, and how sharply desire defines us. These are not morality tales, just an account of what happens, and why; our infinite capacity for self-delusion, by-blow of our drive for pleasure. We go into the dark, Lessing tells us, but the shimmering texture of lived days in these bittersweet stories works against melancholy. The Grandmothers is a feast from life’s long and crowded banqueting table, and the sparrow darts on through the sunlight above it’

Maggie Gee, Independent

‘Lessing is a skilled practitioner of the art of brevity … In these novellas, she sketches characters and situations with wonderful energy and economy, deftly providing just what is required to understand the complex relationships at the heart of each tale. The effect is bracing: the speed and ease of the narratives make the emotional revelations all the more precise and shocking … The warmth and humanity and love of people which [Lessing] saw as vital for the novelist continue to enrich her perception and her writing … At eighty-four, Doris Lessing’s inventive powers remain as fertile as ever’

Pamela Norris, Literary Review

‘[“A Love Child”] is a simple story, but Lessing makes it the vehicle for a rich freight of ideas and impressions. With admirable economy she summons up the peculiar atmosphere of 1930s Britain … Her description of the men’s sufferings on the troopship is marvellously controlled, the hellish conditions made to seem even more awful by the sobriety of her laconic account … This is a short fiction, but Lessing has given it all the ironies and sorrowful wisdom that belong to long duration, the sense of gradual change and of inevitable loss balanced by the slow acquisition of a fully adult sensitivity. There is not only a whole life here, but a whole interconnected web of lives’

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

‘The strangeness, the waywardness, the difficulty, and sometimes the cruelty of love – this is one of Doris Lessing’s central and recurrent subjects, which she explores better than anyone else now writing. Her gaze is so steady, her judgment so sure, her sympathy so wide. She is the most credible of writers … Doris Lessing is so convincing in her depiction of how people feel, how they live part of their lives – often the greater part – in their own minds, because she places her characters so thoroughly and solidly in their everyday experience, because the background to her stories is so solid. She is so good at the ordinary that in her fiction you never question the extraordinary’

Allan Massie, Scotsman

‘[These novellas] showcase a great novelist still at the peak of her form … [In the title story] Lessing brilliantly captures the mindset of easy-going bohemian types nibbling at forbidden fruit. “Victoria and the Staveneys” is a beautiful take on an age-old theme … But Lessing keeps the best till last. “A Love Child” … is a simple story, but embellished with real aplomb. Every detail rings true’

David Robson, Sunday Telegraph

‘Doris Lessing is on top form with these four short novellas. Intense and intimate, they all explore the trials and tribulations of an unconventional extended family, taking a good, old-fashioned dig at middle-class morality, racial stereotypes and personal prejudices’

Illustrated London News

‘These colourful stories of possibility and loss are intelligent and moving reminders that [Lessing] has spark and wisdom enough to delight us still’

Scottish Sunday Herald

‘[Lessing] is a consummate storyteller, shifting timescales and narrative perspectives with case and confidence. Every detail in her tale rings true and she gets inside the heads of her characters and develops the events of the narrative beautifully … Lessing once again proves that she more than deserves her reputation as the grande dame of literary fiction. The Grandmothers is one of the finest short story collections to emerge in recent years, and it should make a welcome addition to any bookshelf’

Sunday Business Post

‘This quartet of long short stories is another exemplary display of a dazzling literary talent that seems to get stronger with every passing year … The tales are beautiful, moving, funny and tragic, each one managing to capture intertwined lives with cinematic vision, while also attending exquisitely to the minutiae of everyday existence … Lessing’s command of mood, emotion and language is unbeatable, making The Grandmothers a simply brilliant display of modern literature at its best’

The List

By the same author

NOVELS

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

The Summer Before the Dark

Memoirs of a Survivor

Diary of a Good Neighbour

If the Old Could …

The Good Terrorist

Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard) Love, Again

Mara and Dann

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

The Sweetest Dream

The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog

The Cleft

‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five

The Sirian Experiments

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence Martha Quest

A Proper Marriage

A Ripple from the Storm

Landlocked

The Four-Gated City

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Under My Skin: Volume 1

Walking in the Shade: Volume 2

SHORT STORIES

Five

The Habit of Loving

A Man and Two Women

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories

Winter in July

The Black Madonna

This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Stories, Vol. 1) The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories, Vol. 2) To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1) The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2) London Observed

The Old Age of El Magnifico

Particularly Cats

Rufus the Survivor

On Cats

The Grandmothers

DRAMA

Each His Own Wilderness

Play with a Tiger

The Singing Door

POETRY

Fourteen Poems

NON-FICTION

In Pursuit of the English

Going Home

A Small Personal Voice

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

The Wind Blows Away Our Words

African Laughter

Time Bites

Read on

Have You Read?

A selection of other books by Doris Lessing

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

The Grass is Singing:

Chapter 1

MURDER MYSTERY

By Special Correspondent

Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered.

It is thought he was in search of valuables.

The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.

And then they turned the page to something else.

But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piece of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.

To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would have never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.

Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.

And then it was that someone used the phrase ‘poor whites’. It caused disquiet. There was no great money-cleavage in those days (that was before the era of the tobacco barons), but there was certainly a race division. The small community of Afrikaners had their own lives, and the Britishers ignored them. ‘Poor whites’ were Afrikaners, never British. But the person who said the Turners were poor whites stuck to it defiantly. What was the difference? What was a poor white? It was the way one lived, a question of standards. All the Turners needed were a drove of children to make them poor whites.

Though the arguments were unanswerable, people would still not think of them as poor whites. To do that would be letting the side down. The Turners were British, after all.

Thus the district handled the Turners, in accordance with that esprit de corps which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves ignored. They apparently did not recognize the need for esprit de corps; that, really, was why they were hated.

The more one thinks about it, the more extraordinary the case becomes. Not the murder itself; but the way people felt about it, the way they pitied Dick Turner with a fine fierce indignation against Mary as if she were something unpleasant and unclean, and it served her right to get murdered. But they did not ask questions.

For instance, they must have wondered who that ‘Special Correspondent’ was. Someone in the district sent in the news, for the paragraph was not in newspaper language. But who? Marston, the assistant, left the district immediately after the murder. Denham, the policeman, might have written to the paper in a personal capacity, but it was not likely. There remained Charlie Slatter, who knew more about the Turners than anyone else, and was there on the day of the murder. One could say that he practically controlled the handling of the case, even taking precedence over the Sergeant himself. And people felt that to be quite right and proper. Whom should it concern, if not the white farmers, that a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned? It was their livelihood, their wives and families, their way of living, at stake.

But to the outsider it is strange that Slatter should have been allowed to take charge of the affair, to arrange that everything should pass over without more than a ripple of comment.

For there could have been no planning: there simply wasn’t time. Why, for instance, when Dick Turner’s farm boys came to him with the news, did he sit down to write a note to the Sergeant at the police camp? He did not use the telephone.

Everyone who has lived in the country knows what a branch telephone is like. You lift the receiver after you have turned the handle the required number of times, and then, click, click, click, you can hear the receivers coming off all over the district, and soft noises like breathing, a whisper, a subdued cough.

Slatter lived five miles from the Turners. The farm boys came to him first, when they discovered the body. And though it was an urgent matter, he ignored the telephone, but sent a personal letter by a native bearer on a bicycle to Denham at the police camp, twelve miles away. The Sergeant sent out half a dozen native policemen at once, to the Turners’ farm, to see what they could find. He drove first to see Slatter, because the way that letter was worded roused his curiosity. That was why he arrived late on the scene of the murder. The native policemen did not have to search far for the murderer. After walking through the house, looking briefly at the body, and dispersing down the front of the little hill the house stood on, they saw Moses himself rise out of a tangled ant-heap in front of them. He walked up to them and said (or words to this effect): ‘Here I am.’ They snapped the handcuffs on him, and went back to the house to wait for the police cars to come. There they saw Dick Turner come out of the bush by the house with two whining dogs at his heels. He was off his head, talking crazily to himself, wandering in and out of the bush with his hands full of leaves and earth. They let him be, while keeping an eye on him, for he was a white man, though mad, and black men, even when policemen, do not lay hands on white flesh.

People did ask, cursorily, why the murderer had given himself up. There was not much chance of escape. But he did have a sporting chance. He could have run to the hills and hidden for a while. Or he could have slipped over the border to Portuguese territory. Then the District Native Commissioner, at a sundowner party, said that it was perfectly understandable. If one knew anything about the history of the country, or had read any of the memoirs or letters of the old missionaries and explorers, one would have come across accounts of the society Lobengula ruled. The laws were strict: everyone knew what they could or could not do. If someone did an unforgivable thing, like touching one of the King’s women, he would submit fatalistically to punishment, which was likely to be impalement over an ant-heap on a stake, or something equally unpleasant. ‘I have done wrong, and I know it,’ he might say, ‘therefore let me be punished.’ Well, it was the tradition to face punishment, and really there was something rather fine about it. Remarks like these are forgiven from native commissioners, who have to study languages, customs, and so on; although it is not done to say things natives do are ‘fine’ (Yet the fashion is changing: it is permissible to glorify the old ways sometimes, providing one says how depraved the natives have become since.)

So that aspect of the affair was dropped, yet it is not the least interesting, for Moses might not have been a Matabele at all. He was in Mashonaland; though of course natives do wander all over Africa. He might have come from anywhere: Portuguese territory, Nyasaland, the Union of South Africa. And it is a long time since the days of the great king Lobengula. But then native commissioners tend to think in terms of the past.

Well, having sent the letter to the police camp, Charlie Slatter went to the Turners’ place, driving at a great speed over the bad farm roads in his fat American car.

Who was Charlie Slatter? It was he who, from the beginning of the tragedy to its end, personified Society for the Turners. He touches the story at half a dozen points; without him things would not have happened quite as they did, though sooner or later, in one way or another, the Turners were bound to come to grief.

Slatter had been a grocer’s assistant in London. He was fond of telling his children that if it had not been for his energy and enterprise they would be running round the slums in rags. He was still a proper cockney, even after twenty years in Africa. He came with one idea: to make money. He made it. He made plenty. He was a crude, brutal, ruthless, yet kindhearted man, in his own way, and according to his own impulses, who could not help making money. He farmed as if he were turning the handle of a machine which would produce pound notes at the other end. He was hard with his wife, making her bear unnecessary hardships at the beginning; he was hard with his children, until he made money, when they got everything they wanted; and above all he was hard with his farm labourers. They, the geese that laid the golden eggs, were still in that state where they did not know there were other ways of living besides producing gold for other people. They know better now, or are beginning to. But Slatter believed in farming with the sjambok. It hung over his front door, like a motto on a wall: ‘You shall not mind killing if it is necessary.’ He had once killed a native in a fit of temper. He was fined thirty pounds. Since then he had kept his temper. But sjamboks are all very well for the Slatters; not so good for people less sure of themselves. It was he who had told Dick Turner, long ago, when Dick first started farming, that one should buy a sjambok before a plough or a harrow, and that sjambok did not do the Turners any good, as we shall see.

Slatter was a shortish, broad, powerful man, with heavy shoulders and thick arms. His face was broad and bristled; shrewd, watchful, and a little cunning. He had a crop of fair hair that made him look like a convict; but he did not care for appearances. His small blue eyes were hardly visible, because of the way he screwed them up, after years and years of South African sunshine.

Bent over the steering wheel, almost hugging it in his determination to get to the Turners quickly, his eyes were little blue chinks in a set face. He was wondering why Marston, the assistant, who was after all his employee, had not come to him about the murder, or at least sent a note. Where was he? The hut he lived in was only a couple of hundred yards from the house itself. Perhaps he had got cold feet and run away? Anything was possible, thought Charlie, from this particular type of young Englishman. He had a rooted contempt for soft-faced, soft-voiced Englishmen, combined with a fascination for their manner and breeding. His own sons, now grown up, were gentlemen. He had spent plenty of money to make them so; but he despised them for it. At the same time he was proud of them. This conflict showed itself in his attitude towards Marston: half hard and indifferent, half subtly deferential. At the moment he felt nothing but irritation.

Half-way he felt the car rock, and swearing, pulled it up. It was a puncture: no, two punctures. The red mud of the road held fragments of broken glass. His irritation expressed itself in the half-conscious thought, ‘Just like Turner to have glass on his roads!’ But Turner was now necessarily an object of passionate, protective pity, and the irritation was focused on Marston, the assistant who, Slatter felt, should somehow have prevented this murder. What was he being paid for? What had he been engaged for? But Slatter was a fair man in his own way, and where his own race was concerned. He restrained himself, and got down to mending one puncture and changing a tyre, working in the heavy red slush of the roads. This took him three-quarters of an hour, and by the time he was finished, and had picked the pieces of green glass from the mud and thrown them into the bush, the sweat was soaking his face and hair.

When he reached the house at last, he saw, as he approached through the bush, six glittering bicycles leaning against the walls. And in front of the house, under the trees, stood six native policemen, and among them the native Moses, his hands linked in front of him. The sun glinted on the handcuffs, on the bicycles, on the masses of heavy wet leaves. It was a wet, sultry morning. The sky was a tumult of discoloured clouds: it looked full of billowing dirty washing. Puddles on the pale soil held a sheen of sky.

Charlie walked up to the policemen, who saluted him. They were in fezes, and their rather fancy-dress uniform. This last thought did not occur to Charlie, who liked his natives either one way or the other: properly dressed according to their station, or in loincloths. He could not bear the half-civilized native. The policemen, picked for their physique, were a fine body of men, but they were put in the shade by Moses, who was a great powerful man, black as polished linoleum, and dressed in a singlet and shorts, which were damp and muddy. Charlie stood directly in front of the murderer and looked into his face. The man stared back, expressionless, indifferent. His own face was curious: it showed a kind of triumph, a guarded vindictiveness, and fear. Why fear? Of Moses, who was as good as hanged already? But he was uneasy, troubled. Then he seemed to shake himself into self-command, and turned and saw Dick Turner, standing a few paces away, covered with mud.

‘Turner!’ he said, peremptorily. He stopped, looking into the man’s face. Dick appeared not to know him. Charlie took him by the arm and drew him towards his own car. He did not know he was incurably mad then; otherwise he might have been even more angry than he was. Having put Dick into the back seat of his car, he went into the house. In the front room stood Marston, his hands in his pockets, in a pose that seemed negligently calm. But his face was pale and strained.

‘Where were you?’ asked Charlie at once, accusingly.

‘Normally Mr Turner wakes me,’ said the youth calmly. ‘This morning I slept late. When I came into the house I found Mrs Turner on the verandah. Then the policemen came. I was expecting you.’ But he was afraid: it was the fear of death that sounded in his voice, not the fear that was controlling Charlie’s actions: he had not been long enough in the country to understand Charlie’s special fear.

Charlie grunted: he never spoke unless necessary. He looked long and curiously at Marston, as if trying to make out why it was the farm natives had not called a man who lay asleep a few yards off, but had instinctively sent for himself. But it was not with dislike or contempt he looked at Marston now; it was more the look a man gives a prospective partner who has yet to prove himself.

He turned and went into the bedroom. Mary Turner was a stiff shape under a soiled white sheet. At one end of the sheet protruded a mass of pale strawish hair, and at the other a crinkled yellow foot. Now a curious thing happened. The hate and contempt that one would have expected to show on his face when he looked at the murderer, twisted his features now, as he stared at Mary. His brows knotted, and for a few seconds his lips curled back over his teeth in a vicious grimace. He had his back to Marston, who would have been astonished to see him. Then, with a hard, angry movement, Charlie turned and left the room, driving the young man before him.

Marston said: ‘She was lying on the verandah. I lifted her on to the bed.’ He shuddered at the memory of the touch of the cold body. ‘I thought she shouldn’t be left lying there.’ He hesitated and added, the muscles of his face contracting whitely: ‘The dogs were licking at her.’

Charlie nodded, with a keen glance at him. He seemed indifferent as to where she might be lying. At the same time he approved the self-control of the assistant who had performed the unpleasant task.

‘There was blood everywhere. I cleaned it up…I thought afterwards I should have left it for the police.’

‘It makes no odds,’ said Charlie absently. He sat down on one of the rough wood chairs in the front room, and remained in thought, whistling softly through his front teeth. Marston stood by the window, looking for the arrival of the police car. From time to time Charlie looked round the room alertly, flicking his tongue over his lips. Then he lapsed back into his soft whistling. It got on the young man’s nerves.

At last, cautiously, almost warningly, Charlie said: ‘What do you know of this?’

Marston noted the emphasized you, and wondered what Slatter knew. He was well in control of himself, but as taut as wire. He said: ‘I don’t know. Nothing really. It is all so difficult .’ He hesitated, looking appealing at Charlie.

That look of almost soft appeal irritated Charlie, coming from a man, but it pleased him too: he was pleased the youth deferred to him. He knew the type so well. So many of them came from England to learn farming. They were usually ex-public school, very English, but extremely adaptable. From Charlie’s point of view, the adaptability redeemed them. It was strange to see how quickly they accustomed themselves. At first they were diffident, though proud and withdrawn; cautiously learning the new ways, with a fine sensitiveness, an alert self-consciousness.

When old settlers say, ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying, in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out: we don’t want you.’ Most of these young men were brought up with vague ideas about equality. They were shocked, for the first week or so, by the way natives were treated. They were revolted a hundred times a day by the casual way they were spoken of, as if they were so many cattle; or by a blow, or a look. They had been prepared to treat them as human beings. But they could not stand out against the society they were joining. It did not take them long to change. It was hard, of course, becoming as bad oneself. But it was not very long that they thought of it as ‘bad’. And anyway, what had one’s ideas amounted to? Abstract ideas about decency and goodwill, that was all: merely abstract ideas. When it came to the point, one never had contact with natives, except in the master-servant relationship. One never knew them in their own lives, as human beings. A few months, and these sensitive, decent young men had coarsened to suit the hard, arid, sundrenched country they had come to; they had grown a new manner to match their thickened sunburnt limbs and toughened bodies.

If Tony Marston had been even a few more months in the country it would have been easy. That was Charlie’s feeling. That was why he looked at the young man with a speculative frowning look, not condemning him, only wary and on the alert.

He said: ‘What do you mean, it is all so difficult?’

Tony Marston appeared uncomfortable, as if he did not know his own mind. And for that matter he did not: the weeks in the Turners’ household with its atmosphere of tragedy had not helped him to get his mind clear. The two standards – the one he had brought with him and the one he was adopting – conflicted still. And there was a roughness, a warning note, in Charlie’s voice, that left him wondering. What was he being warned against? He was intelligent enough to know he was being warned. In this he was unlike Charlie, who was acting by instinct and did not know his voice was a threat. It was all so unusual. Where were the police? What right had Charlie, who was a neighbour, to be fetched before himself, who was practically a member of the household? Why was Charlie quietly taking command?

His ideas of right were upset. He was confused, but he had his own ideas about the murder, which could not be stated straight out, like that, in black and white. When he came to think of it, the murder was logical enough; looking back over the last few days he could see that something like this was bound to happen, he could almost say he had been expecting it, some kind of violence or ugliness. Anger, violence, death, seemed natural to this vast, harsh country…he had done a lot of thinking since he had strolled casually into the house that morning, wondering why everyone was so late, to find Mary Turner lying murdered on the verandah, and the police boys outside, guarding the houseboy; and Dick Turner muttering and stumbling through the puddles, mad, but apparently harmless. Things he had not understood, he understood now, and he was ready to talk about them. But he was in the dark as to Charlie’s attitude. There was something here he could not get hold of.

‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘When I first arrived I didn’t know much about the country.’

Charlie said, with a good-humoured but brutal irony, ‘Thanks for the information.’ And then, ‘Have you any idea why this nigger murdered Mrs Turner?’

‘Well, I have a sort of idea, yes.’

‘We had better leave it to the Sergeant, when he comes then.’

It was a snub; he had been shut up. Tony held his tongue, angry but bewildered.

When the Sergeant came, he went over to look at the murderer, glanced at Dick through the window of Slatter’s car, and then came into the house.

‘I went to your place, Slatter,’ he said, nodding at Tony, giving him a keen look. Then he went into the bedroom. And his reactions were as Charlie’s had been: vindictiveness towards the murderer, emotional pity for Dick, and for Mary, a bitter contemptuous anger: Sergeant Denham had been in the country for a number of years. This time Tony saw the expression on the face, and it gave him a shock. The faces of the two men as they stood over the body, gazing down at it, made him feel uneasy, even afraid. He himself felt a little disgust, but not much; it was mainly pity that agitated him, knowing what he knew. It was the disgust that he would feel for any social irregularity, no more than the distaste that comes from failure of the imagination. This profound instinctive horror and fear astonished him.

The three of them went silently into the living-room.

Charlie Slatter and Sergeant Denham stood side by side like two judges, as if they had purposely taken up this attitude. Opposite them was Tony. He stood his ground, but he felt an absurd guiltiness taking hold of him, simply because of their pose, standing like that, looking at him with subtle reserved faces that he could not read.

‘Bad business,’ said Sergeant Denham briefly.

No one answered. He snapped open a notebook, adjusted elastic over a page, and poised a pencil.

‘A few questions, if you don’t mind,’ he said. Tony nodded.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘About three weeks.’

‘Living in this house?’

‘No, in a hut down the path.’

‘You were going to run this place while they were away?’

‘Yes, for six months.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I intended to go on a tobacco farm.’

‘When did you know about this business?’

‘They didn’t call me. I woke and found Mrs Turner.’

Tony’s voice showed he was now on the defensive. He felt wounded, even insulted that he had not been called: above all, that these two men seemed to think it right and natural that he should be bypassed in this fashion, as if his newness to the country unfitted him for any kind of responsibility. And he resented the way he was being questioned. They had no right to do it. He was beginning to simmer with rage, although he knew quite well that they themselves were quite unconscious of the patronage implicit in their manner, and that it would be better for him to try and understand the real meaning of this scene, rather than to stand on his dignity.

‘You had your meals with the Turners?’

‘Yes.’

‘Apart from that, were you ever here – socially, so to speak?’

‘No, hardly at all. I have been busy learning the job.’

‘Get on well with Turner?’

‘Yes, I think so. I mean, he was not easy to know. He was absorbed in his work. And he was obviously very unhappy at leaving the place.’

‘Yes, poor devil, he had a hard time of it.’ The voice was suddenly tender almost maudlin, with pity, although the Sergeant snapped out the words, and then shut his mouth tight, as if to present a brave face to the world. Tony was disconcerted: the unexpectedness of these men’s responses was taking him right out of his depth. He was feeling nothing that they were feeling: he was an outsider in this tragedy, although both the Sergeant and Charlie Slatter seemed to feel personally implicated, for they had unconsciously assumed poses of weary dignity, appearing bowed down with unutterable burdens, because of poor Dick Turner and his sufferings.

Yet it was Charlie who had literally turned Dick off his farm; and in previous interviews, at which Tony had been present, he had shown none of this sentimental pity.

There was a long pause. The Sergeant shut his notebook. But he had not yet finished. He was regarding Tony cautiously, wondering how to frame the next question. Or that was how it appeared to Tony, who could see that here was the moment that was the crux of the whole affair. Charlie’s face: wary, a little cunning, a little afraid, proclaimed it.

‘See anything out of the ordinary while you were here?’ asked the Sergeant, apparently casual.

‘Yes, I did,’ blurted Tony, suddenly determined not to be bullied. For he knew he was being bullied, though he was cut off from them both by a gulf in experience and belief. They looked up at him, frowning; glanced at each other swiftly – then away, as if afraid to acknowledge conspiracy.

‘What did you see? I hope you realize the – unpleasantness – of this case?’ The last question was a grudging appeal.

‘Any murder is surely unpleasant,’ remarked Tony drily.

‘When you have been in the country long enough, you will understand that we don’t like niggers murdering white women.’

The phrase, ‘When you have been in the country’, stuck in Tony’s gullet. He had heard it too often, and it had come to jar on him. At the same time it made him feel angry. Also callow. He would have liked to blurt out the truth in one overwhelming, incontrovertible statement; but the truth was not like that. It never was. The fact he knew, or guessed, about Mary, the fact these two men were conspiring to ignore, could be stated easily enough. But the important thing, the thing that really mattered, so it seemed to him, was to understand the background, the circumstances, the characters of Dick and Mary, the pattern of their lives. And it was not so easy to do. He had arrived at the truth circuitously: circuitously it would have to be explained. And his chief emotion, which was an impersonal pity for Mary and Dick and the native, a pity that was also rage against circumstances, made it difficult for him to know where to begin.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what I know from the beginning, only it will take some time, I am afraid…’

‘You mean you know why Mrs Turner was murdered?’ The question was a quick, shrewd parry.

‘No, not just like that. Only I can form a theory.’ The choice of words was most unfortunate.

‘We don’t want theories. We want facts. And in any case, you should remember Dick Turner. This is all most unpleasant for him. You should remember him, poor devil.’

Here it was again: the utterly illogical appeal, which to these two men was clearly not illogical at all. The whole thing was preposterous! Tony began to lose his temper.

‘Do you or do you not want to hear what I have to say?’ he asked, irritably.

‘Go ahead. Only remember, I don’t want to hear your fancies. I want to hear facts. Have you ever seen anything definite which would throw light on this murder? For instance, have you seen this boy attempting to get at her jewellery, or something like that? Anything that is definite. Not something in the air.’

Tony laughed. The two men looked at him sharply.

‘You know as well as I do this case is not something that can be explained straight off like that. You know that. It’s not something that can be said in black and white, straight off.’

It was pure deadlock; no one spoke. As if Sergeant Denham had not heard those last words, a heavy frown on his face, he said at last: ‘For instance, how did Mrs Turner treat this boy? Did she treat her boys well?’

The angry Tony, fumbling for a foothold in this welter of emotion and half-understood loyalties, clutched at this for a beginning.

‘Yes, she treated him badly, I thought. Though on the other hand…’

‘Nagged at him, eh? Oh well, women are pretty bad that way, in this country, very often. Aren’t they, Slatter?’ The voice was easy, intimate, informal. ‘My old woman drives me mad – it’s something about this country. They have no idea how to deal with niggers.’

‘Needs a man to deal with niggers,’ said Charlie. ‘Niggers don’t understand women giving them orders. They keep their own women in their right place.’ He laughed. The Sergeant laughed. They turned towards each other, even including Tony, in an unmistakable relief. The tension had broken; the danger was over: once again, he had been bypassed, and the interview, it seemed, was over. He could hardly believe it.

‘But look here,’ he said. Then he stopped. Both men turned to look at him, a steady, grave, irritated look on their faces. And the warning was unmistakable! It was the warning that might have been given to a greenhorn who was going to let himself down by saying too much. This realization was too much for Tony. He gave in; he washed his hands of it. He watched the other two in utter astonishment: they were together in mood and emotion, standing there in perfect understanding; the understanding was unrealized by themselves, the sympathy unacknowledged; their concerted handling of this affair had been instinctive: they were completely unaware of there being anything extraordinary, even anything illegal. And was there anything illegal, after all? This was a casual talk, on the face of it, nothing formal about it now that the notebook was shut – and it had been shut ever since they had reached the crisis of the scene.

Charlie said, turning towards the sergeant, ‘Better get her out of here. It is too hot to wait.’

‘Yes,’ said the policeman, moving to give orders accordingly.

And that brutally matter-of-fact remark, Tony realized afterwards, was the only time poor Mary Turner was referred to directly. But why should she be? – except that this was really a friendly talk between the farmer who had been her next neighbour, the policeman who had been in her house on his rounds as a guest, and the assistant who had lived there for some weeks. It wasn’t a formal occasion, this: Tony clung to the thought. There was a court case to come yet, which would be properly conducted.

‘The case will be a matter of form, of course,’ said the Sergeant, as if thinking aloud, with a look at Tony. He was standing by the police car, watching the native policemen lift the body of Mary Turner, which was wrapped in a blanket, into the back seat. She was stiff; a rigid outstretched arm knocked horribly against the narrow door; it was difficult to get her in. At last it was done and the door shut. And then there was another problem: they could not put Moses the murderer into the same car with her; one could not put a black man close to a white woman, even though she were dead, and murdered by him. And there was only Charlie’s car, and mad Dick Turner was in that, sitting staring in the back. There seemed to be a feeling that Moses, having committed a murder, deserved to be taken by car; but there was no help for it, he would have to walk, guarded by the policemen, wheeling their bicycles, to the camp.

All these arrangements completed, there was a pause.

They stood there beside the cars, in the moment of parting, looking at the red-brick house with its shimmering hot roof, and the thick encroaching bush, and the group of black men moving off under the trees on their long walk. Moses was quite impassive, allowing himself to be directed without any movement of his own. His face was blank. He seemed to be staring straight into the sun. Was he thinking he would not see it much longer? Impossible to say. Regret? Not a sign of it. Fear? It did not seem so. The three men looked at the murderer, thinking their own thoughts, speculative, frowning, but not as if he were important now. No, he was unimportant: he was the constant, the black man who will thieve, rape, murder, if given half a chance. Even for Tony he no longer mattered; and his knowledge of the native mind was too small to give him any basis for conjecture.

‘And what about him?’ asked Charlie, jerking his thumb at Dick Turner. He meant: where does he come in, as far as the court case is concerned?

‘He looks to me as if he won’t be good for much,’ said the Sergeant, who after all had plenty of experience of death, crime and madness.

No, for them the important thing was Mary Turner, who had let the side down; but even she, since she was dead, was no longer a problem. The one fact that remained still to be dealt with was the necessity for preserving appearances. Sergeant Denham understood that: it was part of his job, though it would not appear in regulations, was rather implicit in the spirit of the country, the spirit in which he was soaked. Charlie Slatter understood it, none better. Still side by side, as if one impulse, one regret, one fear, moved them both, they stood together in that last moment before they left the place, giving their final silent warning to Tony, looking at him gravely.

And he was beginning to understand. He knew now, at least, that what had been fought out in the room they had just left was nothing to do with the murder as such. The murder, in itself, was nothing. The struggle that had been decided in a few brief words – or rather, in the silences between the words – had had nothing to do with the surface meaning of the scene. He would understand it all a good deal better in a few months, when he had ‘become used to the country’. And then he would do his best to forget the knowledge, for to live with the colour bar in all its nuances and implications means closing one’s mind to many things, if one intends to remain an accepted member of society. But, in the interval, there would be a few brief moments when he would see the thing clearly, and understand that it was ‘white civilization’ fighting to defend itself that had been implicit in the attitude of Charlie Slatter and the Sergeant, ‘white civilization’ which will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly, a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or for evil, with a black person. For once it admits that, it crashes, and nothing can save it. So, above all, it cannot afford failures, such as the Turners’ failure.

For the sake of those few lucid moments, and his half-confused knowledge, it can be said that Tony was the person present who had the greatest responsibility that day. For it would never have occurred to either Slatter or the Sergeant that they might be wrong: they were upheld, as in all their dealings with the black-white relationship, by a feeling of almost martyred responsibility. Yet Tony, too, wanted to be accepted by this new country. He would have to adapt himself, and if he did not conform, would be rejected: the issue was clear to him, he had heard the phrase ‘getting used to our ideas’ too often to have any illusions on the point. And, if he had acted according to his by now muddled ideas of right and wrong, his feeling that a monstrous injustice was being done, what difference would it make to the only participant in the tragedy who was neither dead or mad? For Moses would be hanged in any case; he had committed a murder, that fact remained. Did he intend to go on fighting in the dark for the sake of a principle? And if so, which principle? If he had stepped forward then, as he nearly did, when Sergeant Denham climbed finally into the car, and had said: ‘Look here, I am just not going to shut up about this,’ what would have been gained? It is certain that the Sergeant would not have understood him. His face would have contracted, his brow gone dark with irritation, and, taking his foot off the clutch, he would have said, ‘Shut up about what? Who has asked you to shut up?’ And then, if Tony had stammered out something about responsiblity, he would have looked significantly at Charlie and shrugged. Tony might have continued, ignoring the shrug and its implication of his wrongmindedness: ‘If you must blame somebody, then blame Mrs Turner. You can’t have it both ways. Either the white people are responsible for their behaviour, or they are not. It takes two to make a murder – a murder of this kind. Though, one can’t really blame her either. She can’t help being what she is. I’ve lived here, I tell you, which neither of you has done, and the whole thing is so difficult it is impossible to say who is to blame.’ And then the Sergeant would have said, ‘You can say what you think right in court.’ That is what he would have said, just as if the issue had not been decided – though ostensibly it had never been mentioned – less than ten minutes before. ‘It’s not a question of blame,’ the Sergeant might have said. ‘Has anyone said anything about blame? But you can’t get away from the fact that this nigger has murdered her, can you?’

So Tony said nothing and the police car went off through the trees. Charlie Slatter followed in his car with Dick Turner. Tony was left in the empty clearing, with an empty house.

He went inside, slowly, obsessed with the one clear image that remained to him after the events of the morning, and which seemed to him the key to the whole thing: the look on the Sergeant’s and Slatter’s faces when they looked down at the body; that almost hysterical look of hate and fear.

He sat down, his hand to his head, which ached badly; then got up again and fetched from a dusty shelf in the kitchen a medicine bottle marked ‘Brandy’. He drank it off. He felt shaky in the knees and in the thighs. He was weak, too, with repugnance against this ugly little house which seemed to hold within its walls, even in its very brick and cement, the fears and horror of the murder. He felt suddenly as if he could not bear to stay in it, not for another moment.

He looked up at the bare crackling tin of the roof, that was warped with the sun, at the faded gimcrack furniture, at the dusty brick floors covered with ragged animal skins, and wondered how those two, Mary and Dick Turner, could have borne to live in such a place, year in and year out, for so long. Why, even the little thatched hut where he lived at the back was better than this! Why did they go on without even so much as putting in ceilings? It was enough to drive anyone mad, the heat in this place.

And then, feeling a little muddle-headed (the heat made the brandy take effect at once), he wondered how all this had begun, where the tragedy had started. For he clung obstinately to the belief, in spite of Slatter and the Sergeant, that the causes of the murder must be looked for a long way back, and that it was they which were important. What sort of woman had Mary Turner been, before she came to this farm and had been driven slowly off balance by heat and loneliness and poverty? And Dick Turner himself – what had he been? And the native – but here his thoughts were stopped by lack of knowledge. He could not even begin to imagine the mind of a native.

Passing his hand over his forehead, he tried desperately, and for the last time, to achieve some sort of a vision that would lift the murder above the confusions and complexities of the morning, and make of it, perhaps, a symbol, or a warning. But he failed. It was too hot. He was still exasperated by the attitude of the two men. His head was reeling. It must be over a hundred in this room, he thought angrily, getting up from his chair, and finding that his legs were unsteady. And he had drunk, at the most, two tablespoons of brandy! This damned country, he thought, convulsed with anger. Why should this happen to me, getting involved with a damned twisted affair like this, when I have only just come: and I really can’t be expected to act as judge and jury and compassionate God into the bargain!

He stumbled on to the verandah, where the murder had been committed the night before. There was a ruddy smear on the brick, and a puddle of rainwater was tinged pink. The same big shabby dogs were licking at the edges of the water, and cringed away when Tony shouted at them. He leaned against the wall and stared over the soaked greens and browns of the veld to the kopjes, which were sharp and blue after the rain; it had poured half the night. He realized, as the sound grew loud in his ears, that cicadas were shrilling all about him. He had been too absorbed to hear them. It was a steady, insistent screaming from every bush and tree. It wore on his nerves. ‘I am getting out of this place,’ he said suddenly. ‘I am getting out of it altogether. I am going to the other end of the country. I wash my hands of the thing. Let the Slatters and the Denhams do as they like. What has it got to do with me?’

That morning, he packed his things and walked over to the Slatters’ to tell Charlie he would not stay. Charlie seemed indifferent, even relieved; he had been thinking there was no need of a manager now that Dick would not come back.

After that the Turners’ farm was run as an overflow for Charlie’s cattle. They grazed all over it, even up to the hill where the house stood. It was left empty: it soon fell down.

Tony went back into town, where he hung round the bars and hotels for a while, waiting to hear of some job that would suit him. But his early carefree adaptability was gone. He had grown difficult to please. He visited several farms, but each time went away: farming had lost its glitter for him. At the trial, which was as Sergeant Denham had said it would be, a mere formality, he said what was expected of him. It was suggested that the native had murdered Mary Turner while drunk, in search of money and jewellery.

When the trial was over, Tony loafed about aimlessly until his money was finished. The murder, those few weeks with the Turners, had affected him more than he knew. But his money being gone, he had to do something in order to eat. He met a man from Northern Rhodesia, who told him about the copper mines and the wonderfully high salaries. They sounded fantastic to Tony. He took the next train to the copper belt, intending to save some money and start some business on his own account. But the salaries, once there, did not seem so good as they had from a distance. The cost of living was high, and then, everyone drank so much…Soon he left underground work and was a kind of manager. So, in the end, he sat in an office and did paperwork, which was what he had come to Africa to avoid. But it wasn’t so bad really. One should take things as they came. Life isn’t as one expects it to be – and so on; these were the things he said to himself when depressed, and was measuring himself against his early ambitions.

For the people in ‘the district’, who knew all about him by hearsay, he was the young man from England who hadn’t the guts to stand more than a few weeks of farming. No guts, they said. He should have stuck it out.

The Golden Notebook

[The four notebooks were identical, about eighteen inches square, with shiny covers, like the texture of a cheap watered silk. But the colours distinguished them—black, red, yellow and blue. When the covers were laid back, exposing the four first pages, it seemed that order had not immediately imposed itself. In each, the first page or two showed broken scribblings and half-sentences. Then a title appeared, as if Anna had, almost automatically, divided herself into four, and then, from the nature of what she had written, named these divisions. And this is what had happened. The first book, the black notebook, began with doodlings, scattered musical symbols, treble signs that shifted into the £ sign and back again; then a complicated design of interlocking circles, then words:]

black
dark, it is so dark
it is dark
there is a kind of darkness here

[And then, in a changed startled writing:]

Every time I sit down to write, and let my mind go easy, the words, It is so dark, or something to do with darkness. Terror. The terror of this city. Fear of being alone. Only one thing stops me from jumping up and screaming or running to the telephone to ring somebody, it is to deliberately think myself back into that hot light…white light, the light, closed eyes, the red light hot on the eyeballs. The rough pulsing heat of a granite boulder. My palm flat on it, moving over the lichens. The grain of the lichens. Tiny, like minute animals’ ears, a warm rough silk on my palm, dragging insistently at the pores of my skin. And hot. The smell of the sun on hot rock. Dry and hot, and the silk of dust on my cheek, smelling of sun, the sun. Letters from the agent about the novel. Every time one of them arrives I want to laugh—the laughter of disgust. Bad laughter, the laughter of helplessness, a self-punishment. Unreal letters, when I think of a slope of hot pored granite, my cheeks against hot rock, the red light on my eyelids. Lunch with the agent. Unreal—the novel is more and more a sort of creature with its own life. Frontiers of War now has nothing to do with me, it is a property of other people. Agent said it should be a film. Said no. She was patient—her job to be.

[A date was scribbled here—1951.]

(1952) Had lunch with film man. Discussed cast for Frontiers. So incredible wanted to laugh. I said no. Found myself being persuaded into it. Got up quickly and cut it short, even caught myself seeing the words Frontiers of War up outside a cinema. Though of course he wanted to call it Forbidden Love.

(1953) Spent all morning trying to remember myself back into sitting under the trees in the vlei near Mashopi. Failed.

[Here appeared the title or heading of the notebook:]

THE DARK

[The pages were divided down the middle by a neat black line, and the subdivisions headed:]

Source Money

[Under the left word were fragments of sentences, scenes remembered, letters from friends in Central Africa gummed to the page. On the other side, a record of transactions to do with Frontiers of War, money received from translations, etc., accounts of business interviews and so on.

After a few pages the entries on the left ceased. For three years the black notebook had in it nothing but business and practical entries which appeared to have absorbed the memories of physical Africa. The entries on the left began again opposite a typed manifesto-like sheet gummed to the page, which was a synopsis of Frontiers of War, now changed to Forbidden Love, written by Anna with her tongue in her cheek, and approved by the synopsis desk in her agent’s office:]

Dashing young Peter Carey, his brilliant scholastic career at Oxford broken by World War II, is posted to Central Africa with the sky-blue-uniformed youth of the RAF to be trained as a pilot. Idealistic and inflammable, young Peter is shocked by the go-getting, colour-ridden small-town society he finds, falls in with the local group of high-living lefts, who exploit his naive young radicalism. During the week they clamour about the injustices meted out to the blacks; week-ends they live it up in a lush out-of-town hotel run by John-Bull-type landlord Boothby and his comely wife, whose pretty teen-age daughter falls in love with Peter. He encourages her, with all the thoughtlessness of youth; while Mrs Boothby, neglected by her hard-drinking money-loving husband conceives a powerful but secret passion for the good-looking youth. Peter, disgusted by the leftists’ week-end orgies, secretly makes contact with the local African agitators, whose leader is the cook at the hotel. He falls in love with the cook’s young wife, neglected by her politics-mad husband, but this love defies the taboos and mores of the white settler society. Mistress Boothby surprises them in a romantic rendezvous; and in her jealous rage informs the authorities of the local RAF camp, who promise her Peter will be posted away from the Colony. She tells her daughter, unaware of her unconscious motive, which is to humiliate the untouched young girl whom Peter has preferred to herself and who becomes ill because of the insult to her white-girl’s pride and announces she will leave home in a scene where the mother, frantic, screams: ‘You couldn’t even attract him. He preferred the dirty black girl to you.’ The cook, informed by Mrs Boothby of his young wife’s treachery, throws her off, telling her to return to her family. But the girl, proudly defiant, goes instead to the nearest town, to take the easy way out as a woman of the streets. Heart-broken Peter, all his illusions in shreds, spends his last night in the Colony drunk, and by chance encounters his dark love in some shabby shebeen. They spend their last night together in each other’s arms, in the only place where white and black may meet, in the brothel by the sullied waters of the town’s river. Their innocent and pure love, broken by the harsh inhuman laws of this country and by the jealousies of the corrupt, will know no future. They talk pathetically of meeting in England when the war is over, but both know this to be a brave lie. In the morning Peter says good-bye to the group of local ‘progressives’, his contempt for them clear in his grave young eyes. Meanwhile his dark young love is lurking at the other end of the platform in a group of her own people. As the train steams out, she waves; he does not see her; his eyes already reflect thought of the death that awaits him—Ace Pilot that he is!—and she returns to the streets of the dark town, on the arm of another man, laughing brazenly to hide her sad humiliation.

[Opposite this was written:]

The man at the synopsis desk was pleased by this; began discussing how to make the story ‘less upsetting’ to the money-bags—for instance, the heroine should not be a faithless wife, which would make her unsympathetic, but the daughter of the cook. I said I had written it in parody whereupon, after a moment’s annoyance, he laughed. I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, good-natured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for instance, Comrade X, on the murder of three British communists in Stalin’s prisons, looked exactly like this when he said: Well, but we’ve never made enough allowance for human nature) and he said: ‘Well, Miss Wulf, you’re learning that when you’re eating with the devil the spoon has got to be not only a long one, but made of asbestos—it’s a perfectly good synopsis and written in their terms.’ When I persisted, he kept his temper and enquired, oh very tolerantly, smiling indefatigably, whether I didn’t agree that in spite of all the deficiencies of the industry, good films got made. ‘And even films with a good progressive message, Miss Wulf?’ He was delighted at finding a phrase guaranteed to pull me in, and showed it; his look was both self-congratulatory and full of cynical cruelty. I came home, conscious of a feeling of disgust so much more powerful than usual, that I sat down and made myself read the novel for the first time since it was published. As if it had been written by someone else. If I had been asked to review it in 1951, when it came out, this is what I should have said:

‘A first novel which shows a genuine minor talent. The novelty of its setting: a station in the Rhodesian veld whose atmosphere of rootless money-driving white settlers against a background of sullen dispossessed Africans; the novelty of its story, a love affair between a young Englishman thrown into the Colony because of the war and a half-primitive black woman, obscures the fact that this is an unoriginal theme, scantily developed. The simplicity of Anna Wulf’s style is her strength; but it is too soon to say whether this is the conscious simplicity of artistic control, or the often deceptive sharpness of form which is sometimes arbitrarily achieved by allowing the shape of a novel to be dictated by a strong emotion.’

But from 1954 on:

‘The spate of novels with an African setting continues. Frontiers of War is competently told, with a considerable vigour of insight into the more melodramatic sexual relationships. But there is surely very little new to be said about the black-white conflict. The area of colour-bar hatreds and cruelties has become the best documented in our fiction. The most interesting question raised by this new report from the racial frontiers is: why, when the oppressions and tensions of white-settled Africa have existed more or less in their present form for decades, is it only in the late forties and fifties that they exploded into artistic form? If we knew the answer we would understand more of the relations between society and the talent it creates, between art and the tensions that feed it. Anna Wulf’s novel has been sprung by little more than a warm-hearted indignation against injustice: good, but no longer enough…’

During that period of three months when I wrote reviews, reading ten or more books a week, I made a discovery: that the interest with which I read these books had nothing to do with what I feel when I read—let’s say—Thomas Mann, the last of the writers in the old sense, who used the novel for philosophical statements about life. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coalmining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel—the quality of philosophy. I find that I read with the same kind of curiosity most novels, and a book of reportage. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of the working-people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers, are read as if savage tribes were being investigated. Those fishermen in Scotland were a different species from the coalminers I stayed with in Yorkshire; and both come from a different world than the housing estate outside London.

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty ‘subjects’ I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist. I suffer torments of dissatisfaction and incompletion because of my inability to enter those areas of life my way of living, education, sex, politics, class bar me from. It is the malady of some of the best people of this time; some can stand the pressure of it; others crack under it; it is a new sensibility, a half-unconscious attempt towards a new imaginative comprehension. But it is fatal to art. I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can. When I said that to Mother Sugar she replied with the small nod of satisfaction people use for these resounding truths, that the artist writes out of an incapacity to live. I remember the nausea I felt when she said it; I feel the reluctance of disgust now when I write it: it is because this business about art and the artist has become so debased, the property of every sloppy-minded amateur that any person with a real connection with the arts wants to run a hundred miles at the sight of the small satisfied nod, the complacent smile. And besides, when a truth has been explored so thoroughly—this one has been the subject matter of art for this century, when it has become such a monster of a cliché, one begins to wonder, is it so finally true? And one begins to think of the phrases ‘incapacity to live’, ‘the artist’, etc., letting them echo and thin in one’s mind, fighting the sense of disgust and the staleness, as I tried to fight it that day sitting before Mother Sugar. But extraordinary how this old stuff issued so fresh and magisterial from the lips of psycho-analysis. Mother Sugar, who is nothing if not a cultivated woman, a European soaked in art, uttered commonplaces in her capacity as witch-doctor she would have been ashamed of if she were with friends and not in the consulting room. One level for life, another for the couch. I couldn’t stand it; that is, ultimately, what I couldn’t stand. Because it means one level of morality for life, and another for the sick. I know very well from what level in my self that novel, Frontiers of War, came from. I knew when I wrote it. I hated it then and I hate it now. Because that area in myself had become so powerful it threatened to swallow everything else, I went off to the witch-doctor, my soul in my hands. Yet the healer herself, when the word Art cropped up, smiled complacently; that sacred animal the artist justifies everything, everything he does is justified. The complacent smile, the tolerant nod, is not even confined to the cultivated healers, or the professors; it’s the property of the money-changers, the little jackals of the press, the enemy. When a film mogul wants to buy an artist—and the real reason why he seeks out the original talent and the spark of creativity is because he wants to destroy it, unconsciously that’s what he wants, to justify himself by destroying the real thing—he calls the victim an artist. You are an artist, of course…and the victim more often than not, smirks, and swallows his disgust.

The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are rushing into a discipline, any discipline at all, which will save them from the poison of the word ‘artist’ used by the enemy.

I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this—why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game—that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all—not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company; yet I know that what made the film company so excited about the possibilities of that novel as a film was precisely what made it successful as a novel. The novel is ‘about’ a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn’t true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can’t read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. And I know that in order to write another, to write those fifty reports on society which I have the material to write, I would have to deliberately whip up in myself that same emotion. And it would be that emotion which would make those fifty books novels and not reportage.

When I think back to that time, those week-ends spent at the Mashopi hotel, with that group of people, I have to first switch something off in me; now, writing about it, I have to switch it off, or ‘a story’ would begin to emerge, a novel, and not the truth. It is like remembering a particularly intense love affair, or a sexual obsession. And it is extraordinary how, as the nostalgia deepens, the excitement, ‘stories’ begin to form, to breed like cells under a microscope. And yet it is so powerful, that nostalgia, that I can only write this a few sentences at a time. Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue. And the people who read Frontiers of War will have had fed in them this emotion, even though they were not conscious of it. That is why I am ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime.

The Good Terrorist:

Chapter 1

The house was set back from the noisy main road in what seemed to be a rubbish tip. A large house. Solid. Black tiles stood at angles along the gutter, and into a gap near the base of a fat chimney a bird flew, trailing a piece of grass several times its length.

‘I should think, 1910,’ said Alice, ‘look how thick the walls are.’ This could be seen through the broken window just above them on the first floor. She got no response, but nevertheless shrugged off her backpack, letting it tumble on to a living rug of young nettles that was trying to digest rusting tins and plastic cups. She took a step back to get a better view of the roof. This brought Jasper into vision. His face, as she had expected it would be, was critical and meant to be noticed. For her part she did not have to be told that she was wearing her look, described by him as silly. ‘Stop it,’ he ordered. His hand shot out, and her wrist was encircled by hard bone. It hurt. She faced him, undefiant but confident, and said, ‘I wonder if they will accept us?’ And, as she had known he would, he said, ‘It is a question of whether we will accept them.’

She had withstood the test on her, that bony pain, and he let her wrist go and went on to the door. It was a front door, solid and sure of itself, in a little side street full of suburban gardens and similar comfortable houses. They did not have slates missing and broken windows.

“Why, why, why?’ asked Alice angrily, addressing the question, probably, to the universe itself, her heart full of pain because of the capacious, beautiful and unloved house. She dragged her backpack by its strap after her and joined him.

‘Profit, of course,’ he said, and pressed the bell, which did not ring. He gave the door a sharp push and they went into a large shadowy hall where stairs went strongly up, turned at a wide landing, and rose out of sight. The scene was illuminated by a hurricane lamp that stood on the floor in a corner. From a side room came the sound of soft drumming. Jasper pushed open this door too. The windows were covered by blankets, leaving not a chink of light. A black youth looked up from his family of drums, his cheeks and teeth shining in candlelight. ‘Hi,’ he said, all his fingers and both feet at work, so that it seemed he was dancing as he sat, or was perhaps on some kind of exercise machine.

This smiling jolly black boy who looked like an advertisement for an attractive holiday in the Caribbean struck Alice’s organ of credibility falsely, and she tucked away a little memo to herself not to forget a first impression of anxiety or even sorrow, which was the real message her nerves were getting from him. She found herself actually on the verge of saying, ‘It’s all right, it’s OK, don’t worry!’ But meanwhile Jasper was demanding, ‘Where’s Bert?’

The black youth shrugged, nonchalantly, still smiling, and did not for one moment stop his energetic attack on his instruments. Jasper’s tight grip on her upper arm took her out of the room into the hall, where Alice said, ‘This place smells.’

‘Well,’ said Jasper, in the clumsily placating way she knew was meant as love, ‘I suppose you’ll put a stop to that.’

At once, feeling her advantage, she said, ‘Don’t forget you’ve been living soft for four years. You’re not going to find it easy after that.’

‘Don’t call me soft,’ he said, and kicked her on the ankle. Not hard, but enough.

This time she went ahead of him and opened a door she felt must be to the kitchen. Light fell on desolation. Worse, danger: she was looking at electric cables ripped out of the wall and dangling, raw-ended. The cooker was pulled out and lying on the floor. The broken windows had admitted rain water which lay in puddles everywhere. There was a dead bird on the floor. It stank. Alice began to cry. It was from pure rage. ‘The bastards,’ she cursed. ‘The filthy stinking fascist bastards.’

They already knew that the Council, to prevent squatters, had sent in the workmen to make the place uninhabitable. ‘They didn’t even make those wires safe. They didn’t even…’ Suddenly alive with energy, she whirled about opening doors. Two lavatories on this floor, the bowls filled with cement.

She cursed steadily, the tears streaming. ‘The filthy shitty swine, the shitty fucking fascist swine…’ She was full of the energy of hate. Incredulous with it, for she had never been able to believe, in some corner of her, that anybody, particularly not a member of the working class, could obey an order to destroy a house. In that corner of her brain that was perpetually incredulous began the monologue that Jasper never heard for he would not have authorized it: But they are people, people did this. To stop other people from living. I don’t believe it. Who can they be? What can they be like? I’ve never met anyone who could. Why, it must be people like Len and Bob and Bill, friends. They did it. They came in and filled the lavatory bowls with cement and ripped out all the cables and blocked up the gas.

Jasper stood and watched her. He was pleased. This fury of energy had banished her look, which he hated, when she seemed, all of her, to be swollen and glistening, as if not merely her face but her whole body filled with tears which oozed from every pore.

Without referring to him she ran up the stairs and he followed slowly, listening to how she banged on doors, and then, hearing nothing, flung them open. On the first-floor landing they stood looking into order, not chaos. Here every room had sleeping-bags, one or two, or three. Candles or hurricane lamps. Even chairs with little tables beside them. Books. Newspapers. But no one was in.

The smell on this floor was strong. It came from upstairs. More slowly they went up generously wide stairs, and confronted a stench which made Jasper briefly retch. Alice’s face was stern and proud. She flung open a door on to a scene of plastic buckets, topped with shit. But this room had been deemed sufficiently filled, and the one next to it had been started. Ten or so red, yellow and orange buckets stood in a group, waiting.

There were other rooms on this floor, but none was used. None could be used, the smell was so strong.

They went down the stairs, silent, watching their feet, for there was rubbish everywhere, and the light came dimly through dirty windows.

‘We are not here,’ said he, anticipating her, ‘to make ourselves comfortable. We aren’t here for that.’

She said, ‘I don’t understand anyone choosing to live like this. Not when it’s so easy.’

Now she sounded listless, flat, all the incandescence of fury gone.

He was about to start a speech about her bourgeois inclinations, as she could see; but the front door opened, and against the sunlight was outlined a military-looking figure.

‘Bert!’ he shouted, and jumped down the stairs three at a time. ‘Bert. It’s Jasper…’

Alice thought maternally, hearing that glad voice ring out, it’s because of his shitty father; but it was part of her private stream, since of course Jasper did not allow her the right to such ideas.

‘Jasper,’ acknowleged Bert, and then peered through the gloom up at her.

‘Alice – I told you,’ said Jasper.

‘Comrade Alice,’ said Bert. His voice was curt, stern and pure, insisting on standards, and Jasper’s voice fell into step. ‘We have just come,’ he said. ‘There was no one to report to.’

‘We spoke to him, in there,’ remarked Alice, arriving beside them, indicating the room from where came the soft drumming.

‘Oh, Jim,’ dismissed Bert. He strode to a door they had not opened, kicked it open, since it had lost it knob, and went in without looking to see if they followed.

This room was as near to normal as any they had seen. With the door shut, you could believe this was a sitting-room in an ordinary house, although everything – chairs, a sofa, the carpet – was dingy. The smell was almost shut out, but to Alice it seemed that an invisible film of stench clung to everything, and she would feel it slippery on her fingers if she touched.

Bert stood upright, slightly bent forward, arms at ease, looking at her. But he did not see her, she knew that. He was a dark thin young man, probably twenty-eight or thirty. His face was full of black shining hairs, and his dark eyes and a red mouth and white teeth gleamed from among them. He wore new stiff dark-blue jeans and a close-fitting dark-blue jacket, buttoned up and tidy. Jasper wore light-blue linen trousers and a striped T-shirt like a sailor’s; but Alice knew he would soon be in clothes like Bert’s, which were in fact his normal gear. He had had a brief escapade into frivolity due to some influence or other.

Alice knew that the two men would now talk, without concerning themselves with her, and set herself to guard her interests, while she looked out of the bow-window into the garden, where rubbish of all kinds reached to the sills. Sparrows were at work on the piles, scratching and digging. A blackbird sat on a milk carton and looked straight at her. Beyond the birds, she saw a thin cat crouched under a hydrangea in young green leaf and slim coronets of pink and blue that would be flowers. The cat was watching her too, with bright starved eyes.

Bert reached into a cupboard and took out a thermos flask the size of a bucket; and three mugs.

‘Oh, you do have electricity then?’ she asked.

‘No. A comrade in the next street fills it for me every morning,’ he said.

Alice, watching the scene with half her attention, saw how Jasper eyed the flask, and the pouring of the coffee. She knew he was hungry. Because of the row with her mother, and then slamming out of the house, he had not breakfasted. And he had not had time to drink the coffee she had taken up to him. She thought, ‘But that’s Bert’s supply for the day,’ and indicated she wanted only half a cup. Which she was given, exactly as specified.

Jasper drank down his cup at once, and sat looking at the thermos, wanting more. Bert did not notice.

‘The situation has changed,’ Bert began, as if this were a continuation of some meeting. ‘My analysis was incorrect, as it happened. I underestimated the political maturity of the cadres. When I put the question to the vote, half decided against, and they left here at once.’

Jasper said, ‘Then they would have proved unreliable. Good riddance.’

‘Precisely.’

‘What was the question?’ inquired Alice. She used her ‘meeting voice’, for she had learned that this was necessary to hold her own. To her, it sounded false and cold, and she was always embarrassed by it; because of the effort it needed, she sounded indifferent, even absentminded. Yet her eyes were steadily and even severely observing the scene in front of her: Bert, looking at her, or rather, at what she had said; Jasper, looking at the thermos. Suddenly he was unable to stop himself, and he reached for the jug. Bert said, ‘Sorry,’ and pushed it towards him.

‘You know what the question was,’ said Jasper, sour. ‘I told you. We are going to join the IRA.’

‘You mean,’ said Alice, ‘you voted on whether to join the IRA?’ She sounded breathless: Bert took it as fear, and he said, with loud, cold contempt, ‘Shit-scared. They ran like little rabbits.’

Alice persisted, ‘How was it put to the vote?’

Bert said, after a pause, ‘That this group should make approaches to the IRA leadership, offering our services as an England-based entity.’

Alice digested this, looking strained because of the effort it cost her to believe it, and said, ‘But Jasper told me that this house was Communist Centre Union?’

‘Correct. This is a CCU squat.’

‘But has the leadership of the CCU decided to offer the services of the whole CCU to the IRA? I don’t understand,’ she said fiercely, not at all in her ‘political’ voice, and Bert said, curt and offhand because, as she could see, he was uncomfortable, ‘No.’

‘Then how can a branch of the CCU offer it services?’

Here she observed that Jasper was seeking to engage Bert’s eyes in ‘Take no notice of her’ looks, and she forestalled him. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

Bert admitted, ‘You are correct, in a way. The point was discussed. It was agreed that while approaches could not be made as a group of the CCU, it would be permissible for a group of CCU members to make the approach, as associated individuals.’

‘But…’ Alice lost interest. They are at it again, she was thinking. Fudging it. She returned her attention to the rubbish pile a yard beyond the dirty glass. The blackbird had gone. The poor cat was sniffing around the edges of the heap, where flies were crawling.

She said, ‘What do you do for food here?’

‘Take-away.’

‘This rubbish is a health hazard. There must be rats.’

‘That’s what the police said.’

‘Have they been?’

‘They were here last night.’

‘Oh, I see, that’s why the others left.’

‘No,’ said Bert. ‘They left because they got the shits. About the IRA.’

‘What did the police say?’

‘They gave us four days to leave.’

‘Why don’t we go to the Council?’ said Alice, in an irritated wail; and as Jasper said, ‘Oh, there she goes again,’ the door opened and a young woman came in. She had short shiny black hair that had been expertly cut, black quick eyes, red lips, a clear white skin. She was glossy and hard, like a fresh cherry. She looked carefully at Bert, at Jasper, and at Alice, and Alice knew she was being seen.

‘I’m Pat,’ she said. ‘Bert told me about you two.’ And then, ‘You are brother and sister?’

At once Jasper snapped, ‘No, we are not!’

But Alice liked it when people made the mistake, and she said, ‘People often take us as brother and sister.’

Pat again examined them. Jasper fidgeted under the look, and turned away, hands in his jacket pockets, as if trying to seem indifferent to an attack.

They were both fair, with reddish gleams in hair that wanted to go into little curls and wisps. Jasper’s was cut very short; Alice’s was short and chunky and serviceable. She cut it herself. They both had pinkish freckled skin. Jasper’s little blue eyes were in round white shallows, and this gave him an angelic, candid air. He was very thin, and wore skin-tight clothes. Alice was stocky, and she had a pudgy, formless look to her. Sometimes a girl of twelve, even thirteen, before she is lit by pubescence, is as she will be in middle age. A group of women are standing on a platform in the Underground. Middle-aged women, with carrier bags, gossiping. Very short women, surely? No, they are girls, of twelve or so. Forty years of being women will boil through them, and leave them as they are now, heavy and cautious, and anxious to please. Alice could seem like a fattish clumsy girl or, sometimes, about fifty, but never looked her age, which was thirty-six. Now it was a girl who returned Pat’s look with friendly curiosity from small blue-grey eyes set under sandy lashes.

‘Well,’ said Pat, strolling to the window to stand by Alice, ‘have you heard that this happy little community is for the chop?’

She looked much older than Alice, was ten years younger. She offered Alice a cigarette, which was refused, and smoked hers needfully, greedily.

‘Yes, and I said, why not negotiate with the Council?’

‘I heard you. But they prefer their romantic squalor.’

‘Romantic,’ said Alice, disgusted.

‘It does go against the grain, negotiating with the Establishment,’ said Bert.

‘Do you mean that this commune is breaking up?’ said Jasper suddenly, sounding so like a small boy that Alice glanced quickly to see whether it had been noticed. It had: by Pat, who stood, holding her cigarette to her lips between two fingers and distancing them, then bringing them back, so that she could puff and exhale, puff and exhale. Looking at Jasper. Diagnosis.

Alice said quickly, her heart full of a familiar soft ache, on Jasper’s account, ‘It doesn’t go against my grain. I’ve done it often.’

‘Oh you have, have you?’ said Pat. ‘So have I. Where?’

‘In Birmingham. A group of seven of us went to the Council over a scheduled house. We paid gas and electricity and water, and we stayed there thirteen months.’

‘Good for you.’

‘And in Halifax, I was in a negotiated squat for six months. And when I was in digs in Manchester, that was when I was at the university, there was a house full of students, nearly twenty of us. It started off as a squat, the Council came to terms, and it ended up as a student house.’

During this the two men listened, proceedings suspended. Jaspar had again filled his mug. Bert indicated to Pat that the thermos was empty, and she shook her head, listening to Alice.

‘Why don’t we go to the Council?’ said Alice direct to Pat.

‘I would. But I’m leaving anyway.’ Alice saw Bert’s body stiffen, and he sat angry and silent.

Pat said to Bert, ‘I told you last night, I was leaving.’

Alice had understood that this was more than political. She saw that a personal relationship was breaking up because of some political thing! Every instinct repudiated this. She thought, involuntarily, What nonsense, letting politics upset a personal relationship! This was not really her belief: she would not have stood by it if challenged. But similar thoughts often did pass through her mind.

Pat said, to Bert’s half-averted face, ‘What the fuck did you expect? At an ordinary meeting like that – two of them from outside, we didn’t know anything about them. We don’t know anything about the couple who came last week. Jim was in the room and he isn’t even CCU. Suddenly putting forward that resolution.’

‘It wasn’t sudden.’

‘When we discussed it before we decided to make individual approaches. To discuss it with individuals, carefully.’

Her voice was full of contempt. She was looking at – presumably – her lover as though he was fit for the dustbin.

‘You’ve changed your mind, at any rate,’ said Bert, his red lips shining angrily from his thickets of beard. ‘You agreed that to support the IRA was the logical position for this stage.’

‘It is the only correct attitude, Ireland is the fulcrum of the imperialist attack,’ said Jasper.

‘I haven’t changed my mind,’ said Pat. ‘But if I am going to work with the IRA or anyone else, then I’m going to know who I am working with.’

‘You don’t know us,’ said Alice, with a pang of painful realization; she and Jasper were part of the reason for this couple’s break-up.

‘No hard feelings,’ said Pat. ‘Nothing personal. But yes. The first I heard of you was when Bert said he had met Jasper at the CND rally Saturday. And I gather Bert hadn’t even met you.’

‘No,’ said Alice.

‘Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not the way to do things.’

‘I see your point,’ said Alice.

A silence. The two young women stood at the window, in an aromatic cloud from Pat’s cigarette. The two men were in chairs, in the centre of the room. The rain-like pattering of the drum came from Jim beyond the hall.

Alice said, ‘How many people are left here now?’

Pat did not answer and at last Bert said, ‘With you two, seven.’ He added, ‘I don’t know about you, Pat.’

‘Yes, you do,’ said Pat, sharp and cold. But they were looking at each other now, and Alice thought: No, it won’t be easy for them to split up. She said, ‘Well, if it’s seven, then four of us are here now. Five if Pat…Where are the other two? I want to get an agreement that I go to the Council.’

‘The lavatories full of cement. The electricity cables torn out. Pipes probably rotten,’ said Bert on a fine rising derisive note.

‘It’s not difficult to put it right,’ said Alice. ‘We did it in Birmingham. The Council smashed the place to a ruin. They pulled the lavatories completely out there. All the pipes. Filled the bath with cement. Piled rubbish in all the rooms. We got it clean.’

‘Who is going to pay for it?’ That was Bert.

‘We are.’

‘Out of what?’

‘Oh, belt up,’ said Pat, ‘it costs us more in take-away and running around cadging baths and showers than it would to pay electricity and gas.’

‘It’s a point,’ said Bert.

‘And it would keep Old Bill off our backs,’ said Alice.

Silence. She knew that some people – and she suspected Bert, though not Pat, of this – would be sorry to hear it. They enjoyed encounters with the police.

Bert said unexpectedly, ‘Well, if we are going to build up our organization we aren’t going to need attention from Old Bill.’

‘Exactly,’ said Pat. ‘As I’ve been saying.’

Silence again. Alice saw it was up to her. She said, ‘One problem. In this borough they need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas. Who is in work?’

‘Three of the comrades who left last night were.’

‘Comrades!’ said Bert. ‘Opportunistic shits.’

‘They are very good honest communists,’ said Pat. ‘They happen not to want to work with the IRA.’

Bert began to heave with silent theatrical laughter, and Jasper joined him.

‘So we are all on Social Security,’ said Alice.

‘So no point in going to the Council,’ said Bert.

Alice hesitated and said painfully, ‘I could ask my mother…’

At this Jasper exploded in raucous laughter and jeers, his face scarlet. ‘Her mother, bourgeois pigs…’

‘Shut up,’ said Alice. ‘We were living with my mother for four years,’ she explained in a fine breathless, balanced voice, which seemed to her unkindly cold and hostile. ‘Four years. Bourgeois or not.’

‘Take the rich middle class for what you can get,’ said Jasper. ‘Get everything out of them you can. That’s my line.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Alice. ‘I agree. But she did keep us for four years.’ Then, capitulating, ‘Well, why shouldn’t she? She is my mother.’ This last was said in a trembling painful little voice.

‘Right,’ said Pat, examining her curiously. ‘Well, no point in asking mine. Haven’t seen her for years.’

‘Well then,’ said Bert, suddenly getting up from the chair and standing in front of Pat, a challenge, his black eyes full on her. ‘So you’re not leaving after all?’

‘We’ve got to discuss it, Bert,’ she said, hurriedly, and walked over to him, and looked up into his face. He put his arm around her and they went out.

Alice surveyed the room. Skilfully. A family sitting-room, it had been. Comfortable. The paint was not too bad, the chairs and a sofa probably stood where they had then. There was a fireplace, not even plastered over.

‘Are you going to ask your mother? I mean, to be a guarantor?’ Jasper sounded forlorn. ‘And who’s going to pay for getting it all straight?’

‘I’ll ask the others if they’ll contribute.’

‘And if they won’t?’ he said, knowingly, sharing expertise with her, a friendly moment.

‘Some won’t, we know that,’ she said, ‘but we’ll manage. We always do, don’t we?’

But this was too direct an appeal to intimacy. At once he backed away into criticism. ‘And who’s going to do all the work?’

As he had been saying now for fourteen, fifteen years.

In the house in Manchester she shared with four other students she had been housemother, doing the cooking and shopping, housekeeping. She loved it. She got an adequate degree, but did not even try for a job. She was still in the house when the next batch of students arrived, and she stayed to look after them. That was how Jasper found her, coming in one evening for supper. He was not a student, had graduated poorly, had failed to find a job after half-hearted efforts. He stayed on in the house, not formally living there, but as Alice’s ‘guest’. After all, it was only because of Alice’s efforts that the place had become a student house: it had been a squat. And Jasper did not leave. She knew he had become dependent on her. But then and since he had complained she was nothing but a servant, wasting her life on other people. As they moved from squat to squat, commune to commune, this pattern remained: she looked after him and he complained that other people exploited her.

At her mother’s he had said the same. ‘She’s just exploiting you,’ he said. ‘Cooking and shopping. Why do you do it?’

‘We’ve got four days,’ said Alice. ‘I’m going to get moving.’ She did not look at him, but walked steadily past him, and into the hall. She carried her backpack into the room where Jim was drumming and said, ‘Keep an eye on this for me, comrade.’ He nodded. She said, ‘If I get permission from the Council for us to live here, will you share expenses?’

His hands fell from the drums. His friendly round face fell into lines of woe and he said, ‘They say I can’t stay here.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh shit, man, I’m not into politics. I just want to live.’ Now he said, incredulously, ‘I was here first. Before any of you. This was my place. I found it. I said to everyone, Yes, come in, come in, man, this is Liberty Hall.’

‘That’s not fair,’ said Alice, at once.

‘I’ve been here eight months, eight months, Old Bill never knew, no one knew. I’ve been keeping my nose clean and minding my own business, and suddenly…’ He was weeping. Bright tears bounced off his black cheeks and splashed on the big drum. He wiped them off with the side of his palm.

‘Well,’ said Alice, ‘you just stay put and I’ll get it on the agenda.’

She was thinking as she left the house: All those buckets of shit up there, I suppose Jim filled them, nearly all. She thought: If I don’t pee I’ll…She could not have brought herself to go up and use one of those buckets. She walked to the Underground, took a train to a station with proper lavatories, used them, washed her face and brushed her hair, then went on to her mother’s stop, where she stood in line for a telephone booth.

Three hours after she left home screaming abuse at her mother, she dialled her number.

Her mother’s voice. Flat. At the sound of it affection filled Alice, and she thought, I’ll ask if she wants me to do some shopping for her on the way.

‘Hello, Mum, this is Alice.’

Silence.

‘It’s Alice.’

A pause. ‘What do you want?’ The flat voice, toneless.

Alice, all warm need to overcome obstacles on behalf of everyone, said, ‘Mum, I want to talk to you. You see, there’s this house. I could get the Council to let us stay on a controlled squat basis, you know, like Manchester? But we need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas.’

She heard a mutter, inaudible, then, ‘I don’t believe it!’

‘Mum. Look, it’s only your signature we want. We would pay it.’

A silence, a sigh, or a gasp, then the line went dead.

Alice, now radiant with a clear hot anger, dialled again. She stood listening to the steady buzz-buzz, imagining the kitchen where it was ringing, the great warm kitchen, the tall windows, sparkling (she had cleaned them last week, with such pleasure), and the long table where, she was sure, her mother was sitting now, listening to the telephone ring. After about three minutes, her mother did lift the receiver and said, ‘Alice, I know it is no use my saying this. But I shall say it. Again. I have to leave here. Do you understand? Your father won’t pay the bills any longer. I can’t afford to live here. I’ll have trouble paying my own bills. Do you understand, Alice?’

‘But you have all those rich friends.’ Another silence. Alice then, in a full, maternal, kindly, lecturing voice, began, ‘Mum, why aren’t you like us? We share what we have. We help each other out when we’re in trouble. Don’t you see that your world is finished? The day of the rich selfish bourgeoisie is over. You are doomed…’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Alice’s mother, and Alice warmed into the purest affection again, for the familiar comforting note of irony was back in her mother’s voice, the awful deadness and emptiness gone. ‘But you have at some point to understand that your father is not prepared any longer to share his ill-gotten gains with Jasper and all his friends.’

‘Well, at least he is prepared to see they are ill-gotten,’ said Alice earnestly.

A sigh. ‘Go away, Alice,’ said Alice’s mother. ‘Just go away. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear from you. Try to understand that you can’t say the things to people you said to me this morning and then just turn up, as if nothing had happened, with a bright smile, for another hand-out.’

The line went dead.

Alice stood, in a dazzle of shock. Her head was full of dizzying shadow and light. Someone behind her in the queue said, ‘If you’ve finished…’, pushed in front of her, and began to dial.

Alice drifted off on to the pavement and wandered aimlessly around the perimeter of that area, now fenced off with high, corrugated iron, where so recently there had been a market, full of people buying and selling. She had had a pitch there herself last summer, and first she sold cakes and biscuits and sweets, and then hot soup, and sandwiches. Proper food, all wholemeal flour and brown sugar, and vegetables grown without insecticides. She cooked all this in her mother’s kitchen. Then the Council closed the place down. To build another of their shitty great enormous buildings, their dead bloody white elephants that wouldn’t be wanted by anyone but the people who made a profit out of building them. Corruption. Corruption everywhere. Alice, weeping out loud, blubbering, went stumbling about outside the enormous iron fence, like a fence around a concentration camp, thinking that last summer…

A whistle shrieked. Some factory or other…one o’clock. She hadn’t done anything yet…Standing on the long shallow steps that led to the Public Library, she wiped her face, and made her eyes look out instead of in. It was a nice day. The sun was shining. The sky was full of racing white clouds, and the blue seemed to dazzle and promise.

She went back to the telephones in the Underground and rang her father’s office on the private number.

He answered at once.

‘This is Alice.’

‘The answer is no.’

‘You don’t know what I was going to say.’

‘Say it.’

‘I want you to guarantee our expenses, electricity and gas, for a squat.’

‘No.’

She hung up, the burning anger back. Its energy took her to the pavement, and walked her up the avenue to a large building which was set back a bit, with steps. She raced up them and pressed a bell, holding it down until a woman’s voice, not the one she expected, said, ‘¿Sí?’

‘Oh, fucking Christ, the maid,’ said Alice, aloud. And, ‘Where’s Theresa?’

‘She at work.’

‘Let me in. Let me come in.’

Alice pushed open the door on the buzzer, almost fell into the hall, and thumped up four flights of heavily carpeted stairs to a door, where a short dumpy dark woman stood, looking out for her.

‘Just let me in,’ said Alice, fiercely pushing her aside, and the Spanish woman said nothing, but stood looking at her, trying to find the right words to say.

Alice went into the sitting-room where she had so often been with her friend Theresa, her friend ever since she, Alice, had been born, kind and lovely Theresa. A large calm ordered room, with great windows, and beyond them gardens…She stood panting. I’ll tear down those pictures, she was thinking, I’ll sell them, I’ll take those little netsukes, what are they worth? I’ll smash the place up…

She tore to the telephone, and rang the office. But Theresa was in conference.

‘Get her,’ she commanded. ‘Get her at once. It is an emergency. Tell her it’s Alice.’

She had no doubt that Theresa would come, and she did.

‘What is it, Alice, what’s wrong, what is the matter?’

‘I want you to guarantee expenses. For a squat. No, no, you won’t have to pay anything, ever, just your signature.’

‘Alice, I’m in the middle of a conference.’

‘I don’t care about your shitty conference. I want you to guarantee our electricity and gas.’

‘You and Jasper?’

‘Yes. And others.’

‘I’m sorry, my dear. No.’

‘What’s the matter with Jasper? Why are you like this? Why? He’s just as good as you are.’

Theresa said, calm and humorous, as always, ‘No, Alice, he is not as good as I am. Far from it. Anyway, that’s it. No, but I’ll give you fifty pounds if you come round.’

‘I am around. I am in your flat. But I don’t want your shitty fifty pounds.’

‘Well, then, I’m sorry, my dear.’

‘You spend fifty pounds on a dress. On a meal.’

‘You shared the meal, didn’t you? This is silly. I’m sorry, I’m busy. All the buyers are here from everywhere.’

‘It’s not silly. When have you seen me spend fifty pounds on a meal? If my mother wants to spend fifty pounds on food for all her shitty rich friends, and I cook it, that doesn’t mean…’

‘Listen, Alice, if you want to come round and have a talk tonight, you are welcome. But it will have to be late, because I will be working until eleven, at least.’

‘You…you…are a lot of rich shits,’ said Alice, suddenly listless.

She put down the receiver, and was about to leave when she remembered, and went to the bathroom, where she emptied herself, again carefully washed her face, and brushed her hair. She was hungry. She went to the kitchen and cut herself a lavish sandwich. Lisa followed her and stood at the door to watch, her hands folded around the handle of a feather duster, as if in prayer. A dark patient tired face. She supported her family in Valencia, so said Theresa. She stood watching Alice eating her salami and her pâté on thick bread. Then watched while Alice peered into every corner of the refrigerator, and brought out some leftover spiced rice, which she ate with a spoon, standing up.

Then she said, ‘Ciao,’ and heard as she left, ‘Buenos días, señorita.’ There was something in that voice, a criticism, that again lit the anger, and she ran down all the stairs again and out on to the pavement.

It was after two.

Her thoughts whirled about. Jasper, why did they hate him so? It was because they were afraid of him. Afraid of his truth…She realized that she had walked herself to a bus-stop, and the bus would take her to the Council. She got on, suddenly cold, concentrated, and careful.

She was rehearsing in her mind her previous successful negotiations. A great deal would depend, she knew, on whom she saw…luck…Well, she had been lucky before. And besides, what she was suggesting was reasonable, in the best interests of everybody, the ratepayers, the public.

In the great room filled with desks and people and telephones, she sat opposite a girl, younger than she, and knew at once that she was lucky. On Mary Williams’s left breast was a ‘Save the Whales!’ button, and the sprightly shape of the animal made Alice feel soft and protective. Mary Williams was a good person, like herself, like Jasper, like all their friends. She cared.

Alice gave the address of her house confidently, stated her case and waited until the official turned to press a button or two, and the information arrived, to be set on the desk between them.

‘Scheduled for demolition,’ said Mary Williams, and sat smiling, nothing more to be said.

This Alice had not expected. She could not speak. It was grief that filled her, transmuting, but slowly, to rage. The face that Mary Williams saw swelled and shone, and caused her to say uncomfortably, even stammering, ‘Why, why, what is the matter?’

‘It can’t be demolished, it can’t,’ stated Alice, in a toneless empty voice. Then, rage exploding, ‘It’s a marvellous house, perfect! How can you demolish it? It’s a bloody scandal.’

‘Yes, I know that sometimes…’ said Mary Williams swiftly. She sighed. Her glance at Alice was a plea not to make a scene. Alice saw it, saw that scenes not infrequently occurred at this desk.

She said, ‘There must be a mistake. Surely they aren’t entitled to destroy a house like this…Have you seen it? It’s a good house. A good place…’

‘I think they mean to put up flats.’

‘Naturally! What else?’

The two young women laughed, their eyes meeting.

‘Wait,’ said Mary Williams, and went off to confer, in her hand the sheet containing the vital statistics of the house. She stood by the desk of a man at the end of the room, and came back to say, ‘There have been a lot of complaints about the state of the houses. The police, for one.’

‘Yes, it’s a disgusting mess,’ agreed Alice. ‘But it’ll be cleared up in no time.’

Here Mary nodded, Proceed! and sat doodling, while Alice talked.

And talked. About the house. Its size, its solidity, its situation. Said that, apart from a few slates, it was structurally sound. Said it needed very little to make it liveable. She talked about the Birmingham squat and the agreed tenancy there; about Manchester, where a slum scheduled for demolition had been reprieved, and became an officially recognized student residence.

‘I’m not saying it couldn’t happen,’ said Mary.

She sat thinking, her biro at work on a structure of cells, like a honeycomb. Yes, Alice knew, Mary was all right, she was on their side. Although Mary was not her style, with her dark little skirt and crisp little blouse, with her bra outlining the modest breast where the whale cavorted, tail in the sky, black on blue sea. All the same, Mary’s soft masses of dark hair that went into curls on her forehead, and her plump white hands, made Alice feel warm and secure. She knew that if Mary had anything to with it, things would go well.

‘Wait a minute,’ Mary said; and again went to confer with her colleague. This man now gave Alice a long inspection, and Alice sat confidently, to be looked at. She knew how she seemed: the pretty daughter of her mother, short curly fair hair nicely brushed, pink and white face lightly freckled, open blue-grey gaze. A middle-class girl with her assurance, her knowledge of the ropes, sat properly in the chair, and if she wore a heavy blue military jacket, under it was a flowered pink and white blouse.

Mary Williams came back and said, ‘The houses are coming up for a decision on Wednesday.’

‘The police gave us four days to clear out.’

‘Well, I don’t see what we can do.’

‘All we need is a statement, in writing, that the case is being considered, to show the police, that’s all.’

Mary Williams did not say anything. From her posture, and her eyes – that did not look at Alice – it was suddenly clear that she was after all, very young, and probably afraid for her job.

There was some sort of conflict there, Alice could see: this was more than just an official who sometimes did not like the work she had to do. Something personal was boiling away in Mary Williams, giving her a stubborn, angry little look. And this again brought her to her feet and took her for the third time to the official whose job it was to say yes and no.

‘You do realize,’ said Mary Williams, talking for her colleague, ‘that this letter would say only that the house is on the agenda for Wednesday?’

Alice said, inspired, ‘Why don’t you come and see it? You and –?’

‘Bob Hood. He’s all right. But he’s the one who…’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Alice. ‘But why don’t you both come and see the house?’

‘The houses, yes – I think Bob did see them, but it was some time ago – yes, perhaps we should.’

Mary was writing the words which would – Alice was sure – save the house. For as long as it was needed by Alice and the others. Save it permanently, why not? The piece of paper was slid into an envelope bearing the name of the Council, and Alice took it.

‘Have you got a telephone in the house?’

‘It was ripped out.’ It was on the tip of Alice’s tongue to describe the state of the house: cement in the lavatories, loose electric cables, the lot; but instinct said no. Although she knew that this girl, Mary, would be as furious, as sick, as anyone could be, that such deliberate damage could be done to a place, the damage had been done by officialdom, and Mary was an official. Nothing should be done to arouse that implacable beast, the bureaucrat.

‘When should I ring you?’ she asked.

‘Thursday.’

That was the day the police said they would be thrown out.

‘Will you be here on Thursday?’

‘If not, Bob over there will take the call.’

But Alice knew that with Bob things would not go so well.

‘It’s routine,’ said Mary Williams. ‘Either they will pull the houses down at once, or they will postpone it. They have already postponed several times.’ Here she offered Alice the smile of their complicity, and added, ‘Good luck.’

‘Thanks. See you.’

Alice left. It was only five o’clock. In one day she had done it. In eight hours.

Love, Again:

Chapter 1

Easy to think this was a junkroom, silent and airless in a warm dusk, but then a shadow moved, someone emerged from it to pull back curtains and throw open windows. It was a woman, who now stepped quickly to a door and went out, leaving it open. The room thus revealed was certainly over-full. Along one wall were all the evidences of technical evolution – a fax machine, a copy machine, a word processor, telephones – but as for the rest, the place could easily be some kind of theatrical storeroom, with a gold bust of some Roman female, much larger than life, masks, a crimson velvet curtain, posters, and piles of sheet music, or rather photocopies that had faithfully reproduced yellowing and crumbling originals.

On the wall over the word processor was a large reproduction of Cézanne’s Mardi Gras, also the worse for wear: it had been torn across and put together with sellotape.

The woman next door was energetically attending to something: objects were being moved about. Then she reappeared and stood looking in at the room.

Not a young woman, as it had been easy to imagine from the vigour of her movements when still half seen in the shadows. A woman of a certain age, as the French put it, or even a bit older, and not dressed to present herself, but wearing old trousers and shirt.

This woman was alert, full of energy, yet she did not seem pleased with what she looked at. However, she shook all that off and went to her processor, sat down, put out a hand to switch on a tape. At once the room was filled with the voice of the Countess Dié, from eight centuries ago (or a voice able to persuade the listener she was the Countess), singing her timeless plaints:

I must sing, whether I will or not:

I feel so much pain over him whose friend I hold myself,

For I love him more than anything that is…

The modern woman, sitting with her hands ready to attack the keys, was conscious she felt superior to this long-ago sister, not to say condemning. She did not like this in herself. Was she getting intolerant?

Yesterday Mary had rung from the theatre to say that Patrick was in emotional disarray because he had fallen in love again, and she had responded with a sharp comment.

‘Now, come on, Sarah,’ Mary had rebuked her.

Then Sarah had agreed, and laughed at herself.

Feeling disquiet, however. There seems to be a rule that what you condemn will turn up sooner or later, to be lived through. Forced to eat your vomit – yes, Sarah knew this well enough. Somewhere in her past she had made a note: Beware of condemning other people, or watch out for yourself.

The Countess Dié was too disturbing, and Sarah switched the plaint off.

Silence. She sat breathing it in. She was altogether too much affected by this old troubadour and trouvère music. She had been listening to little else for days, to set the tone of what she had to write. Not only the Countess, but Bernard de Ventadorn, Pierre Vidal, Giraut de Bornelh, and other old singers, had put her into a state of…she was restless, and she was feverish. When had music affected her like this before? She did not think it had. Wait, though. Once she had listened to jazz, particularly the blues, it seemed day and night, for months. But that was when her husband died, and the music had fed her melancholy. But she did not remember…yes, first she had been grief-ridden, and then she had chosen music to fit her state. But this was a different matter altogether.

Her task this evening was not a difficult one. The programme notes were too stiff in tone: this was because, writing them, she had been afraid of being over-charmed by the subject. And she was being charmed by the sensuous voice of the Countess – or the young woman Alicia de la Haye.

She did not have to do the programme notes now. In fact she had made a rule for herself not to work in the evenings at home: a rule she had not been keeping recently. To spell it out, she had not been keeping her own prescriptions for balance and good mental health.

She sat listening to silence. A sparrow chirped.

She thought, I’ll look up that Provençal poem by Pound; that’s hardly work after all.

The desk was stacked with reference books, files of cuttings, and on one side of it bookshelves rose to the ceiling. A book lay open on one side of the word processor.

Growing old gracefully…the way has been signposted. One might say the instructions are in an invisible script which becomes slowly legible as life exposes it. Then the appropriate words only have to be spoken. On the whole the old don’t do badly. Pride is a great thing, and the necessary stances and stoicisms are made easy because the young do not know – it is hidden from them – that the flesh withers around an unchanged core. The old share with each other ironies appropriate to ghosts at a feast, seen by each other but not by the guests whose antics and posturings they watch, smiling, remembering.

To this set of placid sentences full of self-respect most people getting old would subscribe, feeling well presented and even defended by them.

Yes, I’ll go along with that, thought Sarah. Sarah Durham. A good sensible name for a sensible woman.

The book where she had found these sentences had been on a trestle in a street market, the memoirs of a society woman once known for her beauty, written in old age and published when she was nearly a hundred, twenty years ago. A strange thing, Sarah thought, that she had picked the book up. Once, she would never have even opened a book by an old person: nothing to do with her, she would have felt. But what could be odder than the way that books which chime with one’s condition or stage in life insinuate themselves into one’s hand?

She pushed away that book, thought Pound’s verses could wait, and decided to enjoy an evening when nothing at all would be expected of her. An evening in April, and it was still light. This room was calm, usually calming, and like the other three rooms in this flat held thirty years of memories. Rooms a long time lived in can be like littered sea shores; hard to know where this or that bit of debris has come from.

She knew exactly where the bits of theatrical junk had originated: which play, or what actor. But on the window sill was a bowl of coloured pebbles she had picked up outside a village in Provence where she had gone walking with her two children, then aged twelve and thirteen. What was the name of that village? She had been several times to that region, and she had always picked up stones to take home. Strings of beads in all shades of red were pinned in a fan shape on a board that filled a good part of a wall. Why had she kept the thing? Piles of books on the theatre climbed the walls: she had not opened some of them for years. And there was the poster of Mardi Gras. He had been eye to eye with her for decades, that arrogantly sexy youth in the red and black diamond pattern costume with his touch-me-not look. He was like her own son – well, yes, that had been a long time ago, and George was now an almost middle-aged scientist. These days, when she did look at it (after all, one doesn’t much look at what is on one’s walls), her eyes went to the uncertain youth with his dark thoughtful eyes in the ill-fitting Pierrot dress. Her daughter, aged fifteen, had demanded a Pierrot costume, and she, Cathie’s mother, had known it was a statement. I am like him. I need a disguise. I wish I were not unsure but like the Harlequin, who knows how beautiful he is. There was nothing unsure about Cathie these days, a successful matron, with children, a job, a satisfactory husband.

Sarah knew she saw the picture as portraits of her own children. Why did she keep it there? Parents often secretly cherish photographs of their offspring that have nothing to do with their present ages, and these are not always appealingly helpless infants.

She should get rid of all this rubbish…and now, suddenly, she sat up straight in her chair and then stood and began a prowl around the room. This was not the first time she had had the thought. Years ago, she had looked around this room, full of things that had come to rest there for some reason or another and thought, I must get rid of it all.

The poster was there because her daughter Cathie had brought it home. It had nothing to do with her, Sarah. What could she say was hers? The books, the reference books: her working necessities. And the rest of her home? An extended prowl then, repeated now, took her past dishes of shells collected by the children decades ago, a cupboard that still had their old clothes in it, postcards, stuck on a cork board, from people on holiday. Her clothes? Could she say that these were here because she had chosen them? Well, yes, but fashion had dictated them.

On that evening years ago, she had come to the unsettling conclusion that very little in these four large rooms was here because of some considered choice of hers. A choice from that part of her she thought of as herself. No, and she had decided to go through the rooms and throw everything out…well, almost everything: here was something that would stay if everything else found itself bagged up for the dustbins. It was a real photograph, which took itself seriously. A pleasant man, a bit worried perhaps, or tired? – a net of fine lines around frank and comradely blue eyes, and with grey in his fair hair (whose soft silkiness she could feel in her fingers), which was probably the first sign of a heart attack that was to strike him down so young, at forty. He sat with his arms around two children, boy and girl, aged eight and nine. The three of them were smiling at Sarah. The photograph was in a silver frame, art deco, not Sarah’s taste, but it had been given to her by her husband who had had it from his mother. Should she throw out the frame because she had never liked it?

Why hadn’t she made a clean sweep? It was because she had been too busy. Some new play, probably. She had always worked so hard.

Sarah came to a stop in front of a mirror. She looked at a handsome apparently middle-aged woman with a trim body. Her hair, always in tight smooth bands for convenience – she could not be bothered with hairdressers – was described as fair on her passport, but it was more a dull yellow, like neglected brass. Surely by now she ought to have at least the odd grey hair? But that shade often does not go grey or white, at least not until real old age. Young, its possessors yearn for lively colour and might dye it, and when older gratefully leave it alone and are accused of dyeing it. She did not often look in the mirror: she was not anxious about her looks. Why should she be? She was often thought twenty years younger than her real age. In another mirror, through the open door to her bedroom, she seemed even less her age. She could see the reflection by twisting herself about. Her back was erect and full of vitality. Her osteopath, when treating her for back trouble (it did seem to be making itself felt these days), enquired if she had been a dancer. The two mirrors were there because decades ago her husband had said, ‘Sarah, these rooms are too dark. Can’t we get some light into them?’ The walls were painted bright white, but they had dimmed, and the curtains had been white, were now dark cream. When the sun shone in, the room filled with light, shadow, and moving reflections, a place of suggestion and possibilities. Without sun, the mirrors showed furniture that stood about in a still light like water. A pearly light. Restful. She liked these rooms, could not think of anything worse than having to leave them. They could be criticized for being shabby. Her brother said they were, but she thought his house smart and awful. Nothing had been changed here for years. The rooms gently dimmed into acceptance: of her being so busy always, and of her being, at heart, not much interested, and of the way the years accumulated, leaving deposits, books and photographs, postcards and things from the theatre.

All this junk should go out…Here on the wall of her bedroom was a group of photographs. Some were of her grandmother and grandfather in India, posed and formal, doing their duty, but she had added one cut out of a magazine, of a girl dressed in the fashions of the year Sarah Anstruther went out to marry her fiancé, doing well in the Indian Civil Service. This girl was not Sarah Durham’s grandmother, but all the photographs Sarah had of this woman she had never met were of a young matron competently facing the world, and the shy, frightened unknown was – Sarah Durham was pretty sure – rather more to the point. A girl of eighteen, travelling to a country she knew nothing about, where she would marry a young man she hardly knew, to become a memsahib…common, in those days, but what courage.

Sarah Durham’s life had held no such dramatic choices. In a potted biography, of the kind seen on book jackets or theatre notes, it would look like this:

Sarah Durham was born in 1924 in Colchester. Two children. Her brother studied medicine. She went to a couple of reputable girls’ schools. At university she studied French and Italian, and then spent a year at the University of Montpellier doing music, living with an aunt who had married a Frenchman. During the war she was a chauffeur for the Free French in London. In 1946 she married Alan Durham, and there were two children. He died, leaving her a widow in her mid-thirties. She had lived in London, with the children.

A calm and reasonable woman…true that Alan’s death had thrown her into unhappiness for a time, but it wore off. That was how she put it now, knowing she was choosing not to remember the misery of that time. Hypocrite memory…kind memory that allowed her to claim a tranquil life.

She went back to her workroom and read the exemplary passage in the book again, the one beginning, ‘Growing old gracefully…’ It ended a chapter, and the next one began, ‘What I liked best about my trip to India was the early mornings, before the heat got bad and we had to stay inside. When I decided not to marry Rupert after all I am sure now it was the heat rather than him I was refusing. I was not in love with him, but I did not know that then. I had not learned what being in love was.’

For the third time she read ‘Growing old gracefully…’ to the end of the chapter. Yes, that would do. She found herself at sixty-five telling younger friends that there was nothing to getting old, quite pleasurable really, for if this or that good took itself off, then all kinds of pleasures unsuspected by the young presented themselves, and one often found oneself wondering what the next surprise would be. She said this sort of thing in good faith, and while observing the emotional tumults of those even a decade younger than herself even indulged private shudders at the thought of going through all that again – a formula which included love. As for being in love, it had occurred to her it was twenty years since she had been in love, she who had once fallen in love easily and – she had to admit it – even eagerly. She could not believe she would be in love again. She said this too with complacency, forgetting the hard law that says you must suffer what you despise.

She was not going to sit down and work…it occurred to her that one reason for this exaggerated no to another evening spent doing what she did all day was her – well, yes, the word had to be – fear of that music. Those plaints from long ago were a drug. Had jazz really taken her over as the Countess Dié and Bernard, Pierre and Giraut, had done? And what about the woman who was, these days, her occupation – Julie Vairon, whose music stood in yellowing stacks on a table? No, she distrusted music. She was in good company after all; many of the great and the wise had thought music a dubious friend. She had always listened in the spirit of: You’re not going to take me over, don’t you think it!

No: no work, and no music. She was restless enough to…climb a mountain, to walk twenty miles. Sarah found she was tidying this room, which certainly needed it. She might as well vacuum the floor…why not all four rooms? The kitchen. The bathroom. By twelve her flat was a paragon. You would think this woman took pride in her housewifely skills. Instead she had a cleaner in once a week, and that was it.

Surely she wasn’t nervous of meeting – as she had to do tomorrow – Stephen Ellington-Smith, known jokingly in the company as Our Angel. She could not remember being nervous ever before about this kind of encounter. After all, it was her job to meet and soothe patrons, benefactors, and angels, she did it all the time.

Sarah’s memories divided her life into two eras, or different landscapes, one sunny and unproblematical, and then all effort and difficulty. (Yet the war with its anxieties was somehow accommodated in the first sunlit stretch. How could that be? And all those family money difficulties? Nonsense, mere trifles, compared to what followed.) Her husband’s death, that was when this Sarah Durham had begun, poor and desperate. Her parents did not have much money. There had been no insurance. She could not really afford to stay in this flat but decided she would, preserving continuity for the already traumatized children. She earned her living and theirs by all kinds of badly paid freelance work for newspapers and magazines, publishers and the theatre, one theatre in particular, The Green Bird, then not more than a group putting on plays with small casts where they could, sometimes in pubs. In the seventies there were many brave small companies, chancing their luck. A certain Italian play which she had translated for them, and which they thought they had the rights to, became unavailable, and to fill the gap she adapted from a novel some sketches of contemporary life. These were a success, and she found herself one of the people running the theatre: first there was the fact that she was there all day, casting and then directing; then a regular salary. A regular theatre too. She was one of the four who decided to risk a long lease. These three were her closest friends, for surely the people you spend all day and most evenings with must be that. For ten years they had precariously survived, and then five years ago a play transferred to the West End, did well, and seemed likely to run forever. The Green Bird was now established as one of the best of the fringe theatres, and critics came to their first nights. From being an almost amateur, badly-paid hanger-on to the edges of real theatre, she was now known in the theatre world as the influential manager of The Green Bird and, sometimes, as the director of a play. The fact is, the four all did everything, and had from the beginning. Their success had brought them concomitant envy, and they were known – inevitably – as The Gang of Four. These changes had taken years, and at no point had she made claims for herself. She sometimes privately marvelled that hard work and – of course – good luck had added up to so much: it will be seen that she was not a self-admiring woman, nor even an ambitious one.

Who were these colleagues with whom she had shared so much? Mary Ford had been a pretty wisp of a thing with vast hazy blue eyes and a tremulous stubborn little face, but the years had made of the waif a solid calm competent woman of about forty, whose main job in the theatre was publicity and promotion. Roy Strether, another paradigm of competence, was formally stage manager. He was a solid, apparently slow man, who never allowed himself excitement, no matter what the crisis. He joked of himself that he looked like a footballer gone to seed. He was large, untidy, even clumsy. They remembered him as young, a sixties drop-out, who had earned his living as so many future successes did, painting houses. The fourth member of the permanent staff was Patrick Steele. They would joke, in front of him or not, that it was as well they three were so boringly stolid and reliable, for he was volatile, shrill, and moody; a slight, bird-like boy (he remained a boy while the years changed them) with soft black hair like plumage and black excitable eyes. He was homosexual and, these days, pretty scared. He would not go and be tested, saying that if he was HIV positive he did not want to know, but meanwhile he was being responsible and no danger to anyone. He often wept, for his emotional life gave him frequent cause for tears. He was brilliant, a magician: he could create moonlight, a lake, a mountain, with light and silver paper and shadows. Other theatres tried to lure him away but failed, for these four shared a belief that their talents together were larger than they could ever be apart. Patrick was as versatile as them all. He had written a libretto for a musical that had been so near a success they jested that next time he would soar off away into fame and be forever lost to them.

These were their public personas, their ‘images’ – how people from outside saw them, perhaps while they sat in their daily get-together for discussion, in a small office they might liken to a cockpit or an engine room. It was the usual mix of elegant technology, each machine already obsolete almost before it was installed, and old chairs and tables they felt disinclined to get rid of.

Four people, energized by their competence and success. Behind each there was that hinterland called personal life, which here was very far from being separated from working hours.

Mary was unmarried – without a man – because she had to look after her mother, who had multiple sclerosis and was pretty helpless. When she had been unable to organize other help, sometimes an old woman with shaking hands sat in a wheelchair in an aisle and watched the rehearsals.

Roy Strether was married, with a child. The marriage was unsuccessful. Sometimes the little boy would be inserted into a seat near his father’s at a rehearsal and was commended by everybody for behaving well. Tired or demanding attention, he might sit on the old woman’s lap, she delighted that at least she had some limited usefulness.

Sarah’s responsibilities were self-imposed. For ten years now her vital energies – emotional – had been engaged, not by her own children and grandchildren, established successfully in other continents (India and America) but by her brother’s youngest girl, Joyce. Hal and Anne had three daughters, the older two ordinary and just like everybody else’s children. Joyce had been a problem since birth. Why? Who knows? She was a screaming baby, a grizzling toddler, a disagreeable child. Sent to school, she at once fell ill and had to come home. She simply could not manage school and other children. Her parents both being doctors, her condition never lacked diagnoses. Her records were voluminous and in several hospitals. A psychiatrist recommended that she be allowed to stay at home. Sarah was appealed to, and Joyce spent her days with her, in the room that had been the children’s room. In those days Sarah often worked at home, and when she did go out for appointments Joyce stayed happily by herself. What did she do? Nothing at all. She made herself cups of tea, watched television, and sometimes rang telephone numbers at random until someone was willing to talk to her, when she would chat away sometimes for an hour or two hours. The telephone bills were enormous, and Hal and Anne did not offer to pay for them.

Joyce became anorexic and was again in hospital. She was ‘stabilized’ and despatched back to Sarah, who protested it was not fair, she could not deal any longer with Joyce. Hal had said in his kindly judicious way that it must be nice for Sarah to have Joyce around when her own children were so far away. But when the unsure and suffering Pierrot, now the efficient mother of two children in California, or the arrogantly beautiful boy, now a marine biologist with two sons, came bringing grandchildren to visit their grandmother, Joyce went home and there was no argument about it. As Joyce became fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, things went from bad to very bad. Suicide attempts, crises, cries for help. It was Sarah who took her to hospital and talked with the doctors, who had been briefed, of course, by the parents. It was always Aunt Sarah who was summoned. Back home, Joyce went to bed. Sarah fought with her and often succumbed to the low painful state threatening those who take on the psychic burden of those – as we put it – who cannot cope with ordinary life. There were times when she felt that she too would take to her bed and stay there, but her colleagues sustained her. And then all at once everything changed. One of the people, a girl, who chatted with Joyce on the telephone suggested they should meet. Sarah rang her brother, saying she had not seen Joyce for days, and now it was for him, for Joyce’s parents, to make decisions. When Hal said he was afraid Joyce looked on her – Sarah – as her effective parent (‘You are her effective parent, Sarah, surely you must know that’), Sarah said she was sorry, she had done her bit. Of course that was not the end of it. She worried quite dreadfully about Joyce: it had always been a waste of time worrying about Joyce. As the result of a television programme about people living rough, she went to the police, who suggested a certain café in King’s Cross. Joyce’s name was known to these addicts, pushers, and prostitutes. Sarah again rang her brother, who said, ‘She’s old enough now to take responsibility for herself,’ and then added with cheerful spite, in his way that said since he took pleasure in malice then his interlocutor must too, ‘We’ve been meaning to tell you. You should do something about yourself. You could do with a lick of paint.’

Postponing the lick, she went to the psychiatrist most often consulted about Joyce, where she heard that Joyce’s flight into the great world could be seen as a step into maturity. An interesting notion, that a loony girl’s development might be better furthered by joining drug users, pushers, and prostitutes than by taking refuge in her family. But there was nothing she, Sarah, could do. She would at last lead her own life. No, she did not expect to feel immediately better without the interminable drag and drudge of Joyce. Then she did take herself in hand, at last. She examined herself in the dim mirrors, switching on all the lights. Not bad, she supposed. She looked a handsome middle-aged matron. A hairdresser had improved her hair-do: a small smooth head went well with clothes more expensive than anything she had bought for years. At the theatre, her colleagues commended her. They also allowed her to know she had let herself be put upon and she should stand up for herself.

Besides, they all needed undivided energies. They were all working on a production more ambitious than anything they had done. Only a year ago, Julie Vairon had been on a list of possibilities, and now it was a big co-production, with American, French, and English money. They knew they would have to engage more people, expand, but they put off doing this. They confessed there was something disturbing about Julie Vairon’s irresistible sweep, and Mary Ford wondered aloud if they would have taken on Julie if they had known what an upheaval would result, but Patrick said it was not Julie Vairon but Julie Vairon who was the trouble; and he spoke with the whimsical self-satisfaction which is, because of a secret identification, felt as flattering.

In the eighties of the last century, in Martinique, a beautiful girl – a quadroon, like Napoleon’s Josephine – fascinated a young French officer. This is where Julie Vairon, the play – or, as it was later billed, An Entertainment – began. She was the daughter of a mulatto woman who had been the mistress of a white plantation owner’s son. When he inherited the plantation he married suitably, a poor but aristocratic girl from France, but remained Sylvie Vairon’s protector, while gossip claimed he was much more. He agreed the girl should be educated, at least to the level of the daughters of the neighbouring rich family, also landowners. Perhaps his conscience troubled him, but it was said, too, that he had enlightened ideas and these were expressed only here, in Julie’s education. She had music lessons and drawing lessons and read quantities of books recommended by tutors who fitted in her lessons between the more formal lessons they gave the rich girls in their big house five miles away. The tutors were fiery young men who regretted they had not been born in time for the Revolution, or at least to fight in Napoleon’s armies, just as in our time young men or women mourn because they were not in Paris in ’68. ‘But ’68 was a failure,’ a practical elder may protest, only to be demolished by passionately scornful eyes. ‘What of it! Think how exciting it must have been!’

One of the young ladies, more enterprising than her sisters, decided to satisfy her curiosity about the mysterious Julie and contrived to visit her secretly in the house in the forest where Julie lived with her mother. She boasted about her exploit, which was evidence of her brave indifference to convention, and added to the already noisy rumours. The visit was invaluable to Julie, for she had had nothing to measure herself against. She learned from it that she was more intelligent than these respectable girls – her visitor was supposed to be the cleverest of them – but learned too how socially disadvantaged she herself was, for she was educated above her prospects and even her possibilities. Also, she knew why the tutors were all so ready to teach her. They might all be in love with her, but they could also talk to her.

Of herself at that time she wrote less than ten years later, Inside that pretty little head what an olla podrida of incompatible ideas. But I envy that girl her innocence. She had read the Encyclopedists, was devoted to Voltaire, while Rousseau, so appealing to anyone dependent on natural justice, had to hold sway. She could debate (and did, endlessly, with her tutors) about the acts and speeches of every personage on the great stage of the Revolution as if she had lived through it. She knew as much about the heroes of the American War of Independence. She adored Tom Paine, worshipped Benjamin Franklin, was convinced she and Jefferson were made for each other. She knew that had she been old enough she would have got on a ship to America to nurse the victims of the Civil War. But in fact she was living on her father’s banana estate, the illegitimate part-black (she was a light brown colour, like a southern French or Italian) daughter of a black lady whose house in the sultry forest was where successive waves of young officers, all bored out of their minds in this beautiful but dull island, went for entertainment, dancing, drinking, food, and the delightful singing of beautiful Julie. A very young officer, Paul Imbert, fell in love with her. He adored her, but did he adore her enough to marry her or even take her with him to France? Probably not, if she had not refused to see difficulties and insisted they should run away together. His parents were respectable people living not far from Marseilles, his father a magistrate. They refused to receive Julie. Paul found for her a little stone house in hilly and romantic country, and there he visited his love daily for a year, riding through aromatic pines, poplars, and olive trees. Then his parents pulled strings, the army forgave his young man’s lapse, and he was sent on duty to French IndoChina. And now Julie was alone in the woods, with no means of support. The magistrate sent her money. He had glimpsed the girl walking with his son in the hills. He envied Paul. This was not why he sent money. Paul had confessed with all suitable remorse that Julie was pregnant. For a time she had believed she was. With only a few francs between her and starvation, she returned the money to Paul’s father, saying that it was true she had been pregnant, but nature had quickly come to her aid – to the aid of all of them. Thus she made a claim on him, on his feelings of responsibility. She thanked him for his interest and asked him to help her get employment in the middle-class homes of the small town near to her, Belles Rivières. She could draw well, and she painted in water colours – unfortunately oils were too expensive for her. She played the piano. She could sing. ‘I believe that in these accomplishments I shall prove in no way inferior to the tutors currently employed in this district.’ She was asking for far more than the generous sum of money he had offered. By now everyone knew of the pretty but dubious girl who had tried to ensnare the son of one of their most respected families and lived all by herself like a savage in the woods. Her lover’s father thought for a long time. Probably he would not have responded had he not caught that glimpse of her with Paul. He went to see her and found an accomplished, witty, and delightful young woman, with the most charming manners in the world. In short, he fell in love with her, as everyone did. He could not bring himself to refuse her, said he would speak to selected families on her behalf, but kept himself in face by asking for an undertaking that she would never contact any member of his family again. She replied with a quick and impatient scorn he had to see was genuine: ‘I had assumed, monsieur, that you would have already understood that.’

For four years she taught the daughters of a doctor, two lawyers, three chemists, and a prosperous shopkeeper. All of them begged her to move into the little town, ‘where you will be more comfortable.’ Meaning that they were uncomfortable because this girl, no matter how well-bred and clever, was living by herself a good three miles from Belles Rivières. She refused, delightfully but firmly, telling them about the great forests of Martinique, the flowers and the butterflies and the brilliant birds, where she had wandered, absolutely by herself. She could not be happy living in streets, she said, though the truth was she dreamed of the streets of Paris and how she could reach them without worsening her already bad position. If she was going to try her chances in the big city it should be now, while she was still young and pretty, but she still dreamed of Paul. That she had been bound to lose him she had very soon learned, and knew that if he came back from the army she could not have him. Living, as she insisted on doing, free but alone told everyone she was waiting for him, and everyone – father, mother, sisters, would be writing to tell him so. Far from enticing him to her, this would put him off, as all her instincts, and the worldly wisdom imparted by her mother, told her. But she could not leave the place. Freedom! Liberty! she often cried to herself, roaming about her forests.

What did she look like at this time? How did she see her prospects? How did she strike the good people whose daughters she taught? How did they strike her? We know. We know it all. She drew self-portraits all her life, not because she had no other model, but because she was engaged in discovering her real, her hidden nature: we have a phrase for this search. She kept journals from the time she reached France. And there was her music, that would have told us everything even without her journals. The picture that emerges is not merely of an intelligent and attractive woman, but one who disturbed and challenged even when she did not intend to, who all her life fed malicious tongues, who always had men in love with her though she did not expect them to be or try to attract them. When she was accepted as tutor into these good houses, she behaved like a paragon of propriety, but she knew it would take only a small mistake to have the doors shut on her. She walked on a knife-edge, for above all, she had charm, that double-edged gift, arousing more expectations than it can ever fulfil. She certainly disappointed the young ladies she taught, who called her best friend and championed her to doubtful mothers and fathers, yet secretly hoped for more than her prudent advice: ‘Do you really want to be like me?’ she might sweetly enquire, when some over-protected daughter asked her aid in some minor rebellion. ‘Do what your parents say, and when you are married you can do as you like.’ She had learned this from Stendhal’s letters to his sister.

In her journals she wrote she would rather be herself, ‘an outcast’, than any one of these privileged girls.

When she was twenty-five she took a big step up the social ladder. She taught the two daughters of a Comte Rostand. The Rostands were the leading family in the area. They lived in a large and ancient château and sent a carriage for her twice a week. That was when she gave lessons in the dark hours as well as in the light, for before the carriage she had insisted that since she had to walk miles back and forth from her little house, she would teach in the town only in the day. This caused sarcastic comments. Everyone knew she wandered about all by herself at night in her forests. Yet she was too delicate to walk back in the dark from the town? And how about dancing by herself among the rocks, banging a tambourine, or something that looked like one – a primitive looking thing, probably from that primitive country she came from. Dancing naked – some claimed to have seen her.

Did she? There is no mention of it in her journals – though when she began to keep a record, there were only notes and jottings, and only later did it develop into a running commentary on her life. There is, however, a drawing of a woman dancing in a setting of trees and rocks. A full moon. Naked. This drawing is so unlike anything else she did of herself it shocks. Interesting to watch when some fan of Julie’s was handed a pile of her drawings. The face froze, there was an indrawn breath and – then – a laugh. The laugh was from shock. But how often is shock no more than a moment of half-expected revelation? A door opens (perhaps literally) onto a scene that is beautiful, or ugly, something ferocious or shocking – at any rate, the other side of the well-lit and ordered world we know: there it is, the truth. But why was there never mention of dancing in her journals? Perhaps it only happened once, and she got some kind of a scare. A pretty risky thing, to dance like that. She knew people spied on her. The gendarmes certainly did, but if one of them took a look through her uncurtained and unshuttered window – she hated feeling shut in, she said – he would see the proper young woman of the drawing rooms standing before her easel or playing her harp or writing at a small table under an oil lamp that showed the open book, her neatly ringed hand with the pen, her face, her bands of black hair, her bust smooth in a dress that went high to her throat, where there was a small white collar.

The gendarmes would also report that there were many books. If they took a good look when she was out, down in the town, they would not now be able to report anything consistently seditious or troubling. For while she still loved Revolutions as a matter of principle – she would not have been able to think of herself as a serious person if she did not – her shelves now provided a more balanced diet. Montaigne sat by Madame Roland, Madame de Sévigné with Énile. Clarissa – that novel whose influence on European literature had been and still was so strong – was in a pile with Rousseau’s Confessions, while Victor Hugo and Maupassant, Balzac and Zola, saw no reason why they should not share space with Voltaire. Beside her bed – small and narrow, with a single pillow – was evidence that she was taking possession of the part of France she found herself in, because she was reading whatever she could find of regional literature, had fallen in love with the old Provençal poets, and they and the newest Provençal poet, Mistral, were by the little blue enamel candlestick with its modest white candle on her night table.

A learned young woman, even a bluestocking, so the talk went, side by side with the other, more appetizing rumours, and when the château sent the carriage for Julie – it had to wait a good mile from her house, and even then there was only a cart road – this meant that the Rostands did not know about her nocturnal activities, or perhaps they did not care, were at the very least respecting her insistence on being considered, at least for form’s sake, as one of them.

The youngest son, Rémy, soon fell fatally in love with her. If Paul had been the essence of the romantic hero, dark, handsome, impetuous, full of temperament, then Rémy was the mature love, sober, patient, observant, with that small dry humour women love as a sign of seriousness, of experience.

When she began to love him it was against her good sense, and then she abandoned caution, just as she had in Martinique with Paul, and loved him absolutely. The carriage no longer waited for her where the cart track ended, for she ceased to give lessons at the château, but he visited her in her forest house and sometimes stayed with her for days at a time. The family knew he would get over it, and waited. He begged them to allow him to marry her. She dreamed of marrying him, while common sense told her to stop. All this went on for months – three years in fact – of bliss, of anguish, or despair, heights and depths of all kinds. She continued to give lessons in the town, while he begged her to rely on him. The citizens were able to ignore the hideous rumours, because their aristocratic family were being so cool, and because the pair was so discreet. They were never seen together. Besides, the young woman was such an excellent teacher. And above all her fees were so moderate.

This time Julie did get pregnant, and the lovers were happy and dreamed of the life they would have with their child. The baby was born, was a healthy child, but died of a minor ailment, the way children did so easily then. The two were ill with grief, but soon learned that the rumours in the town were more than ugly – they were dangerous. Criticism of Julie, so long repressed because of her confidence, and her skills, and because she always seemed to have powerful protectors, now expressed itself in the gossip that she had killed the child. It was known where and how. Half a mile from her house, a river ran fast downhill over rocks into a deep cold pool. The child’s death ended the family’s patience. Rémy was told to remove himself into the army. He was twenty-three. Julie was then twenty-eight. The two parted in an agony of grief, hardly able to move, as if they had been slowed by a deadly cold, an invisible ice. They told each other they would never get over it, and somewhere or other, they did not.

She had not been able to teach in the town since her pregnancy showed. With what she had saved, and what Rémy could give her when he left, she had enough to live on for a year. While she was slowly putting herself together again, and her journals tell us how painful a process this was, she repeated former behaviour. In a letter beginning, ‘There is no more helpless and unfortunate being than a young woman without a family, without a protector…,’ she asked Count Rostand to get her work as a copier of music. This he did. He knew she was more than adequately equipped for anything in this line. The family was a musical one. Musicians both well known and amateur played in their salons on feast days, and Julie’s own music had been played at these evenings, and sometimes by herself. It was a strange music – but then, she did come from an exotic island. The family knew she was a real musician, wrote serious music.

For years she lived quietly by herself, earning her living in a variety of ways. She copied music and even, on request, composed pieces for special occasions. She sang at the more respectable public feasts or festivals, always careful to refuse an invitation that might lower her status as a respectable woman. She drew and painted, in pastels and water colours, the picturesque scenes she lived among, and made studies of birds and animals. These pictures were sold from a printer’s shop in the town. She was never well off, but she was not poor either. Several times her journals recorded timely gifts of money from the Rostands, presumably at Rémy’s request.

She was alone? Yes, always. She was not able to forget Rémy, and he did not forget her. Occasionally they wrote long letters. Three years after he was banished into the army in French Equatorial Africa, he came on leave, and visited her, but they were both so affected they decided never to meet again. He was already engaged to marry a girl from a suitable family.

This romantic story, the reader has probably long ago decided, is hardly unusual. Beautiful young women without family support, and disadvantaged – in this case doubly, being both illegitimate and coloured – have this kind of history. In the rich parts of the world. In the poor countries of the Third World most particularly. Even in the Second World (but where is that?), poor and pretty girls match dreams to expectations, but with their hearts, not their heads.

Julie’s head was far from weaker than her heart. As her journals show. And her self-portraits. And, not least, her music. While her unfortunately not unusual story unfolded itself, her mind remained – bad luck for her – above it all, as if Jane Austen were rewriting Jane Eyre, or Stendhal a novel by George Sand. An uncomfortable business, reading her journals, because one has to feel that it is bad enough she had to suffer all that pain and loneliness, without having to endure her own severe view of herself. She might have adored her lover Paul, and more than adored Rémy, but she often described these passions as if a busy physician were making notes about calamitous illnesses. Not that she dismissed these calamities as worthless or meaningless: on the contrary, she gave them all the weight and meaning they did have in her life.

Five years after the loss of her lover Rémy, she was asked in marriage by a man of fifty, Philippe Angers, the master of the printing works where she sold her pictures. He was well-off, a widower with grown-up children. She liked him. She wrote that talking with him was the best thing in her life, after her music. He visited her in her own house, openly, his horse and sometimes his carriage left standing under the pines and turkey oaks where the cart track ended. She walked with him in a public garden at Belles Rivières. They spent the day together at a fête in Nice. This was his way of telling the world that he approved of Julie and her way of life, and proposed to take her on regardless of public opinion. But by now people were pleased that this vagabond and disturber of minds should be made harmless at last.

She was writing, I like him so much, and everything about this proposition is sensible. Why then does it lack conviction? She mused that the word conviction was an interesting one in this context. Paul had been convincing, and Rémy most certainly was. What did she mean by it, though?

For a long sober year Julie and the master printer planned their marriage. His children met her and presumably approved. One of them was a farmer, Robert. She describes how Robert joined the printer and herself for a meal. I could love that one, she remarks. And he certainly could love me. When we looked at each other we knew it. That would have conviction, all right! But it doesn’t matter. He lives with his wife and his four children near Béziers. We shall probably never see each other.

Remarks about her future husband continue, and they are calm, sensible, one could say respectful. There is, however, an entry describing a day in her married life. I shall wake up in that comfortable bed beside him, when the maid comes in to do the fire. Just as his wife did. Then I will kiss him and I will get up to make the coffee, since he likes my coffee. Then I shall kiss him when he goes downstairs to the shop. Then I shall give the girl orders. At last I will go to the room he says I can have for myself and I shall paint. Oils if I like. I will be able to afford anything I like in that line. He usually doesn’t come to the midday meal, so I shall ignore it and walk in the gardens and make conversation with the citizens, who are longing to forgive me. Then I shall play the piano a little, or my flute. He has not heard the music I am writing these days. I don’t think he would like it. Dear Philippe, he is so warmhearted. He had tears in his eyes when the dog was sick. He will come in for supper and we will eat soup. He likes my soup, he likes how I cook. Then we will talk about his day. It is interesting, the work he does. Then we will talk about the newspapers. We shall often disagree. He certainly does not admire Napoleon! He goes to bed early. That will be the hardest, to be shut up in a house all night.

Not once is there a suggestion of a financial calculation. Yet she was quite alone in the world. Her mother had been killed in the Mount Pelée earthquake, having gone to visit a sister living at St Pierre, which was destroyed. It is not recorded whether Julie ever asked her father for help.

A week before the mayor, who was an old friend of Philippe’s, was to marry them at the town hall, she drowned herself in the pool where gossips said she had killed her baby. They did not believe she had killed herself. Why should she, now that all her problems were solved? Nor had she slipped and fallen, which was what the police decided. Absurd! – when she had been jumping around those woods for years, like a goat. No, she was murdered, and probably by a disappointed lover no one knew about. Living all by herself miles from any decent people, she had been asking for something of the sort.

There were suitable condolences for the citizen who had lost his love, for no one could doubt he adored her, but people said he was well out of it. The gendarmes collected up her papers, her sketches, her pictures, a good deal of sheet music, and for lack of a better idea put it all into a big packing case that went to stand in the cellar of the provincial museum. Then, in the 1970s, Rémy’s descendants found some of her music among their papers, were pleased with it, remembered there was a packing case in the museum, found more music there, and got it played at a local summer festival. That is where the Englishman Stephen Ellington-Smith heard it. As music lovers will know, Julie Vairon quickly became recognized as a composer unique in her time, an original, and people are already using the word great.

But she was not only a musician. The artistic world admires her. ‘A small but secure niche…’ is how she is currently evaluated. Some people think she will be remembered for her journals. Excerpts appeared in both France and England, and were at once praised: very much to the taste of this time. Three volumes of her journals were published in France, and one volume (the three abridged) in Britain, where no one disagreed with the French claim that she deserves to stand on the same shelf as Madame de Sévigné. But some people have too many talents for their own good. Perhaps better if she had been an artist with that modest sensitive unpretentious talent so becoming in women. Which brings us to the feminists for whom she is a contentious sister. For some she is the archetypal female victim, while others identify with her independence. And as a musician, so one critic complained, ‘the trouble is one doesn’t know how to categorize her.’ All very well to say now how modern she is, but her music was not of her time. She came from the West Indies, people remind each other, where there is all that loud and disturbing music and it was ‘in her blood’. No one forgets that ‘blood’, an asset now, if not then. No wonder her rhythms are not of Europe. But then, they aren’t African either. To add to the problem, her music had two distinct phases. The first kind is not hard to understand, though where it could have come from certainly is: nearest to it is the trouvère and troubadour music of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. But that music was not available in Julie’s time, as it is now, in recordings of arrangements made using the instruments of then and recreated from difficult-to-decipher manuscripts. There are ways of bringing that old music back to life. One tradition of Arab music has changed little in all those centuries from what was taken to Spain, whence it came to southern France and inspired the singers and musicians who wandered from castle to castle, court to court, with instruments that were the ancestors of the ones we know. Yet when music has to be inferred, recreated, ‘heard’, the interpretation of an individual has to be at least in part an original inspiration. The words of the Countess Dié are as she sang them, but exactly how did she sing them? Did Julie see old manuscripts somewhere? We all know the most unlikely things do happen. Where? Did the Rostand family have ancient manuscripts in their possession? The trouble with this interesting theory – which postulates that this ancestor-loving, music-loving clan were so careless with a treasure from the past that they did not recognize its influences on Julie – is that Julie wrote that kind of music before knowing the family, for her songs of that time were fed by her grief over losing Paul. One may speculate harmlessly that among those solid middle-class families whose daughters she taught was one with an ancient chest full of…it is possible. Very well, then, how did this kind of singing come into her mind, living in her hilly solitude? What was she hearing, listening to? It was certain there were the sounds of running and splashing water, the noise of cicadas and crickets, owls and nightjars, and the high thin scream of a hawk on its rocky heights, and the winds of that region, which whine drily through hills where the troubadours went, making their singular music. There are those who say fancifully that she was visited by their essences during those long evenings alone, composing her songs. A music lover actually played them at a concert of trouvère and troubadour music, and everyone marvelled, for she could have been one of them. So that was her ‘first phase’, hard to explain but easy to listen to. Her ‘second phase’ was different, though there was a short period when the two kinds of music were in an uneasy alliance. Oil and water. Nothing African about the new phase. Long flowing rhythms go on, and very occasionally a primitive theme appears, if by that is meant sounds that remind one of dancing, of physical movement. But then it becomes only one of several themes weaving in and out, rather as the voices in late medieval music make patterns where no one voice is more important than another. Impersonal. Perhaps it is that which disturbs. The music of her ‘troubadour’ period complains right enough, but formally, within the limits of a form (like the fado or, for that matter, like the blues) which always sets bounds to the plaint of a little individual calling out for compassion, for surcease – for love. Her late music, cool and crystalline, could have been written by an angel, as a French critic said, but another riposted, No, by a devil.

It is hard, listening to her late music, to match it with what she said of herself in her journal, and with her self-portraits. Just before she threw herself into the pool, because that sensible marriage ‘lacked conviction’, she drew in pastels a wreath of portraits of herself, a satirical echo of those garlands of little cherubs or angels to be found on greeting cards. The sequence begins at top left with a pretty, wispy baby who is staring with intelligent black eyes straight back at the viewer – at, it must be remembered, Julie, as she worked. Next, the delightful little girl, her white muslin dress, the pink ribbons, vigorous black curls, and a smile that both seduces and mocks the viewer. Then an adolescent girl, and she is the only one who does not look directly back out of the picture. She is half turned away, with a proud poised profile, like an eaglet. Nothing comfortable about this girl, and one is glad to be spared her eyes, bound to demand strong reactions and sympathies. At the bottom, a spray of conventionalized leaves to match a bow of white ribbon at the top. At bottom right, opposite the eaglet, a young woman, seen as the apogee of this life, its achievement: she is not unlike Goya’s Duchess of Alba, but prettier, with black curls, a fresh vigorous figure, and black bold amused eyes, forcing you to stare back into them. On the opposing side to the adolescent girl, in her way matching or commenting on her, is a coolly smiling woman in her early thirties, handsome and composed, nothing remarkable about her except for the thoughtful gaze, which holds you until: Very well, then, what is it you want to say? There is a black line drawn between this portrait and the next two: two stages of her life she chose not to live. A plump middle-aged woman sits with folded hands, eyes lowered. All the energy of the picture is in a yellow scarf over her grey hair: she could be any woman of fifty-five. The old woman is only an old woman. There is no individuality there, as if Julie could not imagine herself old or did not care enough to think herself into being old. And having drawn that emphatic black line, she had walked out of her house through the trees and stood – for how long? – on the edge of the river, and then jumped into a pool full of sharp rocks.

This was just before the First World War, which so rapidly and drastically changed the lives of women. Supposing she had not jumped, decided to live?

Before jumping she put her pictures, her music, her journals, into tidy heaps. She did not seem to have destroyed anything, probably thought: Take it or leave it. She did write a helpful note for the police, telling them where to look for her body.

Oblivion, for three-quarters of the century. Then the summer recital in Belles Rivières where her music was played for the first time. Shortly after that, her work was included in an exhibition of women artists in Paris, which came successfully to London. A television documentary was made. A romantic biography was written by someone who had either not read the journals or decided to take no notice of them.

This was where Sarah Durham had entered the story. She read the English version of the journals, thought it unsatisfactory, sent to Paris for the French edition, and found herself captivated by Julie to the extent that she was actually making a draft of a play before discussing it with the other three. They were as intrigued as she was. Afterwards no one could remember who had suggested using Julie’s music; this kind of creative talk among people who work together is very much more than the sum of its parts. They could not stop talking about Julie. She had taken over The Green Bird. Sarah did another draft, with music. This was shown to potential backers, and at once Julie Vairon began to escalate. Then another play arrived, written by Stephen Ellington-Smith, who had done so much to ‘discover’ and then ‘promote’ Julie Vairon: ‘Julie’s Angel’.

They all read this new play, which was romantic, not to say sentimental, and no one would have given it another thought had Patrick not demanded a special meeting. Present were Sarah, Mary Ford, Roy Strether, Patrick Steele – the Founding Four. And, too, Sonia Rogers, an energetic redhead who was being ‘tried out’. They were still saying that she was being tried out when it was evident she was a fixture, because no one wanted to admit an era was over. Why Sonia? Why none of the other hopefuls who worked in and around the theatre, sometimes without payment or for very little? Well, it was because she was there. She was everywhere, in fact. ‘Turn the stone and there you find her,’ jested Patrick. She had come in as a ‘temp’ and had at once become indispensable. Simple. She was at this meeting because she had come into the office for something and was invited to stay. She perched on the top of a filing cabinet as if ready to fly away at one cross word.

Patrick opened fire with ‘What’s the matter with Stephen Whatsit’s play? It just needs a bit of tightening, that’s all.’

Mary sang, ‘ “She was poor but she was honest, victim of a rich man’s whim”.’

Roy said, ‘Two rich men, to be accurate.’

Sarah said, ‘Patrick, these days you simply can’t have a play with a woman as a victim – and that’s all.’

Patrick said, sounding, as he did so often, trapped, betrayed, isolated, ‘Why not? That’s what she was. Like poor Judy. Like poor Marilyn.’

‘I agree with Sarah,’ said Sonia. ‘We couldn’t have a play about Judy. We couldn’t do Marilyn – not just victims and nothing else. It’s not on.’

There was a considerable pause, of the kind when invisible currents and balances shift. Sonia had spoken with authority. She had said We. She wasn’t thinking of herself as temporary, on trial. Right, the Founding Four were thinking. And now that’s it. We have to accept it.

They all knew what each of the others was thinking. How could they not? They did not need even to exchange glances, or grimaces. They were feeling, were being made to feel, faded, shabby – past it. There sat this Sonia, as bright and glossy as a lion cub, and they were seeing themselves through her eyes.

‘I agree absolutely,’ said Mary, finally, assuming responsibility for the moment. And her smile at Sonia was such that the young woman showed her pleasure with a short triumphant laugh, tossing her fiery head. ‘They wouldn’t do an opera about Madame Butterfly now.’ Mary went on.

‘Everyone goes to see Madame Butterfly,’ said Patrick.

‘Everyone?’ said Sonia, making a point they were meant to see was a political one.

‘How about Miss Saigon?’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve read the script.’

‘What’s it about?’ asked Sonia.

‘The same plot as Madame Butterfly,’ said Patrick. ‘You talk your way out of that one, Sarah Durham.’

‘It’s a musical,’ said Sarah. ‘Not our audience.’

‘Disgraceful,’ said Sonia. ‘Are you sure, Patrick?’

‘Absolutely.’

Patrick pressed his attack. ‘Then how about the Zimbabwe play? I don’t remember anyone saying it should be a musical.’

The Zimbabwe play, by black feminists, was about a village girl who longed to live in town, just like everyone else in Zimbabwe, but there is unemployment. Her aunt in Harare says no, her house is already over-full. This precipitates a moral storm in the village, because the aunt’s refusal is a break with the old ways, when the more fortunate members of a family had to keep any poor relation who asked. But the aunt says, I have already got twenty people in my house, with my children and my parents and I’m feeding everyone. She is a nurse. The village girl catches the eye of a local rich man, the owner of a lorry service. She gets pregnant. She kills the child. Everyone knows, but she is not prosecuted. She becomes an amateur prostitute. She never thinks of herself as one: ‘This time the man will love me and marry me.’ Another baby is left on the doorstep of the Catholic mission. She gets AIDS. She dies.

‘I saw it,’ said Sonia. ‘It was good.’

‘But that was all right, because she was black?’ said Patrick, and laughed aloud at the political minefield he had invited them into.

‘Let’s not start,’ said Mary. ‘We’ll be here all night.’

‘Right,’ said Patrick, having made his point.

‘It’s too late anyway,’ said Roy, summing up, as he generally did. Calm, large, unflappable, one of the world’s natural arbiters. ‘We’ve already agreed on Sarah’s play.’

‘But,’ Sonia directed them, ‘I do think we should at least remember that it is the story of girls all over the world. As we sit here. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.’

‘But it’s too late,’ said Roy.

Mary remarked. ‘I don’t think the French are in on it because they like the idea of a good cry. They don’t see it as a weepy. When I talked to Jean-Pierre on the phone yesterday about the publicity, he said Julie was born out of her time.’

‘Well, of course,’ said Sarah.

‘Jean-Pierre says they see her as an intellectual, in their tradition of female bluestockings.’

‘In other words,’ said Roy, ending the meeting by standing up, ‘we shouldn’t be having this conversation at all.’

‘What about the American sponsors?’ demanded Patrick. ‘What have they agreed to? I bet not a French bluestocking.’

‘They bought the package,’ said Sarah.

‘I can tell you this,’ said Patrick. ‘If you did Stephen Whatsit’s play there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.’

As Mary and Roy went banging off down the wooden stairs, they sang, ‘“She Was Poor but She Was Honest”,’ and Patrick actually had tears in his eyes. ‘For goodness sake!’ said Sarah, and put her arms around him. As people did so often: There there! He complained they patronized him, and they said, But you need it, with your wounded heart always on view. All this had been going on for years. But things had changed…Sonia wasn’t going to spoil him. Now, at the foot of the stairs, she looked critically at Patrick who – always ornamental, and even bizarre – was today like a beetle, in a shiny green jacket, his black hair in spikes. But Sonia, in the height of fashion, wore black full Dutch-boy trousers, a camouflage T-shirt from army surplus and over it a black lace bolero from some flea market, desert boots, a jet Victorian choker necklace, many rings and earrings. Her hair, in a variation of a 1920s shingle, was in a tight point at the back, and in front in deeply curving lobes, like a spaniel’s ears. But her hair was seldom the same for more than a day or two. Her get-up did not please Patrick. He had already been heard shrilly criticizing her for lack of chic. ‘Being a freak isn’t smart, love,’ he had said. To which she had replied, ‘And who’s talking?’

Sarah did not go to bed on the night before she was due to meet Stephen Ellington-Smith. For one thing, she had not finished cleaning until three in the morning. Then she decided to do the programme notes after all. Then she reread Julie’s journals, preparing herself for what she believed would be a fight with Julie’s Angel.

‘Look,’ she imagined herself saying, ‘Julie never saw herself as a victim. She saw herself as having choice. Until 1902 and her mother’s death, she could have gone home to Martinique. Her mother actually wrote saying she was welcome any time. There’s even a rather silly letter from her half-brother, who took over the estate when the father died, making jokes about their relationship; it was insulting in a sort of schoolboy way. He said the father had told him to “look after” Julie. But she didn’t reply. She wondered whether she should be a prostitute – don’t forget this was the time of les grandes horizontales. But she said she had no taste for luxury, and that did seem to be essential for a highclass tart. She was offered a job as a chanteuse in a nightclub in Marseilles, but she said it would be too emotionally demanding, she would have no time for her music and her painting. Anyway, she hated provincial towns. She did actually have the chance of going to Paris in a touring company as a singer. But this was nothing like her dreams of Paris. She said in her journal, If Rémy asked me to go to Paris and live with him there…we could live quietly, we could have real friends…The underline there says everything, I think. She goes on. Of course it is out of the question, though I saw him with his wife at the fête. It is clear they do not love each other. She was invited to go as governess in a lawyer’s household in Avignon: he was a widower. Several men wanted to set her up in Nice or Marseilles as a mistress. These offers were merely recorded, as she might have written, It was hot today, or, It was cold.

‘We could easily present Julie in terms of what she refused. And what did she actually choose? A little stone house in the forest. “The cow-byre”, as the citizens contemptuously called it. She chose to live alone, paint and draw and compose her music and, every night of her life, write a commentary on it.

‘Yes, I agree it is not easy to make of this a riveting drama. Not easy even if we keep the form you have chosen. Act One: Paul. Act Two: Rémy. Act Three: Philippe. Yes, you could argue that she did write, I don’t think I could bear to move away from my little house where everything speaks to me of love. As George Sand might have written. But don’t forget she went on, I live here exactly as my mother did in her house. The difference is that she has been kept all her life. By one man – my father. She always loved him and never had choice. She could not leave his estate because if she did she could have earned her living only as a brothel-keeper (like her mother and her grandmother, or so she hinted). Or as an ordinary prostitute, or perhaps as a housekeeper. What were her accomplishments? She could cook. She could dress. She knew about plants and herbs. Presumably she knew about love but we never discussed love, that is, the making of it, because she destined me to be a young lady and she didn’t want to raise thoughts in my mind about her, about what she is really like (and that is in itself so touching it could almost break my heart, because how else could I have defined myself, what I am, if not by understanding her?). But I am very much afraid, if we sat alone and talked like women, I would hear her say, I live here in this house because everything in it and near it reminds me of love. And included in this love would be memories of shadows of great trees on her walls, and in the mirror of her sitting room and on the ceilings of her bedroom, and the damp, the everlasting humidity, and the heavy smell of flowers and of wet vegetation, and a smell something like the wet fur of animals that filled the house when it rained. But the fact is, my mother could not have left her house and her life even if she wanted to, but I can leave here at any time.

‘Where in all this do we see the victim?’

It was not that she was afraid of any financial consequences of refusing his play, because he had written, ‘I am sure it goes without saying that my support for the play will not be in any way affected if you all decide my little attempt is not good enough.’

He was already at a table in a restaurant she was relieved to find was not one of the currently fashionable ones. A large, rather dark, old-fashioned room, and quiet. He was at first glance a country gentleman. As she advanced towards him she reflected that it was surely remarkable that when she returned to the office and answered Mary Ford’s query, ‘What’s he like?’ with ‘He’s a country gentleman, old style’ – then Mary would at once know what she meant. Her parents, or Mary Ford’s, her grandparents or Mary’s, would not at once be able to ‘place’ many people in today’s Britain, but they would know Stephen Ellington-Smith at a glance. He was a man of about fifty, large but not fat. He was big-framed and, authoritatively but casually, seemed to take up a lot of space. His face was blond and open: green-eyed, sandy-lashed; and his hair, once fair, was greying. His clothes were as you’d expect: but Sarah found herself automatically making notes for the next time they needed to fit out such a character in a play. Their essence, she decided, was that they would be unnoticeable if he was stalking a deer. His mildly checked brownish-yellow jacket was like a zebra’s coat in that it was designed to merge.

He watched her come towards him, rose, pulled out a chair. His inspection, she knew, was acute, but not defensive. She felt he liked her, but then, people on the whole tended to.

‘There you are,’ said he. ‘I must say you are a relief. I don’t know quite what I expected, though.’ Then, before they had even settled themselves, he said, ‘I really do have to make it clear that I’m not going to mind if you people have decided against my play. I’m not a playwright. It was a labour of love.’

He was saying this as one does to clear the ground before another – the real problem is faced. And she was thinking of a conversation in the office. Mary had remarked, ‘All the same, it’s a funny business. He’s been involved with Julie Vairon for a good ten years one way or another. What’s in it for him?’ Quite so. Why should this man, ‘A regular amateur of the arts, old style, you know’ – so he had been described by the Arts Council official who had suggested approaching him as a patron – have been involved with that problematical Frenchwoman for a decade or more? The reason was almost certainly the irrational and quirky thing that is so often the real force behind people and events, and often not mentioned, or even noticed. This was what Mary Ford had been hinting at. More than hinting. She had said, ‘If we’re going to have problems with him, let’s have them out in the open right from the beginning.’ ‘What sort of problems do you expect?’ Sarah had asked, for she respected Mary’s intuition. ‘I don’t know.’ Then she sang, to the tune of ‘Who Is Sylvia’, ‘Who is Julie, what is she…’

They began by talking practicalities. There was the difficulty that began Julie Vairon’s career. The play was to have gone on in London at The Green Bird, one of three planned for the summer season. By chance, Jean-Pierre le Brun, an official from Belles Rivières, heard from the Rostand family, which had been very co-operative, that a play was imminent, and he flew to London to protest. How was it that Belles Rivières had not been consulted? The truth was, the Founding Four had not thought of it, but that was because they had not seen the piece as ambitious enough to involve the French. Besides, Belles Rivières did not have a theatre. And, as well, Julie Vairon was in English. Jean-Pierre had accepted that the English had been quicker to see the possibilities of Julie, and no one wanted to deny them that honour. There was no question of taking Julie Vairon away from The Green Bird. That was hardly possible, at this stage. But he was genuinely and bitterly hurt that Belles Rivières had been excluded. What was to be done? Very well, the English version could be used for a run in France. Yes, unfortunately it had to be admitted that if tourists were attracted, then they would be more likely to speak English than French. And besides, so many of the English themselves were settled in the area…he shrugged, leaving them to decide what he thought of this state of affairs.

So it was decided. And what about the money? For The Green Bird could not finance the French run. No problem, cried Jean-Pierre; the town would provide the site, using Julie’s own little house in the woods – or what was left of it. But Belles Rivières did not have the resources to pay for the whole company for a run of two weeks. It was at this point that an American patron came in, to add his support. How had he heard of this, after all, pretty dicey proposition? Someone in the Arts Council had recommended it and this was because of Stephen’s reputation.

At this point, mutual support and helpfulness was being expressed mostly in photographs back and forth, London to Belles Rivières, London to California, Belles Rivières to California. It turned out that there was already a Musée Julie Vairon in Belles Rivières. Her house was visited by pilgrims.

Stephen was disturbed. ‘I wonder what she’d think of so many people in her forest. Her house.’

‘Didn’t we tell you we were going to use her house for the French run? Didn’t you see the promotional material?’

‘I suppose I hadn’t really taken it in.’ He seemed to be debating whether to trust her. ‘I even felt bad about writing that play – invading her privacy, you know.’ Then, as she found herself unable to reply to this, for it was a new note, and unexpected, he added abruptly, thrusting out his chin small-boy style, ‘You have understood, I am sure, that I am hopelessly in love with Julie?’ Then gave a helpless, painful grimace, flung himself back in his chair, pushed away his plate, and looked at her, awaiting a verdict.

She attempted a quizzical look, but his gesture was impatient. ‘Yes, I am besotted with her. I have been since I first heard her music at that festival. In Belles Rivières, you know. She’s the woman for me. I knew that at once.’

He was trying to sound whimsical but was failing.

‘I see,’ she said.

‘I hope you do. Because that’s the whole point.’

‘You aren’t expecting me to say anything boring, like, She’s been dead for over eighty years?’

‘You can say it if you like.’

The silence that followed had to accommodate a good deal. It was not that his passion was ‘crazy’ – that portmanteau word, but that he was sitting there four-square and formidable, determined that she should not find it so. He waited, apparently at his ease because he had made his ultimatum, and he even glanced about at this familiar scene of other eaters, waiters, and so on, but she knew that here, at this very point, was what he was demanding in return for his very sizeable investment. She had to accept him, his need.

After a time she heard herself remark, ‘You don’t like her journals very much, do you?’

At this he let out a breath. It would have been a sigh if he had not been measuring it, checking it, even, for too much self-revelation. He shifted his legs abruptly. He looked away, as if he might very well get up and escape and then made himself face her again. She liked him very much then. She liked him more and more. It was because she felt at ease with him, absolutely able to say anything.

‘You’ve put your finger on…no, I don’t. No, when I read her journals I feel – shut out. She slams a door in my face. It’s not what I…’

‘What you are in love with?’

‘I don’t think I’d like that cold intelligence of hers directed at me.’

‘But when one is in love one’s intelligence does go on, doesn’t it? Commenting on –’

‘On what?’ he cut in. ‘No, if she’d been happy she’d never have written all that. All that was just…self-defence.’

At this she had to laugh, because of the enormity of his dismissal of – as far as she was concerned – the most interesting aspect of Julie.

‘Oh all right, laugh,’ he said grumpily, but with a smile. She could see he did not mind her laughing. Perhaps he even liked it. There was something about him of a spreading, a relaxation, as if he had held a breath for too long and was at last able to let it go. ‘But you don’t understand, Sarah – I may call you Sarah? Those journals are such an accusation.’

‘But not of you.’

‘I wonder. Yes, I do, often. What would I have done? Perhaps she would have written of me as she did about Rémy. I represented to him everything he had ever dreamed about when he hoped to be larger than his family, but in the end he was not more than the sum of his family.’

‘And is that what she represents to you? An escape from your background?’

‘Oh no,’ he said at once. ‘To me she represents – well, everything.’

She could feel her whole self rejecting this mad exaggeration. Her body, even her face, was composing itself into critical lines, without any directing intention from her intelligence. She lowered her eyes. But he was watching her – yes, she already knew that close, intelligent look – and he knew what she was feeling, for he said, ‘Please don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said cautiously, ‘I have decided to forget it.’

‘Why?’ he enquired, not intending flattery. ‘You are a good-looking woman.’

‘I am a good-looking woman still,’ said she. ‘I am still a good-looking woman. Quite so. That’s it. I haven’t been in love for twenty years. Recently I’ve been thinking about that – twenty years.’ As she spoke she was amazed that she was saying to this stranger (but she knew he was not that) things she had never said to dear and good friends, her family – that is what they were – at the theatre. She put on the humour and maternal style that seemed more and more her style: ‘And what was it all about, I wonder now, all that…absurdity?’

‘Absurdity?’ And he let out that grunt of laughter that means isolation in the face of wilful misunderstanding.

‘All that anguish and lying awake at night,’ she insisted, forcing herself to remember that indeed she had done all that. (It occurred to her she had not even acknowledged, for years, that she had done all that.) ‘Thank God it can never happen to me again. I tell you, getting old has its compensations.’ Here she stopped. It was because of his acute examination of her. She felt at once that her voice had rung false. She was blushing – she felt hot, at any rate. He was, there was no doubt, a handsome man, or had been. He was a pretty good proposition even now. Twenty years ago perhaps…and here she smiled ironically at him, for she knew her hot cheeks were making confessions. She went on, however, actually thinking that if he could be so brave, then so could she. ‘What I think now is, I was in love too often.’

‘I’m not talking about the little inflammations.’

Again she had to laugh. ‘Well, perhaps you are right.’ Right about what? – and she could see he was finding the phrase, as she did the moment it was out, a bromide, dishonest. ‘But why do we assume it always means the same thing to everyone – being in love? Perhaps “little inflammations” is accurate enough, for a lot of people. Sometimes when I see someone in love I think that a good screw would settle it.’ Here she took from him, as she had expected to, a surprised and even hard look at the ugly term, which she had used deliberately. Women who are ‘getting on’ often have to do this. One minute (so it feels) they are using the language of our time (ugly, crude, honest), and in the next, they have become, or feel they soon will if they don’t do something about it, ‘little old ladies’, because the younger generation have begun to censor their speech, as if to children. But, she thought, critical of herself, there is no need to take up stances with this man.

He said, after a long pause, while he examined her, ‘You’ve simply decided to forget, that’s all it is.’

She conceded, ‘Very well, then, I have. Perhaps I don’t want to remember. If a man had ever been everything to me – that’s what you said, everything…but I did have a very good marriage. But everything…let’s talk about your play, Stephen.’ And she deliberately (dishonestly) let this look as if she didn’t want to talk about her dead husband.

‘All right,’ he agreed, after a pause. ‘But it’s not important. I don’t really mind about it. Scrap it.’

‘Wait. I’m going to keep a good bit of it. The dialogue is good.’ This was not tact. His dialogue in parts was better than hers. Now she knew why. ‘Do you realize you have made Rémy the focus of everything? The real love? What about Paul? After all, she did run away to France with him.’

‘Rémy was the love of her life. She said so herself. It’s in her journals.’

‘But she didn’t get into her stride with the journals until after Paul ditched her. Suppose we had a day-by-day record of her feelings for Paul, as we have for Rémy?’ He definitely did not like this. ‘You identify with Rémy – and it is your own background. Minor aristocracy?’

‘Well, perhaps.’

‘And you’ve hardly mentioned the son of her worthy printer. Julie and Robert took one look at each other and, quote, If you have a talent for the impossible, then at least recognize it. After that, she killed herself. It seems to me the printer’s son could easily have been as important as Rémy.’

‘It seems to me you want to make her a kind of tart, falling in love with one man after another.’

She couldn’t believe her ears. ‘How many women have you been in love with?’

Obviously he couldn’t believe his. ‘I don’t really see the point of discussing the double standard.’

They were looking at each other with dislike. There was nothing for it but to laugh.

Then he insisted, ‘I have been in love, seriously, with one woman.’

She waited for him to say ‘my wife’ – he was married – or someone else, but he meant Julie. She said, ‘It’s my turn to say that you have decided to forget. But that isn’t the point. At the risk of being boring, art is one thing and life another. You don’t seem to see the problem. In your version, her main occupation was being in love.’

‘Wasn’t being in love her main occupation?’

‘She was in love a lot of her time. It wasn’t her main occupation. But these days we cannot have a play about a woman ditched by two lovers who then commits suicide. We can’t have a romantic heroine.’

Clearly she could not avoid this conversation: she reflected it was probably the tenth time in a month.

‘I don’t see why not. Girls are going through this kind of thing all the time. They always have.’

‘Look. Couldn’t we leave it to people who write theses? It’s an aesthetic question. I am simply telling you what I know. Out of theatre experience. After all, even the Victorians made a comic song out of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”. But I think I know how to solve it.’ Her duplicity with him would be limited to not telling him she had solved it already. ‘We can leave the story exactly as you have it. But what will put the edge on it…there is something; I hope you are going to ask what.’

‘Very well,’ he said, and she could see that this was the moment when he finally gave up his play. With good grace. As one would expect from someone like him.

‘We will use what she thought about it all…’

‘Her journals!’

‘Partly. Her journals. But even more, her music. There are her songs, and a lot of her music lends itself – we can use words from the journals and fit them to the music. Her story will have a commentary – her own.’

He thought about this an uncomfortably long time. ‘It is astonishing – it is really extraordinary – the way Julie is always being taken away from me.’ Here he looked embarrassed and said, ‘All right, I know that sounds mad.’

She said, ‘Oh well, we are all mad,’ but, hearing her comfortable maternal voice, knew at once she was not going to be allowed to get away with it. Again she was finding his acute look hard to bear. ‘I do wonder what it is you are mad about,’ he remarked, with more than a flick of malice.

‘Ah, but I’ve reached those heights of common sense. You know, the evenly lit unproblematical uplands where there are no surprises.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

You could say their smiles at each other, companionable but satiric, marked a stage.

The restaurant was emptying. They had come to the end of what they had to say to each other, at least for now. Both were making the small movements that indicate a need to separate.

‘You don’t want to hear any more of my ideas for the play?’

‘No, I shall leave it to you.’

‘But your name will be on it, with mine, as co-authors.’

‘That would be more than generous.’

They left the restaurant, slowly. At this very last moment, it seemed they did not want to part. They said goodbye and walked away from each other. Only then did they remember they had been together for nearly three hours, talking like intimates, had told each other things seldom said even to intimates. This idea stopped them both, and turned them around at the same moment on the pavement of St Martin’s Lane. They stood examining each other’s faces with curiosity, just as if they had not been sitting a few feet apart, for so long, talking. Their smiles confessed surprise, pleasure, and a certain disbelief, which latter emotion – or refusal of it – was confirmed when he shrugged and she made a spreading gesture with her hands which said, Well, it’s all too much for me! At which they actually laughed, at the way they echoed, or mirrored, each other. Then they turned and walked energetically away, he to his life, she to hers.

In the office, Sarah found Mary Ford making a collage of photographs for publicity, while Sonia stood over her, hands on her hips, in fact learning, but making it look as if she was casually interested.

Sarah told Mary that Stephen Ellington-Smith was a country gentleman, old style. That he was too magnanimous to be petty about his play. That he was, in fact, a poppet. Mary said, ‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ Sonia took in this exchange with her little air of detachment.

Sarah sat with her back to the two young women, pretending to work, listening…no, one young woman and a middle-aged one: she had to accept that about Mary, even if it did hurt. They had all become so used to each other…Sonia was there in that office – not strictly her territory – not only to learn but to stake a claim. She wanted to be made responsible for the next production, Hedda Gabler. ‘You people will be busy with your Julie,’ she said. There was no need for the two senior officials to confer: they knew what each other thought. And why not? They were not likely to find anyone sharper, cleverer – and more ambitious – than Sonia. ‘Why not?’ said Mary, and without turning around, Sarah said, ‘Why not?’ In this way confirming Sonia’s position, and a much larger salary. Sonia left. ‘Why not?’ said Mary again, quietly, and Sarah turned herself about and smiled confirmation of Mary’s real message, which was that there really was no doubt of it – an epoch was indeed over.

Sarah did not need a week to use Stephen’s dialogue where it fitted, but decided to pretend she had needed that time, so he would not feel his contribution was inconsiderable. But when she was actually seated there, in her room, the mess of papers she was already calling the script spread about, a week did not seem too much. For one thing, she was unhappy with the existing translation of the journals. She had made her own of some of the passages, those that would accompany the music. She had had to get permission from the Rostands. ‘After all,’ she had written, ‘it is only a question of a few pages. It is not as if I were proposing to make a new translation of all Julie’s writings.’ In fact she wished she could. She privately believed that people loving literature who chanced to read her translations would at once see how much better, more vivacious, her language was, how much closer to Julie’s self. Perhaps one day she would make a new translation, choosing different passages: she did not necessarily agree with the English translator’s choices. She understood Julie much better than…Sitting there, the word processor pushed to one side, for she was still at the stage of words scribbled on loose sheets with a Biro – yes, pretty old-fashioned, she knew – she thought, That’s something of a claim I’m making…conceited? Perhaps. But I think it’s true. This young woman hasn’t understood the first thing about Julie…I care very much that her translation is flat, no effervescence. I care too much. I am altogether too much involved in this business. Yes, of course you have to be totally submerged in what you are working on, even if a week after it’s finished you’ve forgotten it…What is it about that bloody Julie: she gets under people’s skin; she’s under mine. Look how this thing takes off, spreads itself about – she’s blowing us all apart, and we know it. I really am intoxicated – probably all these months of listening to the music. Well, I have to listen to it this week…I’m making everything too complicated: I’ve spent years and years weighted with Duty, working like a madwoman, and if I don’t watch out I’ll go sailing off into the sky like a hydrogen balloon.

She sat, hour after hour, choosing words, hearing them: seductive. Like music, particularly when choosing words that will be congruous with music. The words, which she was already hearing sung, were running in her head. This is an affliction of words’ users and makers. Words appear in your mind and dance there to rhythms you consciously know nothing about. Tags and rags of words: they can be an indication of a hidden state of mind. They can jiggle or sing for days, driving you mad. They can be like invisible film, like cling film, between you and reality. She was hardly the first person to have noted this. D. H. Lawrence, for instance: ‘She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life out of living things.’ Yes, this was an illustration of exactly what she complained of: there was the quotation, pat and patented, colonizing her mind. Well, when she had finished this task, Julie’s words, not to mention the Countess Dié’s, would linger and then sink back into that vast invisible Book of Great Quotations, leaving her in peace…she had long ago created a saving mental image, to be used at moments when her brain was so abuzz with words she seemed to prickle all over with their energy.

She imagined a shepherd boy from a long time ago – hundreds of years, for it was more restful if this scene lived in an antique air, as if it had come off a wall or the side of a vase. This young creature was illiterate, had never seen words on a page, or on a parchment. There were tales in his head, for there has never been a country or a culture without them. But when he sat on his dry hillside, under his tree, watching – what? sheep, probably – his mind was empty, and memories or thoughts came to him in the shape of pictures. Sarah did not allow this poor youth even the traditional shepherd’s pipe. Silence it had to be. Only a breeze moving through the tree he sat under. A cricket. The sheep cropping the grass. This figure had to be a boy. A girl – no. She would almost certainly be wondering whom she would be married off to. Girls were seldom allowed to be alone, but it did not matter, a girl or a boy – and silence. Sarah tried to imagine what it would be like not to have a brain set by the printed word. Not easy.

When the week was up, Sarah telephoned Stephen to say she believed the script – the libretto? how was this hybrid to be described? – was ready. No doubt that he was pleased to hear her voice, and she was disproportionately pleased that his voice warmed and lifted. Then he said, ‘But you know, you really don’t have to…’ in the way of someone not expecting much consideration. Which was surely remarkable?

‘But of course,’ said Sarah. ‘We are co-authors after all.’

‘I’m not going to complain. Tomorrow?’

And now began a time which, when she looked back on it, seemed like a country where she had gone by chance, one she had not known existed, a place of charm, a landscape like a dream landscape, with its own strong atmosphere, that speaks in a language one half knows or has forgotten. Before meeting Stephen somewhere – a restaurant, a garden, a park, she would say to herself, Oh come on, you’re imagining it. When it was time to part, she was reluctant, and made excuses to put off the moment. She knew he was doing the same. He too probably thought before meeting her or after they separated, ‘Nonsense, I’m imagining it.’ But they could not doubt that when they were together they were in a pleasantness, an case, an air different from quotidian life. A charmed place where anything could be said. And yet this was not a case of two people finding each other’s lives a reason for being intrigued. If she was not much interested in his, it was because she had not experienced anything like it: he was rich, he owned a large and historic house. When he asked about her life, she gave him the facts: she had been married young, widowed young, she had successfully brought up two children by herself. She had almost by accident – so it seemed now – become well known in the theatre. Oh yes, she had for a time been responsible for her brother’s child. He listened, thought, and remarked, ‘When people tell you about their lives – well, the plot – they don’t tell you much about themselves. Not really.’ As if he thought she was about to disagree, he went on, ‘That is, not if they are people with anything to them. What’s interesting about people is not what life hands out to them. We can’t help that, can we?’

He was making some kind of plea for himself, or an explanation, so she believed. But why did he need to? He often seemed to feel the need to apologize. What for?

Meanwhile they went on – well, yes, they were enjoying themselves.

‘I do enjoy being with you,’ he said, and not only did this have the frankness – the generosity – she expected from him, but he sounded surprised. Was enjoyment not something he expected? Well, this kind of delightfulness was not anything she was used to either. She really had had to work so hard, had been so weighed down with responsibility…but surely a man with so many advantages did not lack opportunities for…but it was the two of them, their being together, as if they both owned a key to this place whose air was happiness.

And they might shake their heads, offering each other ironic smiles because of the improbability of this affinity. Charm. Like opening a wonderfully wrapped package and finding in it a gift secretly hankered after for years but never really expected. Her life had become charmed because of this Stephen What’s-his-name, who was in love with a dead woman. Which passion they discussed a good deal, he with perfect good humour because, as he informed her, he had carried away his Julie into some fastness where she, Sarah, could not come. ‘I simply have to save her from you,’ he said. They had fallen into the habit of talking whimsically about his craziness – she could use the word because he did. ‘You’re crazy, Stephen.’ ‘Yes, I’ll freely admit it, Sarah.’ But to say someone is crazy is almost to make it all harmless. It is a joky little word.

Yet she believed he was doing himself real harm. Sometimes, when a silence had fallen between them she saw his face sombre, abstracted: yes, indeed ‘his’ Julie was in some deep place inside him where he visited her. But this was not doing him good, to judge from the dark hurt look he wore then. Sometimes, when she saw that look, she decided not to think about what it meant, for fear she too would succumb. She had learned this habit of self-protection with Joyce: there was a point when she decided not to enter imaginatively into the poor girl’s state of mind, for fear of being taken over. Surely there was something here that contradicted the outward life of this man, which was everything it should be, public-spirited, sane, generous, open for anyone to look at and judge. To joke about his ‘crush’ on Julie, choosing to avert her mind from what it might mean, saved their friendship from Julie. For Sarah – and she was ashamed of the irrationality of it – wondered more and more what witchery that woman must have had to influence people so strongly after she was dead. One might even fancifully see her as Orpheus, charming victims into dark places, by the power of her music and her words.

As for Sarah’s play – or script – Stephen said, ‘You’ve got her pretty well. I do realize I was being partial – I mean, in the play I did. And I’m glad you’ve made me see her…rounded out. It’s odd, what a block I had about reading her thoughts. But it hasn’t changed what I feel about her. You see, we were made for each other, Julie and I. Well, Sarah, your face isn’t exactly designed to hide what you think…is that because you don’t believe there can be someone made for you? I remember I thought that once. But the truth is, there can be just the one person. It’s funny, isn’t it, how few people there are who…but you can have this feeling about the most unlikely people. I remember once – I was in Kenya, on active service. Everyone’s forgotten Kenya. Too many wars, I suppose. I met this woman. She was an Indian woman. Older than I was. And it was there…we knew each other at once. You have to trust in this kind of thing. If you don’t, you are denying the best part of life. You and I have something of the kind – well, we know that. It has nothing to do with age, or sex, or colour, or anything of that sort.’

Sarah was saying to herself, about ‘this thing I have with Stephen’, that if she had had a brother – a real one, not a clown like Hal – then this is what it might have been like. Extraordinary it had not ever occurred to her that to have a brother might be a pleasant thing.

Sarah and Mary flew together to Nice. When high in the air over Europe, Sarah observed that Mary’s mouth was moving as she sat with closed eyes. No, Mary was not praying. She made a point of repeating her mantra as a public relations woman several times a day: ‘This summer dozens of festivals will compete for attention. The Julie Vairon Festival will be only one of them. I shall make sure it will be the best, the most visible, and that everyone will want to come.’

They were met at the airport by Jean-Pierre le Brun, whom they felt they already knew, after so many consultations by telephone. He was dark, good-looking, well-dressed, combining in that uniquely French way correctness, politeness, and a practised scepticism, as if at university he had taken Anarchy and Law as his main subjects, and these had merged and become subdued to a style. Meeting the Englishwomen, also officials of a kind, he managed to express an extreme of respectful politeness, with a readiness to be affronted. He was not aware that he radiated resentment as well, but in no time he had forgotten about it, for he decided he liked them. They enjoyed an amiable lunch at Les Collines Rouges, Belles Rivières’ main café-restaurant. It then being late for business in the town hall, he drove them off into the wooded hills behind the town, first speeding along a tarmacked road and then driving not much slower when it became a rough track. This was the road Julie had followed when she walked to and from Belles Rivières. ‘She walked in all weathers, la pauvre,’ said Jean-Pierre. Here two unsentimental Englishwomen smiled at the Frenchman who was being so formally sentimental, exactly as expected. And in fact he had tears in his eyes.

At the track’s end they walked up a rocky path till they stood in a wide space between trees and rocks. The soil was a vibrant red in the late afternoon sun. The green of the trees was intense. The air was full of a murmur like bees, but this was the river and the waterfall: apparently there had been heavy rain. There was not much left of the ‘cow-byre’ the citizens had complained about. To quote from Mary Ford’s publicity brochure: A little stone house, cold, uncomfortable, was where Julie Vairon lived in the south of France, from the day of her landing penniless off the ship until she died. It had been a charcoal burner’s house. ‘Well, why not?’ Mary demanded. ‘Someone must have lived there before she did.’ After Julie’s death it stood empty for many years. Then the farmer Leyvecque, whose grandsons still farm in the area, used it as a stable. A storm took off the tile roof. If the town of Belles Rivières had not rescued it, there would be left only a heap of rubble, but instead the site is now a charming theatre, where this summer…

There wasn’t much left of the house. The long back wall stood, and parts of the side wall, now capped with cement to stop them collapsing further. Behind the house red earth sloped to the trees. Umbrella pines. Oaks. Olives and chestnuts. Some of these trees had known Julie. The air was full of healthy aromatic smells. The three people walked back and forth over the site where Julie’s life would shortly be re-enacted. Well, her life as edited by the necessities of the production. The acting would be on the space on a side of the house. The musicians would be on a low stone platform – at once Sarah and Mary began explaining that this platform must be larger, and nearer the acting area, because of the importance of the music. Jean-Pierre argued for form’s sake and then said he had not understood the music would carry so much of the meaning. He gracefully gave in, as he had been going to from the start. These negotiations were going on in a mixture of French and English – the English for Mary’s benefit. She had explained over lunch that she could not learn languages, in the way the English have, as if afflicted by a defective gene as yet unknown to science. Because it was Mary who was going to have to work with Jean-Pierre on publicity, Sarah listened to what turned out to be a pretty fundamental clash of views. He said he expected an audience of about two hundred for each night of the two weeks. Mary protested that many more must be planned for. Jean-Pierre said that one could not expect large audiences for a new play, and one with only local significance. Still gracefully disagreeing, the three arrived back in the town. Jean-Pierre left them at their hotel to return to his family, and it was with regret. Mary and he were making a game out of her inability to speak French and were communicating in Franglais. Clearly he enjoyed the surprise of this large, calm, apparently stolid young woman, with her equable blue eyes, taking off into ever surrealer flights of language.

There were three hotels. Among them the whole company would be distributed. All this was arranged by Sarah next morning, before the visit to the town hall, which was a formality, since everything had been already agreed on. Then Mary went off to interview descendants of the Imberts and the Rostands, Paul’s family and Rémy’s. Jean-Pierre went with her. Both clans had announced themselves only too willing to aid the Julie Vairon Festival, which would add such lustre to the little town. She also intended to visit the Julie Vairon Museum, and the archives, and the house – still as it was – where Julie would have lived had she decided to marry Philippe the master printer. And how about Philippe’s son Robert’s family? Perhaps they would agree – but they were a good way off. All this was going to take at least three days. Sarah flew back to London by herself.

She telephoned Stephen. On hearing each other’s voices they at once entered a region of privileged complicity, like children with secrets. This new note had been struck from the moment the script was judged finished by the Founding Four. When adults do this, it often means they are over-burdened, or even threatened in some way. Well, Stephen’s Julie was certainly threatened. ‘Now Julie’s gone public…’ as he put it.

She told him what she had seen of Julie’s house. Stephen had visited it ten years earlier when bushes were growing up through the floors and dislodging stones from the walls. She told him of the three hotels, two new, all named after Julie. She described Jean-Pierre. Because of her tone, he enquired, ‘And how does he see her?’ and she was enabled to murmur, ‘La pauvre…la pauvre…’ so that Stephen was able to exclaim, ‘Sentimental bloody…’ and she laughed. In short, they behaved as they had to in this ancient business of the French and the English finding each other impossible, to the satisfaction of both. But perhaps each nation’s need always to find the same traits in the other imposes a style, and so it is all perpetuated.

And now she and anyone else from The Green Bird who was interested were invited to the house in Oxfordshire, because there would be an evening of music and dancing, a miniature festival, and Julie’s music would be sung. Sarah had been invited for the whole weekend. She did not really want to see him in his house, his other life – his real life? Their friendship was threatened, so she felt. Surely it was a tenuous thing, based on imaginings, on phantoms? She knew very well what she was afraid of: that the ‘magic’, the charm, would simply evaporate. But of course she had to go, and she even wanted to. During the week before that weekend, they met for dinner, on his suggestion. She could see that he too was uneasy. He was giving her information, facts, one after another, fielding them to her, she thought, and even said it to him, earning a smile – like an elder brother practising bowling on a sister, watching to make sure she accepted what was sent in the right way. ‘No, no,’ she parodied, ‘don’t step back, you’ll knock the stumps off! Elbow up, as you bring the bat forward.’

The house was his wife Elizabeth’s. His was the money. No, it certainly was not for mutual convenience they had married, but the house was central to their lives: they both loved it.

There were three children, boys, at boarding school. They like boarding school, he insisted, in a way that said he often had to insist. She was interested that people like him felt they had to defend the sacred institution. Boarding school suited them, said Stephen. Yes, it was a pity they hadn’t a daughter. ‘Particularly for me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if we’d had a daughter, Julie wouldn’t have got to me the way she did.’ But there would not be another child. Poor Elizabeth had more than done her bit.

They were good friends, he and Elizabeth, he said, choosing his words, but not looking into her face, rather down at his plate. Not because he was evading something, but because – she felt – there was more he might be saying, which he expected her to see for herself.

He liked to think he managed the estate productively. Elizabeth certainly ran the house well. Every summer they had festivals. ‘Half the county come to them, and we do them proud. Elizabeth had the idea first, but it was because she knows it’s the kind of thing I like. Now we both put everything we’ve got into it.’ This was said with satisfaction, even pride. They were going to expand, become something like Glyndebourne, only on a much smaller scale. And only in the summers. Sarah would see it all for herself, when she came.

Again she felt that another meaning was carried by these words: and wondered if he was aware that everything he said seemed to be signalling: Listen to this carefully.

‘I want you to see it all,’ he insisted, this time looking at her. ‘I like the idea of your being there. I’m not really the kind of man who likes his life in compartments – yes, I know there are plenty who do, but I…’ His smile had energy in it, the mild elation that seemed to expand him when he talked of his house and his life in it. ‘You mustn’t think I don’t know how extraordinarily lucky I am,’ he said, as they strolled to the tube. ‘Well, you’ll see for yourself. I don’t take anything for granted, I assure you.’

She was to take the train to Oxford on the mid-afternoon on Friday. At two the doorbell rang, and there was Joyce. Having not seen her for some time, Sarah saw her with new eyes, if only for a moment. At once her heart began to feel an only too familiar oppression. As Joyce walked in she seemed to be straying, or wandering in some private dream. She was a tall girl, now very thin. When her sisters put make-up on her she could be lovely. Her hair – and this is what struck to the heart – was marvellous, a fine light gold, and full of vitality, loose around her pasty spotty little face. ‘Make yourself some tea,’ said Sarah, but Joyce fell into a chair. She really did seem ill. Her great blue eyes were inflamed. Her characteristic smile – she had faced the world with it since she stopped being a child, was bright, scared, anxious. Yes, she was ill. Sarah took her temperature and it was 101.

‘I want to stay here,’ Joyce said. ‘I want to live here with you.’

Her dilemma was being put to Sarah in as dramatic a form as it could be. She had been afraid of something like this. All kinds of pressure, though none that could be visible, or even probable, to anyone but herself, were urging her to give in at once. But she was remembering something Stephen had said: ‘You’ve been looking after her for – how long? Did you say ten years? Why don’t her parents look after her?’ And when Sarah could not reply, ‘Well, Sarah, it looks a funny business to me.’

‘At the time it seemed quite natural.’

But his silence was because he had decided not to say what he thought. Yet usually they did say what they thought. Would he have said, ‘You’re crazy, Sarah’ and admitted her to the company of those who behave as they do because they cannot help themselves? And another time he had remarked, ‘If you hadn’t taken her in, what do you think would have happened?’ This was not the hot and indignant voice she was used to hearing from people who feel threatened, because they are thinking, If you take on such a burden, then perhaps I shall be expected to sacrifice myself too. No, he had been thinking it all out. She had never wondered what would have happened to Joyce if she had not looked after her. But would Joyce have been worse off if her aunt had left her to her parents? She couldn’t be much worse off, could she?

Now she made herself say, the effort putting severity into her voice, ‘Joyce, I’m just leaving. I’m off for the weekend. I’ll take you home and put you to bed there.’

‘But I’ve lost the door key,’ said Joyce, her eyes filling with tears.

Sarah knew the key had not been lost, but to prove that meant she would have to search Joyce’s pathetic grubby bag, which once had been a brightly striped Mexican affair.

She told herself that on this ground she would have to fight, though it was poor ground. If she did not…She telephoned the hospital where her brother was a consultant, was told it was his afternoon in Harley Street, rang Harley Street, was told he was with a patient. Sarah said to the receptionist that this was Dr Millgreen’s sister, and the call concerned his daughter, who was ill. She would hold on. She held on for a good ten minutes, while Joyce cried quietly in her chair.

At one point she said in a little voice, ‘But I want to stay here with you, Auntie.’

‘You can’t stay here with me now. You’re ill, you need treatment.’

‘But he’ll make me go to hospital. I don’t want to.’

‘No, but he’d make you stay in bed, and so would I.’

‘Why are you all so horrible to me? I want to live with you always.’

‘Joyce, none of us has heard one word from you – good God, it must be five months. I was running all over London looking for you.’

At this point the receptionist said Dr Millgreen could not come to the telephone, Mrs Durham must manage. ‘Tell my brother that his daughter is in my flat. She is ill. I shall be away until Monday.’

She was angry. That she was full of guilt goes without saying. It was no use telling herself she had no reason to feel guilt.

She said to Joyce, ‘I suppose someone will come and fetch you. If not, I should simply get into a taxi and go home.’ Here she put some money into the Mexican bag.

Joyce whimpered, ‘Oh Auntie, I don’t understand.’

Because this was a child talking, not even Joyce the unpredictable adolescent, who did manage to cope with life on some sort of level, Sarah did not reply to her. Instead she said to an adult, reminding herself that Joyce was twenty, ‘Look, Joyce, you understand perfectly well. Something or other has happened out there, but of course you’ll never tell us what…’

Joyce interrupted angrily, ‘If I did tell you, you’d take advantage of me and punish me.’

Sarah said, ‘I don’t remember my punishing you for anything, ever.’

‘But my father does. He’s always horrible.’

‘He is your father. And you have a mother; she stands up for you.’ Joyce turned away her face. She was trembling, in spasms. ‘You are a grown-up woman, Joyce. You’re not a little girl.’

At this a little girl looked vaguely in her aunt’s direction with enormous drowned eyes. A small pink mouth stood pathetically half open.

‘I’m not going to spend my life looking after you. I don’t mind if you come and stay here when I’m here. But I’m not going to wait on you. If you like I’ll take you for a holiday somewhere. You certainly look as if you could do with one. Well, we’ll talk about it, but not now. I’ve got a train to catch. I’ll ring up from Oxfordshire and find out if you’ve gone home.’

Joyce would not go home. Late that night Hal might mention to his wife, if he remembered, that the girl was ill and alone in Sarah’s flat. Rather, ‘Joyce has turned up at Sarah’s, and Sarah seems to think she’s not well.’ Anne, exhausted and irritable, would instruct the two girls, Briony and Nell, to go over to Sarah’s. They would be angry with Joyce for disappearing for so long. They would be angry with Sarah for not coping. Everyone would be angry with Sarah. As usual. It crossed Sarah’s mind now to think that was indeed a bit odd.

When Sarah got off the train, it was Elizabeth who came to introduce herself. The two women frankly inspected each other, Elizabeth in a way that made Sarah wonder exactly what Stephen had said about her, for Elizabeth had the look of someone checking to make sure information had been correct: apparently, yes, it had. Elizabeth was a smallish woman, with shiny yellow hair held by a black velvet ribbon, and this made her look both efficient and spirited. Her face was round and healthy and her cheeks were country pink. She had unequivocal bright blue eyes. Her body was firm and rounded: if one touched it, one’s finger would bounce off, thought Sarah. Everything about this woman told the world, but in a take-it-or-leave it voice, You can rely on me for anything reasonable. She seemed pleased with Sarah and was certainly thinking, Good, I don’t have to bother with her, she can look after herself. For Elizabeth – like Sarah – was one of the people who wake every morning with a mind’s eye list of items to be dealt with. Sarah had already been crossed off the list.

Now Elizabeth strode off to a station wagon, but slowed so as to adjust to Sarah’s pace. The back of the car seemed crammed with large healthy dogs. Elizabeth drove fast and well – what else? She commanded the car with every muscle of her body, as if it were a horse she could not trust not to get out of hand. Meanwhile she gave Sarah information about what they saw as they drove through the jolly countryside. At the top of a rise she stopped the car and said, ‘There it is, there’s Queen’s Gift.’ Although she had lived in the house all her life and could hardly be unused to this view, she sounded like a child trying not to be too pleased with itself, and Sarah liked her from that moment.

The house stood four-square on its slight rise, dignified but sprightly, as if a country dance had been magicked into brick, but not without suggestions (the eight barred windows at the top?) that in its long centuries there must have been plenty of drama. It was a hot still afternoon in that summer of 1989, when one perfect day followed another. The house seemed determined to soak in sunlight and store it against the English weather that was bound to set in again soon. There it sat glowing redly amid its English lawns and shrubs and judiciously disposed trees, take me or leave me, not a house one could live in without submitting to it, and, clearly, Elizabeth felt that in presenting the house she was defining herself. Now she told Sarah she had been born there. Her father had been born there. Queen’s Gift had been in her family one way or another since it had been built.

They drove slowly through appropriately impressive gates, the dogs barking and whining at being home, then through a wood of beeches and oaks, and turned a corner abruptly to approach a side view of the house, where, on a tall board that pointed the way to a beech walk, was Julie’s face – an impetuous smiling girl – styled in black and white on a poster. At once Sarah was returned to her own world, or rather the two worlds slid together. There are times when everything seems like a film set or a stage set, and the old house had become a background for Julie Vairon, incongruous though that certainly was.

Stephen emerged from tall doors at the top of a flight of stone steps that were an invitation (only conditional, for above them was a notice that said, discreetly, Cloakrooms) to the public to ascend them. Stephen seemed worried. He descended the steps, smiling at her, but on the last one he stopped, and his large hand was curving around a gently eroded stone ball that crowned a pillar, as if, because of the habits necessary to a busy man, he was assessing the condition of this sphere since it might be time for him to do something about it.

He took her suitcase, set it on the bottom step, and said he would show her around. At this Elizabeth laughed and said, ‘But poor Sarah, can’t she have a cup of tea first?’ as she relinquished their guest, her own duty done, to her husband. Sarah waited for a signal or glance that recognizes a situation, and it came: Elizabeth shone that smile on them both that says – in this case with good-humoured irony – ‘I know what is going on and I don’t mind,’ before going off on her own affairs. In fact she had so little interest in this obligatory little act that the smile had faded before she turned away. There are not many spouses, or partners, strong-minded enough to forgo that look, that smile, or laugh, for it makes a claim, and an even stronger one than jealousy or anger. Stephen glanced at Sarah to see if she had noticed, and then a small grimace signalled, A pity, and he said aloud, ‘Don’t mind. She’s got it wrong. If she had ever asked, I would have…’

‘Oh, but it’s a compliment,’ she said.

He put his hand inside her elbow. This hand both took possession of Sarah and said it was prepared to relinquish her at the smallest sign that it was taking too much for granted. Sarah, from the world of the theatre, laughed, put her arms around him, and kissed him on both cheeks, one, two. He at once went bright red. He was pleased, though.

‘Sarah, I really am so glad to see you here. Don’t ever think I’m not.’

Why should she think such a thing?

Apparently he still felt she needed essential instruction. Again he took her arm, this time with confident masculine proprietorship, which she enjoyed (she was prepared to concede) more than perhaps she ought. They walked slowly through gardens and shrubberies, and past long warm reddish brick walls where roses sent out waves of scent. Late May: the roses were early.

Stephen said he hoped that she, Sarah, and the whole company would give Elizabeth credit for all the work she had done. It was she who had persuaded artistic friends in Paris to get Julie Vairon’s pictures exhibited. It was she who had approached the television people to make a documentary. Elizabeth was a generous woman, he insisted.

They walked on grass between two hedges of beech, whose attribute is to remind you, when in full healthy green, that it will hold its own through long winters, withstanding gales, frost, anything at all nature chooses to throw at it, never losing so much as a russet leaf. A beech hedge, whether it likes it or not, makes statements of confidence. It refuses pathos.

‘She is always generous,’ he said again, and, feeling she was being prompted, she asked, ‘What does she make of – well, of you and Julie?’ But it was the wrong question, for his face said he had already answered her. Disappointment in her made him relinquish her arm, and she, disappointed in her turn, insisted, ‘She would admit that one may be jealous of a…’ She could not bring herself to say, ‘a dead woman’, for it was too brutal. Instead she said, ‘…of a ghost?’ A foolish, harmless word.

‘I don’t think she would admit to anything so irrational.’

They had strolled on a good few yards through air that was a mix of warm dry scents all making claims on her memory, when she remarked, ‘For one thing, you can’t compete with a…dead woman.’ It was not easy to use that word.

He stopped and turned to look close into her face. ‘You say that as if you knew all about jealousy.’

‘Did I? I suppose I did.’ And hearing in retrospect how she had spoken, she was discomfited. She was off balance. Meanwhile his eyes, green but – seen so close – as full of variegations as the surface of a cut olivine, green specked with black and grey, were full on her face. Trying to laugh, she said, ‘I remember saying to myself, That’s it, never again, I’ll never feel jealousy again.’ She knew her voice was full of resentment.

‘So you were generous too?’

‘If you want to make it generosity…I thought of it as self-preservation. I know one thing – funny that I haven’t thought of it for ages: but you can kill yourself with jealousy.’ She was trying to make her voice light and humorous. She failed.

‘You said to whoever it was, Bless you, my child, run off to your little amusements, what we have is so strong it can’t affect our marriage?’

‘It wasn’t my marriage. It was later than that. And I certainly never said, Run along! On the contrary, that was it – finished!’ She was surprising herself by the cold anger in her voice. ‘I could never say it couldn’t affect a marriage or anything else. It was a question of…’

‘Well?’ he demanded, and gripped her elbows in large and confident hands. The strength of those hands spoke direct to her, reminding her…His eyes, those interesting pebbles so close to her own, seemed to her now to be tinged with – was that anxiety?

Violent needs conflicted in her. One was to comfort and heal, for she always felt he emanated an appeal, a need: she had never been more aware than now that he guarded a hurt place. But it seemed her own need was stronger, for what burst out of her was: ‘Pride. It was pride.’ And she was surprised – if she could be more surprised than she had already become, seeing what was revealed of a forgotten past – at the violence in the word. What’s the matter with me? she was asking herself, while she withstood the pressure of those uncompromising eyes. ‘Of course it was pride. Do you imagine I’d keep a man who wanted someone else?’

She, Sarah – that is, the Sarah of today – had not spoken these words. Some long ago Sarah had said them. It was getting harder every second to stand there between Stephen’s hands and sustain that long close examination. She felt ashamed, and her face burned.

‘You are talking like the kind of woman you seem determined not to be – to seem to be.’

‘What kind of woman?’

‘A love woman,’ he said. ‘A woman who takes her stand on love.’

‘Well,’ said she, attempting humour again, but with no success, ‘I do seem to remember something of the kind.’ And was about to walk away from the situation, when he tightened his grip on her elbows.

‘Wait, you always run away.’

‘But it was all a long time ago…All right, then, I’ll try. Do you remember Julie’s journals – yes I know you don’t like them. When she was writing about her master printer, she said, And there will inevitably come that night when I know it is not me, Julie, he is holding in his arms, but the wife of the chemist or the farmer’s daughter who brought the eggs that afternoon. I’d rather die. And of course, she did.’ Her voice was full of defiance. ‘Immature – that’s what our Julie was. A mature woman knows that if her husband chooses to fancy the chemist’s wife or the girl who is driving the Express delivery cart, and fucks them in her stead, well, it’s just one of those things.’

‘And vice versa, I think.’ He smiled. ‘The husband knows he is holding in his arms the stable boy, because his wife is?’

‘That’s your – his affair.’

‘Well, well, well,’ he said, full of sardonic relish. He let her go. And as they walked on, while the essences of flower and leaf meandered past their faces, ‘And that marriage of yours? I really am curious. That little way of yours, all passion spent, amuse yourself, my children, while I benevolently look on.’ This was not spiteful, or even resentful: he laughed, a bark of sceptical laughter, but gave her the look of a friend.

Sarah fought to become that Sarah who was able benevolently to look on.

‘It lasted ten years. Then he died.’ Now she believed that the younger Sarah had taken herself off, back into some dark corner. ‘I don’t look back on my pursuit of love after that with much admiration for myself. I was so immature, you see. I was never prepared to settle for the sensible – you know, a widow with two young children should look for a father for her children.’

He snorted a kind of amusement. Then, ‘A real romantic. Who would have thought it? Well, actually, yes, I did, I really did.’

‘And I am walking on a lovely afternoon with a man who is besotted, may I use that word? – with a phantom.’

‘She is no phantom,’ he said gravely.

In front of them the shrubs were thinning: an open space was imminent, showing through the branches.

She heard herself sigh, and he sighed too.

‘Sarah! Do you imagine I don’t know how all this sounds? I am not so mad that…give me some credit.’ They stood on the edge of a vast lawn, glimmering a strong green in yellow light. ‘For a time I believed I was possessed. I even considered going off to be exorcised – but for that kind of thing to work, surely you have to believe in it? But I’m afraid I don’t believe that some Tom, Dick, or Harry of a priest can deal with…Someone no better than I am? Nonsense. And then I began to do a lot of reading, and I found that Julie is that side of myself that was never allowed to live. The Jungians have a word for it. My anima. What’s in a word? It seems to me all that kind of thing amounts to – well, not much more than the pleasures of definition. Why is a word like that useful when you are experiencing…? All I know is that if she walked towards me now I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.’

The great lawn, as flat as a lake, was backed by beeches, chestnuts, and oaks; and some shrubs that were all in flower, pink, white, and yellow, although well grown themselves, were made so small by the trees they seemed like flowers in a border. In the middle of the green expanse was a wooden stage, about three feet in height. There the musicians and singers would be tomorrow. A few wooden chairs idled on the grass: apparently this was an audience that liked to stroll about while it listened. Slowly the two approached the little stage, which was like a flat rock in still water. This place, this stage, this lawn, was a vast O framed by trees, green heights around flat green. Now the two were circling the stage. On the far side of it was a poster of Julie, or rather of Julie’s drawing of herself as an Arab girl, a transparent veil across the lower part of her face, her eyes black and – yes, the word haunting would do. Stephen came to a standstill. He made a small sound – a protest. ‘Elizabeth didn’t say she was using this one,’ he said. It was not the picture on the other posters. ‘What’s wrong with it?’ she asked. He did not reply. He was staring helplessly, as at an accident, or a catastrophe. He was pale. Sarah put her hand into his arm and moved him away. He walked stiffly, even stumbled. He turned his face to her, and Sarah almost let out that laugh which says, ‘You are doing it well, congratulations.’ Nothing that he had said, nothing she had thought about him – and she believed she had been prepared to dive deep into his wells of fantasy – had prepared her for what she saw. His face was pulled into that mask that illustrates Tragedy – the other side of Comedy; the theatrical stereotypes. She was standing still, staring at him. Her heart beat. Foreboding. Fear – yes, it was that. Yes, she had seen his face wretched; she had said to herself the sanitized sets of words we use in this time of ours, which has banished this kind of thing, has decided it is all an affair of horoscopes, or ‘ghosts’, and that if they squeak and gibber, then they are comic rather than not. She had never even begun to imagine what she was seeing now, the haunted tragic face with the dragged-down mouth that seemed as if an invisible hand held it, a mouth all suffering. She was shocked as if she had opened a door by mistake and seen something like a murder or an act of torture, or a woman in an extreme of grief, sitting rocking, clutching at her hair with both hands, then raking her nails across her breasts, where the blood runs down.

He’s ill, she thought. She thought, That’s grief. What I am looking at – that’s grief. She felt ashamed to be a witness of it and turned her face away, thinking, I’ve never, ever, felt anything like that.

Now he remembered she was there, and he turned his own face away and said, his voice rough, ‘You see, you have no idea at all, Sarah. You simply don’t understand…well, why should you? I hope you never will.’

At supper that night there were seven people. The informal meal was taken in a room that had a hatch through into the kitchen, and it had been cooked and served by a pleasant motherly sort of woman not unlike an auburn-haired blue-eyed sheepdog. This was Norah Daniels, a housekeeper, or something of that sort, and she sat at the table with Stephen and Elizabeth and Sarah and the three boys, James, about twelve, George, ten or so, and Edward, seven. These children were beautifully behaved, in a style imposed on them by their parents: a light impersonal affection, and it was joky, for there was a lot of banter of the kind Sarah remembered from her school days. It was mostly Norah who played this game. Stephen was silent. He claimed he had a headache and they must forgive him. Not ask too much of him was what he meant and what they all heard. It was evident that this was a message heard often in this family, from him, and from Elizabeth, because she was so very busy. She kept saying she was, and that was why she had not done a variety of things she had promised – ring up a friend’s mother, write a letter about a visit, buy new cricket balls. But she would do all these things tomorrow. The three boys, fair, slight, blue-eyed, angelic-looking children, watched the adults’ faces carefully for signals. This was their habit. This was their necessity. They had been taught never to ask too much. Only Norah was outside this pattern, for she smiled special smiles at each of them, helped them to food in an indulgent way, remembered personal tastes, gave Edward, the smallest one, an extra helping of pudding, kissed him warmly, with a hug, and then excused herself, her own meal finished, saying she had things to do. At once the boys asked permission to leave the table, and they slid away into a warm dusk. For a time their high clear voices could be heard from the garden. Soon music sounded from the top of the house – some pop group. Elizabeth remarked that it was time the boys were asleep, and departed, but only briefly, to make sure they were in bed.

Then Stephen and Elizabeth apologized to Sarah, saying they needed a couple of hours to discuss arrangements for tomorrow, for more people were coming than they had expected. ‘This Julie of yours is obviously a great draw,’ said Elizabeth, but it did not seem she meant anything special by it.

Sarah walked about in the dusk for a while, until the birds stopped commenting on the affairs of the day and the moon made itself brilliantly felt. She telephoned her brother’s house. Anne answered. Yes, she had sent the girls to collect Joyce, who, on arriving home, had at once disappeared again. Anne did not suggest this was Sarah’s fault, as Hal would have done. He had said they should all have a serious talk about Joyce, and suggested Monday night. Sarah agreed, but knew her voice communicated to Anne, as Anne’s did to her, that nothing would come of this.

Sarah’s room was full of moonlight and overlooked the great lawn and the trees beyond, the scene full of glamour and mystery, like a theatre set.

She lay in bed and was determined she would not think about Joyce, for she did not feel strong enough to accommodate the anxiety thoughts of joyce always brought with them, when she was already anxious enough. She had expected to be disturbed by this visit, and she was. Not in the way she had been afraid of. Whatever it was that Stephen and she shared, they shared it still. No, now she felt she had been selfish, for she could not get out of her mind the look on his face that afternoon – such grief, such pain, such a degree of suffering. It was crazy. He might be sane in nine-tenths of his life, this intelligent hard-working many-sided life of his, but in one part of it he was, quite simply, not normal. Well, what of it? It did not seem to be doing much harm, and certainly not to Elizabeth. But there was something bothering Sarah, and she couldn’t put a finger on it. She went off to sleep, glad to forget it all, and woke completely and as suddenly as if there had been a clap of thunder. The moon had left her room. She was remembering a scene at the table of Norah handing Elizabeth a glass of wine, and Elizabeth’s smile at Norah. Well, yes, that was it. And she shut her eyes and replayed the scene. Stephen was at one end of the table, Elizabeth at the other, Norah beside Elizabeth. The women’s bodies had carried on a comfortable conversation with each other, as well-married bodies often do. And Stephen? Now it seemed to Sarah that he was an outsider in his own house – no, for this house had, for all those centuries, accommodated any number of eccentricities and deviations. It was certainly not the house that excluded Stephen. Was he excluded at all? He had said he and his wife were good friends, and evidently they were. But her picture of Stephen – at least tonight, as she lay half asleep – seemed to be merging with that of Joyce, the girl, or child, who was always on the fringes of life, unaccepted by it, unacceptable. And that had to be ridiculous, for Stephen was firmly set in this life of his, born to it, could not be imagined outside it.

Sarah briskly got up, had a long bath, and watched early light come streaming through great trees. Five in the morning. She went quietly down the great central staircase, found a side door where bolts slid easily back, and went out. Two red setters came rushing around the corner of the house, silently, thank goodness, their fringed ears streaming. They put wet noses into her palm and their bodies wriggled with pleasure. She had not gone far into the woods when Stephen came through the trees. He had seen her from his bedroom window. Nothing now could seem more absurd than her earlier thoughts about Stephen. Nor could anything be more pleasant than this strolling about in the trees with cheerful dogs, listening to the raucous exchanges of the crows and the chattering of the small birds as they got their affairs together. At one point Stephen even casually mentioned Elizabeth and Norah, like this: ‘You must have noticed, I’m sure…’ He did not seem disturbed, and there was no sign of the tragic mask she had stared at yesterday. He seemed in good spirits and entertained her with a comic view of himself as a Maecenas. As a young man, he said, he had been a bit of a red, ‘but not too inappropriately extreme for my station in life,’ and had had nothing but contempt for rich patrons. ‘“We know what we are, but know not what we may be,”’ he quoted, and added – and this was the only moment that morning when there was a suggestion of something darker, ‘But the truth is, if we did know what we are, then we would know what we could be. And I wonder how many people would be able to stand that?’

Later, after breakfast, the boys made friends with her in their easy well-mannered way and took her off on a tour around the estate. She could see they had been told to do this. ‘Not Angles, but angels’ inevitably popped into her mind.

After lunch the theatre contingent arrived. Mary Ford, to take photographs of everything and to interview Elizabeth; Roy Strether, and, unexpectedly, Henry Bisley, the American chosen to direct because of the American money in the production. Besides, he seemed by far the best available. He was in Munich directing Die Fledermaus and had come for the weekend to hear this music. Henry was at first all defensive. There are men who carry with them, as some half-grown fishes are attached to yolk sacs, the shadow of their mothers, at once visible in an over-defensiveness and readiness for suspicion. It happened that on his arrival he walked into a room that had in it four women, Elizabeth, Norah, Mary Ford, and Sarah, and he was on the point of fleeing, when Sarah rescued him and took him out to the gardens. They had become acquainted during the casting session a month before. He was bound to be wary of her on two counts: first that she was co-author of this play, and then that as one of the four who ran The Green Bird, she had engaged him. Soon he was reassured. For one thing, he was not by temperament ever likely to remain in one place, physically or emotionally. A man of about thirty-five: his restlessness seemed appropriate for someone younger: he danced rather than walked, as if to stay still might make him vulnerable to attack, and black eyes darted enquiries into a place, a person, and moved on to the next thing, which was also bound to be a challenge. She talked soothingly about this and that, noting that she was employing the murmuring maternal persona identified and rejected by Stephen. She showed him the gardens. She showed him the big lawn – the theatre area. She took him to see a half-built new block of rehearsal rooms. He was subdued by the beauty of the place, and flattered by it, being absorbed, as they all were, into a munificence like a general blessing. As they went back into the house he stopped to look up at its façade and ask why those top windows were barred. She did not know. Encountering Norah, who was pushing through the hall a trolley laden with cleaning equipment, like those used in hotels, Sarah asked about the barred windows, and Norah said they were probably for the first Mrs Rochester. ‘Well, they must have had plenty of loonies here, in all that time.’

The afternoon went enjoyably past, while Mary Ford photographed them all. A buffet supper was served, in a much larger and grander room, Elizabeth and Norah supervising Alison and Shirley, two girls from the near town, whose healthy and wholesome prettiness reminded everyone that so recently there had indeed been country girls. Guests arrived, it seemed far too many, but these grounds could accommodate large numbers without seeming overpopulated. People went wandering about, stood on the lawn talking, sat on the grass. A company from London did Elizabethan dances. A local group sang songs composed by Tudor monarchs. Then came the main event, Julie’s music, with the words Sarah had put to it. This was the late music, and there were singers only, without accompaniment, for it had been agreed that her ‘troubadour music’ needed the old instruments to do it justice, and not all had yet been found. The singers stood on the little stage in a strong yellow evening light, four girls in white dresses with their hair loose, a style appropriate, they had decided, for this music that filled the great grassy space between the trees with shimmering uncomfortable patterns of sound continually repeating, but not exactly, for they changed by a note, or a tone, so that when you thought you were listening to the same sequence of notes, they had subtly changed, gone into a different mode, while the ear followed a little behind. The words were half heard, were cries, or even laments, but from another time, the future perhaps, or another place, for if these sounds mourned, it was not for any small personal cause. The music floated in the dusk, and the dark filled the trees and the moon lifted over them, and the singers too seemed to float in their pale dresses. Lights came on in the big house, but not here. The girls were chanting to a silent crowd.

Sarah stood in anxiety with her colleagues. None had heard this music sung with words. Solid and sensible Mary, solid and reliable Roy, stood on either side of Sarah, reserving judgement, and then, unable to contain themselves, exclaimed that it was marvellous, it was wonderful, and Sarah herself could hardly believe it was she who had done this – though it was not her at all, it was rather Julie Vairon. The three stood close, part of their attention charmed into passivity, listening, while the other part was energetically at work on this material, imagining it in various settings and modes. Stephen came up and said, ‘Sarah, I’m hearing something I simply didn’t expect. I had no idea…’ and he strode off into the dusk. Mary Ford summed up professionally: ‘Sarah, it’s all going to work.’ And Henry Bisley materialized in front of her, his dark eyes shining in the light from the high windows of the house, and said in a voice full of surprise and gratitude, ‘Sarah, that’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful, Sarah.’

They all had to get back to London, and Henry to Munich. Sarah went with them. She said she had to work, but the truth was she did not want to spoil by daytime ordinariness the other-worldly charm of that evening. Charm…what is it, what can account for it? One says, charm, enchantment, and nothing has been said. But this place, and this group of people who were going to work together to make Julie Vairon, were charged with some subtle fascination, like the light that fades from a dream as you wake.

That night at home, Sarah thought she could not remember another time in her life that had this quality of…whatever the word should be. She found herself smiling, as at a child or a lover, without meaning to, without knowing she was going to. But what was making her smile, or even laugh, she had no idea at all.

If you find a ghost in your arms, better not look at its face.

– Julie Vairon’s Journals, English edition, page 43

But Sarah was choosing not to remember Stephen’s tragic mask.

And now it was Monday night. It occurred to Sarah, as she waited for the doorbell, that her exhilaration could only be because she actually believed some sort of sensible solution would end this talk. You’re living in a dream world, she told herself, and hummed ‘Living in a dream world with me.’ All the same, she strolled about her rooms arranging sentences in her mind which would be persuasive enough to make Hal – well, make him what?

The bell rang. Peremptory. Hal stood there, stood dramatically, apparently waiting for a formal invitation, while Anne, with glances and smiles that managed to be both apologetic and exasperated, simply came in and stood with her back to both of them, at the window.

‘Oh, do come in, Hal,’ said Sarah, annoyed with him already. She left him standing and went to sit down. Hal did not at once enter. He was giving her living-room a good once-over: he had not been in it for some time. The room had been variously used in this family flat’s long history. It had once been her children’s bedroom, but it had been a living room now for years. She was seldom in it. She would not have invited her brother into her study or her bedroom, where he would see photographs, piles of books, all kinds of objects that would emanate the intensely personal look of continuous use, which he would find irritating, even shameless, like underclothes left lying about. As he stood there, he sent suspicious glances to a drawing of Julie pinned on the door. Anne at the window could not be saying more clearly that she did not consider herself part of this scene. She was a tall woman, thin – too thin, a rack of bones – and her pale dry hair was tied back roughly behind her head. As usual she was surrounded by a fug of tobacco smoke, which seemed the very essence of dry exhaustion. She had lit a cigarette already, but furtively: she always smoked with guilt, as if still in her hospital, knowing she was giving a bad example to her patients. At the sight of her, Sarah’s compunctious heart reminded her that Anne’s perennial exhaustion was why she, Sarah, could never bring herself to ‘put her foot down’ over Joyce. She had never not pitied her sister-in-law.

And now Hal did come in, letting it be understood by means of compressed lips and raised brows – useful perhaps for indicating to patients that their lifestyle did not meet with his approval? – that it was time his sister took her room in hand. He looked judiciously at a cheerful if faded chair opposite Sarah’s – would he allow himself to sit in it? He did.

Hal was not the elder brother, as his air of command might suggest, but three years younger than Sarah. A large comfortable man, with an affable manner; everything about him must give his patients confidence. He was a success in his professional life, and his family life wasn’t so bad either, though he had always been unfaithful to Anne. She forgave him. Rather, one deduced that she must, since she did not go in for confidences. Probably she did not care, or perhaps it was that one could not imagine him unforgiven. Now Hal was sitting on the stiff chair, his arms folded high on his chest, legs apart and braced, as if he might otherwise bounce as he sat. He looked like a great delightful baby, with his little wisps of black hair, his fat little tummy, his little chins. He had small black eyes like large raisins.

Sarah offered them drinks, tea, coffee, and so forth, and her brother’s impatient shake of the head made it clear he was pressed for time.

‘Now look here,’ he said. ‘We do realize you have always been amazingly good with Joyce.’

There are occasions, when it becomes evident they are bound to develop in a certain way, that have a quite intoxicating momentum.

‘Yes, I think I have too.’

‘Oh, really, Sarah,’ he exclaimed hotly, his wells of patience already overdrawn.

And now he began on the rhetorical statements (the counterpart of her prepared reasonings to him) rehearsed and polished on the way here. They had the theatrical ring which goes with a thoroughly false position. ‘You must see that Joyce looks on you as a mother,’ he said. ‘You have been a mother to her, we both know that.’ Here he looked at Joyce’s mother, wanting her agreement, but she was smoking furiously, her back turned. ‘It really isn’t on for you to drop her like this.’

‘But I haven’t dropped her, any more than you have.’

He registered this shaft with a hostile look and a quiver of his lips which said he felt he was unfairly treated. ‘You know very well what I am saying.’

‘What you are saying is that I should give up my job and sit here for when she does turn up, even if it is only once in six months for an evening. Because that is what it amounts to.’

‘Exactly,’ said Anne angrily.

Hal sat puffing his lips out, hugging himself with both arms: he was a threatened man; he had two women against him. ‘Why can’t you take her with you to rehearsals, that kind of thing?’

‘Why don’t you take her to your hospital and to Harley Street? Why doesn’t Anne give up her job and sit at home waiting for Joyce?’

At this Anne let out a loud theatrical titter. ‘Exactly,’ she said again, through swirls of smoke. She swatted her hand at the smoke, to show how she deplored her weakness.

‘Look, Hal,’ said Sarah, keeping her voice down. ‘You’re talking as if nothing has changed. Well, they have. Joyce is a young woman. She’s not a little girl any longer.’

‘No,’ said Anne, ‘he can’t see it. Or won’t.’

‘Oh really,’ exploded Hal, and then he collapsed. He let his arms fall, and stared, his face all disconsolate lines.

This man who had all his life been lucky and successful had met something intractable. But the point was, this had happened not this week but years ago. It was as if he had never taken the truth in. ‘It is really quite appalling,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do about it? She runs around with drop-outs and layabouts and all sorts of people.’

‘Alcoholics and drug pushers and prostitutes,’ said Anne, and at last turned herself around. Her face was flushed, and brave with the determination to have her say. ‘Hal, at some point you have to face up to it. There’s nothing we can do about Joyce. Short of chaining her down and locking her up. All we can do is to take her in when she does turn up and not lecture her. Why do you always shout at her? No wonder she comes here to Sarah.’

Some people are the moral equivalent of those who have never, ever, been ill in their lives and, when they are at last ill, might even die from the shock. Hal could not face up to it: if he admitted one defeat, what might then follow? He sat silent, breathing heavily, arms hanging, not looking at them. His little pink mouth stood slightly open – like Joyce’s, in fact. ‘It’s awful, awful,’ he sighed at last, and got up. He had inwardly shelved the problem, and that was that.

‘Yes, dear, it is awful,’ said his wife firmly. ‘It has always been awful and it will probably go on being awful.’

‘Something has to be done about it,’ he said, just as if beginning the conversation, and Sarah breathed, ‘Good God!’ while Anne said, with a tight and derisive smile, ‘You two are so funny.’

Sarah felt all the indignation due when one is in the right but being classed with someone in the wrong.

Anne explained apologetically, ‘You both seem to think that if you just come up with something, then Joyce will become normal.’ She shrugged, gave Sarah an apologetic grimace. Husband and wife went to the door, the big man drifting along beside Anne, his eyes abstracted. He had inwardly removed himself. Sarah was able to visualize furious scenes between these two, when Anne tackled Hal, and Hal simply repeated, ‘Yes, we must do something.’ For years. Meanwhile good old Sarah looked after Joyce. Nothing at all would change as a result of this talk. Well, something had. Sarah had not before seen that somewhere or other she did believe that Joyce would suddenly become normal, if only they could come up with the right recipe.

The door was shut, and she listened to their feet on the stairs, their voices raised in connubial disagreement.

Sarah sat at her desk and stared into the watery depths of the mirror. She had to do more work on the songs, fitting Julie’s words to music and even making some words up. I don’t know why it is, Julie had written, and this was when she had just agreed to marry Philippe the master printer, but every scene I am part of, when there are people in it, rejects me. If someone were to reach out a hand to me and I stretched out my hand to him, I know my hand would go into a cloud or a mist, like the spray that lies over my pool when there has been heavy rain in the hills. But suppose in spite of everything my fingers closed over warm fingers? She called the music she wrote that spring ‘Songs from a Shore of Ice’.

Sarah began, ‘If I reached my hand into cloud or river spray…’ She, Sarah, had found a hand in a cloud or mist – for Stephen had certainly been an unknown – a warm hand, kindly by habit, a strong one, but holding it, she had felt its grasp become desperate. Help me, help me, said that hand.

The rehearsals were to be in London, in a church hall, a utilitarian place that managed to be dim enough to need some lights on, in spite of the sunlight outside. Fewer than the full company arrived for the first rehearsal. The musicians and singers would come later. Henry Bisley was in New Orleans for the opening of his production of La Dame aux Camélias, set in the brothels of that town at the turn of the century. Roy Strether, Patrick Steele, and Sandy Grears, the lighting and effects man, were all busy on the final rehearsals for the opening in The Green Bird of Abélard and Héloïse, which would precede Hedda Gabler. Patrick had announced that he was glad Julie Vairon would need so little in the way of scenery. He was so disappointed: Sarah had turned his Julie into a bluestocking, he explained, and he did not think he could ever forgive her.

Julie had arrived, a strong healthy girl with the misty blue eyes that can only be Irish. She was Molly McGuire, from Boston. Philippe the master printer was Richard Service, from Reading, a quiet middle-aged man of the observing non-commenting kind: probably similar to Philippe Angers. Paul, or Bill Collins, was a handsome, in fact beautiful, young man, who at once claimed he was all cockney, and proved it by singing ‘She Was Poor but She Was Honest’ – a song which by now they had all understood would be the theme song of the rehearsals. Actually he was from a prosperous London suburb, or at least partly, for he had lived half his life in the States, because of the complicated marriages of his parents. In impeccable English, he said, ‘I’m all things to all men, that’s it, mate, that’s me, Bill, the all-purpose all-weather dancing and singing cockney actor from Brixton.’ The Noël Coward drawl that went with this vanished, as he said in an American accent, and this had the effect of changing him completely: face, smile, set of body, ‘Don’t you believe it. I’m a pretty limited sort of guy. “I won’t dance, please don’t make me, I won’t sing, please don’t make me…,’’ singing this not badly at all. ‘Limitations I do have –’ He hesitated and might have stopped there, but added, compelled to it, with a sudden cold ruthlessness, ‘But I know how to sell myself.’ Now he gave a swift look around to judge the effect of all this, saw them disconcerted, realized the reason was what he had said last, heard it as they had, and sent a nervous small boy’s smile all around. Then, with the grimace that goes with I don’t know why I do this sort of thing, he walked quickly to a chair in a corner and sat there alone. So unhappy did he look that Julie’s mother, Madame Sylvie Vairon (Sally Soames from Brixton – really from Brixton; she had been born there), went over to sit with him, apparently casually. She was a large stately beautiful black woman, who, it was already clear, was going to dominate any scene by her looks, just as Bill did.

Rémy Rostand, or Andrew Stead, was a Texan, with sandy hair, freckles, and pale blue eyes which had too many wrinkles around them for his age, probably forty. He had just come from making a film about the old gauchos, shot on the high plateaux of north-west Argentina. He walked like a horseman, stood like a film gunman, and had shortly to become Rémy, with all the diffidence and hard-to-achieve self-respect of a youngest son. Had Henry known what he was doing when he cast this bandit for the role? In the early days of every production, this unvoiced query is in the air. An unemphatically good-looking, ordinary young man, George White, was going to be Paul’s comrade-in-arms in Martinique, then Rémy’s older brother, not to mention Philippe’s assistant in the printing shop.

On the first day, Sarah and Stephen were more prominent than they had planned, because of the absence of Henry, but luckily Mary Ford had ordered a photo session, and the six actors and two authors were photographed, separately and in couples and in groups, endlessly photographed, the actors at least posing with practised good nature, obedient to the god Publicity. And Mary’s face was solemn, concentrated, for she was utterly given up to her devotions as she took the pictures. Photographers are always in search of that perfect, that paradigmatic, but just out of reach summit of revelation. The next one – yes! – that will be it…do you mind turning your head just half an inch…that’s it, but no, don’t smile…yes, this time smile…this one will be…just one more…one more…and now…yes, I think I got it that time…but I’ll just use up this roll…All over the world these pictures are stacked up in piles, in files and folders, in drawers, on shelves, on walls, the visible record of that race of transcendence-seekers, the photographers’ compulsive quest.

And while Mary sat chatting with them all, her camera was held between alert fingers, ready to swoop it up into place to catch that unique and utterly unrepeatable pose or look which would transform a summary biography – twenty lines on the programme – into irresistible truth.

During that first day a good deal was said about how wonderful a thing Julie Vairon was, how altogether unique. This was because the actors were all taking a chance, much more than is usual with that hazard the theatre. The piece was a sport: not a play, not an opera. They had not heard the music that would fit the words. All of them confessed to having been attracted to Julie Vairon, but they did not know why, for all they had been sent – all they could have been sent – was an assemblage of scenes so lightly sketched that sometimes only a phrase or a sentence indicated passionate love, or renunciation. They were reassuring themselves.

First Molly came to Sarah, who invited her to sit down between her and Stephen, to say she had been told by those who had been at Queen’s Gift how wonderful the music was, and the songs, and she simply couldn’t wait to hear it all. Stephen only allowed himself a glance at this dangerous girl and then stared off at the others, while Sarah talked for him. Molly went, and then Bill, who had been watching for an opportunity, appeared by them, murmuring congratulations on the script and the lyrics. It was a shock to hear the word lyric used to describe those bitterly sad, some said abrasive, songs of the ‘first period’, and the broken lines of the ‘second period’, when there might be no more than a phrase repeated many times, or a word chosen for its sound.

‘I seem to hear it all already,’ claimed Bill, sliding into the seat between Sarah and Stephen, but smiling at Sarah. Then, having established his right to intimacy with Sarah – she could see this was his style, or his need – he glanced at Stephen. But Stephen was not going to succumb, for there was a sharp, not to say critical, look to him, as he examined the young man. Bill quietly got up and walked away, not, however, without the quick flash of a smile at her.

Walking to the tube with Sarah, Stephen remarked, ‘Molly doesn’t look remotely like Julie.’

‘She’ll convince you when the time comes.’

‘And Andrew might as well be a cowboy.’

‘Rémy must surely have spent a lot of time on horseback?’

‘And as for that young…Julie would never fall for that pretty face.’

‘But Julie did fall for a pretty face. Paul has to be a romantic young lieutenant, and not much more, don’t you see? For the sake of dramatic contrast.’

‘Good God.’

‘Nothing she wrote indicated he was more than a good-looking boy.’

They stood together on the pavement. She was thinking that this querulous note in him was new. More, that in the first weeks of their friendship she would have thought him incapable of it. She was relieved to see that now he seemed to be fighting to preserve an obstinate self-respect, while his eyes were full of misery.

Unexpectedly he said, ‘Sarah…I’m out of my depth…’ He grimaced, then made this a smile, walked away to the Underground entrance, turned to give her a small apologetic wave – and vanished.

It was the first read-through of the first act. They were nearly all present now, but there did not seem many people scattered about in the large hall. Henry had announced that he would be putting them all into position right from the start, because how people stood, or were, in relation to each other changed their voices, their movements – everything about them. The actors exchanged those smiles – what else? – meaning that from him they expected no less. Their smiles were already affectionate, as they stood about like dancers waiting for lift-off, and for him to command them. He had arrived that morning by plane from New Orleans, but he was already almost dancing his instructions, falling for seconds at a time into the characters they were going to play. He had been an actor, surely? Yes, and a dancer too, but that was before he had become an old man, and he had worked in a circus too: and here he became a clown, staggering over his own inept feet, miraculously recovering himself, and jumping back into his own self with a clap of the hands that summoned them into their positions. He must be of Italian descent, with those dark and dramatic eyes. Often, in southern Europe, you see a man, a woman, leaning against a wall, standing behind a market stall, all loud exclamatory sound and gesticulation, in the moment before they suddenly go quiet, black eyes staring in sombre fatalism: too much sun, too much bloody history, too much bloody everything, and a bred-in expectation of more of the same. And here was Henry Bisley, from the northern United States, standing limp, switched off, his eyes sombre and abstracted, southern eyes, eyes from the Mediterranean, but even as he leaned briefly against a wall, he seemed already on his way somewhere else. And the idea of movement was emphasized by his shoes, for they would have been useful for a marathon. For that matter, all their shoes seemed designed for a hundred-yard sprint.

Stephen and Sarah sat side by side at a table which was a continuation of Henry’s – the director’s. At the table beyond that was Roy Strether, watching everything and making notes. Mary Ford was photographing at the theatre.

The read-through began with the scenes in Julie’s mother’s house in Martinique, and the evening party where the handsome lieutenant Paul, brought by his comrade Jean, was introduced to Julie.

Since the musicians were not there, it was a question of going through the scenes while the words of the songs were spoken, so that everyone would get an idea of what would happen. Roy read, in a voice as flat as the recorded telephone announcement ‘Your number has not been recognized’.

This first scene had Julie standing attractively by her harp, shoulder outlined in white muslin (in fact Molly wore jeans and a purple T-shirt), a dress bought by papa on his last visit to distant Paris, on mother Sylvie’s insistence. Julie was singing (today she only spoke) a conventional ballad from sheet music (a piece of typing paper) brought by the father from Paris with the dress. For while the reputation of this house and the two beautiful women was exactly what might be expected among the young officers who were unwillingly on service in this attractive but boring island, Julie and her mother disappointed expectations by behaving with the propriety used by the mothers and sisters of these young men, and even more so. Nor had they expected to find Parisian fashions.

It was only when the officers had gone that the women became themselves and spoke their minds, in words recorded by Julie.

To start with, beauty was not so much in the eye of this beholder, for that first evening all I thought was, That’s a pretty hero! No, it was Maman who was dissolved by Paul. I said to her, He’s too much, he’s like a present in pretty paper, and you don’t want to unwrap it because it would spoil the parcel. Maman said, ‘My God, if I were even ten years younger.’ Maman was forty then. She said, ‘I swear, if he kissed me, it would be my first time ever.’

The two women were to sing a duet, ‘If he kissed me it would be my first time ever,’ using the first-period music, like a blues.

This was hardly likely to be the first time for Julie, not with all those young officers about. Sarah passed a note to Henry that unless they were careful, this song would get the wrong kind of laughter. He tilted a page towards her to show he had already marked the danger point with an underlined Laughs!

‘But I wouldn’t mind a smile,’ he said, and smiled at her to show the kind of smile.

This cast did laugh a lot. Laughter kept breaking out during the duet, which of course was being spoken, not sung. Henry asked them to cool it, and at once they sobered, the impassioned words being exchanged without emotion, producing an effect of hopeless despair. So sudden was the change that there was a sigh, the long slowly released breath that means surprise, even shock.

‘Right,’ said Henry. ‘That’s it. We’ll have to wait for the music.’

They were already a group, a family, partly because of their real interest in this piece, partly because of the infectious energies of Henry. Already they were inside the feeling of conspiracy, faint but unmistakable, the we-against-the-world born out of the vulnerability of actors in the face of criticism so often arbitrary, or lazy, or ignorant, or spiteful – against the world outside, which was them and not we, the world which they would conquer. They already believed they would conquer. It was because of Julie Vairon’s special atmosphere.

How easily, how recklessly we join this group or that, religious, political, theatrical, intellectual – any kind of group: that most potent of witches’ brews, charged with the possibilities for harm and for good, but most often for illusion. Sarah was not exactly a stranger to the fumy atmospheres the theatre creates, but usually she was in and out of rehearsals, doing this job and that, and she had not before written a whole play, based on journals and music she had soaked herself in for months, then been in on the casting, then committed herself to what would be two months, more, of day-by-day involvement with rehearsals. She would not this time be flitting off to other productions, other rehearsals. She would be part of Julie Vairon, day and night, indefinitely.

Meanwhile minor annoyances were being absorbed into a general effervescence, which was surely pretty unusual so early in a production. Having to wait for the music was testing them all. This was not the most comfortable of rehearsal places. It was too big, and their voices echoed in it: there was no way of judging how they should be pitched and used. Even with the sun blazing down outside, the old hall was dismal, and a shaft of light striking down from a high window showed up the dust in the air, like a column of water full of algae, or like bits of mica.

‘Solid enough to climb up,’ said Henry, actually making a pantomime of climbing up, defusing possible complaints with a laugh. And they all laughed again at the unexpected effect when the column of light, moving as the earth turned, reached the actors at exactly that moment when Paul and Julie stole away from Maman’s house on a dark night, though she was not deceived, and knew they were going, while the bright column pointed at them like the finger of God.

After the read-through Sarah and Stephen were going off to lunch with Henry Bisley, for they had to know one another better, but as they stood at the exit into the outside world, Paul the handsome lieutenant, or rather Bill Collins, was there with them, though he had not been invited. They climbed the stairs together, and when they went to the little local restaurant, Bill was the fourth. In the restaurant, the rest of the cast sat at one table, but Bill was at theirs. Sarah did not take much notice of him, because of getting to know Henry. This was going to be a satisfactory director, she was thinking, and could feel Stephen thinking too. He was sharp, competent, knew the material inside out, and, as a bonus, was very funny. Anywhere near him, people laughed. Sarah was laughing, and Stephen too, though when he did, it sounded as if he was surprised at himself for doing it. Halfway through the meal, Stephen left them. Elizabeth was preparing another recital of Tudor music, but this time with dancing, modern dancing, athletic and vigorous. Apparently it ‘worked’, though one could tell he did not much care for the combination. He said to Sarah, ‘You see, it’s my part of the bargain. She would never say anything if I was not there, but if I didn’t turn up, she’d feel let down. And rightly.’ He did not want to go. She did not want him to go. She was surprised at the strength of the pang she felt. Henry was called over to the other table: Andrew Stead wanted advice. That left her and Bill. He was eating heartily – Henry had eaten a little salad; Stephen had left most of his food. She thought that this is how a very young man ate, even a schoolboy – or a young wolf. Well, he was very young. Twenty-six, and she guessed much younger than that in himself. All those winning smiles and sympathetic glances – he kept them up although, clearly, he was famished and that was his first consideration. Behind her she heard laughter at the other table, and turned her head to listen. Bill at once saw this and said, ‘I simply have to tell you, Sarah, what it means to me, getting this part – I mean, a real part. I’m afraid I’ve had to take quite a few parts that – well, we have to eat, don’t we?’

Laughter again. Mary was telling a tale which concerned Sonia, and it ended: ‘Two knives, on his seat.’ ‘Knives?’ said Richard. ‘Surgical knives,’ said Mary. The laughter was now loud, and nervous, and Richard said, ‘You can’t expect a man to laugh at that,’ and laughed. ‘All the same…serves the little creep right.’

‘Sarah,’ said Bill, leaning forward to claim her, his beautiful eyes on her eyes. ‘I do feel so at home with you. I felt that so much, at the casting session, but now…’ She smiled at him and said, ‘But I have to go.’ He was genuinely disconcerted, rejected. Like a small boy. Sarah went past the other table, smiling generally and said to Mary, who was about to return to the theatre, ‘Ring me tonight?’

Bill was already settling himself beside Mary. Sarah paid her bill and looked back. Bill sat straight up, head slightly back. He looked like an arrogantly sulky adolescent, touch me not at war with oh yes, please. Henry was reaching out with a pencil in his hand to mark a passage in Richard’s script. He was looking over it at her, eyes sombre.

That evening she sat thinking about brother Hal, because of her feelings about Stephen. There were no new thoughts in her head. Hal had been her mother’s favourite, she had always known and accepted that. Or at least she could not remember ever having not accepted it. He was the much wanted and loved boy, and she had taken second place from the moment he was born. Well, unfair preferences are hardly unusual in families. She had never liked Hal, let alone loved him. And now, for the first time, she was understanding how much she had missed in her life. Instead of something like a black hole – all right, then, a grey hole – there would have been all her life…what? A warmth, a sweetness. Instead of always having to brace herself when she had to meet Hal, she could have smiled, as she did when thinking of Stephen. She knew she did, for she had caught the smile on her face.

Late that night Mary rang. First she said her mother was in a bad patch, with a leg that was paralysed, perhaps temporarily. One had to expect this kind of thing with multiple sclerosis. She was going to have to pay someone to come in twice a day when she, Mary, was working so intensively. She did not say this was going to be financially difficult. Sarah did not say that extra money would be found. All their salaries were due to go up: the four had always accepted less than they could have claimed. But now, with Julie Vairon, there was suddenly much more money…if none of this was said, it was understood.

Then Mary told Sarah about Sonia and the knives.

From time to time, in London, some young man desiring to attract attention announces that Shakespeare had no talent. This guarantees a few weeks of indignation. (Usually it is the perpetrator who has no talent – but Bernard Shaw, who had, made this particular way of shocking the bourgeoisie permissible.) Shakespeare had been announced as having no talent quite recently, and a new ploy was needed. What better than to say, in a country with a genius for the theatre, that theatre itself is stupid and unnecessary? A certain young man who had created for himself and his cronies a style of sneering attack on nearly everything not themselves, had become editor of a well-known periodical. A schoolfriend, Roger Stent, meeting his suddenly well-known chum, asked if there was a job for him on New Talents. ‘Do you like theatre?’ ‘I don’t know anything about it.’ ‘Perfect,’ cried this editor. ‘Just what I want. I want someone who is not part of that old gang.’ (Newcomers to a literary scene always imagine cabals, gangs, and cliques.) Roger Stent went on his first visit to the theatre, the National, and in fact rather enjoyed himself. His review would have been favourable, but he put in some criticisms. The editor said he was disappointed. ‘Really my ideal theatre critic would be someone who loathed the theatre.’ ‘Let me have another try,’ said Roger Stent. His reviews became notorious for their vindictiveness – but this was the style of this new addition, the Young Turks, to the literary scene in the early eighties. He perfected a sneering, almost lazy contempt for everything he reviewed.

Abélard and Héloïse had opened, and his review began, ‘This is a turgid piece about a sex-crazed nun and her life-long pursuit of a Paris savant. Not content with being the cause of his castration, she felt no shame about boring him with wittering letters about her emotions…’

The policy of The Green Bird was to rise above unpleasant or even malicious reviews, but Sonia said, ‘Why? I’m not going to let him get away with it.’ She wrote a letter to him, with a copy to the editor, beginning, ‘You ignorant and illiterate little shit, if you ever come anywhere near The Green Bird again, you’d better watch it.’

He wrote her a graceful, almost languid letter, saying that perhaps he had been mistaken and he was ready to see the piece again and he ‘trusted there would be a ticket for him at the box office’ on such and such a night. This last bit of impertinence was very much in the style of this latent incarnation of Young Turks.

She left a message that there would be a ticket for him, as requested. When he reached his seat, he found two surgical knives lying crossed on it. They were so sharp that he cut his fingers picking them up and had to leave the theatre, bleeding profusely. Sonia supplied full details to a gossip columnist.

Sarah laughed and said she hoped this was not how Sonia was going to react to every unfavourable review.

Mary, laughing, said that Sonia had explained that bullies only understand the boot. ‘The new brutalism, that’s what she says it is. She says we lot are all living in a dream world.’

‘She said, “you lot”?’

‘Well, she did say “we” the other day.’

‘So she did. We must hope.’

At rehearsals that week she missed Stephen, but she rang him or he rang her to find out how they were going. Meanwhile she sat by Henry, or rather by his chair while he was working with the actors. If Henry did actually arrive back to sit down for a moment, he was off again after whispering a word or two, usually a joke. This was becoming their style: they jested. Yet he felt threatened. For he must: she could see herself, that watchful (that maternal) presence, making notes. And she was still at work on the lyrics, if that was the word for them, for often the actors said something, improvised, suggested changes. She was needed here: she had to reassure herself because she knew how very much she did not want to leave. Julie had her in thrall. A sweet insidious deceptiveness seemed now to be the air she breathed, and if it was a poison, she did not care.

The actors all came to sit by her, in Henry’s empty chair, or in Stephen’s, but she soon saw that Bill was there oftener than any of them. This gift of his for establishing instant intimacy – she felt she had known the young man for years. But she was not the only one being offered his charm. He seemed to be making a gift of himself to everyone. During this first week, which was devoted to the first act, the handsome lieutenant Paul had to dominate: he was in nearly every scene. And his part was so sympathetic, for he was so innocently as well as so madly in love with Julie. From the moment he first saw Julie standing by her harp, he was in a fever, not only of love, but the intoxication of the discovery of his own tenderness. The apprentice loves of young men tend to be brutal. He was truly convinced of their happiness once they reached France, and did not know it was an idyll possible only in Martinique, in this artificial and romantic setting, with its outsize butterflies, its brilliant birds, its languorous flowers and insinuating breezes. He forgot that it had been not his but Julie’s idea to run away, taking their idyll with them. The young man simply shone with the confidence of love, its triumphs, its discoveries, and this was not only during Paul’s scenes with Molly, where the two were entirely professional, making the jokes about their passion necessary to defuse those stormy love scenes. And yet, more than once, Sarah had caught him glancing at herself while he was making love to Molly, a quick hard calculating look from a world far from the simplicities of sympathy they enjoyed when he sat chatting in a chair beside her. He wanted to know if she was affected by him. Well, she was. But so was everybody else. Sally, that handsome black lady, who always wore an air of sceptical worldly wisdom and a sweet derisive worldly smile, a woman who commanded attention even when she sat knitting in a chair offstage (not one to waste time, she knitted not only for her family but for sale to a certain very expensive shop) – Sally watched Bill Collins with exactly the same fatalistic short laugh and shrug that, as Julie’s mother, she allowed herself when first observing her daughter’s passion for Paul. She and Sarah exchanged glances of female appreciation for the young man, but they were critical too, because he was so conscious of his looks and so skilled at using them. Well, good luck to him, those looks said. The other females present were the same. Mary Ford and Molly (as Molly) caught each other’s eyes and grimaced: no, he is really altogether too much.

The Fifth Child:

Chapter 1

Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that this was what they had been waiting for. Someone conservative, old-fashioned, not to say obsolescent; timid, hard to please: this is what other people called them, but there was no end to the unaffectionate adjectives they earned. They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that they were ordinary and in the right of it, should not be criticized for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness, just because these were unfashionable qualities.

At this famous office party, about two hundred people crammed into a long, ornate, and solemn room, for three hundred and thirty-four days of the year a boardroom. Three associated firms, all to do with putting up buildings, were having their end-of-year party. It was noisy. The pounding rhythm of a small band shook walls and floor. Most people were dancing, packed close because of lack of space, couples bobbing up and down or revolving in one spot as if they were on invisible turntables. The women were dressed up, dramatic, bizarre, full of colour: Look at me! Look at me! Some of the men demanded as much attention. Around the walls were pressed a few non-dancers, and among these were Harriet and David, standing by themselves, holding glasses – observers. Both had reflected that the faces of the dancers, women more than men, but men, too, could just as well have been distorted in screams and grimaces of pain as in enjoyment. There was a forced hecticity to the scene – but these thoughts, like so many others, they had not expected to share with anyone else.

From across the room – if one saw her at all among so many eye-demanding people – Harriet was a pastel blur. As in an Impressionist picture, or a trick photograph, she seemed a girl merged with her surroundings. She stood near a great vase of dried grasses and leaves and her dress was something flowery. The focusing eye then saw curly dark hair, which was unfashionable … blue eyes, soft but thoughtful lips rather too firmly closed. In fact, all her features were strong and good, and she was solidly built. A healthy young woman, but perhaps more at home in a garden?

David had been standing just where he was for an hour drinking judiciously, his serious grey-blue eyes taking their time over this person, that couple, watching how people engaged and separated, ricocheting off each other. To Harriet he did not have the look of someone solidly planted: he seemed almost to hover, balancing on the balls of his feet. A slight young man – he looked younger than he was – he had a round, candid face and soft brown hair girls longed to run their fingers through, but then that contemplative gaze of his made itself felt and they desisted. He made them feel uncomfortable. Not Harriet. She knew his look of watchful apartness mirrored her own. She judged his humorous air to be an effort. He was making similar mental comments about her: she seemed to dislike these occasions as much as he did. Both had found out who the other was. Harriet was in the sales department of a firm that designed and supplied building materials; David was an architect.

So what was it about these two that made them freaks and oddballs? It was their attitude to sex! This was the sixties! David had had one long and difficult affair with a girl he was reluctantly in love with: she was what he did not want in a girl. They joked about the attraction between opposites. She joked that he thought of reforming her: ‘I do believe you imagine you are going to put the clock back, starting with me!’ Since they had parted, unhappily enough, she had slept – so David reckoned – with everyone in Sissons Blend & Co. With the girls, too, he wouldn’t be surprised. She was here tonight, in a scarlet dress with black lace, a witty travesty of a flamenco dress. From this concoction her head startingly emerged. It was pure nineteen-twenties, for her black hair was sleeked down into a spike on her neck at the back, with two glossy black spikes over her ears, and a black lock on her forehead. She sent frantic waves and kisses to David from across the room where she circled with her partner, and he smiled matily back: no hard feelings. As for Harriet, she was a virgin. ‘A virgin now,’ her girl friends might shriek; ‘are you crazy?’ She had not thought of herself as a virgin, if this meant a physiological condition to be defended, but rather as something like a present wrapped up in layers of deliciously pretty paper, to be given, with discretion, to the right person. Her own sisters laughed at her. The girls working in the office looked studiedly humorous when she insisted, ‘I am sorry, I don’t like all this sleeping around, it’s not for me.’ She knew she was discussed as an always interesting subject, and usually unkindly. With the same chilly contempt that good women of her grandmother’s generation might have used, saying, ‘She is quite immoral you know,’ or, ‘She’s no better than she ought to be,’ or, ‘She hasn’t got a moral to her name’; then (her mother’s generation), ‘She’s man-mad,’ or, ‘She’s a nympho’ – so did the enlightened girls of now say to each other, ‘It must be something in her childhood that’s made her like this. Poor thing.’

And indeed she had sometimes felt herself unfortunate or deficient in some way, because the men with whom she went out for a meal or to the cinema would take her refusal as much as evidence of a pathological outlook as an ungenerous one. She had gone about with a girl friend, younger than the others, for a time, but then this one had become ‘like all the others’, as Harriet despairingly defined her, defining herself as a misfit. She spent many evenings alone, and went home often at weekends to her mother. Who said, ‘Well, you’re old-fashioned, that’s all. And a lot of girls would like to be, if they got the chance.’

These two eccentrics, Harriet and David, set off from their respective corners towards each other at the same moment: this was to be important to them as the famous office party became part of their story. ‘Yes, at exactly the same time…’ They had to push past people already squeezed against walls; they held their glasses high above their heads to keep them out of the way of the dancers. And so they arrived together at last, smiling – but perhaps a trifle anxiously – and he took her hand and they squeezed their way out of this room into the next, which had the buffet and was as full of noisy people, and through that into a corridor, sparsely populated with embracing couples, and then pushed open the first door whose handle yielded to them. It was an office that had a desk and hard chairs, and, as well, a sofa. Silence … well, almost. They sighed. They set down their glasses. They sat facing each other, so they might look as much as they wished, and then began to talk. They talked as if talk were what had been denied to them both, as if they were starving for talk. And they went on sitting there, close, talking, until the noise began to lessen in the rooms across the corridor, and then they went quietly out and to his flat, which was near. There they lay on his bed holding hands and talked, and sometimes kissed, and then slept. Almost at once she moved into his flat, for she had been able to afford only a room in a big communal flat. They had already decided to marry in the spring. Why wait? They were made for each other.

Harriet was the oldest of three daughters. It was not until she left home, at eighteen, that she knew how much she owed to her childhood, for many of her friends had divorced parents, led adventitious and haphazard lives, and tended to be, as it is put, disturbed. Harriet was not disturbed, and had always known what she wanted. She had done well enough at school, and went to an arts college where she became a graphic designer, which seemed an agreeable way of spending her time until she married. The question whether to be, or not to be, a career woman had never bothered her, though she was prepared to discuss it: she did not like to appear more eccentric than she had to be. Her mother was a contented woman who had everything she could reasonably want; so it appeared to her and to her daughters. Harriet’s parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.

David’s background was a quite different matter. His parents had divorced when he was seven. He joked, far too often, that he had two sets of parents: he had been one of the children with a room in two homes, and everybody considerate about psychological problems. There had been no nastiness or spite, if plenty of discomfort, even unhappiness – that is, for the children. His mother’s second husband, David’s other father, was an academic, an historian, and there was a large shabby house in Oxford. David liked this man, Frederick Burke, who was kind, if remote, like his mother, who was kind and remote. His room in this house had been his home – was, in his imagination, his real home now, though soon, with Harriet, he would create another, an extension and amplification of it. This home of his was a large bedroom at the back of the house overlooking a neglected garden; a shabby room, full of his boyhood, and rather chilly, in the English manner. His real father married one of his kind: she was a noisy, kind, competent woman, with the cynical good humour of the rich. James Lovatt was a boat builder, and when David did consent to visit, his place could easily be a bunk on a yacht, or a room (‘This is your room, David!’) in a villa in the South of France or the West Indies. But he preferred his old room in Oxford. He had grown up with a fierce private demand on his future: for his own children it would all be different. He knew what he wanted, and the kind of woman he needed. If Harriet had seen her future in the old way, that a man would hand her the keys of her kingdom, and there she would find everything her nature demanded, and this as her birthright, which she had – at first unknowingly, but then very determinedly – been travelling towards, refusing all muddles and dramas, then he saw his future as something he must aim for and protect. His wife must be like him in this: that she knew where happiness lay and how to keep it. He was thirty when he met Harriet, and he had been working in the dogged disciplined manner of an ambitious man: but what he was working for was a home.

Not possible to find the kind of house they wanted, for the life they wanted, in London. Anyway, they were not sure London was what they needed – no, it wasn’t, they would prefer a smallish town with an atmosphere of its own. Weekends were spent looking around towns within commuting distance of London, and they soon found a large Victorian house in an overgrown garden. Perfect! But for a young couple it was absurd, a three-storeyed house, with an attic, full of rooms, corridors, landings … Full of space for children, in fact.

But they meant to have a lot of children. Both, somewhat defiantly, because of the enormity of their demands on the future, announced they ‘would not mind’ a lot of children. ‘Even four, or five …’ ‘Or six,’ said David. ‘Or six!’ said Harriet, laughing to the point of tears from relief. They had laughed and rolled about the bed and kissed and were exuberant because this, the place where both had expected and even been prepared to accept rebuff or a compromise, had turned out to be no danger at all. But while Harriet could say to David, David to Harriet, ‘Six children at least,’ they could not say this to anyone else. Even with David’s quite decent salary, and Harriet’s, the mortgage of this house would be beyond them. But they would manage somehow. She would work for two years, commute with David daily to London, and then …

On the afternoon the house became theirs, they stood hand in hand in the little porch, birds singing all around them in the garden where boughs were still black and glistening with the chilly rain of early spring. They unlocked their front door, their hearts thudding with happiness, and stood in a very large room, facing capacious stairs. Some previous owner had seen a home as they did. Walls had been pulled down to make this a room that accommodated nearly all the ground floor. One half of it was a kitchen, marked off from the rest by no more than a low wall that would have books on it, the other half with plenty of space for settees, chairs, all the sprawl and comfort of a family room. They went gently, softly, hardly breathing, smiling and looking at each other and smiling even more because both had tears in their eyes – they went across the bare boards that soon would have rugs on them, and then slowly up the stairs where old-fashioned brass rods waited for a carpet. On the landing, they turned to marvel at the great room that would be the heart of their kingdom. They went on up. The first floor had one large bedroom – theirs; and opening off it a smallish room, which would be for each new baby. There were four other decent rooms on this floor. Up still generous but narrower stairs, and there were four more rooms whose windows, like the rooms below, showed trees, gardens, lawns – all the perspectives of pleasant suburbia. And above this floor was an enormous attic, just right for the children when they had got to the age for secret magical games.

They slowly descended the stairs, one flight, two, passing rooms, and rooms, which they were imagining full of children, relatives, guests, and came again into their bedroom. A large bed had been left in it. It had been specially made, that bed, for the couple they had bought the house from. To take it away, so said the agent, would have meant dismantling it, and anyway the owners of the bed were going to live abroad. There Harriet and David lay down side by side, and looked at their room. They were quiet, awed by what they were taking on. Shadows from a lilac tree, a wet sun behind it, seemed to be enticingly sketching on the expanses of the ceiling the years they would live in this house. They turned their heads towards the windows where the top of the lilac showed its vigorous buds, soon to burst into flower. Then they looked at each other. Tears ran down their cheeks. They made love, there, on their bed. Harriet almost cried out, ‘No, stop! What are we doing?’ For had they not decided to put off having children for two years? But she was overwhelmed by his purpose – yes, that was it, he was making love with a deliberate, concentrated intensity, looking into her eyes, that made her accept him, his taking possession of the future in her. She did not have contraceptives with her. (Both of course distrusted the Pill.) She was at the height of her fertility. But they made love, with this solemn deliberation. Once. Twice. Later, when the room was dark, they made love again.

‘Well,’ said Harriet, in a little voice, for she was frightened and determined not to show it, ‘Well, that’s done it, I’m sure.’

He laughed. A loud, reckless, unscrupulous laugh, quite unlike modest, humorous, judicious David. Now the room was quite dark, it looked vast, like a black cave that had no end. A branch scraped across a wall somewhere close. There was a smell of cold rainy earth and sex. David lay smiling to himself, and when he felt her look, he turned his head slightly and his smile included her. But on his terms; his eyes gleamed with thoughts she could not guess at. She felt she did not know him… ‘David,’ she said quickly, to break the spell, but his arm tightened around her, and he gripped her upper arm with a hand she had not believed could be so strong, insistent. This grip said, Be quiet.

They lay there together while ordinariness slowly came back, and then they were able to turn to each other and kiss with small reassuring daytime kisses. They got up and dressed in the cold dark: the electricity wasn’t on yet. Quietly they went down the stairs of their house where they had so thoroughly taken possession, and into their great family room, and let themselves out into the garden that was mysterious and hidden from them, not yet theirs.

‘Well?’ said Harriet humorously as they got into his car to return to London. ‘And how are we going to pay for it all if I am pregnant?’

Quite so: how were they? Harriet indeed became pregnant on that rainy evening in their bedroom. They had many bad moments, thinking of the slenderness of their resources, and of their own frailty. For at such times, when material support is not enough, it is as if we are being judged: Harriet and David seemed to themselves meagre and inadequate, with nothing to hold on to but stubborn beliefs other people had always judged as wrong-headed.

David had never taken money from his well-off father and stepmother, who had paid for his education, but that was all. (And for his sister Deborah’s education; but she had preferred her father’s way of life as he had preferred his mother’s, and so they had not often met, and the differences between brother and sister seemed to him summed up in this – that she had chosen the life of the rich.) He did not now want to ask for money. His English parents – which was how he thought of his mother and her husband – had little money, being unambitious academics.

One afternoon, these four – David and Harriet, David’s mother, Molly, with Frederick – stood in the family room by the stairs and surveyed the new kingdom. There was by now a very large table, which would easily accommodate fifteen or twenty people, at the kitchen end; there were a couple of vast sofas, and some commodious armchairs bought second-hand at a local auction. David and Harriet stood together, feeling themselves even more preposterously eccentric, and much too young, faced with these two elderly people who judged them. Molly and Frederick were large and untidy, with a great deal of grey hair, wearing comfortable clothes that complacently despised fashion. They looked like benevolent haystacks, but were not looking at each other in a way David knew well.

‘All right, then,’ he said humorously, unable to bear the strain, ‘you can say it.’ And he put his arm around Harriet, who was pale and strained because of morning sickness and because she had spent a week scrubbing floors and washing windows.

‘Are you going to run a hotel?’ enquired Frederick reasonably, determined not to make a judgement.

‘How many children are you intending to have?’ asked Molly, with the short laugh that means there is no point in protesting.

‘A lot,’ said David softly.

‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘Yes.’ She did not realize, as David did, how annoyed these two parents were. Aiming, like all their kind, at an appearance of unconformity, they were in fact the essence of convention, and disliked any manifestation of the spirit of exaggeration, of excess. This house was that.

‘Come on, we’ll give you dinner, if there is a decent hotel,’ said David’s mother.

Over that meal, other subjects were discussed until, over coffee, Molly observed, ‘You do realize that you are going to have to ask your father for help?’

David seemed to wince and suffer, but he had to face it: what mattered was the house and the life that would be lived in it. A life that – both parents knew because of his look of determined intention, which they judged full of the smugness of youth – was going to annul, absolve, cancel out all the deficiencies of their life, Molly’s and Frederick’s; and of James’s and Jessica’s life, too.

As they separated in the dark car-park of the hotel, Frederick, said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you are both rather mad. Well, wrong-headed, then.’

‘Yes,’ said Molly. ‘You haven’t really thought it out. Children … no one who hasn’t had them knows what work they make.’

Here David laughed, making a point – and an old one, which Molly recognized, and faced, with a conscious laugh. ‘You are not maternal,’ said David. ‘It’s not your nature. But Harriet is.’

‘Very well,’ said Molly, ‘it’s your life.’

She telephoned James, her first husband, who was on a yacht near the Isle of Wight. This conversation ended with ‘I think you should come and see for yourself.’

‘Very well, I will,’ said he, agreeing as much to what had not been said as to what had: his difficulty in keeping up with his wife’s unspoken languages was the main reason he had been pleased to leave her.

Soon after this conversation, David and Harriet again stood with David’s parents – the other pair – in contemplation of the house. This time they were outside it. Jessica stood in the middle of a lawn still covered with the woody debris of the winter and a windy spring, and critically surveyed the house. To her it was gloomy and detestable, like England. She was the same age as Molly and looked twenty years younger, being lean and brown and seeming to glisten with sun oil even when her skin was without it. Her hair was yellow and short and shiny and her clothes bright. She dug the heels of her jade-green shoes in the lawn and looked at her husband, James.

He had already been over the house and now he said, as David had expected. ‘It’s a good investment.’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘It’s not overpriced. I suppose that’s because it’s too big for most people. I take it the surveyor’s report was all right’

‘Yes,’ said David.

‘In that case I shall assume responsibility for the mortgage. How long is it going to take to pay off?’

‘Thirty years,’ said David.

‘I’ll be dead by then, I expect. Well, I didn’t give you much in the way of a wedding present.’

‘You’ll have to do the same by Deborah,’ said Jessica.

‘We have already done much more for Deborah than for David,’ said James. ‘Anyway, we can afford it.’

She laughed, and shrugged: it was mostly her money. This ease with money characterized their life together, which David had sampled and rejected fiercely, preferring the parsimony of the Oxford house – though he had never used that word aloud. Flashy and too easy, that was the life of the rich; but now he was going to be beholden to it.

‘And how many kids are you planning, if one may ask?’ enquired Jessica, looking like a parakeet perched on that damp lawn.

‘A lot,’ said David.

‘A lot,’ said Harriet.

‘Rather you than me, then,’ said Jessica, and with that David’s other parents left the garden, and then England, with relief.

Now entered on to this scene Dorothy, Harriet’s mother. It occurred to neither Harriet nor David to think, or say, ‘Oh God, how awful, having one’s mother around all the time,’ for if family life was what they had chosen, then it followed that Dorothy should come indefinitely to help Harriet, while insisting that she had a life of her own to which she must return. She was a widow, and this life of hers was mostly visiting her daughters. The family house was sold, and she had a small flat, not very nice, but she was not one to complain. When she had taken in the size and potential of the new house, she was more silent than usual for some days. She had not found it easy bringing up three girls. Her husband had been an industrial chemist, not badly paid, but there never had been much money. She knew the cost, in every way, of a family, even a small one.

She attempted some remarks on these lines one evening at supper. David, Harriet, Dorothy. David had just come home late: the train was delayed. Commuting was not going to be much fun, was going to be the worst of it, for everyone, but particularly of course for David, for it would take nearly two hours twice a day to get to and from work. This would be one of his contributions to the dream.

The kitchen was already near what it ought to be: the great table, with heavy wooden chairs around it – only four now, but more stood in a row along the wall, waiting for guests and still unborn people. There was a big stove, an Aga, and an old-fashioned dresser with cups and mugs on hooks. Jugs were full of flowers from the garden where summer had revealed a plenitude of roses and lilies. They were eating a traditional English pudding, made by Dorothy; outside, the autumn was establishing itself in flying leaves that sometimes hit the windowpanes with small thuds and bangs, and in the sound of a rising wind. But the curtains were drawn, warm thick flowered curtains.

‘You know,’ said Dorothy, ‘I’ve been thinking about you two.’ David put down his spoon to listen as he would never have done for his unworldly mother, or his worldly father. ‘I don’t believe you two ought to rush into everything – no, let me have my say. Harriet is only twenty-four – not twenty-five yet. You are only just thirty, David. You two go on as if you believe if you don’t grab everything, then you’ll lose it. Well, that’s the impression I get, listening to you talk.’

David and Harriet were listening: their eyes did meet, frowning, thoughtful. Dorothy, this large, wholesome, homely woman, with her decisive manner, her considered ways, was not to be ignored; they recognized what was due to her.

‘I do feel that,’ said Harriet.

‘Yes, girl, I know. You were talking yesterday of having another baby straight away. You’ll regret it, in my view.’

‘Everything could very well be taken away,’ said David, stubborn. The enormity of this, something that came from his depths, as both women knew, was not lessened by the News, which was blasting from the radio. Bad news from everywhere: nothing to what the News would soon become, but threatening enough.

‘Think about it,’ said Dorothy. ‘I wish you would. Sometimes you two scare me. I don’t really know why.’

Harriet said fiercely, ‘Perhaps we ought to have been born into another country. Do you realize that having six children, in another part of the world, it would be normal, nothing shocking about it – they aren’t made to feel criminals.’

‘It’s we who are abnormal, here in Europe,’ said David.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Dorothy, as stubborn as either of them. ‘But if you were having six – or eight, or ten – no, I know what you are thinking, Harriet, I know you, don’t I? – and if you were in another part of the world, like Egypt or India or somewhere, then half of them would die and they wouldn’t be educated, either. You want things both ways. The aristocracy – yes, they can have children like rabbits, and expect to, but they have the money for it. And poor people can have children, and half of them die, and expect to. But people like us, in the middle, we have to be careful about the children we have so we can look after them. It seems to me you haven’t thought it out … no, I’ll go and make the coffee, you two go and sit down.’

David and Harriet went through the wide gap in the wall that marked off the kitchen to the sofa in the living-room, where they sat holding hands, a slight, stubborn, rather perturbed young man, and an enormous, flushed, clumsily moving woman. Harriet was eight months pregnant, and it had not been an easy pregnancy. Nothing seriously wrong, but she had been sick a lot, slept badly from indigestion, and was disappointed with herself. They were wondering why it was that people always criticized them. Dorothy brought coffee, set it down, said, ‘I’ll do the washing-up – no, you just sit there.’ And went back to the sink.

‘But it is what I feel,’ said Harriet, distressed.

‘Yes.’

‘We should have children while we can,’ said Harriet.

Dorothy said, from the sink, ‘At the beginning of the last war, people were saying it was irresponsible to have children, but we had them, didn’t we?’ She laughed.

‘There you are, then,’ said David.

‘And we kept them,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, here I am certainly,’ said Harriet.

The first baby, Luke, was born in the big bed attended mostly by the midwife, with Dr Brett there, too. David and Dorothy held Harriet’s hands. It goes without saying that the doctor had wanted Harriet in hospital. She had been adamant; was disapproved of – by him.

It was a windy cold night, just after Christmas. The room was warm and wonderful. David wept. Dorothy wept. Harriet laughed and wept. The midwife and the doctor had a little air of festivity and triumph. They all drank champagne, and poured some on little Luke’s head. It was 1966.

Luke was an easy baby. He slept most peaceably in the little room off the big bedroom, and was contentedly breast-fed. Happiness! When David went off to catch his train to London in the mornings, Harriet was sitting up in bed feeding the baby, and drinking the tea David had brought her. When he bent to kiss her goodbye, and stroked Luke’s head, it was with a fierce possessiveness that Harriet liked and understood, for it was not herself being possessed, or the baby, but happiness. Hers and his.

That Easter was the first of the family parties. Rooms had been adequately if sketchily furnished, and they were filled with Harriet’s two sisters, Sarah and Angela, and their husbands and their children; with Dorothy, in her element; and briefly by Molly and Frederick, who allowed that they were enjoying themselves but family life on this scale was not for them.

Connoisseurs of the English scene will by now have realized that on that powerful, if nowhere registered, yardstick, the English class system, Harriet scaled rather lower than David. Within five seconds of any of the Lovatts or the Burkes meeting any of the Walkers, the fact had been noted but not commented on – verbally, at least. The Walkers were not surprised that Frederick and Molly said they would be there for only two days; not that they changed their minds when James Lovatt appeared. Like many husbands and wives forced to separate by incompatibility, Molly and James enjoyed meeting when they knew they must shortly part. In fact, they all enjoyed themselves, agreeing that the house was made for it. Around the great family table, where so many chairs could be comfortably accommodated, people sat through long pleasant meals, or found their way there between meals to drink coffee and tea, and to talk. And laugh … Listening to the laughter, the voices, the talk, the sounds of children playing, Harriet and David in their bedroom, or perhaps descending from the landing, would reach for each other’s hand, and smile, and breathe happiness. No one knew, not even Dorothy – certainly not Dorothy – that Harriet was pregnant again. Luke was three months old. They had not meant for Harriet to be pregnant – not for another year. But so it was. ‘There’s something progenitive about this room, I swear it,’ said David, laughing. They felt agreeably guilty. They lay in their bed, listening to Luke make his baby noises next door, and decided not to say a word until after everyone had gone.

When Dorothy was told, she was again rather silent, and then said, ‘Well, you’ll need me, won’t you?’

They did. This pregnancy, like the other, was normal, but Harriet was uncomfortable and sick, and thought to herself that while she had not changed her mind at all about six (or eight or ten) children, she would be jolly sure there was a good interval between this one and the next.

For the rest of the year, Dorothy was pleasantly around the house, helped look after Luke and to make curtains for the rooms on the third floor.

That Christmas, Harriet was again enormous, in her eighth month, and she laughed at herself for her size and unwieldiness. The house was full. All the people who were here for Easter came again. It was acknowledged that Harriet and David had a gift for this kind of thing. A cousin of Harriet’s with three children came, too, for she had heard of the wonderful Easter party that had gone on for a week. A colleague of David’s came with his wife. This Christmas was ten days long, and one feast followed another. Luke was in his pram downstairs and everyone fussed over him, and the older children carried him around like a doll. Briefly, too, came David’s sister Deborah, a cool attractive girl who could easily have been Jessica’s daughter and not Molly’s. She was not married, though she had had what she described as near misses. In general style she was so far removed from the people in the house, all basic British – as they defined themselves relative to her – that these differences became a running joke. She had always lived the life of the rich, had found the shabby high-mindedness of her mother’s house irritating, hated people being crammed together, but conceded that she found this party interesting.

There were twelve adults and ten children. Neighbours, invited, did appear, but the sense of family togetherness was strong and excluded them. And Harriet and David exulted that they, their obstinacy, what everyone had criticized and laughed at, had succeeded in this miracle: they were able to unite all these so different people, and make them enjoy each other.

The second child, Helen, was born, like Luke, in the family bed, with all the same people there, and again champagne anointed the baby’s head, and everyone wept. Luke was evicted from the baby’s room into the next one down the corridor, and Helen took his place.

Though Harriet was tired – indeed, worn out – the Easter party took place. Dorothy was against it. ‘You are tired, girl,’ she said. ‘You are bone tired.’ Then, seeing Harriet’s face: ‘Well, all right, but you aren’t to do anything, mind.’

The two sisters and Dorothy made themselves responsible for the shopping and the cooking, the hard work.

Downstairs among all the people – for the house was again full – were the two little creatures, Helen and Luke, all wispy fair hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks. Luke was staggering about, aided by everyone, and Helen was in her pram.

That summer – it was 1968 – the house was full to the attic, nearly all family. The house was so convenient for London: people travelled up with David for the day and came back with him. There was good walking country twenty minutes’ drive away.

People came and went, said they were coming for a couple of days and stayed a week. And how was all this paid for? Well, of course everyone contributed; and, of course, not enough, but people knew David’s father was rich. Without that mortgage being paid for, none of this could have happened. Money was always tight. Economies were made: a vast hotel-size freezer bought second-hand was stocked with summer fruit and vegetables. Dorothy and Sarah and Angela bottled fruit and jam and chutneys. They baked bread and the whole house smelled of new bread. This was happiness, in the old style.

There was a cloud, though. Sarah and her husband, William, were unhappily married, and quarrelled, and made up, but she was pregnant with her fourth, and a divorce was not possible.

Christmas, just as wonderful a festival, came and went. Then Easter … sometimes they all had to wonder where everybody was fitting themselves in.

The cloud on family happiness that was Sarah and William’s discord disappeared, for it was absorbed in worse. Sarah’s new baby was Down’s syndrome, and there was no question of them separating. Dorothy remarked sometimes that it was a pity there wasn’t two of her, Sarah needed her as much, and more, than Harriet. And indeed she did take off on visits to her Sarah, who was afflicted, while Harriet was not.

Jane was born in 1970, when Helen was two. Much too fast, scolded Dorothy, what was the hurry?

Helen moved into Luke’s room, and Luke moved one room along. Jane made her contented noises in the baby’s room, and the two little children came into the big family bed and cuddled and played games, or they visited Dorothy in her bed and played there.

Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved. Often, when David and Harriet lay face to face, it seemed that doors in their breasts flew open, and what poured out was an intensity of relief, of thankfulness, that still astonished them both: patience for what seemed now such a very long time had not been easy, after all. It had been hard preserving their belief in themselves when the spirit of the times, the greedy and selfish sixties, had been so ready to condemn them, to isolate, to diminish their best selves. And look, they had been right to insist on guarding that stubborn individuality of theirs, which had chosen, and so obstinately, the best – this.

Outside this fortunate place, their family, beat and battered the storms of the world. The easy good times had utterly gone. David’s firm had been struck, and he had not been given the promotion he expected; but others had lost their jobs and he was lucky. Sarah’s husband was out of work. Sarah joked dolefully that she and William attracted all the ill luck in the clan.

Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William’s unhappiness, their quarelling, had probably attracted the mongol child – yes, yes, of course she knew one shouldn’t call them mongol. But the little girl did look a bit like Genghis Khan, didn’t she? A baby Genghis Khan with her squashed little face and her slitty eyes? David disliked this trait of Harriet’s, a fatalism that seemed so at odds with the rest of her. He said he thought this was silly hysterical thinking: Harriet sulked and they had to make up.

The little town they lived in had changed in the five years they had been here. Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now commonplace. Gangs of youths hung around certain cafés and street-ends and owed respect to no one. The house next door had been burgled three times: the Lovatts’ not yet, but then there were always people about. At the end of the road there was a telephone box that had been vandalized so often the authorities had given up: it stood unusable. These days, Harriet would not dream of walking at night by herself, but once it would not have occurred to her not to go anywhere she pleased at any time of the day or night. There was an ugly edge on events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in England, not one – enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other said. The young Lovatts made themselves read the papers, and watch the News on television, though their instinct was to do neither. At least they ought to know what went on outside their fortress, their kingdom, in which three precious children were nurtured, and where so many people came to immerse themselves in safety, comfort, kindness.

The fourth baby, Paul, was born in 1973, between a Christmas and an Easter. Harriet was not very well: her pregnancies had continued uncomfortable and full of minor problems – nothing serious, but she was tired.

The Easter festivities were the best ever: that year was the best of all their years, and, looking back afterwards, it seemed that the whole year was a celebration, renewed from a spring of loving hospitality whose guardians were Harriet and David, beginning at Christmas when Harriet was so very pregnant, everyone looking after her, sharing in the work of creating magnificent meals, involved with the coming baby … knowing that Easter was coming, then the long summer, then Christmas again …

Easter went on for three weeks, all of the school holidays. The house was crammed. The three little children had their own rooms but moved in together when beds were needed. Which of course they adored. ‘Why not let them sleep together always?’ Dorothy, the others would enquire. ‘A room each for such little tiddlers!’

‘It’s important,’ said David, fierce; ‘everyone should have a room.’

The family exchanged glances as families do when stubbing toes on some snag in one of them: and Molly, who felt herself both appreciated but in some devious way criticised, too, said, ‘Everyone in the world! Everybody!’ She had intended to sound humorous.

This scene was at breakfast – or, rather, mid-morning – in the family room, breakfast continuing indefinitely. All the adults were still around the table, fifteen of them. The children played among the sofas and chairs of the sitting-room area. Molly and Frederick sat side by side, as always, preserving their air of judging everything by the perspectives of Oxford, for which, here, they often got teased, but did not seem to mind, and were humorously on the defensive. David’s father, James, had been written to again by Molly, who had said he must ‘fork out’ more money, the young couple simply were not coping with feeding Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. He had sent a generous cheque and then had come himself. He sat opposite his former wife and her husband, and as usual both kinds of people were observed examining each other and marvelling that they could ever have come together. He looked fitted out for some sporting occasion: in fact, he was off skiing shortly, like Deborah, who was here with her little air of an exotic bird that had alighted in a strange place and was kept there by curiosity – she was not going to admit to admiration. Dorothy was there, dispensing tea and coffee. Angela sat with her husband; her three children played with the others. Angela, efficient, brisk (‘a coper,’ as Dorothy said, the ‘thank God’ being unspoken), allowed it to be known that she felt the two other sisters took up all of Dorothy and left her nothing. She was like a clever, pretty little fox. Sarah, Sarah’s husband, cousins, friends – the big house had people tucked into every corner, even on the sofas down here. The attic had long ago become a dormitory stacked with mattresses and sleeping bags in which any number of children could be bedded. As they sat here in the great warm comfortable room, which had a fire burning of wood collected by everyone yesterday from the woodland they had been walking in, the rooms above resounded with voices, and with music. Some of the older children were practising a song. This was a house – and this defined it for everyone, admiring what they could not achieve themselves – where television was not often watched.

Sarah’s husband, William, was not at the table, but lounging against the dividing wall; and the little distance expressed what he felt his relation to the family was. He had left Sarah twice, and come home again. It was evident to everyone this was a process that would continue. He had got himself a job, a poor one, in the building trade: the trouble was that he was distressed by physical disability, and his new daughter, the Down’s syndrome baby, appalled him. Yet he was very much married to Sarah. They were a match: both tall, generously built, dark, like a pair of gypsies, always in colourful clothes. But the poor baby was in Sarah’s arms, covered up so as not to upset everyone, and William was looking everywhere but at his wife.

He looked instead at Harriet, who sat nursing Paul, two months old, in the big chair that was hers because it was comfortable for this function. She looked exhausted. Jane had been awake in the night with her teeth, and had wanted Mummy, not Granny.

She had not been much changed by presenting the world with four human beings. She sat there at the head of the table, the collar of her blue shirt pushed to one side to show part of a blue-veined white breast, and Paul’s energetically moving little head. Her lips were characteristically firmly set, and she was observing everything: a healthy, attractive young woman, full of life. But tired … the children came rushing from their play to demand her attention, and she was suddenly irritable, and snapped, ‘Why don’t you go and play upstairs in the attic?’ This was unlike her – again glances were exchanged among the adults, who took over the job of getting the children’s noise out of her way. In the end, it was Angela who went with them.

Harriet was distressed because she had been bad-tempered. ‘I was up all night,’ she began, and William interrupted her, taking command – expressing what they all felt, and Harriet knew it; even if she knew why it had to be William, the delinquent husband and father.

‘And now that’s got to be it, sister-in-law Harriet,’ he announced, leaning forward from his wall, hand raised, like a band-leader. ‘How old are you? No, don’t tell me, I know, and you’ve had four children in six years…’ Here he looked around to make sure they were all with him: they were, and Harriet could see it. She smiled ironically.

‘A criminal,’ she said, ‘that’s what I am.’

‘Give it a rest, Harriet. That’s all we ask of you,’ he went on, sounding more and more facetious, histrionic – as was his way.

‘The father of four children speaks,’ said Sarah, passionately cuddling her poor Amy, defying them to say aloud what they must be thinking: that she was going out of her way to support him, her unsatisfactory husband, in front of them all. He gave her a grateful look while his eyes avoided the pathetic bundle she protected.

‘Yes, but at least we spread it out over ten years,’ he said.

‘We are going to give it a rest,’ announced Harriet. She added, sounding defiant, ‘For at least three years.’

Everyone exchanged looks: she thought them condemning.

‘I told you so,’ said William. ‘These madmen are going to go on.’

‘These madmen certainly are,’ said David.

‘I told you so,’ said Dorothy. ‘When Harriet’s got an idea into her head, then you can save your breath.’

‘Just like her mother,’ said Sarah forlornly: this referred to Dorothy’s decision that Harriet needed her more than Sarah did, the defective child notwithstanding. ‘You’re much tougher than she is, Sarah,’ Dorothy had pronounced. ‘The trouble with Harriet is that her eyes have always been bigger than her stomach.’

Dorothy was near Harriet, with little Jane, listless from the bad night, dozing in her arms. She sat erect, solid; her lips were set firm, her eyes missed nothing.

‘Why not?’ said Harriet. She smiled at her mother: ‘How could I do better?’

‘They are going to have four more children,’ Dorothy said, appealing to the others.

‘Good God,’ said James, admiring but awed. ‘Well, it’s just as well I make so much money.’

David did not like this: he flushed and would not look at anyone.

‘Oh don’t be like that, David,’ said Sarah, trying not to sound bitter: she needed money, badly, but it was David, who was in a good job, who got so much extra.

‘You aren’t really going to have four more children?’ enquired Sarah, sighing – and they all knew she was saying, four more challenges to destiny. She gently put her hand over the sleeping Amy’s head, covered in a shawl, holding it safe from the world.

‘Yes, we are,’ said David.

‘Yes, we certainly are,’ said Harriet. ‘This is what everyone wants, really, but we’ve been brainwashed out of it. People want to live like this, really.’

‘Happy families,’ said Molly critically: she was standing up for a life where domesticity was kept in its place, a background to what was important.

‘We are the centre of this family,’ said David. ‘We are – Harriet and me. Not you, Mother.’

‘God forbid,’ said Molly, her large face, always highly coloured, even more flushed: she was annoyed.

‘Oh all right,’ said her son. ‘It’s never been your style.’

‘It’s certainly never been mine,’ said James, ‘and I’m not going to apologize for it.’

‘But you’ve been a marvellous father, super,’ chirruped Deborah. ‘And Jessica’s been a super mum.’

Her real mother raised her ponderous brows.

‘I don’t seem to remember your ever giving Molly much of a chance,’ said Frederick.

‘But it’s so co-o-o-ld in England,’ moaned Deborah.

James, in his bright, overbright clothes, a handsome well-preserved gent dressed for a southern summer, allowed himself the ironical snort of the oldster at youthful tactlessness, and his look at his wife and her husband apologized for Deborah. ‘And anyway,’ he insisted, ‘it isn’t my style. You’re quite wrong, Harriet. The opposite is true. People are brainwashed into believing family life is the best. But that’s the past.’

‘If you don’t like it, then why are you here?’ demanded Harriet, much too belligerently for this pleasant morning scene. Then she blushed and exclaimed, ‘No, I didn’t mean that!’

‘No, of course you don’t mean it,’ said Dorothy. ‘You’re overtired.’

‘We are here because it’s lovely,’ said a schoolgirl cousin of David’s. She had an unhappy, or at least complicated, family background, and she had taken to spending her holidays here, her parents pleased she was having a taste of real family life. Her name was Bridget.

David and Harriet were exchanging long supportive humorous looks, as they often did, and had not heard the schoolgirl, who was now sending them pathetic glances.

‘Come on, you two,’ said William, ‘tell Bridget she’s welcome.’

‘What? What’s the matter?’ demanded Harriet.

William said, ‘Bridget has to be told by you that she is welcome. Well – we all do, from time to time,’ he added, in his facetious way, and could not help sending a look at his wife.

‘Well, naturally you are welcome, Bridget,’ said David. He sent a glance to Harriet, who said at once. ‘But of course.’ She meant, That goes without saying; and the weight of a thousand marital discussions was behind it, causing Bridget to look from David to Harriet and back, and then around the whole family, saying, ‘When I get married, this is what I am going to do. I’m going to be like Harriet and David, and have a big house and a lot of children … and you’ll all be welcome.’ She was fifteen, a plain dark plump girl who they all knew would shortly blossom and become beautiful. They told her so.

‘It’s natural,’ said Dorothy tranquilly. ‘You haven’t any sort of a home really, so you value it.’

‘Something wrong with that logic,’ said Molly.

The schoolgirl looked around the table, at a loss.

‘My mother means that you can only value something if you’ve experienced it,’ said David. ‘But I am the living proof that isn’t so.’

‘If you’re saying you didn’t have a proper home,’ said Molly, ‘that’s just nonsense.’

‘You had two,’ said James.

‘I had my room,’ said David. ‘My room – that was home.’

‘Well, I suppoe we must be grateful for that concession. I was not aware you felt deprived,’ said Frederick.

‘I didn’t, ever – I had my room.’

They decided to shrug, and laugh.

‘And you haven’t even thought about the problems of educating them all,’ said Molly. ‘Not so far as we can see.’

And now here was appearing that point of difference that the life in this house so successfully smoothed over. It went without saying that David had gone to private schools.

‘Luke will start at the local school this year,’ said Harriet. ‘And Helen will start next year.’

‘Well, if that’s good enough for you,’ said Molly.

‘My three went to ordinary schools,’ said Dorothy, not letting this slide; but Molly did not accept the challenge. She remarked, ‘Well, unless James chips in to help …’ thus making it clear that she and Frederick could not or would not contribute.

James said nothing. He did not even allow himself to look ironical.

‘It’s five years, six years, before we have to worry about the next stage of education for Luke and Helen,’ said Harriet, again sounding over-irritable.

Insisted Molly: ‘We put David down for his schools when he was born. And Deborah, too.’

‘Well,’ said Deborah, ‘why am I any better for my posh schools than Harriet – or anyone else?’

‘It’s a point,’ said James, who had paid for the posh schools.

‘Not much of a point,’ said Molly.

William sighed, clowning it: ‘Deprived all the rest of us are. Poor William. Poor Sarah. Poor Bridget. Poor Harriet. Tell me, Molly, if I had been to posh schools would I get a decent job now?’

‘That isn’t the point,’ said Molly.

‘She means you’d be happier unemployed or in a filthy job well educated than badly educated,’ said Sarah.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Molly. ‘Public education is awful. It’s getting worse. Harriet and David have got four children to educate. With more to come, apparently. How do you know James will be able to help you? Anything can happen in the world.’

‘Anything does, all the time,’ said William bitterly, but laughed to soften it.

Harriet moved distressfully in her chair, took Paul off her breast with a skill at concealing herself they all noted and admired, and said, ‘I don’t want to have this conversation. It’s a lovely morning …’

‘I’ll help you, of course, within limits,’ said James.

‘Oh, James…’ said Harriet, ‘thank you … thank you…Oh dear…why don’t we go up to the woods? … We could take a picnic lunch.’

The morning had slid past. It was midday. Sun struck the edges of the jolly red curtains, making them an intense orange, sending orange lozenges to glow on the table among cups, saucers, a bowl of fruit. The children had come down from the top of the house and were in the garden. The adults went to watch them from the windows. The garden continued neglected; there was never time for it. The lawn was patchily lush, and toys lay about. Birds sang in the shrubs, ignoring the children. Little Jane, set down by Dorothy, staggered out to join the others. A group of children played noisily together, but she was too young, and strayed in and out of the game, in the private world of a two-year-old. They skilfully accommodated their game to her. The week before, Easter Sunday, this garden had had painted eggs hidden everywhere in it. A wonderful day, the children bringing in magical eggs from everywhere that Harriet and Dorothy and Bridget, the schoolgirl, had sat up half the night to decorate.

Harriet and David were together at the window, the baby in her arms. He put his arm around her. They exchanged a quick look, half guilty because of the irrepressible smiles on their faces, which they felt were probably going to exasperate the others.

‘You two are incorrigible,’ said William. ‘They are hopeless,’ he said to the others. ‘Well, who’s complaining? I’m not! Why don’t we all go for that picnic?’

The house party filled five cars, children wedged in or on the adults’ laps.

Summer was the same: two months of it, and again the family came and went, and came again. The schoolgirl was there all the time, poor Bridget, clinging fast to this miracle of a family. Rather, in fact, as Harriet and David did. Both more than once – seeing the girl’s face, reverential, even awed, always on the watch as if she feared to miss some revelation of goodness or grace the moment she allowed her attention to lapse – saw themselves. Even uneasily saw themselves. It was too much … excessive … Surely they should be saying to her, ‘Look here, Bridget, don’t expect so much. Life isn’t like that!’ But life is like that, if you choose right: so why should they feel she couldn’t have what they had so plentifully?

Even before the crowd gathered before the Christmas of 1973, Harriet was pregnant again. To her utter dismay, and David’s. How could it have happened? They had been careful, particularly so because of their determination not to have any more children for a while. David tried to joke, ‘It’s this room, I swear it’s a baby-maker!’

They had put off telling Dorothy. She was not there, anyway, because Sarah had said it was unfair that Harriet got all the help. Harriet simply could not manage. One after another, three girls came to help; they had just left school and could not easily find work. They were not much good. Harriet believed she looked after them more than they her. They came or didn’t come as the mood took them, and would sit around drinking tea with their girl-friends while Harriet toiled. She was frantic, exhausted…she was peevish; she lost her temper; she burst into tears … David saw her sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands, muttering that this new foetus was poisoning her: Paul lay whimpering in his pram, ignored. David took a fortnight’s leave from his office to come home and help. They had known how much they owed Dorothy, but now knew it better – and that when she heard Harriet was pregnant again she would be angry. Very. And she would be right.

‘It will all be easier when Christmas starts,’ wept Harriet.

‘You can’t be serious,’ said David, furious. ‘Of course they can’t come this Christmas.’

‘But it is so easy when people are here, everyone helps me.’

‘Just for once we’ll go to one of them,’ said David, but this idea did not live for more than five minutes: none of the other households could accomodate six extra people.

Harriet lay weeping on her bed. ‘But they must come, don’t put them off – oh, David, please … at least it’ll keep my mind off it.’

He sat on his side of the bed watching her, uneasy, critical, trying not to be. Actually he would be pleased not to have the house full of people for three weeks, a month: it cost so much, and they were always short of money. He had taken on extra work, and here he was at home, a nursemaid.

‘You simply have to get someone in to help, Harriet. You must try and keep one of them.’

She burst out in indignation at the criticism. ‘That’s not fair! You aren’t here stuck with them – they aren’t any good. I don’t believe any of these girls have done an hour’s work in their lives.’

‘They’ve been some help – even if it’s only the washing-up.’

Dorothy telephoned to say that both Sarah and Harriet were going to have to manage: she, Dorothy, needed a break. She was going home to her flat to please herself for a few weeks. Harriet was weeping, hardly able to speak. Dorothy could not get out of her what could possibly be wrong: she said, ‘Very well, I suppose I’ll have to come, then.’

She sat at the big table with David, Harriet, the four children there, too, and looked severely at Harriet. She had understood her daughter was pregnant again within half an hour of arriving. They could see from her set angry face that she had terrible things to say. ‘I’m your servant, I do the work of a servant in this house.’ Or, ‘You are very selfish, both of you. You are irresponsible.’ These words were in the air but were not spoken: they knew that if she allowed herself to begin she would not stop with this.

She sat at the head of the table – the position near the stove – stirring her tea, with one eye on baby Paul, who was fretful in his little chair and wanted to be cuddled. Dorothy, too, looked tired, and her grey hair was disordered: she had been going up to her room to tidy herself when she had been swallowed in embraces with Luke and Helen and Jane, who had missed her and knew that the crossness and impatience that had ruled the house would now be banished.

‘You know that everyone is expecting to come here for Christmas,’ she demanded heavily, not looking at them.

‘Oh yes, yes, yes,’ clamoured Luke and Helen, making a song and dance of it and rushing around the kitchen. ‘Oh yes, when are they coming? Is Tony coming? Is Robin coming? Is Anne coming?’

‘Sit down,’ said David, sharp and cold, and they gave him astonished, hurt looks and sat.

‘It’s crazy,’ said Dorothy. She was flushed with the hot tea and with all the things she was forcing herself not to say.

‘Of course everyone has to come,’ Harriet said, weeping – and ran out of the room.

‘It’s very important to her,’ said David apologetically.

‘And not to you?’ This was sarcastic.

‘The thing is, I don’t think Harriet is anywhere near herself,’ said David, and held his eyes on Dorothy’s, to make her face him. But she would not.

‘What does that mean, my mother isn’t near herself?’ enquired Luke, the six-year-old, ready to make a word game of it. Even, perhaps, a riddle. But he was perturbed. David put out his arm and Luke went to his father, stood close, looked up into his face.

‘It’s all right, Luke,’ said David.

‘You’ve got to get someone in to help,’ said Dorothy.

‘We have tried.’ David explained what had happened with the three amiable and indifferent girls.

‘Doesn’t surprise me. Who wants to do an honest job these days?’ said Dorothy. ‘But you have to get someone. And I can tell you I didn’t expect to end my days as your and Sarah’s skivvy.’

Here Luke and Helen gave their grandmother incredulous looks and burst into tears. After a pause, Dorothy controlled herself and began consoling them.

‘All right, it’s all right,’ she said. ‘And now I’m going to put Paul and Jane to bed. You two, Luke and Helen, can put yourselves to bed. I’ll come up and say good night. And then your gran is off to bed. I’m tired.’

The subdued children went off upstairs.

Harriet did not come down again that evening; her husband and her mother knew she was being sick. Which they were used to…but were not used to ill temper, tears, fretfulness.

When the children were in bed, David did some of the work he had brought home, made himself a sandwich, and was joined by Dorothy, who had come down to make herself tea. This time they did not exchange irritabilites: they were together in a companionable silence, like two old campaigners facing trials and difficulties.

Then David went up into the great shadowy bedroom, where lights from an upstairs window in a neighbouring house a good thirty yards away sent gleams and shadows on to the ceiling. He stood looking at the big bed where Harriet lay. Asleep? Baby Paul was lying asleep close to her, unwrapped. David cautiously leaned over, folded Paul into his cuddling blanket, took him to his room next door. He saw Harriet’s eyes shine as she followed his movements.

He got into bed and, as always, slid out his arm so that she could put her head on to it and be gathered close to him.

But she said, ‘Feel this,’ and guided his hand to her stomach.

She was nearly three months pregnant.

This new baby had not yet shown signs of independent life, but now David felt a jolt under his hand, quite a hard movement.

‘Can you be further along that you thought?’ Once more he felt the thrust, and could not believe it.

Harriet was weeping again, and he felt, knowing of course this was unfair, that she was breaking the rules of some contract between them: tears and misery had not ever been on their agenda!

She felt rejected by him. They had always loved to lie here feeling a new life, greeting it. She had waited four times for the first little flutters, easily mistaken but then certain; the sensation that was as if a fish mouthed out a bubble; the small responses to her movements, her touch, and even – she was convinced – her thoughts.

This morning, lying in the dark before the children woke, she had felt a tapping in her belly, demanding attention. Disbelieving, she had half sat up, looking down at her still flat, if soft, stomach, and felt the imperative beat, like a small drum. She had been keeping herself on the move all day, so as not to feel these demands from the new being, unlike anything she had known before.

‘You had better go and get Dr Brett to check the dates,’ said David.

Harriet said nothing, feeling it was beside the point: she did not know why she felt this.

But she did go to Dr Brett.

He said, ‘Well, perhaps I was out by a month – but if so, you have really been very careless, Harriet.’

This scolding was what she was getting from everyone, and she flashed out, ‘Anyone can make a mistake.’

He frowned as he felt the emphatic movements in her stomach, and remarked, ‘Well, there’s nothing very much wrong with that, is there?’ He looked dubious, however. He was a harassed, no longer young man, who, she had heard, had a difficult marriage. She had always felt rather superior to him. Now she felt at his mercy, and was looking up into that professionally reticent face as she lay there, under his hands, longing for him to say something else. What? An explanation.

‘You’ll have to take it easy,’ he said, turning away.

Behind his back, she muttered, ‘Take is easy yourself!’ and chided herself, You bad-tempered cow.

Everyone arriving for Christmas was told Harriet was pregnant – it was a mistake – but now they were pleased, really…But ‘Speak for yourselves,’ said Dorothy. People had to rally around, even more than they always did. Harriet was not to cook, do housework, do anything. She must be waited upon.

Each new person looked startled on hearing this news, then made jokes. Harriet and David came into rooms full of family, talking, who fell silent knowing they were there. They had been exchanging condemnations. Dorothy’s role in keeping this household going was being given full credit. The pressure on David’s salary – not, after all, a large one – was mentioned. Jokes were made about James’s probable reception of the news. Then the teasing began. David and Harriet were commended for their fertility, and jokes were made about the influences of their bedroom. They responded to the jokes with relief. But all this jesting had an edge on it, and people were looking at the young Lovatts differently from the way they had done before. The quietly insistent patient quality that had brought them together, that had caused this house to come into being and had summoned all these unlikely people from various parts of England, and the world, too – James was coming from Bermuda, Deborah from the States, and even Jessica had promised to put in a brief appearance – this quality, whatever it was, this demand on life, which had been met in the past with respect (grudging or generous), was now showing its reverse side, in Harriet lying pale and unsociable on her bed, and then coming down determined to be one of the party but failing, and going upstairs again; in Dorothy’s grim patience, for she worked from dawn to dusk and often in the night, too; and in the children’s querulousness and demands for attention – particularly little Paul’s.

Another girl came in from the village, found by Dr Brett. She was, like the other three, pleasant, lazy, seeing nothing to be done unless her attention was directed to it, affronted by the amount of work needed by four children. She did, however, enjoy the people sitting around and talking, the sociable atmosphere, and in no time she was sharing meals and sitting around with them; she found it quite in order to be waited on by them. Everyone knew that she would find an excuse to leave when this delightful house party broke up.

Which it did, rather earlier than usual. It was not only Jessica (in her bright summer clothes that made no concession to the English winter except for a slight cardigan) who remembered people elsewhere who had been promised visits. Jessica took herself off, and Deborah with her. James followed. Frederick had to finish a book. The enraptured schoolgirl, Bridget, found Harriet lying down, her hands pressed into her stomach, tears running down her face, moaning from some pain she would not specify – and was so shocked she, too, wept and said she had always known it was too good to last, and went off back home to her mother, who had just remarried and did not really want her.

The girl who had come to help went home, and David looked for a trained nanny in London. He could not afford one, but James had said he would pay for it. Until Harriet was better, he said: uncharacteristically grumpy, he was making it clear he thought that Harriet had chosen this life and now should not expect everyone to foot the bill.

But they could not find a nanny: the nannies all wanted to go abroad with families who had a baby, or perhaps two; or to be in London. This small town, and the four children, with another coming, put them off.

Instead, Alice, a cousin of Frederick’s, a widow down on her luck, came to help Dorothy. Alice was quick, fussy, nervous, like a little grey terrier. She had three grown-up children, and grandchildren, but said she did not want to be a nuisance to them, a remark that caused Dorothy to make dry remarks, which Harriet felt like accusations. Dorothy was not pleased to have a woman of her own age sharing authority, but it could not be helped. Harriet seemed unable to do anything much.

She went back to Dr Brett, for she could not sleep or rest because of the energy of the foetus, which seemed to be trying to tear its way out of her stomach.

‘Just look at that,’ she said as her stomach heaved up, convulsed, subsided. ‘Five months.’

He made the usual tests, and said, ‘It’s large for five months, but not abnormally so.’

‘Have you ever had a case like this before?’ Harriet sounded sharp, peremptory, and the doctor gave her an annoyed look.

‘I’ve certainly seen energetic babies before,’ he said shortly, and when she demanded, ‘At five months? Like this?’ he refused to meet her – was dishonest, as she felt it. ‘I’ll give you a sedative,’ he said. For her. But she thought of it as something to quiet the baby.

Now, afraid of asking Dr Brett, she begged tranquillizers from friends, and from her sisters. She did not tell David how many she was taking, and this was the first time she had hidden anything from him. The foetus was quiet for about an hour after she dosed herself, and she was given a respite from the ceaseless battering and striving. It was so bad that she would cry out in pain. At night, David heard her moan, or whimper, but now he did not offer comfort, for it seemed that these days she did not find his arms around her any help.

‘My God,’ she said, or grunted, or groaned, and then suddenly sat up, or scrambled out of bed and went doubled up out of the room, fast, escaping from the pain.

He had stopped putting his hand on her stomach, in the old companionable way, for what he felt there was beyond what he could manage with. It was not possible that such a tiny creature could be showing such fearful strength; and yet it did. And nothing he said seemed to reach Harriet, who, he felt, was possessed, had gone right away from him, in this battle with the foetus, which he could not share.

He might wake to watch her pacing the room in the dark, hour after hour. When she at last lay down, regulating her breathing, she would start up again, with an exclamation, and, knowing he was awake, would go downstairs to the big family room where she could stride up and down, groaning, swearing, weeping, without being observed.

As the Easter holiday approached and the two older women made remarks about getting the house ready, Harriet said, ‘They can’t come. They can’t possibly come.’

‘They’ll expect it,’ said Dorothy.

‘We can manage,’ said Alice.

‘No,’ said Harriet.

Wails and protests from the children, and Harriet did not soften. This made Dorothy even more disapproving. Here she was, with Alice, two capable women, doing all the work, and the least Harriet could do …

‘You’re sure you don’t want them to come?’ asked David, who had been begged by the children to make her change her mind.

‘Oh, do what you like,’ Harriet said.

But when Easter came, Harriet was proved right: it was not a success. Her strained, abstracted face as she sat there at her table, stiffly upright, braced for the next jolt, or jab, stopped conversation, spoiled the fun, the good times. ‘What have you got in there?’ asked William, jocular but uneasy, seeing Harriet’s stomach convulse. ‘A wrestler?’

‘God only knows,’ said Harriet, and she was bitter, not joking. ‘How am I going to get through to July?’ she demanded, in a low appalled voice. ‘I can’t! I simply can’t do it!’

They all – David, too – judged that she was simply exhausted because this baby was coming too soon. She must be humoured. Alone in her ordeal – and she had to be, she knew that, and did not blame her family for not accepting what she was being slowly forced to accept – she became silent, morose, suspicious of them all and their thoughts about her. The only thing that helped was to keep moving.

If a dose of some sedative kept the enemy – so she now thought of this savage thing inside her – quiet for an hour, then she made the most of the time, and slept, grabbing sleep to her, holding it, drinking it, before she leaped out of bed as it woke with a heave and a stretch that made her feel sick. She would clean the kitchen, the living-room, the stairs, wash windows, scrub cupboards, her whole body energetically denying the pain. She insisted that her mother and Alice let her work, and when they said there was no need to scrub the kitchen again, she said, ‘For the kitchen no, for me yes.’ By breakfast time she might have already worked for three or four hours, and looked hag-ridden. She took David to the station, and the two older children to school, then parked the car somewhere and walked. She almost ran through streets she hardly saw, hour after hour, until she understood she was causing comment. Then she took to driving a short way out of the town, where she walked along the country lanes, fast, sometimes running. People in passing cars would turn, amazed, to see this hurrying driven woman, white-faced, hair flying, open-mouthed, panting, arms clenched across her front. If they stopped to offer help, she shook her head and ran on.

Time passed. It did pass, though she was held in an order of time different from those around her – and not the pregnant woman’s time either, which is slow, a calendar of the growth of the hidden being. Her time was endurance, containing pain. Phantoms and chimeras inhabited her brain. She would think, When the scientists make experiments, welding two kinds of animal together, of different sizes, then I suppose this is what the poor mother feels. She imagined pathetic botched creatures, horribly real to her, the products of a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little spaniel; a lion and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger and a goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws.

In the afternoon, she collected the children from school, and, later, David from the station. She walked around the kitchen as suppers were eaten, encouraged the children to watch television, and then went up to the third floor where she hastened up and down the corridor.

The family could hear her swift heavy steps, up there, and did not let their eyes meet.

Time passed. It did pass. The seventh month was better, and this was because of the amount of drugs she took. Appalled at the distance that had grown up between her and her husband, between her and the children, her mother, Alice, she now planned her day for one thing: that she would seem to be normal between the hours of four, when Helen and Luke ended school, until eight or nine, when they went to bed. The drugs did not seem to be affecting her much: she was willing them to leave her alone and to reach the baby, the foetus – this creature with whom she was locked in a struggle to survive. And for those hours it was quiet, or if it showed signs of coming awake, and fighting her, she took another dose.

Oh how eager everyone was to welcome her back into the family, normal, herself: they ignored, because she wanted them to, her tenseness, her tiredness.

David would put his arms around her and say, ‘Oh, Harriet, you are all right?’

Two months to go.

‘Yes, yes, I am. Really.’ And she silently addressed the being crouching in her womb: ‘Now you shut up or I’ll take another pill.’ It seemed to her that it listened and understood.

A scene in the kitchen: family supper. Harriet and David commanded the head and foot of the table. Luke and Helen sat together on one side. Alice held little Paul, who could never get enough cuddling: he got so little from his mother. Jane sat near Dorothy’s place, who was at the stove, ladle in her hand. Harriet looked at her mother, a large healthy woman in her fifties, with her bush of iron-grey curls, and her pink fresh face, and her large blue eyes ‘like lollipops’ – a family joke – and thought, I’m as strong as she is. I’ll survive. And she smiled at Alice, thin, wiry, tough, energetic, and thought again, These elderly women, look at them, they’ve survived everything.

Dorothy was filling their plates with vegetable soup. She sat down, at leisure, with her own plate. Bread was passed around, a big basket of it.

Happiness had returned and sat at the table with them – and Harriet’s hand, unseen below the level of the table-top, was held over the enemy: You be quiet.

‘A story,’ said Luke. ‘A story, Daddy.’

On days when there was school tomorrow, the children had supper early and went up to bed. But on Fridays and Saturdays they ate with the grown-ups and a story was told during the meal.

Here, enclosed in the hospitable kitchen, it was warm and steamy with the smell of soup. Outside was a blustering night. May. The curtains were not drawn. A branch stretched across the window: a spring branch, full of pristine blossom, pale in the twilight, but the air that beat on the panes had been blasted down south from some iceberg or snow-field. Harriet was spooning in soup, and broke hunks of bread into it. Her appetite was enormous, insatiable – so bad she was ashamed and raided the fridge when no one could see her. She would interrupt her nocturnal peregrinations to stuff into herself anything she could find to eat. She even had secret caches like an alcoholic’s hoards, only it was food: chocolate, bread, pies.

David began, ‘Two children, a boy and a girl, set off one day to have an adventure in the forest. They went a long way into the forest. It was hot outside, but under the trees it was cool. They saw a deer lying down, resting. Birds flitted about and sang to them.’

David stopped to eat soup. Helen and Luke sat with their eyes on his face, motionless. Jane listened, too, but differently. Four years old: she looked to see how they took in the story, and copied them, fixing her eyes on her father.

‘Do the birds sing to us?’ enquired Luke doubtfully, frowning. He had a strong, severe face; and, as always, he demanded the truth. ‘When we are in the garden and the birds sing, are they singing to us?’

‘Of course not, silly,’ said Helen. ‘It was a magic forest.’

‘Of course they sing to you,’ said Dorothy firmly.

The children, first hunger appeased, sat with their spoons in their hands, wide eyes on their father. Harriet’s heart oppressed her: it was their open trustfulness, their helplessness. The television was on: a professionally cool voice was telling about some murders in a London suburb. She lumbered over to turn it off, plodded back, served herself more soup, piled in the bread … She listened to David’s voice, tonight the storyteller’s voice, so often heard in the kitchen, hers, Dorothy’s –

‘When the children got hungry, they found a bush covered with chocolate sweets. Then they found a pool made of orange juice. They were sleepy. They lay under a bush near the friendly deer. When they woke up, they said thank you to the deer and went on.

‘Suddenly the little girl found she was alone. She and her brother had lost each other. She wanted to go home. She did not know which way to walk. She was looking for another friendly deer, or a sparrow, or any bird, to tell her where she was and show her the way out of the forest. She wandered about for a long time, and then she was thirsty again. She bent over a pool wondering if it would be orange juice, but it was water, clear pure forest water, and it tasted of plants and stones. She drank, from her hands.’ Here the two older children reached for their glasses and drank. Jane interlaced her fingers to form a cup.

‘She sat there by the pool. Soon it would be dark. She bent over the pool to see if there was a fish who could tell her the way out of the forest, but she saw something she didn’t expect. It was a girl’s face, and she was looking straight up at her. It was a face she had never seen in her whole life. This strange girl was smiling, but it was a nasty smile, not friendly, and the little girl thought this other girl was going to reach up out of the water and pull her down into it …’

A heavy, shocked, indrawn breath from Dorothy, who felt this was too frightening at bedtime.

But the children sat frozen with attention. Little Paul, grizzling on Alice’s lap, earned from Helen ‘Be quiet, shut up.’

‘Phyllis – that was the little girl’s name – had never seen such frightening eyes.’

‘Is that Phyllis in my nursery school?’ asked Jane.

‘No,’ said Luke.

‘No,’ said Helen.

David had stopped. Apparently for inspiration. He was frowning, had an abstracted look, as if he had a headache. As for Harriet, she was wanting to cry out, ‘Stop – stop it! You are talking about me – this is what you are feeling about me!’ She could not believe that David did not see it.

‘What happened then?’ asked Luke. ‘What happened exactly?’

‘Wait,’ said David. ‘Wait, my soup …’ He ate.

‘I know what happened,’ said Dorothy firmly. ‘Phyllis decided to leave that nasty pool at once. She ran fast along a path until she bumped into her brother. He was looking for her. They held each other’s hands and they ran out of the forest and they ran safely home.’

‘That was it, exactly,’ said David. He was smiling ruefully, but looked bemused.

‘And that was what really really happened, Daddy?’ demanded Luke, anxious.

‘Absolutely,’ said David.

‘Who was that girl in the pool, who was she?’ demanded Helen, looking from her father to her mother.

‘Oh just a magic girl,’ said David casually. ‘I have no idea. She just materialized.’

‘What’s materialized?’ asked Luke, saying the word with difficulty.

‘It’s bedtime,’ said Dorothy.

‘But what is materialized?’ Luke insisted.

‘We haven’t had any pudding!’ cried Jane.

‘There’s no pudding, there’s fruit,’ said Dorothy.

‘What is materialized, Daddy?’ Luke anxiously persisted.

‘It is when something that wasn’t there suddenly is there.’

‘But why, why is it?’ wailed Helen, distressed.

Dorothy said, ‘Upstairs, children.’

Helen took an apple, Luke another, and Jane lifted some bread off her mother’s plate with a quick, conscious, mischievous smile. She had not been upset by the story.

The three children went noisily up the stairs, and baby Paul looked after them, excluded, his face puckering, ready to cry.

Alice swiftly got up with him and went after the children, saying, ‘No one told me stories when I was little!’ It was hard to tell whether this was a complaint or, ‘and I’m better for it.’

Suddenly, Luke appeared on the landing. ‘Is everyone coming for the summer holidays?’

David glanced worriedly at Harriet – then away. Dorothy looked steadily at her daughter.

‘Yes,’ said Harriet weakly. ‘Of course.’

Luke called up the stairs, ‘She said, “Of course”!’

Dorothy said, ‘You will have just had this baby.’

‘It’s up to you and Alice,’ said Harriet. ‘If you feel you can’t cope, then you must say so.’

‘It seems to me that I cope,’ said Dorothy, dry.

‘Yes, I know,’ said David quickly. ‘You’re marvellous.’

‘And you don’t know what you would have done –’

‘Don’t,’ said David. And to Harriet: ‘Much better that we put things off, and have them all at Christmas.’

‘The children will be so disappointed,’ said Harriet.

This did not sound like her old insistence: it was flat and indifferent. Her husband and her mother examined her curiously – so Harriet felt their inspection of her, detached, unkind. She said grimly, ‘Well, perhaps this baby will be born early. Surely it must.’ She laughed painfully, and then suddenly she got up, exclaiming, ‘I must move, I have to!’ and began her dogged, painful hour-after-hour walk back and forth, up and down.

She went to Dr Brett at eight months and asked him to induce the baby.

He looked critically at her and said, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in it.’

‘I don’t. But this is different.’

‘Not that I can see.’

‘It’s because you don’t want to. It’s not you who is carrying this –’ She cut off monster, afraid of antagonizing him. ‘Look,’ she said, trying to sound calm, but her voice was angry and accusing, ‘would you say I was an unreasonable woman? Hysterical? Difficult? Just a pathetic hysterical woman?’

‘I would say that you are utterly worn out. Bone tired. You never did find being pregnant easy, did you? Have you forgotten? I’ve had you sitting here through four pregnancies, with all kinds of problems – all credit to you, you put up with everything very well.’

‘But it’s not the same thing, it is absolutely different, I don’t understand why you can’t see it. Can’t you see it?’ She thrust out her stomach, which was heaving and – as she felt it – seething as she sat there.

The doctor looked dubiously at her stomach, sighed, and wrote her a prescription for more sedatives.

No, he couldn’t see it. Rather, he wouldn’t – that was the point. Not only he, but all of them, they wouldn’t see how different this was.

And as she walked, strode, ran along the country lanes, she fantasized that she took the big kitchen knife, cut open her own stomach, lifted out the child – and when they actually set eyes on each other, after this long blind struggle, what would she see?

Soon, nearly a month early, the pains began. Once she started, labour had always gone quickly. Dorothy rang David in London, and at once took Harriet into hospital. For the first time, Harriet had insisted on a hospital, surprising everyone.

By the time she was there, there were strong wrenching pains, worse, she knew, than ever in the past. The baby seemed to be fighting its way out. She was bruised – she knew it; inside she must be one enormous black bruise … and no one would ever know.

When at last the moment came when she could be given oblivion, she cried out, ‘Thank God, thank God, it’s over at last!’ She heard a nurse saying, ‘This one’s a real little toughie, look at him.’ Then a woman’s voice was saying, ‘Mrs Lovatt, Mrs Lovatt, are you with us? Come back to us! Your husband is here, dear. You’ve a healthy boy.’

‘A real little wrestler,’ said Dr Brett. ‘He came out fighting the whole world.’

She raised herself with difficulty, because the lower half of her body was too sore to move. The baby was put into her arms. Eleven pounds of him. The others had not been more than seven pounds. He was muscular, yellowish, long. It seemed as if he were trying to stand up, pushing his feet into her side.

‘He’s a funny little chap,’ said David, and he sounded dismayed.

He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all. He had a heavy-shouldered hunched look, as if he were crouching there as he lay. His forehead sloped from his eyes to his crown. His hair grew in an unusual pattern from the double crown where started a wedge or triangle that came low on the forehead, the hair lying forward in a thick yellowish stubble, while the side and back hair grew downwards. His hands were thick and heavy, with pads of muscle in the palms. He opened his eyes and looked straight up into his mother’s face. They were focused greeny-yellow eyes, like lumps of soapstone. She had been waiting to exchange looks with the creature who, she had been sure, had been trying to hurt her, but there was no recognition there. And her heart contracted with pity for him: poor little beast, his mother disliking him so much … But she heard herself say nervously, though she tried to laugh, ‘He’s like a troll, or a goblin or something.’ And she cuddled him, to make up. But he was stiff and heavy.

‘Come, Harriet,’ said Dr Brett, annoyed at her. And she thought, I’ve been through this with Dr bloody Brett four times and it’s always been marvellous, and now he’s like a schoolmaster.

She bared her breast and offered the child her nipple. The nurses, the doctor, her mother, and her husband stood watching, with the smiles that this moment imposed. But there was none of the atmosphere of festival, of achievement, no champagne; on the contrary, there was a strain in everyone, apprehension. A strong, sucking reflex, and then hard gums clamped down on her nipple, and she winced. The child looked at her and bit, hard.

‘Well,’ said Harriet, trying to laugh, removing him.

‘Try him a little more,’ said the nurse.

He was not crying. Harriet held him out, challenging the nurse with her eyes to take him. The nurse, mouth tight with disapproval, took the baby, and he was put unprotesting in his cot. He had not cried since he was born, except for a first roar of protest, or perhaps surprise.

The four children were brought in to see their new brother in the hospital ward. The two other women who shared the room with her had got out of bed and taken their babies to a day-room. Harriet had refused to get out of bed. She told the doctors and nurses she needed time for her internal bruises to heal; she said this almost defiantly, carelessly, indifferent to their critical looks.

David stood at the end of the bed, holding baby Paul.

Harriet yearned for this baby, this little child, from whom she had been separated so soon. She loved the look of him, the comical soft little face, with soft blue eyes – like bluebells, she thought –and his soft little limbs … it was as if she were sliding her hands along them, and then enclosing his feet in her palms. A real baby, a real little child …

The three older children stared down at the newcomer who was so different from them all: of a different substance, so it seemed to Harriet. Partly this was because she was still responding to the look of him with her memories of his difference in the womb, but partly it was because of his heavy, sallow lumpishness. And then there was this strange head of his, sloping back from the eyebrow ridges.

‘We are going to call him Ben,’ said Harriet.

‘Are we?’ said David.

‘Yes, it suits him.’

Luke on one side, Helen on the other, took Ben’s small hands, and said, ‘Hello, Ben.’ ‘Hello, Ben.’ But the baby did not look at them.

Jane, the four-year-old, took one of his feet in her hand, then in her two hands, but he vigorously kicked her away.

Harriet found herself thinking, I wonder what the mother would look like, the one who would welcome this – alien.

She stayed in bed a week – that is, until she felt she could manage the struggle ahead – and then went home with her new child.

That night, in the connubial bedroom, she sat up against a stack of pillows, nursing the baby. David was watching.

Ben sucked so strongly that he emptied the first breast in less than a minute. Always, when a breast was nearly empty, he ground his gums together, and so she had to snatch him away before he could begin. It looked as if she were unkindly depriving him of the breast, and she heard David’s breathing change. Ben roared with rage, fastened like a leech to the other nipple, and sucked so hard she felt that her whole breast was disappearing down his throat. This time, she left him on the nipple until he ground his gums hard together and she cried out, pulling him away.

‘He’s extraordinary,’ said David, giving her the support she needed.

‘Yes, he is, he’s absolutely not ordinary.’

‘But he’s all right, he’s just …’

‘A normal healthy fine baby,’ said Harriet, bitter, quoting the hospital.

David was silent: it was this anger, this bitterness in her that he could not handle.

She was holding Ben up in the air. He was wrestling, fighting, struggling, crying in his characteristic way, which was a roar or a bellow, while he went yellowish white with anger – not red, like a normal cross baby.

When she held him to get up the wind, he seemed to be standing in her arms, and she felt weak with fear at the thought that this strength had so recently been inside her, and she at its mercy. For months, he had been fighting to get out, just as now he fought in her grasp to become independent.

When she laid him in his cot, which she was always glad to do because her arms ached so badly, he bellowed out his rage, but soon lay quiet, not sleeping, fully alert, his eyes focused, and his whole body flexing and unflexing with a strong pushing movement of heels and head she was familiar with: it was what had made her feel she was being torn apart when he was inside her.

She went back into bed beside David. He put out his arm, so that she could lie by him, inside it, but she felt treacherous and untruthful, for he would not have liked what she was thinking.

Soon she was exhausted with feeding Ben. Not that he did not thrive: he did. He was two pounds over his birth weight when he was a month, which was when he would have been less than a week old if he had gone full term.

Her breasts were painful. Making more milk than they ever had had to do, her chest swelled into two bursting white globes long before the next feed was due. But Ben was already roaring for it, and she fed him, and he drained every drop in two or three minutes. She felt the milk being dragged in streams from her. Now he had begun something new: he had taken to interrupting the fierce sucking several times during a feed, and bringing his gums together in the hard grinding movement that made her cry out in pain. His small cold eyes seemed to her malevolent.

‘I’m going to put him on the bottle,’ she said to Dorothy, who was watching this battle with the look, it seemed to Harriet, everyone had when watching Ben. She was absolutely still and intent, fascinated, almost hypnotized, but there was repugnance there, too. And fear?

Harriet had expected her mother to protest with ‘But he’s only five weeks old!’ – but what Dorothy said was ‘Yes, you must, or you’ll be ill.’ A little later, watching Ben roar, and twist and fight, she remarked. ‘They’ll all be coming soon for the summer.’ She spoke in a way new to her, as if listening to what she said and afraid of what she might say. Harriet recognized it, for this was how she felt saying anything at all. So do people speak whose thoughts are running along secretly in channels they would rather other people did not know about.

On that same day, Dorothy came into the bedroom where Harriet fed Ben, and saw Harriet pulling the child clear of breasts that had bruises all around the nipples. She said, ‘Do it. Do it now. I’ve bought the bottles, and the milk. I’m sterilizing the bottles now.’

‘Yes, wean him,’ said David, agreeing at once. But she had fed the other four for months, and there had been hardly a bottle in the house.

The adults, Harriet and David, Dorothy and Alice, were around the big table, the children having gone up to bed, and Harriet tried Ben with the bottle. He emptied it in a moment, while his body clenched and unclenched, his knees up in his stomach, then extended like a spring. He roared at the empty bottle.

‘Give him another,’ sad Dorothy, and set about preparing one.

‘What an appetite,’ said Alice socially, trying hard, but she looked frightened.

Ben emptied the second bottle: he was supporting it with his two fists, by himself. Harriet barely needed to touch it.

‘Neanderthal baby,’ said Harriet.

‘Oh come on, poor little chap,’ said David, uneasy.

‘Oh God, David,’ said Harriet, ‘poor Harriet is more like it.’

‘All right, all right – the genes have come up with something special this time.’

‘But what, that’s the point,’ said Harriet. ‘What is he?’

The other three said nothing – or, rather, said by their silence that they would rather not face the implications of it.

‘All right,’ said Harriet, ‘let’s say he has a healthy appetite, if that makes everyone happy.’

Dorothy took the fighting creature from Harriet, who collapsed exhausted back in her chair. Dorothy’s face changed as she felt the clumsy weight of the child, the intransigence, and she shifted her position so that Ben’s pistoning legs could not reach her.

Soon Ben was taking in twice the amount of food recommended for his age, or stage: ten or more bottles a day.

He got a milk infection, and Harriet took him to Dr Brett.

‘A breast-fed baby shouldn’t get infections,’ he said.

‘He’s not breast-fed.’

‘That’s not like you, Harriet! How old is he?’

‘Two months,’ said Harriet. She opened her dress and showed her breasts, still making milk, as if they responded to Ben’s never appeased appetite. They were bruised black all around the nipples.

Dr Brett looked at the poor breasts in silence, and Harriet looked at him: his decent, concerned doctor’s face confronting a problem beyond him.

‘Naughty baby,’ he conceded, and Harriet laughed out loud in astonishment.

Dr Brett reddened, met her eyes briefly in acknowledgement of her reproach, and then looked away.

‘All I need is a prescription for diarrhoea,’ said Harriet. She added deliberately, staring at him, willing him to look at her, ‘After all, I don’t want to kill the nasty little brute.’

He sighed, took off his glasses, and rubbed them slowly. He was frowning, but not in disapproval of her. He said, ‘It is not abnormal to take a dislike to a child. I see it all the time. Unfortunately.’

Harriet said nothing, but she was smiling unpleasantly, and knew it.

‘Let me have a look at him.’

Harriet took Ben out of the pram, and laid him on the table. At once he turned on to his stomach and tried to get himself on all fours. He actually succeeded for a moment before collapsing.

She looked steadily at Dr Brett, but he turned away to his desk to write a prescription.

‘There’s obviously nothing much wrong with him,’ he said, with the same baffled, offending note that Ben did bring out of people.

‘Have you ever seen a two-month baby do that?’ she insisted.

‘No. I must admit I haven’t. Well, let me know how you get on.’

The news had flown around the family that the new baby was successfully born, and everything was all right. Meaning that Harriet was. A lot of people wrote and rang, saying they were looking forward to the summer holidays. They said, ‘We are longing to see the new baby.’ They said, ‘Is little Paul still as delicious as he was?’ They arrived bringing wine and summer produce from all over the country, and all kinds of people stood bottling fruit and making jams and chutneys with Alice and Dorothy. A crowd of children played in the garden or were taken off to the woods for picnics. Little Paul, so cuddlesome and funny, was always on somebody’s lap, and his laugh was heard everywhere: this was his real nature, overshadowed by Ben and his demands.

Because the house was so full, the older children were in one room. Ben was already in a cot with high wooden slatted sides, where he spent his time pulling himself up to a sitting position, falling, rolling over, pulling himself up … This cot was put in the room where the older children were, in the hope that Ben would be made social, friendly, by his siblings. It was not a success. He ignored them, would not respond to their advances, and his crying – or, rather, bellowing – made Luke shout at him, ‘Oh shut up!’ – but then he burst into tears at his own unkindness. Helen, at the age to cherish a baby, tried to hold Ben, but he was too strong. Then all the older children in the house were put into the attic, where they could make as much noise as they wanted, and Ben went back into his own room, ‘the baby’s room’ – and from there they heard his grunts and snuffles and roars of frustration as he tried some feat of strength and fell down.

The new baby had of course been offered to everyone to hold, when they asked, but it was painful to see how their faces changed confronting this phenomenon. Ben was always quickly handed back. Harriet came into the kitchen one day and heard her sister Sarah say to a cousin, ‘That Ben gives me the creeps. He’s like a goblin or a dwarf or something. I’d rather have poor Amy any day.’

This afflicted Harriet with remorse: poor Ben, whom no one could love. She certainly could not! And David, the good father, hardly touched him. She lifted Ben from his cot, so much like a cage, and put him on the big bed, and sat with him. ‘Poor Ben, poor Ben,’ she crooned, stroking him. He clutched her shirt with both hands, pulled himself up, and stood on her thigh. The hard little feet hurt her. She tried to cuddle him, persuade him to soften against her … Soon she gave up, put him back in his pen, or cage … a roar of frustration because he had been put down, and she held out her hands to him, ‘Poor Ben, dear Ben,’ and he grasped her hands and pulled himself up and stood grunting and roaring with triumph. Four months old … He was like an angry, hostile little troll.

She did make a point of going to him every day when the other children were out of the way, and taking him to the big bed for a time of petting and play, as she had with all of them. Never, not once, did he subside into a loving moment. He resisted, he strove, he fought – and then he turned his head and closed his jaws over her thumb. Not as an ordinary baby will, in the sucking bite that relieves the pain of teething, or explores the possibilites of a mouth, tongue: she felt her bone bend, and saw his cold triumphant grin.

She heard herself say, ‘You aren’t going to do me in, I won’t let you.’

But for a while she did try hard to make him ordinary. She took him down into the big living-room where all the family were, and put him into the playpen there – until his presence affected people, and they tended to go away. Or she took him to the table in her arms, as she had done with the others – but could not hold him, he was too strong.

In spite of Ben, the summer holidays were wonderful. Again, there were two months of it. Again, David’s father, briefly descending, gave them a cheque, and they could not have managed without. ‘It is like being in the middle of some bloody great fruit pudding, this house,’ said James. ‘God knows how you do it.’

But afterwards, when Harriet thought of those holidays, what she remembered was how they all looked at Ben. There would be a long thoughtful stare, puzzled, even anxious; but then came fear, though everyone tried to conceal it. There was horror, too: which is what Harriet felt, more and more. He did not seem to mind, or even to notice. It was hard to make out what he did think of other people.

Harriet lay inside David’s arms one night before sleeping, talking over the day, as they always did, and she remarked, out of a current of thoughts about the summer, ‘Do you know what this house is good for? What people come for? It’s for a good time, that’s all.’

He was surprised. Even – she felt – shocked. ‘But what else do we do it for?’ he enquired.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, sounding helpless. Then she turned in to his embrace, and he held her while she wept. They had not yet resumed love-making. This had never happened before. Making love during pregnancy, and very soon after pregnancy – this had never been a problem. But now they were both thinking, That creature arrived when we were being as careful as we knew how – suppose another like him comes? For they both felt – secretly, they were ashamed of the thoughts they had about Ben – that he had willed himself to be born, had invaded their ordinariness, which had no defences against him or anything like him. But not making love was not only a strain for them both, it was a barrier, because they had to be reminded continually of what threatened them … so they felt.

Then something bad happened. Just after all the family had gone away, as the school term began, Paul went into Ben’s room by himself. Of all the children, he was the most fascinated by Ben. Dorothy and Alice, who were together in the kitchen, Harriet having gone off to take the older ones to school, heard screams. They ran upstairs to find that Paul had put his hand in to Ben through the cot bars, and Ben had grabbed the hand and pulled Paul hard against the bars, bending the arm deliberately backwards. The two women freed Paul. They did not bother to scold Ben, who was crowing with pleasure and achievement. Paul’s arm was badly sprained.

No one felt like saying to the children, ‘Be careful of Ben.’ But there was no need after the incident with Paul’s arm. That evening the children heard what had happened, but did not look at their parents and Dorothy and Alice. They did not look at each other. They stood silent, heads bent. This told the adults that the children’s attitudes to Ben were already formed: they had discussed Ben and knew what to think about him. Luke, Helen and Jane went away upstairs silently, and it was a bad moment for the parents.

Alice said, watching them, ‘Poor little things.’

Dorothy said, ‘It’s a shame.’

Harriet felt that these two women, these two elderly, tough, seasoned survivors, were condemning her, Harriet, out of their vast experience of life. She glanced at David, and saw he felt the same. Condemnation, and criticism, and dislike: Ben seemed to cause these emotions, bring them forth out of people into the light …

The day after this incident, Alice announced that she felt she was no longer needed in this house, she would go back to her own life: she was sure Dorothy could manage. After all, Jane was going to school now. Jane would not have gone to school this year, a proper school, all day, for another year: they had sent her early. Precisely because of Ben, though no one had said it. Alice left, with no suggestion it was because of Ben. But she had told Dorothy, who had told the parents, that Ben gave her the horrors. He must be a changeling. Dorothy, always sensible, calm, matter-of-fact, had laughed at her. ‘Yes, I laughed at her,’ she reported. Then, grim, ‘But why did I?’

David and Harriet conferred, in the low, almost guilty, incredulous voices that Ben seemed to impose. This baby was not six months old yet … he was going to destroy their family life. He was already destroying it. They would have to make sure that he was in his room at mealtimes and when the children were downstairs with the adults. Family times, in short.

Now Ben was almost always in his room, like a prisoner. He outgrew his barred cot at nine months: Harriet caught him just as he was about to fall over the top. A small bed, an ordinary one, was put into his room. He walked easily, holding on to the walls, or a chair. He had never crawled, had pulled himself straight up on to his feet. There were toys all over the floor – or, rather, the fragments of them. He did not play with them: he banged them on the floor or the walls until they broke. The day he stood alone, by himself, without holding on, he roared out his triumph. All the other children had laughed, chuckled, and wanted to be loved, admired, praised, on reaching this moment of achievement. This one did not. It was a cold triumph, and he staggered about, eyes gleaming with hard pleasure, while he ignored his mother. Harriet often wondered what he saw when he looked at her: nothing in his touch or his look ever seemed to say, This is my mother.

One early morning, something took Harriet quickly out of her bed into the baby’s room, and there she saw Ben balanced on the window-sill. It was high – heaven only knew how he had got up there! The window was open. In a moment he would have fallen out of it. Harriet was thinking, What a pity I came in …and refused to be shocked at herself. Heavy bars were put in, and there Ben would stand on the sill, gripping the bars and shaking them, and surveying the outside world, letting out his thick, raucous cries. All the Christmas holidays he was kept in that room. It was extraordinary how people, asking – cautiously – ‘How is Ben?’ and hearing, ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ did not ask again. Sometimes a yell from Ben loud enough to reach downstairs silenced a conversation. Then the frown appeared on their faces that Harriet dreaded, waiting for it: she knew it masked some comment or thought that could not be voiced.

And so the house was not the same; there was a constraint and a wariness in everybody. Harriet knew that sometimes people went up to look at Ben, out of the fearful, uneasy curiosity he evoked, when she was out of the way. She knew when they had seen him, because of the way they looked at her afterwards. As if I were a criminal! she raged to herself. She spent far too much of her time quietly seething, but did not seem able to stop. Even David, she believed, condemned her. She said to him, ‘I suppose in the old times, in primitive societies, this was how they treated a woman who’d given birth to a freak. As if it was her fault. But we are supposed to be civilized!’

He said, in the patient, watchful way he now had with her, ‘You exaggerate everything.’

‘That’s a good word – for this situation! Congratulations! Exaggerate!’

‘Oh God, Harriet,’ he said differently, helplessly, ‘don’t let’s do this – if we don’t stand together, then …’

It was at Easter that the schoolgirl Bridget, who had returned to see if this miraculous kingdom of everyday life was perhaps still there, enquired, ‘What is wrong with him? Is he a mongol?’

‘Down’s syndrome,’ said Harriet. ‘No one calls it mongol now. But no, he’s not.’

‘What’s wrong with him, then?’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Harriet airily. ‘As you can see for yourself.’

Bridget went away, and never came back.

The summer holidays again. It was 1975. There were fewer guests: some had written or rung to say they could not afford the train fare, or the petrol. ‘Any excuse is better than none,’ remarked Dorothy.

‘But people are hard up,’ said David.

‘They weren’t so hard up before that they couldn’t afford to come and live here for weeks at a time at your expense.’

Ben was over a year old now. He had not said one word yet, but in other ways he was more normal. Now it was difficult to keep him in his room. Children playing in the garden heard his thick, angry cries, and saw him up on the sill trying to push aside his bars.

So he came out of his little prison and joined them downstairs. He seemed to know that he ought to be like them. He would stand, head lowered, watching how everyone talked, and laughed, sitting around the big table; or sat talking in the living-room, while the children ran in and out. His eyes were on one face, then another: whomever he was looking at became conscious of that insistent gaze and stopped talking; or turned a back, or a shoulder, so as not to have to see him. He could silence a room full of people just by being there, or disperse them: they went off making excuses.

Towards the end of the holidays, someone came bringing a dog, a little terrier. Ben could not leave it alone. Wherever the dog was, Ben followed. He did not pet it, or stroke it: he stood staring. One morning when Harriet came down to start breakfast for the children, the dog was lying dead on the kitchen floor. It had had a heart attack? Suddenly sick with suspicion, she rushed up to see if Ben was in his room: he was squatting on his bed, and when she came in, he looked up and laughed, but soundlessly, in his way, which was like a baring of the teeth. He had opened his door, gone quietly past his sleeping parents, down the stairs, found the dog, killed it, and gone back up again, quietly, into his room, and shut the door … all that, by himself! She locked Ben in: if he could kill a dog, then why not a child?

When she went down again, the children were crowding around the dead dog. And then the adults came, and it was obvious what they thought.

Of course it was impossible – a small child killing a lively dog. But officially the dog’s death remained a mystery; the vet said it had been strangled. This business of the dog spoiled what was left of the holidays, and people went off home early.

Dorothy said, ‘People are going to think twice about coming again.’

Three months later, Mr McGregor, the old grey cat, was killed in the same way. He had always been afraid of Ben, and kept out of reach. But Ben must have stalked him, or found him sleeping.

At Christmas the house was half empty.

It was the worst year of Harriet’s life, and she was not able to care that people avoided them. Every day was a long nightmare. She woke in the morning unable to believe she would ever get through to the evening. Ben was always on his feet, and had to be watched every second. He slept very little. He spent most of the night standing on his window-sill, staring into the garden, and if Harriet looked in on him, he would turn and give her a long stare, alien, chilling: in the half dark of the room he really did look like a little troll or a hobgoblin crouching there. If he was locked in during the day, he screamed and bellowed so that the whole house resounded with it, and they were all afraid the police would arrive. He would suddenly, for no reason she could see, take off and run into the garden, and then out the gate and into the street. One day, she ran a mile or more after him, seeing only that stubby squat little figure going through traffic lights, ignoring cars that hooted and people who screamed warnings at him. She was weeping, panting, half crazed, desperate to get to him before something terrible happened, but she was praying, Oh, do run him over, do, yes, please … She caught up with him just before a main road, grabbed him, and held the fighting child with all her strength. He was spitting and hissing, while he jerked like a monster fish in her arms. A taxi went by; she called to it, she pushed the child in, and got in after him, holding him fast by an arm that seemed would break with his flailing about and fighting.

What could be done? Again she went to Dr Brett, who examined him and said he was physically in order.

Harriet described his behaviour and the doctor listened.

From time to time, a well-controlled incredulity appeared on his face, and he kept his eyes down, fiddling with pencils.

‘You can ask David, ask my mother,’ said Harriet.

‘He’s a hyperactive child – that’s how they are described these days, I believe,’ said old-fashioned Dr Brett. She went to him because he was old-fashioned.

At last he did look at her, not evading her.

‘What do you expect me to do, Harriet? Drug him silly? Well, I am against it.’

She was crying inwardly, Yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly what I want! But she said, ‘No, of course not.’

‘He’s physically normal for eighteen months. He’s very strong and active of course, but he’s always been that. You say he’s not talking? But that’s not unusual. Wasn’t Helen a late talker? I believe she was?’

‘Yes,’ said Harriet.

She took Ben home. Now he was locked into his room each night, and there were heavy bars on the door as well. Every second of his waking hours, he watched. Harriet watched him while her mother managed everything else.

David said, ‘What is the point of thanking you, Dorothy? It seems everything has gone a long way beyond thank-yous.’

‘Everything has gone a long way beyond. Period.’ Said Dorothy.

Harriet was thin, red-eyed, haggard. Once again she was bursting into tears over nothing at all. The children kept out of her way. Tact? Were they afraid of her? Dorothy suggested staying alone with Ben for a week in August while the family went off together somewhere.

Neither Harriet nor David would normally have wanted to go anywhere, for they loved their home. And what about the family coming for the summer?

‘I haven’t noticed any rush to book themselves in,’ said Dorothy.

They went to France, with the car. For Harriet it was all happiness: she felt she had been given back her children. She could not get enough of them, nor they of her. And Paul, her baby whom Ben had deprived her of, the wonderful three-year-old, enchanting, a charmer – was her baby again. They were a family still! Happiness … they could hardly believe, any of them, that Ben could have taken so much away from them.

When they got home, Dorothy was very tired and she had a bad bruise on her forearm and another on her cheek. She did not say what had happened. But when the children had gone to bed on the first evening, she said to Harriet and David, ‘I have to talk – no, sit down and listen.’

They sat with her at the kitchen table.

‘You two are going to have to face it. Ben has got to go into an institution.’

‘But he’s normal,’ said Harriet, grim. ‘The doctor says he is.’

‘He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are.’

‘What kind of institution would take him?’

‘There must be something,’ said Dorothy, and began to cry.

Now began a time when every night Harriet and David lay awake talking about what could be done. They were making love again, but it was not the same. ‘This must be what women felt before there was birth control,’ Harriet said. ‘Terrified. They waited for every period, and when it came it meant reprieve for a month. But they weren’t afraid of giving birth to a troll.’

While they talked, they always listened for sounds from ‘the baby’s room’ – words they never used now, for they hurt. What was Ben doing that they had not believed him capable of? Pulling those heavy steel bars aside?

‘The trouble is, you get used to hell,’ said Harriet. ‘After a day with Ben I feel as if nothing exists but him. As if nothing has ever existed. I suddenly realize I haven’t remembered the others for hours. I forgot their supper yesterday. Dorothy went to the pictures, and I came down and found Helen cooking their supper.’

‘It didn’t hurt them.’

‘She’s eight.’

Having been reminded, by the week in France, of what their family life really was, could be, Harriet was determined not to let it all go. She found she was again silently addressing Ben: ‘I’m not going to let you destroy us, you won’t destroy me …’

She was set on another real Christmas, and wrote and telephoned to everyone. She made a point of saying that Ben was ‘much better, these days.’

Sarah asked if it would be ‘all right’ to bring Amy. This meant that she had heard – everyone had – about the dog, and the cat.

‘It’ll be all right if we are careful never to leave Amy alone with Ben,’ said Harriet, and Sarah, after a long silence, said, ‘My God, Harriet, we’ve been dealt a bad hand, haven’t we?’ ‘I suppose so,’ said Harriet, but she was rejecting this submission to being a victim of fate. Sarah, yes; with her marital problems, and her mongol child – yes. But she, Harriet, in the same boat?

She said to her own children, ‘Please look after Amy. Never leave her alone with Ben.’

‘Would he hurt Amy the way he hurt Mr McGregor?’ asked Jane.

‘He killed Mr McGregor,’ Luke said fiercely. ‘He killed him.’

‘And the poor dog,’ said Helen. Both children were accusing Harriet.

‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘he might. That’s why we have to watch her all the time.’

The children, the way they did these days, were looking at each other, excluding her, in some understanding of their own. They went off, without looking at her.

The Christmas, with fewer people, was nevertheless festive and noisy, a success; but Harriet found herself longing for it to be over. It was the strain of it all, watching Ben, watching Amy – who was the centre of everything. Her head was too big, her body too squat, but she was full of love and kisses and everyone adored her. Helen, who had longed to make a pet of Ben, was now able to love Amy. Ben watched this, silent, and Harriet could not read the look in those cold yellow-green eyes. But then she never could! Sometimes it seemed to her that she spent her life trying to understand what Ben was feeling, thinking. Amy, who expected everyone to love her, would go up to Ben, chuckling, laughing, her arms out. Twice his age, but apparently half his age, this afflicted infant, who was radiant with affection, suddenly became silent; her face was woeful, and she backed away, staring at him. Just like Mr McGregor, the poor cat. Then she began to cry whenever she saw him. Ben’s eyes were never off her, this other afflicted one, adored by everyone in the house. But did he know himself afflicted? Was he, in fact? What was he?

Christmas ended, and Ben was two and a few months old. Paul was sent to a little nursery school down the road, to get him away from Ben. The naturally high-spirited and friendly child was becoming nervous and irritable. He had fits of tears or of rage, throwing himself on the floor screaming, or battering at Harriet’s knees, trying to get her attention, which never seemed to leave Ben.

Dorothy went off to visit Sarah and her family.

Harriet was alone with Ben during the day. She tried to be with him as she had with the others. She sat on the floor with building blocks and toys you could push about. She showed him colourful pictures. She sang him little rhymes. But Ben did not seem to connect with the toys, or the blocks. He sat among the litter of bright objects and might put one block on another, looking at Harriet to see if this was what he should do. He stared hard at pictures held out to him, trying to decipher their language. He would never sit on Harriet’s knees, but squatted by her, and when she said, ‘That’s a bird, Ben, look – just like that bird on that tree. And that’s a flower,’ he stared, and then turned away. Apparently it was not that he could not understand how this block fitted into that or how to make a pile of them, rather that he could not grasp the point of it all, nor of the flower, nor the bird. Perhaps he was too advanced for this sort of game? Sometimes Harriet thought he was. His response to her nursery pictures was that he went out into the garden and stalked a thrush on the lawn, crouching down and moving on a low fast run – and he nearly did catch the thrush. He tore some primroses off their stems, and stood with them in his hands, intently staring at them. Then he crushed them in his strong little fists and let them drop. He turned his head and saw Harriet looking at him: he seemed to be thinking that she wanted him to do something, but what? He stared at the spring flowers, looked up at a blackbird on a branch, and came slowly indoors again.

One day, he talked. Suddenly. He did not say, ‘Mummy,’ or ‘Daddy,’ or his own name. He said, ‘I want cake.’ Harriet did not even notice, at first, that he was talking. Then she did, and told everyone, ‘Ben’s talking. He’s using sentences.’ As their way was, the other children encouraged him: ‘That’s very good, Ben,’ ‘Clever Ben!’ But he took no notice of them. From then on he announced his needs. ‘I want that.’ ‘Give me that.’ ‘Go for a walk now.’ His voice was heavy and uncertain, each word separate, as if his brain were a lumber-house of ideas and objects, and he had to identify each one.

The children were relieved he was talking normally. ‘Hello, Ben,’ one would say. ‘Hello,’ Ben replied, carefully handing back exactly what he had been given. ‘How are you, Ben?’ Helen asked. ‘How are you?’ he replied. ‘No’ said Helen, ‘now you must say, “I’m very well, thank you,” or, “I’m fine”.’

Ben stared while he worked it out. Then he said clumsily, ‘I’m very well.’

He watched the children, particularly Luke and Helen, all the time. He studied how they moved, sat down, stood up; copied how they ate. He had understood that these two, the older ones, were more socially accomplished than Jane; and he ignored Paul altogether. When the children watched television, he squatted near them and looked from the screen to their faces, for he needed to know what reactions were appropriate. If they laughed, then, a moment later, he contributed a loud, hard, unnatural-sounding laugh. What was natural to him, it seemed, in the way of amusement was his hostile-looking teeth-bared grin, that looked hostile. When they became silent and still with attention, because of some exciting moment, then he tensed his muscles, like them, and seemed absorbed in the screen – but really he kept his eyes on them.

Altogether, he was easier. Harriet thought: Well, any ordinary child is at its most difficult for about a year after it gets to its feet. No sense of self-preservation, no sense of danger: they hurl themselves off beds and chairs, launch themselves into space, run into roads, have to be watched every second … And they are also, she added, at their most charming, delightful, heart-breakingly sweet and funny. And then they gradually become sensible and life is easier.

Life had become easier … but this was only as she saw it, as Dorothy brought home to her.

Dorothy came back to this household after what she called ‘a rest’ of some weeks, and Harriet could see her mother was preparing for a ‘real talk’ with her.

‘Now, girl, would you say that I am interfering? That I give you a lot of unwanted advice?’

They were sitting at the big table, mid-morning, with cups of coffee. Ben was where they could watch him, as always, Dorothy was trying to make what she said humorous, but Harriet felt threatened. Her mother’s honest pink cheeks were bright with embarrassment, her blue eyes anxious.

‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘You aren’t. You don’t.’

‘Well, now I’m going to have my say.’

But she had to stop: Ben began banging a stone against a metal tray. He did this with all his force. The noise was awful, but the women waited until Ben stopped: interrupted, he would have raged and hissed and spat.

‘You have five children,’ Dorothy said. ‘Not one. Do you realize that I might just as well be the mother of the others when I’m here? No, I don’t believe you do, you’ve got so taken over by …’

Ben again banged the tray with his stone, in a frenzy of exulting accomplishment. It looked as if he believed he was hammering metal, forging something: one could easily imagine him, in the mines deep under the earth, with his kind … Again they waited until he stopped the noise.

‘It’s not right,’ said Dorothy. And Harriet remembered how her mother’s ‘That’s not right!’ had regulated her childhood.

‘I’m getting on, you know,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can’t go on like this, or I’ll get ill.’

Yes, Dorothy was rather thin, even gaunt. Yes, Harriet thought, full of guilt as usual, she should have noticed.

‘And you have a husband, too,’ said Dorothy, apparently not knowing how she was turning the knife in her daughter’s heart. ‘He’s very good, you know, Harriet. I don’t know how he puts up with it.’

The Christmas after Ben became three only partly filled the house. A cousin of David’s had said, ‘I’ve been inspired by you, Harriet! After all, I’ve got a home, too. It’s not as big as yours, but it’s a nice little house.’ Several of the family went there. But others said they were coming: made a point of coming, Harriet realized. These were the near relations.

Again a pet was brought. This time it was a big dog, a cheerful boisterous mongrel, Sarah’s children’s friend, but most particularly Amy’s. Of course all the children loved him, but Paul most of all, and this made Harriet’s heart ache, for they could have no dog or cat in their home. She even thought: Well, now Ben is more sensible, perhaps … But she knew it was impossible. She watched how the big dog seemed to know that Amy, the loving little child in the big ugly body, needed gentleness: he moderated his exuberance for her. Amy would sit by the dog with her arm around his neck, and if she was clumsy with him, he lifted his muzzle and gently pushed her away a little, or gave a small warning sound that said, ‘Be careful.’ Sarah said this dog was like a nursemaid to Amy. ‘Just like Nana in Peter Pan,’ the children said. But if Ben was in the room, the dog watched him carefully and went to lie in a corner, his head on his paws, stiff with attention. One morning when people were sitting around having breakfast, Harriet for some reason turned her head and saw the dog, asleep, and Ben going silently up to him in a low crouch, hands held out in front of him …

‘Ben!’ said Harriet sharply. She saw those cold eyes turn towards her, caught a gleam of pure malice.

The dog, alerted, scrambled up, and his hair stood on end. He whined anxiously, and came into the part of the room where they all were, and lay down under the table.

Everyone had seen this, and sat silent, while Ben came to Dorothy and said, ‘I want milk.’ She poured him some, and he drank it down. Then he looked at them all staring at him. Again he seemed to be trying to understand them. He went into the garden, where they could see him, a squat little gnome, poking with a stick at the earth. The other children were upstairs somewhere.

Around the table sat Dorothy, with Amy on her lap, Sarah, Molly, Frederick, James and David. Also Angela, the successful sister, ‘the coper’, whose children were all normal.

The atmosphere made Harriet say defiantly, ‘All right, then, let’s have it.’

She thought it not without significance, as they say, that it was Frederick who said, ‘Now look here, Harriet, you’ve got to face it, he’s got to go into an institution.’

‘Then we have to find a doctor who says he’s abnormal,’ said Harriet. ‘Dr Brett certainly won’t.’

‘Get another doctor,’ said Molly. ‘These things can be arranged.’ The two large haystacky people, with their red well-fed faces, were united in determination, nothing vague about them now they had decided there was a crisis, and one that – even indirectly – threatened them. They looked like a pair of judges after a good lunch, Harriet thought, and glanced at David to see if she could share this criticism with him; but he was staring down at the table, mouth tight. He agreed with them.

Angela said, laughing, ‘Typical upper-class ruthlessness.’

No one could remember that note being struck, or at least not so sharply, at this table before. Silence, and then Angela softened it with ‘Not that I don’t agree.’

‘Of course you agree,’ said Molly. ‘Anyone sensible would have to.’

‘It’s the way you said it,’ said Angela.

‘What does it matter how it is said?’ enquired Frederick.

‘And who is going to pay for it?’ asked David. ‘I can’t. All I can do is to keep the bills paid, and that is with James’s help.’

‘Well, James is going to have to bear the brunt of this one,’ said Frederick, ‘but we’ll chip in.’ It was the first time this couple had offered any financial help. ‘Mean, like all their sort,’ the rest of the family had agreed; and now this judgement was being remembered. They would come for a stay of ten days and contribute a pair of pheasants, a couple of bottles of very good wine. Their ‘chipping in’, everyone knew, wouldn’t amount to much.

Full of division, the family sat silent.

Then James said, ‘I’ll do what I can. But things are not as good as they were. Yachts are not everyone’s priority in hard times.’

Silence again, and everyone was looking at Harriet.

‘You are funny people,’ she said, setting herself apart from them. ‘You’ve been here so often and you know –I mean, you really know what the problem is. What are we going to say to the people who run this institution?’

‘It depends on the institution,’ said Molly, and her large person seemed full of energy, conviction: as if she had swallowed Ben whole and was digesting him, thought Harriet. She said, mildly enough, though she trembled, ‘You mean, we have to find one of those places that exist in order to take on children families simply want to get rid of?’

‘Rich families,’ said Angela, with a defiant little sniff.

Molly, confronting impertinence, said firmly, ‘Yes. If there is no other kind of place. But one thing is obvious: if something isn’t done, then it’s going to be catastrophic.’

‘It is catastrophic,’ said Dorothy, firmly taking her position. ‘The other children … they’re suffering. You’re so involved with it, girl, that you don’t see it.’

‘Look,’ said David, impatient and angry because he could not stand this, fibres tangled with Harriet, with his parents, being tugged and torn. ‘Look, I agree. And some time Harriet is going to have to agree. And as far as I am concerned, that time is now. I don’t think I can stick it any longer.’ And now he did look at his wife, and it was a pleading, suffering look. Please, he was saying to Harriet. Please.

‘Very well,’ said Harriet. ‘If some place can be found that …’ And she began to cry.

Ben came in from the garden and stood watching them, in his usual position, which was apart from everyone else. He wore brown dungarees and a brown shirt, both in strong material. Everything he wore had to be thick, because he tore his clothes, destroyed them. With his yellowish stubbly low-growing hair, his stony unblinking eyes, his stoop, his feet planted apart and his knees bent, his clenched held-forward fists, he seemed more than ever like a gnome.

‘She is crying,’ he remarked, of his mother. He took a piece of bread off the table and went out.

‘All right,’ said Harriet, ‘what are you going to tell them?’

‘Leave it to us,’ said Frederick.

‘Yes,’ said Molly.

‘My God!’ said Angela, with a kind of bitter appreciation of them. ‘Sometimes when I’m with you, I understand everything about this country.’

‘Thank you,’ said Molly.

‘Thank you,’ said Frederick.

‘You aren’t being fair, girl,’ said Dorothy.

‘Fair,’ said Angela, and Harriet, and Sarah, her daughters, almost all at once.

And then everyone but Harriet laughed. In this way was Ben’s fate decided.

A few days later, Frederick rang to say that a place had been found and a car was coming for Ben. At once. Tomorrow.

Harriet was frantic: the haste of it, the – yes, ruthlessness! And the doctor who had authorized this? Or would? A doctor who had not even seen Ben? She said all this to David, and knew from his manner that a good deal had gone on behind her back. His parents had talked to him at his office. David had said something like ‘Yes, I’ll see to it’ when Molly, whom suddenly Harriet hated, had said, ‘You’ll have to be firm with Harriet.’

‘It’s either him or us,’ said David to Harriet. He added, his voice full of cold dislike for Ben, ‘He’s probably just dropped in from Mars. He’s going back to report on what he’s found down here.’ He laughed – cruelly, it seemed to Harriet, who was silently taking in the fact – which of course she had half known already – that Ben was not expected to live long in this institution, whatever it was.

‘He’s a little child,’ she said, ‘He’s our child.’

‘No, he’s not,’ said David, finally. ‘Well, he certainly isn’t mine.’

They were in the living-room. Children’s voices rose sharp and distant from the dark winter garden. On the same impulse, David and Harriet went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. The garden held dim shapes of tree and shrub, but the light from this warm room reached across the lawn to a shrub that was starkly black with winter, lit twiggy growths that showed a glitter of water, and illuminated the white trunk of a birch. Two small figures, indistinguishably unisex in their many-coloured padded jackets, trousers, woollen caps, emerged from the black under a holly thicket, and came forward. They were Helen and Luke, on some adventure. Both held sticks and were prodding them here and there into last year’s leaves.

‘Here it is!’ Helen’s voice rose in triumph, and the parents saw, emerging into the light on the end of the stick, the summer’s lost red-and-yellow plastic ball. It was dirtied and squashed, but whole. The two children began a fast stamping dance around and around, the rescued ball held aloft in triumph. Then, suddenly, for no obvious reason, they came racing up to the french doors. The parents sat down on a sofa, facing the doors, which burst inwards, and there they were, two slight, elegant little creatures, with flaring red, frost-burned cheeks and eyes full of the excitements of the dark wilderness they had been part of. They stood breathing heavily, their eyes slowly adjusting to reality, the warm, lit family room and their parents sitting there looking at them. For a moment it was the meeting of two alien forms of life: the children had been part of some old savagery, and their blood still pounded with it; but now they had to let their wild selves go away while they rejoined their family. Harriet and David shared this with them, were with them in imagination and in memory, from their own childhoods: they could see themselves clearly, two adults, sitting there, tame, domestic, even pitiable in their distance from wildness and freedom.

Seeing their parents there alone, no other children around, and above all, no Ben, Helen came to her father, Luke to his mother, and Harriet and David embraced their two adventurous little children, their children, holding them tight.

Next morning the car, which was a small black van, came for Ben. Harriet had known it was coming, because David had not gone to work. He had stayed so as to ‘handle’ her! David went upstairs, and brought down suitcases and holdalls that he had packed quietly while she was giving the children breakfast.

He flung these into the van. Then, his face set hard, so that Harriet hardly knew him, he picked Ben up from where he sat on the floor in the living-room, carried him to the van, and put him in. Then he came fast to Harriet, with the same hard set face, and put his arm around her, turned her away from the sight of the van, which was already on its way (she could hear yells and shouts coming from inside it), and took her to the sofa, where – still holding her tight – he said, over and over again, ‘We have to do it, Harriet. We have to.’ She was weeping with the shock of it, and with relief, and with gratitude to him, who was taking all the responsibility.

When the children came home, they were told Ben had gone to stay with someone.

‘With Granny?’ asked Helen, anxious.

‘No.’

Four pairs of suspicious, apprehensive eyes became suddenly full of relief. Hysterical relief. The children danced about, unable to help themselves, and then pretended it was a game they had thought up then and there.

At supper they were overbright, giggling, hysterical. But in a quiet moment Jane asked shrilly, ‘Are you going to send us away, too?’ She was a stolid, quiet little girl, Dorothy in miniature, never saying anything unnecessary. But now her large blue eyes were fixed in terror on her mother’s face.

‘No, of course we aren’t,’ said David, sounding curt.

Luke explained, ‘They are sending Ben away because he isn’t really one of us.’

In the days that followed, the family expanded like paper flowers in water. Harriet understood what a burden Ben had been, how he had oppressed them all, how much the children had suffered; knew that they had talked about it much more than the parents had wanted to know, had tried to come to terms with Ben. But now Ben was gone their eyes shone, they were full of high spirits, and they kept coming to Harriet with little gifts of a sweet or a toy, ‘This is for you, Mummy.’ Or they rushed up to kiss her, or stroke her face, or nuzzle to her like happy calves or foals. And David took days off from work to be with them all – to be with her. He was careful with her, tender. As if I were ill, she decided rebelliously. Of course she thought all the time of Ben, who was a prisoner somewhere. What kind of a prisoner? She pictured the little black van, remembered his cries of rage as he was taken away.

The days went by, and normality filled the house. Harriet heard the children talking about the Easter holidays. ‘It will be all right now that Ben isn’t here,’ said Helen.

They had always understood so much more than she had wanted to acknowledge.

While she was part of the general relief, and could hardly believe she had been able to stand such strain, and for so long, she could not banish Ben from her mind. It was not with love, or even affection, that she thought of him, and she disliked herself for not being able to find one little spark of normal feeling: it was guilt and horror that kept her awake through the nights. David knew she was awake, though she did try to hide it.

Then one morning she started up out of sleep, out of a bad dream, though she did not know what, and she said, ‘I’m going to see what they are doing to Ben.’

David opened his eyes, and lay silent, staring over his arm at the window. He had been dozing, not asleep. She knew he had feared this, and there was something about him then that said to her: Right, then that’s it, it’s enough.

‘David, I’ve got to.’

‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘I simply have to.’

Again she knew from the way he lay there, not looking at her, and did not say anything more than that one syllable, that it was bad for her, that he was making decisions as he lay there. He stayed where he was for a few minutes, and then got out of bed, and went out of the room and downstairs.

When she had got her clothes on, she rang Molly, who was at once coldly angry. ‘No, I’m not going to tell you where it is. Now you’ve done it, then leave it alone.’

But at last she did give Harriet the address.

Again Harriet was wondering why she was always treated like a criminal. Ever since Ben was born it’s been like this, she thought. Now it seemed to her the truth, that everyone had silently condemned her. I have suffered a misfortune, she told herself; I haven’t committed a crime.

Ben had been taken to a place in the North of England; it would be four or five hours’ drive – perhaps more, if she was unlucky with traffic. There was bad traffic, and she drove through grey wintry rain. It was early afternoon when she approached a large solid building of dark stone, in a valley high among moors she could hardly see for grey drifting rain. The place stood square and upright among dismal dripping evergreens, and its regular windows, three rows of them, were barred.

She entered a small entrance lobby that had a handwritten card tacked on the inner door: ‘Ring for Attendance.’ She rang, and waited, and nothing happened. Her heart was beating. She still surged with the adrenalin that had given her the impetus to come, but the long drive had subdued her, and this oppressive building was telling her nerves, if not her intelligence – for, after all, she had no facts to go on – that what she had feared was true. Yet she did not know exactly what that was. She rang again. The building was silent: she could hear the shrill of a bell a long way off in its interior. Again, nothing, and she was about to go around to the back when the door abruptly opened to show a slatternly girl wearing jerseys, cardigans, and a thick scarf. She had a pale little face under a mass of curly yellow hair that had a blue ribbon holding a queue like a sheep’s tail. She seemed tired.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

Harriet saw, understanding what this meant, that people simply did not come here.

She said, already stubborn, ‘I’m Mrs Lovatt and I’ve come to see my son.’

It was evident that these were words this institution, whatever it was, did not expect to meet.

The girl stared, gave an involuntary little shake of the head that expressed incapacity, and then said, ‘Dr MacPherson isn’t here this week.’ She was Scottish, too, and her accent was strong.

‘Someone must be deputizing for him,’ said Harriet decisively.

The girl fell back before Harriet’s manner, smiling uncertainly, and very worried. She muttered, ‘Wait here, then,’ and went inside. Harriet followed her before the big door was shut to exclude her. The girl did glance around, as if she planned to say, You must wait outside, but instead she said, ‘I’ll fetch someone,’ and went on into the dark caverns of a corridor that had small ceiling lights all along it, hardly disturbing the gloom. There was a smell of disinfectant. Absolute silence. No, after a time Harriet became aware of a high thin screaming that began, and stopped, and went on again, coming from the back of the building.

Nothing happened. Harriet went out into the vestibule, which was already darkening with the approaching night. The rain was now a cold deluge, silent and regular. The moors had disappeared.

She rang again, decisively, and returned to the corridor.

Two figures appeared, a long way off under the pinpoints of the ceiling lights, and came towards her. A young man, in a white coat that was not clean, was followed by the girl, who now had a cigarette in her mouth and was screwing up her eyes from the smoke. Both looked tired and uncertain.

He was an ordinary young man, though worn down in a general way; taken bit by bit, hands, face, eyes, he was unremarkable, but there was something desperate about him, as if he contained anger, or hopelessness.

‘You can’t be here,’ he said, in a flurried indecisive way. ‘We don’t have visiting days here.’ His voice was South London, flat and nasal.

‘But I am here,’ said Harriet. ‘I am here to see my son Ben Lovatt.’

And suddenly he took in a breath, and looked at the girl, who pursed her lips together and raised her eyebrows.

‘Listen,’ said Harriet. ‘I don’t think you understand. I’m not just going away, you know. I’ve come to see my son, and that is what I am going to do.’

He knew she meant it. He slowly nodded, as if saying, Yes, but that isn’t the point. He was looking hard at her. She was being given a warning, and from someone who was taking the responsibility for it. He might be a rather pitiable young man, and certainly an overtired and inadequately fed one, doing this job because he could not get another, but the weight of his position – the unhappy weight of it – was speaking through him, and his expression and his reddened, smoke-tired eyes were severe, authoritative, to be taken seriously.

‘When people dump their kids here, they don’t come and see them after,’ he said.

‘You see, you don’t understand at all,’ said the girl.

Harriet heard herself explode with ‘I’m sick of being told I don’t understand this and that. I’m the child’s mother. I’m Ben Lovatt’s mother. Do you understand that?’

Suddenly they were all three together in understanding, even in desperate acceptance of some kind of general fatality.

He nodded, and said, ‘Well, I’ll go and see …’

‘And I am coming, too,’ she said.

This really did alert him. ‘Oh no,’ he exclaimed, ‘You are not!’ He said something to the girl, who began running surprisingly fast down the corridor. ‘You stay here,’ he said to Harriet, and strode after the girl.

Harriet saw the girl turn right and disappear, and without thinking she opened a door at her right hand. She saw the young man’s arm raised in imprecation, or warning, while what was behind that door reached her.

She was at the end of a long ward, which had any number of cots and beds along the walls. In the cots were – monsters. While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot held an infant or small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body … then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs … a small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting – a doll with chalky swollen limbs, its eyes wide and blank, like blue ponds, and its mouth open, showing a swollen little tongue. A lanky boy was skewed, one half of his body sliding from the other. A child seemed at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her. Rows of freaks, nearly all asleep, and all silent. They were literally drugged out of their minds. Well, nearly silent: there was a dreary sobbing from a cot that had its sides shielded with blankets. The high intermittent screaming, nearer now, still assaulted her nerves. A smell of excrement, stronger than the disinfectant. Then she was out of the nightmare ward and in another corridor, parallel to the one she had first seen, and identical. At its end she saw the girl, followed by the young man, come a little way towards her and then again turn right … Harriet ran fast, hearing her feet thud on the boards, and turned where they did, and was in a tiny room holding trolleys of medicines and drugs. She ran through this and was now in a long cement-floored passage that had doors with inspection grilles in them all along the wall facing her. The young man and the girl were opening one of these doors as she arrived beside them. All three were breathing heavily.

‘Shit,’ said the young man, meaning her being there.

‘Literally,’ said Harriet as the door opened on a square room whose walls were of white shiny plastic that was buttoned here and there and looked like fake expensive leather upholstery. On the floor, on a green foam-rubber mattress, lay Ben. He was unconscious. He was naked, inside a strait-jacket. His pale yellow tongue protruded from his mouth. His flesh was dead white, greenish. Everything – walls, the floor, and Ben – was smeared with excrement. A pool of dark yellow urine oozed from the pallet which was soaked.

‘I told you not to come!’ shouted the young man. He took Ben’s shoulders and the girl Ben’s feet. From the way they touched the child, Harriet saw they were not brutal; that was not the point at all. They lifted Ben thus – for in this way they had to touch very little of him – out of this room, along the corridor a little way, and through another door. She followed, and stood watching. This was a room that had sinks all along one wall, an immense bath, and a sloping cement shelf with plugs all along it. They put Ben on this shelf, unwound the strait-jacket, and, having adjusted the temperature of the water, began washing him down with a hose that was attached to one of the taps. Harriet leaned against the wall, watching. She was shocked to the point where she felt nothing at all. Ben did not move. He lay like a drowned fish on the slab, was turned over several times by the girl, when the young man interrupted the hosing process for the purpose, and was finally carried by them both to another slab, where they dried him and then took a clean strait-jacket from a pile and put it on him.

‘Why?’ demanded Harriet, fierce. They did not answer.

They took the child, trussed, unconscious, his tongue lolling, out of the room, down the corridor, and into another room that had a cement shelf like a bed in it. They put Ben on it, and then both stood up and sighed: ‘Phew.’

‘Well, there he is,’ said the young man. He stood for a moment, eyes closed, recovering from the ordeal, and then lit a cigarette. The girl put out her hand for one; he gave it to her. They stood smoking, looking at Harriet in an exhausted, defeated way.

She did not know what to say. Her heart was hurting as it would for one of her own, real children, for Ben looked more ordinary than she had ever seen him, with those hard cold alien eyes of his closed. Pathetic: she had never seen him as pathetic before.

‘I think I’ll take him home,’ she said.

‘It’s up to you,’ said the young man shortly.

The girl was looking curiously at Harriet, as if she were part of the phenomenon that was Ben, of the same nature. She asked, ‘What are you going to do with him?’ She added, and Harriet recognized fear in her voice, ‘He’s so strong – I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘None of us have seen anything like it,’ said the young man.

‘Where are his clothes?’

Now he laughed, scornful, and said, ‘You’re going to put his clothes on and take him home, just like that?’

‘Why not? He was wearing clothes when he came.’

The two attendants – nurses, orderlies, whatever they were – exchanged looks. Then both took a drag on their cigarettes.

He said, ‘I don’t think you understand, Mrs Lovatt. How far have you got to go, for a start?’

‘Four or five hours’ driving.’

He laughed again, at the impossibility of it – of her, Harriet – and said, ‘He’s going to come round on the journey, and then what?’

‘Well, he’ll see me,’ she said, and saw from their faces that she was being stupid. ‘All right, then, what do you advise?’

‘Wrap him in a couple of blankets, over the strait-jacket,’ said the girl.

‘And then drive like hell,’ he said.

The three now stood in silence, looking at each other, a long, sober look.

‘You try doing this job,’ said the girl suddenly, full of rage against fate. ‘You just try it. Well, I’m leaving at the end of this month.’

‘And so am I, no one sticks it longer than a few weeks,’ said the man.

‘All right,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m not going to complain, or anything.’

‘You’ll have to sign a form. We have to be covered,’ he said.

But they could not easily find the form. At last, after a lot of rummaging about in a filing cabinet, they produced a slip of paper, mimeographed years ago, that said Harriet acquitted the institution of all responsibility.

Now she picked Ben up, touching him for the first time. He was deadly cold. He lay heavy in her arms, and she understood the words ‘a dead weight’.

She went out into the corridor, saying, ‘I’m not going through that ward again.’

‘Who could blame you?’ said the young man, wearily sarcastic. He had got hold of a load of blankets, and they wrapped Ben in two, carried him out to the car, laid him on the back seat, and piled more blankets over him. Only his face showed.

She stood with the two young people by the car. They could hardly see each other. Apart from the car lights, and the lights of the building, it was dark. Water squelched under foot. The young man took out of his overall pocket, a plastic package containing a syringe, a couple of needles, and some ampules.

‘You had better take these,’ he said.

Harriet hesitated, and the girl said, ‘Mrs Lovatt, I don’t think you realize – ’

She nodded, took the package, got in.

‘You can give him up to four shots a day, no more,’ said the young man.

As she was about to let the clutch pedal out, she asked, ‘Tell me, how long do you think he would have lasted?’

Their faces were white patches in the gloom, but she could see that he shook his head, turning away. The girl’s voice came: ‘None of them last long. But this one … he’s very strong. He’s the strongest any of us have seen.’

‘Which means he would have lasted longer?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, that’s not it at all. Because he’s so strong, he fights all the time, and so he has to have bigger shots. It kills them.’

‘All right,’ said Harriet. ‘Well, thank you both.’

They stood watching as she drove off, but almost at once vanished into the wet dark. As she rounded the drive, she saw them standing in the dimly lit porch, close together, as if reluctant to go in.

She drove as fast as she could through the wintry rain, avoiding the main roads, keeping an eye on the heap of blankets behind her. About half-way home she saw the blankets heave and convulse, and Ben woke with a bellow of rage, and thrashed about, landing on the floor of the car, where he began to scream, not like the thin high automatic screaming she had heard at the institution but screams of fear that vibrated through her. She stuck it out for half an hour, feeling the thuds that Ben made vibrate through the car. She was looking for a lay-by that had no other car in it, and when she found one, she stopped, let the engine run, and took out the syringe. She knew how to use it, from some illness of the other children. She broke open the capsule, which had no brand name on it, and filled the syringe. Then she leaned over the back of the seat. Ben, naked except for the strait-jacket, and blue with cold, was heaving and struggling and bellowing. His eyes looked up at her in a glare of hate. He didn’t recognize her, she thought. She did not dare unwind the jacket. She was afraid of injecting him anywhere near his neck. At last she managed to grab, and hold, an ankle, jabbed the needle into the lower part of his calf, and waited until he went limp: it took a few moments. What was this stuff?

Again she put him on the back seat under the blankets, and now she drove on the main roads home. She got there at about eight. The children would be sitting around the kitchen table. And David would be with them: he would not have gone to work.

With Ben a mound of blankets in her arms, his face covered, she went into the living-room, and looked over the low wall to where they all sat around the big table. Luke. Helen. Jane. Little Paul. And David, his face set and angry. And very tired.

She remarked, ‘They were killing him,’ and saw that David would not forgive her for saying this in front of the children. All showed fear.

She went straight up the stairs to the big bedroom, and through it to ‘the baby’s room’, and put Ben on the bed. He was waking up. And then it began, the fighting, the heaving, the screaming. Again he was on the floor, rolling around on it; and again he flexed and bent and thrashed, and his eyes were pure hate.

She could not take off the strait-jacket.

She went down into the kitchen, and got milk and biscuits while her family sat and watched her in total silence.

Ben’s screams and struggling were shaking the house.

‘The police will be here,’ said David.

‘Keep them quiet,’ she commanded, and went up with the food.

When Ben saw what she held, he became silent and still, and his eyes were avid. She lifted him like a mummy, put the cup of milk to his lips, and he almost drowned as he gulped: he was starving. She fed him bits of biscuit, keeping her fingers clear of his teeth. When what she had brought was finished, he began roaring and flailing again. She gave him another jab.

The children were in front on the television, but were not watching it. Jane and Paul were crying. David sat at the table with his head in his hands. She said softly, for him to hear, ‘All right, I am a criminal. But they were murdering him.’

He did not move. She had her back to him. She did not want to see his face.

She said, ‘He would have been dead in a few months. Weeks, probably.’ A silence. At last she turned. She could hardly bear to look at him. He looked ill, but that was not it …

She said, ‘I couldn’t stand it.’

He said deliberately, ‘I thought that was the idea.’

She cried out, ‘Yes, but you didn’t see it, you didn’t see –!’

‘I was careful not to see,’ he said. ‘What did you suppose was going to happen? That they were going to turn him into some well-adjusted member of society and then everything would be lovely?’ He was jeering at her, but it was because his throat was stiff with tears.

Now they looked at each other, long, hard, seeing everything about each other. She thought, All right, he was right, and I was wrong. But it’s done.

She said aloud, ‘All right, but it’s done.’

‘That’s the mot juste, I think.’

She sat down beside the children on the sofa. Now she saw they all had tear-stained faces. She could not touch them to comfort them, because it was she who made them cry.

When she at last said ‘Bed,’ they all got up at once and went, without looking at her.

She took supplies of suitable food for Ben up to the big bedroom. David had moved his things to another room.

When Ben woke towards morning and began his roaring, she fed him, and drugged him.

She gave the children breakfast as always, and tried to be normal. They tried, too. No one mentioned Ben.

When David came down, she said, ‘Please take them to school.’

Then the house had only her and Ben in it. When he woke, she fed him but did not drug him. He roared and struggled, but, she thought, much less.

In a lull, when he seemed worn out, she said, ‘Ben, you are at home, not in that place.’ He was listening.

‘When you stop making all that noise, I’ll take you out of that thing they put you in.’

It was too soon, he began struggling again. Through his screams she heard voices, and went to the banisters. David had not gone to his office, had stayed home to help her. Two young policewomen stood there, and David was talking to them. They went away.

What had they been told? She did not ask.

Towards the time the children were due home, she said to Ben, ‘I want you to be quiet now, Ben. The other children will be here and you’ll frighten them screaming like that.’

He became quiet: it was exhaustion.

He was on the floor, which was by now streaked with excrement. She carried him to the bathroom, took off the jacket, put him in the bath and washed him, and saw that he was shuddering with terror: he had not always been unconscious when they washed him in that place. She took him back to the bed, and said, ‘If you start all that again, then I’m going to have to put that thing back on you.’

He ground his teeth at her, his eyes blazing. But he was afraid, too. She was going to have to control him through fear.

She cleaned his room while he lay moving his arms about, as if he had forgotten how to do it. He had been in that cloth prison, probably, ever since he had been in the institution.

Then he squatted on his bed, moving his arms and staring around his room, recognizing it, and her, at last.

He said, ‘Open the door.’

She said, ‘No, not until I am sure you will behave well.’

He was about to start again, but she shouted at him, ‘Ben, I mean it! You shout and scream and I’ll tie you up.’

He controlled himself. She handed him sandwiches, which he crammed into his mouth, choking.

He had unlearned all the basic social skills that it had been so hard to teach him.

She talked quietly while he ate. ‘And now listen to me, Ben. You have to listen. You behave well and everything will be all right. You must eat properly. You must use the pot or got to the lavatory. And you mustn’t scream and fight.’ She was not sure he heard her. She repeated it. She went on repeating it.

That evening she stayed with Ben, and she did not see the other children at all. David went up to the other room away from her. How she felt at this time was that she was shielding them from Ben while she re-educated him for family life. But how they felt it, she knew, was that she had turned her back on them all and chosen to go off into alien country, with Ben.

That night she locked the door on him, and bolted it, left him undrugged and hoped he would sleep. He did, but woke, screaming in fear. She went in to him, and found him backed against the wall at the end of the bed, an arm up over his face, unable to hear her, while she talked, and talked, using reasonable persuasive words against this storm of terror. At last he became quiet and she gave him food. He could not get enough food: he had really been starving. They had had to keep him drugged, and, when drugged, he could not eat.

Fed, he again backed himself against the wall, squatted on the bed, and looked at the door where his jailers would enter: he had not really understood he was at home.

Copyright

Harper Press
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First published by Flamingo 2003

Copyright © Dons Lessing 2003

Doris Lessing asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library These short novels are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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