2

‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour, so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour.’

The Sunday after Mary’s funeral, Aldous sat in St Nicola’s church listening to Father Gerhart reading from Ecclesiastes.

‘. . . the lips of a fool will swallow up himself. The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness, and the end of his talk is mischievous madness.’

A reading Aldous had presumed was inspired by the current political follies, though he couldn’t tell if it was directed particularly at Edward Heath or Joe Gormley, leader of the miners’ union, whose dispute had led to power cuts last winter and the collapse of the Heath government. It was very difficult to tell which way Father Gerhart leaned politically.

‘The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to go to the city.’

The candlelit winter evenings had been fun at first. The shops had quickly sold out of jigsaws and playing cards. People were rediscovering the old amusements now that the telly was off. One night the telly had even born witness to its own temporary execution – broadcasting live pictures of the power station employee pulling the lever that cut off the supply to Windhover Hill, and as the lever was pulled, so the house went dark, the telly giving a little electrical whimper as it died. People were saying it was a blessing in disguise, that the long lost art of conversation was being revived. Someone on TV was even saying they should do this all the time, strikes or no strikes, for one or two days a week. Might be a good idea, but Aldous remembered how odd the front room had seemed without television – no one sat in it – there was no reason . . .

‘By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through.’

Now there was a minority Labour Government. Mr Wilson had won the election in February with fewer votes than Heath. There was likely to be another election in October. Heath had campaigned with the slogan Who Governs Britain? A question the election hadn’t satisfactorily answered. A shame teachers hadn’t been put on the three-day week. There were ration books in petrol stations. People were being urged to scrimp and save, like during the war. SOS had been used as a reminder to ‘Switch off Something’, though Janus had said it stood for Silly Old Sods.

‘A feast is made for laughter and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.’

That had to be the object of Father Gerhart’s sermon. Aldous had never really got to know Father Gerhart. Their old priest, Father Webb, a cultured, gregarious Irishman who had become a family friend after burying Nana, had moved to another parish somewhere in the North. Father Gerhart was older, grey-haired and bulky in both body and face, with loose, pulpy lips that added a slur to his strong German accent. Though Aldous dutifully shook hands with him at the door every Sunday on leaving the church, they had exchanged very few words.

Aldous rather liked Father Gerhart, however. He found those whispered vowels and slushy consonants very soothing. He liked the way he performed the ritual of the sacrament, so slowly and ponderously, like a nodding dog, almost tripping over his own vestments, murmuring his Latin over the crumbled host, bathing his hands in the dish held by those nervous altar boys – Lavabo inter innocentes. Aldous found the whole experience of Mass very relaxing – except, that is, for the recent innovation of shaking hands with the strangers sitting next to you. It had come as rather a shock the first time it happened. Let us now exchange the sign of peace, Father Gerhart had said, then Aldous found that the ancient creature to his right, a hunchbacked great grandmother wearing a coat of scarlet wool with a turquoise turban on her tiny head, was offering her shrivelled little hand for him to shake. It had been cold and scratchy, and despite the gay smile of the nonagenarian, Aldous had had doubts about going to church the next Sunday. On that occasion however, the old crone had transformed into a petite teenage girl with braces on her teeth and butterfly-shaped barrettes in her hair. The two experiences cancelled each other out, and Aldous now even enjoyed that brief moment of hand-to-hand intimacy with a stranger, young or old.

Today was Palm Sunday. At the door, palms were being distributed, long, delicately tapering leaves coming to a needle-sharp point, dried to a crisp yellow. Aldous took a handful, then shook hands with Father Gerhart.

‘I think you were at the funeral service on Thursday,’ the priest said.

‘Oh. Yes,’ Aldous had almost forgotten.

‘A dear relative? A kind friend?’

‘No, not really. She . . .’ Aldous had to pause to consider how he was related to Mary. Had she been his sister-in-law? Surely that only applied to the wives of one’s own brothers. What was the wife of one’s brother-in-law? ‘She was my wife’s sister-in-law.’

‘Ah, well. Your wife will be welcome with open arms here, Mr Jones . . .’

‘Oh, she’s very busy, what with everything. That’s not really an excuse, I know. She’s here in her heart, I can assure you. By the way,’ Aldous felt a need to change the subject, ‘I thoroughly enjoyed the reading today, very well chosen. Foolishness – very apt for our current political climate . . .’

Father Gerhart looked a little surprised, as though the thought hadn’t struck him.

‘I was thinking always that Easter is a time we remember the foolishness of those who took the life of our saviour – but you are right to see a more contemporary interpretation, that is always how the Bible should be read.’

And with that, Father Gerhart averted his eyes, seeming suddenly very shy as he prepared himself to greet the next member of his flock.

After lighting a candle in Mary’s memory, Aldous passed through the door into the sunlight, and strolled along Dorset Street, with that peculiar sense of freedom he always experienced on coming out of church, feeling as though he had all the time in the world to get where he wanted, to do what he liked. In such moods he could have happily spent a day enjoying the compact and orderly spectacle of each little suburban house he passed, with their brave little front gardens, their bushes of speckled laurel (a universe contained in each leaf), and soon-to-flower rose bushes. He admired the cars, many of which had been cleaned that morning, as the soapy gutters testified, plucky little things as well, with their sparkling chrome and glass, their armour of glossily painted steel. Aldous felt he had all the time in the world to admire these brightly coloured Sunday morning sights, though in reality if he wasn’t home within half an hour Colette, by now happy in a kitchen full of steam and bubbling saucepans, would start to worry. And as he meandered along Hoopers Lane, past The Goat and Compasses with its flock of nineteenth-century workmen’s cottages, he felt the sense of doom that always gathered about him when he thought about returning home after a spell away, however brief.

He heard whistling behind him, and laughter, and chirpy calling, but ignored it. At this point the slight bend in Hoopers Lane meant the houses on the left were foreshortened by perspective into nothing more than a series of contrastingly coloured bands, a sight which always afforded Aldous a little private delight – that the inhabitants of Hoopers Lane should have unconsciously built a rainbow together. He paused to admire it, which allowed the whistlers behind him to catch up.

‘Been to church have you?’ It was his daughter and her husband walking side by side. They had come up from the bus stop by the church, having taken a detour so that Juliette could indulge her passion for sherbet lemons at Sweet Inspiration (Formerly Dorset Street Sweet Shop) on the way to Fernlight Avenue. Bill had a sketchbook tucked under his arm.

It had become something of a tradition for his daughter and son-in-law to come over to Fernlight Avenue for Sunday lunch (usually a roast chicken, sometimes, if Colette was feeling daring enough, a spaghetti bolognese). They were usually there by the time Aldous had got back from church, having dutifully trundled up Green Lanes on a 123 or a W4. They must have been running late.

‘What are you holding?’ said Juliette.

‘Palms,’ said Aldous, brandishing them before his daughter’s face, ‘it’s Palm Sunday today. They were giving these out at the door . . .’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Bill, ‘how you can sit there with all those hypocrites who are pretending to be so good, when tomorrow they’ll go into a factory and make bombs to drop on Vietnam.’

Aldous searched without success for a telling answer, not wanting to get into a theological discussion with Bill, whose energy for arguments seemed limitless.

Aldous was fond of his son-in-law, though he had been angry with Juliette when she decided to drop out of school before her O Levels to marry him. He believed she had a good brain, and was wasting it. She could have been and done anything she’d put her mind to, but she’d thrown it all away for the sake of a bearded Marxist butcher and a life in a poky flat in Polperro Gardens.

Juliette seemed happy working at Eve St John’s on Green Lanes – an odd little establishment, comprised of two shops side by side, one selling electrical goods and ladies’ hosiery (a rather alarming combination Aldous always felt), the other toys. Aldous had begun to wonder if Janus had set a pattern that the rest of his children would follow, throwing away academic brilliance for a career in menial employment. Janus had been a gasman, a telephonist, and now worked in a builders’ merchants, bagging and weighing nails for the carpenters of North London. James had at least gone to university after two years of drifting from one dead-end job to another.

Bill, too, had decided not to make use of his lively and intelligent mind, opting instead for the undemanding world of semiskilled labour. He had been a steeplejack when he’d first wooed Juliette, impressing her by knocking back salt-laden cocktails in the public bar of The Carpenters Arms, a rough, noisy pub in Wood Green where Juliette, who, at fifteen, had grown from a tousled tomboy into a considerable beauty, drank illegally with other underage friends. She had fallen, so Aldous understood, for his public bar sophistication, his oratory, the glamour of his political radicalism, his skill as an artist, his wit. Juliette had told her father how different Bill was from other men she knew. He looked much older than his years, being lushly bearded in the manner of a sage of the revolution – he wore corduroy jackets decorated with small enamelled badges of the trade unions to which he didn’t belong – and Communist icons (a clenched fist, Lenin in profile). A pipe smoker, he always wore ties, which in these times of shabby informality made him seem quaintly anachronistic. He had an untutored but genuine artistic talent which found its most fruitful outlet in the reproductions he would make, in oils on blocks of wood, of Russian religious icons. In the long arguments between Juliette and her parents that presaged her wedding, Aldous began to understand how impressive Bill must have seemed to a girl whose previous boyfriends had been drippy sixth formers and pimply students. Here was a man who by day scaled the few industrial chimneys there were left in north London, who had raised the steel flue that carried away the fumes of incinerated limbs at the East Edmonton Hospital (a story he always liked to tell), while by evening with callused, chapped fingers he painted the delicate, mantis-like hands of Russian Orthodox iconography.

Shortly after their marriage, however, Bill had unexpectedly developed a fear of heights and had plumped instead for the ground-level life of supermarket butchery. He’d always been proud of his hands, which were a working man’s hands, and an artist’s hands. The torn nails, the wounded, stigmatised palms. These days he always had a set of cuts to show, some fresh (an arc across the ball of the thumb), some mature and scabbed (the cloven end of an index finger), some fading and ghostly (a V on the back of the wrist), some few permanent scars, little crescents of shiny pink scar tissue on the tanned surface of his skin.

The problem with Bill, however, was that he was a drinker, and had formed with Janus a drinking partnership that seemed hell bent on scaling ever higher peaks of debauchery and derangement. At the same time, Bill was one of the few people, perhaps the only person, who could control Janus when he was drunk. He had a reputation as a gentle giant, a Hercules of colossal strength gained from a working life of hauling bricks up ladders, so that he seemed to act, in the friendship that had developed between himself and Janus, as keeper to Janus’s lunatic, his bodyguard, henchman, minder. One particularly troublesome night at Fernlight Avenue, when Janus had passed into the violent, penultimate phase of his drunkenness (the ultimate phase being sleep), after most of the family had tried and failed in various ways to calm, restrain or wrestle him, Colette had pleaded with her son-in-law to use his strength to subdue Janus.

‘Can’t you just punch him in the head and knock him out?’ she’d said.

‘I can’t do that,’ replied Bill, almost shocked.

‘Just a punch to the head, just so we can get him into bed.’

‘You can’t just punch someone in the head. I might break his jaw, or something. I might give him a brain haemorrhage. This isn’t some Hollywood movie.’

Instead Bill preferred to use his eloquence, his drunkard’s camaraderie, his rambling abilities as a storyteller to soothe fretful Janus. And when this failed he would sit on his chest for half an hour.

This Sunday Colette had made a spaghetti bolognese for lunch, a carefully crafted meal, long in preparation, but which went almost unnoticed beneath the vociferous discussions that were conducted during its consumption, and which continued afterwards, when Aldous had taken the plates and cutlery to the sink for washing up. James was home for the Easter holidays, and seemed particularly keen, after two terms at university, to display his newly acquired knowledge.

‘Wages are like prices,’ he said, answering a point Bill had made, ‘goods that are in high demand cost more. It’s the same with wages, they reflect the availability of skills.’

‘Well, well, well,’ said Bill, who was leaning with an elbow propped on the mantelpiece, threatening to inadvertently cause a small avalanche of bric-a-brac, ‘I’d never have had you down as an acolyte of that raving fascist Ted Heath. But then even Heath can see you’ve got to have wage control. You’ve got to have an incomes policy. You can’t treat wages like tins of baked beans, paying less if there are more. There has to be a moral dimension to wage allocation, you have to pay people according to their value as people . . .’

‘But if everyone’s equal,’ said Colette from her armchair by the boiler into which she’d recently flopped, ‘they all get the same pay, is that right? The doctor, the dustman, they both get paid the same?’

‘Well answer me this,’ said Bill, ‘What would cause more disruption to society, doctors going on strike or dustmen going on strike?’

James laughed knowingly, as if to let everyone know he’d heard this argument before.

Colette thought for a second before saying

‘Doctors.’

‘Why doctors?’ said Bill, raising a finger.

‘Because if dustmen went on strike, their work could be done by soldiers, or even by volunteers if things got desperate. But if doctors went on strike – well, it would be a disaster. You couldn’t have soldiers doing brain surgery.’

‘Do you realize,’ said Bill, ‘that 95 per cent of doctors’ work could just as easily be done by nurses? Do you realize that if the dustmen went on strike, the army couldn’t dispose of more than a quarter of the rubbish, and that within a few weeks we’d be overrun by epidemics of cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, influenza, polio . . . Thousands, maybe millions of people would die. A doctors’ strike would result in just a handful of deaths . . .’

‘Isn’t that amazing?’ said Colette, who looked genuinely convinced, ‘So you think they should swap around? Pay the dustmen what we pay doctors now, and let doctors live on dustmen’s wages.’

Bill nodded, laughing, ‘Doctors are just parasites. We should be talking about the poor nurses who, like I said, can do most of the doctors’ work, yet just because the doctor spent a few years at university, paid for by his rich parents, he thinks he deserves to get paid fifteen thousand a year, or whatever obscene salaries they earn.’

‘So get rid of doctors altogether?’

‘Yes. Just better train the nurses and we won’t have any need of doctors.’

‘That sounds a wonderful idea. Darling!’ She called to Aldous behind her at the sink, ‘I’m a communist!’

Janus was sitting at the table. The silver spotted crippled cat, Scipio, his mother’s gift to him seven years ago, was sitting in his lap.

‘You tell them comrade,’ he said, raising his clenched fist.

‘What I don’t understand about communism,’ said Aldous, drying his hands and re-entering the main part of the room, ‘is what happens in this perfect society, where everything is free and equal, when some selfish person comes along and tries to take advantage?’

‘Selfishness is a by-product of private ownership. If everyone has what they need, why should they want any more?’ Bill said this with a grimace, as though pleading to be understood.

‘People are always wanting more than they need,’ said Aldous.

‘Like the miners,’ said Colette, laughing, ‘thirty-five per cent!’

‘That’s right,’ said James, ‘none of us need more than the basics for survival – a warm cave and lots of wild boar to hunt, but we all want more . . .’

‘I can’t believe you just said that about the miners, mother,’ said Juliette sharply, the sherbet lemon rattling like dice against her teeth as she spoke, ‘have you any idea what it’s like to work down a coal mine?’

‘No. Have you?’

‘People only want more because they want the same as what other people have,’ said Bill, ‘it’s a caucus race, the poor are always trying to catch up with the selfish rich who just get richer and richer. If we are all equal, this cycle of envy will stop . . .’

‘But it would just take one greedy person taking more than they need to start the cycle up again . . .’ said Aldous.

‘Yes, you still haven’t answered dad’s main question,’ said James.

‘I told you,’ Bill spluttered, ‘the situation wouldn’t arise . . .’

Howls of derision from half the room, Bill shouted to be heard above it, ‘. . . but if it did then we’d shoot the buggers . . .’

The howls intensified.

‘Just like we’ll shoot Ted Heath and Prince Charles and all the rest of them – string them up and let them dangle from the balcony of Buckingham Palace – you can’t have a perfect society without first cutting out the rotten wood . . .’

For once Bill’s voice was almost lost amid the noise generated by his opponents, who, sensing a rare victory, continued to pour scorn on his argument long after it had died. Bill, having given up verbally, resorted to gestures, spraying his extended family with machine gun fire, and lobbing invisible hand grenades to every corner of the kitchen.

These post-prandial Sunday afternoons were usually passed, as if by some unspoken agreement, without the accompaniment of alcohol. A kind of alcoholic truce, a drinker’s cease-fire, the one point in the week when everyone agreed to pass the time soberly. But this particular Sunday afternoon it was clear that Janus had been drinking. Aldous had noticed how, every half an hour or so, he would leave the room for no obvious reason, to return a few minutes later. Once he followed him and crept up the stairs while he was in his bedroom. He could hear the gasp and sigh of a beer can yielding its pressurized contents, the muscular clenching of Janus’s neck as he swallowed. When he came out of the room he leant across to the lavatory and pulled its chain, to provide a motive for his going upstairs. The traditional abstinence of Sunday afternoons had encouraged Janus to drink secretly. At any other time he would have drunk openly, not to say blatantly, but today, it seemed, he felt a need to drink furtively.

Aldous foresaw a day of troubles that depressed him deeply. For Janus to begin drinking so early would mean a long afternoon and evening of steadily growing tension and hostility, to culminate in heaven knew what drunken mayhem at night. Now he wished Colette had laced his lunch with crushed Antabuse tablets, as she had done in the past. They’d never managed those pills properly, somehow. The idea was that they induced a state of nausea if one took them before drinking alcohol, so deterring heavy drinking. Janus refused to take them voluntarily, so a couple of times Colette had crushed them with a rolling pin and mixed them in with the gravy of his roast dinner, or the sauce of his bolognese. They’d been warned by the doctor that to allow someone to go out drinking, unaware that they’d taken the tablets, could be dangerous, they were to be treated rather as a form of voluntary deterrence. So Colette would tell Janus, after he’d finished his dinner, that she’d spiked the gravy, in the hope he would abandon any plans for drinking that evening. But she’d underestimated his drinkers’ resolve. His first action, on learning of her trickery, was to swallow a pint of heavily salted water, and then to vomit into the toilet, bringing up most of the tablets with his dinner. Aldous said she shouldn’t have told him, just fed him the drugs and let him take the consequences, or at least let him digest more of his meal before she told him. That was rarely possible, as his evening drinking often started the moment he’d finished his dinner. So they’d given up on the Antabuse idea pretty quickly. Colette wasn’t even convinced that they worked anyway. And for a few weeks after that Janus refused, like some paranoid Roman emperor, to eat any food she’d prepared for him.

Having succumbed to a rare defeat against James, Bill had retired to the music room where he sat on the windowsill next to the piano, leaning back against the window frame, almost hidden by one of the tall, viridian green curtains, reading Under the Volcano, and smoking his pipe. He was shortly joined by Julian, who was passing through a brief passion for the game of chess. He’d carried his little set into the music room, anxious for a partner.

Bill was known to be a good chess player. He could beat everyone in the family, including James, although Janus would usually put up a good fight. So chess was more than one of Bill’s Marxist affectations. He was genuinely good at the game, and Julian had never known him decline an offer to play.

They set up the board on the piano stool and Julian knelt on the floor, plopping the pieces into position, while Bill folded a corner of his novel down and closed it. Bill’s copy of Under the Volcano was the Penguin Modern Classics edition with a Diego Rivera painting on the cover. It was creased and scuffed almost to the point of disintegration, the corners of the cover nipped with white, the spine a cluster of parallel scars where it had been folded back too far. The wear and tear of this book was due to the fact that Bill Brothers had been carrying it around in the paperback-sized pockets of his jackets and coats for more than a year, continually reading and rereading the novel.

‘This is the best book in the English language,’ he said to Julian, showing him the front of the book and tapping the picture with his finger.

‘Janus always says Nostromo is the best book in the English language,’ said Julian, recalling the evening when Janus had given him a long lecture on Joseph Conrad.

‘Janus is merely parroting a man called Leavis who decided, one day, that Nostromo was the greatest novel in the English language, and for some reason everyone has decided to agree with him, just because he’s the Mr Big at Cambridge. In fact, no one has actually read Nostromo . . .’

‘Janus has,’ said Julian, with a certain amount of pride in his voice, ‘he’s shown me bits of it where Conrad uses triple quotation marks . . .’

‘Triple?’

‘Yes, you know, like someone saying someone else’s words . . .’

‘And that, of course, means it’s a great novel . . .’

‘And Conrad wasn’t even English. He ran away to sea didn’t he?’

‘He did. But was he a drinker? That is the question, Julian. It is a well-known fact that no one can write a great novel in a state of sobriety, and I’m pretty sure Conrad never touched a drop of the hard stuff, or even the soft stuff. Now if he had had a can of Special Brew always to hand, or at least a few Gold Labels on his desk, we might be able to read Nostromo . . .’

‘Oh,’ Julian laughed, ‘yeah . . .’

They played chess. Bill rapidly overpowered Julian who’d agreed to be Bobby Fischer to Bill’s Boris Spassky. Shortly after the game started, Janus came into the room, the three remaining cans of a four-pack swinging in their plastic nooses from his hand. He began playing the piano.

Julian was so absorbed in his game the conversations of Bill and Janus passed over his head unnoticed. He could sense that their talk was louder and ruder than it had been, and that Bill was now giving only half his attention to the game, which impressed Julian all the more. Julian would ponder for ten minutes over his move, only to have Bill negate it with a casual sideways move of a knight. He concealed his thought processes with a slow, distracted commentary, ‘you’re moving there are you, Julian, well, in that case . . . I shall have to . . . move . . . there’. Julian couldn’t at first understand why Bill spent so much time moving and reinforcing his pawns, until it became apparent that his forces had been sundered into two uncoordinated halves by a v-shaped wedge of them. Then came a small armada sailing down the queen’s side that swallowed his bishops. Julian’s queen was stranded in dangerous territory on the king’s side in the distant ranks towards Bill’s rooks. But by this time Bill and Janus were into their second can of beer and Bill had drifted away from the game and towards the piano, where he exhorted Janus to play Mussorgsky’s The Great Gate of Kiev, which Janus did with all the gusto and flamboyance he could manage.

‘Muchas Loudas!’ cried Bill. ‘If you play this on the piano at The Lemon Tree it is bound to attract some New Zealand foxes. Play more muchas loudas Janussimus, it is good for me to think much of my fatherland, even though we are speaking of a pre-Revolutionary bourgeois composer . . .’

Julian left the game, his queen still stranded. He’d been waiting perhaps half an hour for Bill to make his move, and he left the room unnoticed by the others.

In the kitchen there was still a lively discussion going on, James, it seemed, having taken the place of Bill at the mantelpiece.

‘But how do you know the oak tree really exists? If you see it or touch it, you are experiencing mental sensations. How do you know that these have any relationship to what is actually out there?’ He gestured grandly towards the kitchen windows which were filled with a frothy display of apple and cherry blossom.

Aldous and Colette seemed unable, or were reluctant to grasp the argument.

‘I still don’t understand, James,’ said Colette, ‘how can the tree be there and not be there?’

Juliette beckoned to Julian again and whispered to him.

‘Go and tell Bill to come in here.’

Julian went back to the music room. As he opened the door, what had previously been the sound of muffled levity was now pronounced and intricately noisy. Janus and Bill sitting side by side at the Bechstein’s keyboard. Two long haired, heavily bearded men, it was as though Marx and Engels were playing a duet – puffily red faced, Bill trilling tunelessly in the upper registers while Janus provided a variety of accompaniments – raunchy boogie-woogie, Mozartian Alberti sequences, lavish Lisztian flourishes. They didn’t notice Julian enter. His chess set was still on the floor.

Julian walked round the piano and pulled gently at Bill’s sleeve. Bill, in the midst of a cacophonic piece of improvisation, and laughing blearily all the while, didn’t notice until Julian had almost pulled him off the piano stool.

‘Juliette wants to speak to you,’ Julian said once he had his brother-in-law’s attention. He noticed a little flurry of worry pass over Bill’s face, which quickly dissipated.

‘Does she? In that case I must now take my leave of the concert platform. Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, standing to address the wall, ‘there will be a short intermission while Janussimus my vice-pianist will entertain you with tunes he heard while on an expedition to discover the source of that great river . . .’ his speech petered out for want of a river name.

‘I suppose your savages never worry about whether trees exist or not,’ Aldous was saying as Bill came into the kitchen.

Aldous and Colette were still trying to adjust to this new James that had emerged since he’d gone to university, the James that was full of ideas, mostly half-formed, but propounded with an authority that they didn’t like to challenge, that wore faded denims deckled with patches, that had grown its hair long with a girlish centre parting. This weekend he was wearing a faded yellow cheesecloth shirt and a denim waistcoat with silver buttons.

Though still only in his first year, James did his best to talk about anthropology with the air of a seasoned expert.

‘On the contrary, there are many societies who believe the whole of the empirical world to be the dream of a mystical creature, like the rainbow snake of the Aborigines, or the . . . the giant moth-pangolin of the Dorbourgon . . .’

Aldous was half-laughing, half-wincing, as though he found the idea gloriously repulsive.

‘They sound just up Janus Brian’s street,’ said Colette, ‘It’s such a shame you didn’t come down a couple of days earlier, James, you could have come to Mary’s funeral. I think you’d get on with Janus Brian these days – he’d love to hear about these Bourbons whoever they are.’

‘I think Janus Brian just says the past is a dream,’ said Aldous, as if to excuse his brother-in-law, ‘I’m sure he thinks the present is real.’

‘But then he did say “remember Dismal Desmond”,’ said Colette, ‘So he’s admitting the past is real. Life must be real, if I was making all this up, surely I’d make up a better life for myself.’

Quietly, while this discussion had progressed, Juliette and Bill were talking in an intense undertone.

‘We should have been home an hour ago,’ Juliette said.

‘But I’ve been playing the piano with Janus . . .’

‘Where did you get the drink from?’

‘What drink?’

‘Don’t be pathetic . . .’

At this point Janus entered the room. A stranger wouldn’t have known he’d been drinking, but everyone in the room could tell. There was something in his stance, his pace, as though gravity took to him more keenly, and because of this the atmosphere in the room changed as instantly as if a switch had been thrown, the air became more acute, sound became clearer, the colour of things deepened a shade, and there were long, uncomfortable pauses in the conversation where before it had flowed seamlessly.

‘We agreed that you wouldn’t go out tonight,’ Juliette said in a quietly angry voice. The room was now focusing on this hushed conversation.

Bill tried to sit on his wife’s knee, dislodging the handbag that had been there. There was an awkward shifting of weight.

‘Don’t be like that my little darling, I’ve just been conversing with my most esteemed brother-in-law.’

Juliette’s face winced as she caught the sour, beery breath that came from Bill’s mouth. Bill seemed to think she was amused.

Janus, who’d been standing next to Bill, squeezed past Juliette to another chair and sat down. He took a cigarette from his packet, lit it, and put the box in the breast pocket of his thin cotton shirt. The sharp oblong shape of it was distinct through the fabric.

‘I’ve got square tits,’ he said, laughing.

Juliette looked at him and scowled.

‘What did you say?’ she said loudly.

Janus, affronted by her effrontery, didn’t know how to reply at first.

‘What?’ he said, eventually.

‘What did you say about me?’

‘He didn’t say anything about you, my sweet,’ said Bill, crooningly, soothingly, ‘he was just making a joke about his cigarette packet, he said it made him look like he’d got square . . .’ and here Bill reddened and laughed childishly, bashfully unable to continue.

‘I thought he was talking about me,’ said Juliette.

‘Touchy aren’t we,’ said Janus.

‘How could Janus say that about you, my sweet little angel, you’ve got lovely little . . .’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake Bill,’ snapped Juliette, pushing back a hand that was moving towards her chest, and pushing her husband off her knee, ‘let’s go.’

‘Bill and me have got business,’ said Janus, blowing a smoke ring.

‘No you haven’t,’ said Juliette, standing up, ‘Bill is staying in tonight with me, that’s what we agreed, isn’t it?’

Bill shrugged apologetically.

‘Where are my fags,’ said Colette, ‘Ah, here they are.’

‘Those are mine,’ said James, triumphantly, ‘look, they’ve got my name on them.’

‘Why’ve you written your name on my fags?’

‘Those are yours, over there,’ said James.

Eventually cigarette ownership was established and fags lit.

‘Well I’m going,’ said Juliette, ‘are you coming with me?’

‘It’s not quite as simple as that, my angel, you see, there’s the question of the source of the Limpopo.’

Janus gave a shriek of laughter.

‘The pubs don’t open till seven,’ said Colette, wads of smoke coming from her nostrils.

‘What about the Limpopo, mate?’ Janus shouted.

‘So I’m going home on my own, am I?’

‘Why don’t you come with us?’

‘It’s Sunday,’ said Juliette, ‘we always stay in on Sunday evenings. We’ve got work tomorrow . . .’

‘I haven’t got work tomorrow,’ said Janus, even though he hadn’t been the subject of Juliette’s last sentence. Nevertheless, the statement caused a stir.

‘What do you mean,’ said Colette, ‘it’s not a Bank Holiday, is it?’

‘No,’ said Janus, ‘I’ve been given the sack.’

Suddenly everything that had seemed odd and unusual about the afternoon – Janus and Bill’s drinking, their removal to the music room, Janus’s quietness, fell into place.

‘What do you mean you’ve been given the sack?’ said Colette, above a barely audible groan from her husband.

‘I mean I went into work as usual yesterday morning and Mr Hawes said my services were no longer needed.’ Janus giggled.

‘He can’t just do that,’ said Colette, ‘what was he playing at?’

Janus was frequently in and out of work. He’d been sacked from Swallows before, then reinstated when Mr Hawes realised how much he needed Janus’s abilities at mental arithmetic. When he worked there was a rhythm to his drinking, a recognizable pattern, which meant the others would know where he was and when he was likely to be drunk. Out of work he would be around the house all day, sometimes drunk, sometimes not, with no way of telling where or when. This was the reason Janus’s news cast such a pall on the afternoon.

‘You weren’t drinking at work again, were you?’ said Colette.

Janus shrugged, not quite able to admit it.

‘You idiot, Janus,’ she said, then, less forcefully, ‘well, you won’t have any money for drinking, then.’

Janus reached into his back pocket and waved a handful of five pound notes.

‘Hawes settled up out of the till – back pay, holiday pay – this should see me alright for a while . . .’ He gave a sneaky, jeering laugh.

‘Get the money off him, James,’ Colette said to her other son, who was nearest Janus, with such urgency that James made for the money, before checking himself, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, mother,’ he said.

Colette had sprung out of her chair, ‘Bill, grab it,’ she nodded urgently at the wad Janus was still waving. Underestimating her seriousness, Bill seemed bemused, but by this time Colette was herself making a lunge for the cash. Janus repocketed it slowly and deliberately.

In the commotion Colette knocked a cup off the table. A glass smashed.

‘What are you doing, mother,’ said Juliette, annoyed that her own crisis had been overshadowed by Janus’s news.

‘Trying to get that money off him. There’s enough there to keep him drunk for weeks on end. And what about all the housekeeping he’ll owe me for when he’s on the dole? I’m entitled to most of it . . .’

‘There’s no point . . .’

‘Now we know what you’re really worried about,’ said Janus, grinning, ‘just worried about your own supplies of Gold Labels . . .’

‘I’m not the one who ends up in a police cell every other week. You don’t know how to handle money, or drink. So come on, hand it over.’

She held out her hand, palm up, a debtor demanding payment.

The hand was held just a little below Janus’s face, Colette leaning across the length of the table to reach. Juliette and Bill, on one side, watched amusedly. James, leaning against the wall on the other, observing with a half-smile on his face.

Janus bent his face towards Colette’s palm, as if to plant a kiss on it. Instead, he dropped a white bolus of spittle from his lips which Colette unwittingly caught. She slapped him, rather weakly, across the side of his face with her soiled hand. Bill stood up to restrain Colette, who was attempting further strikes.

‘Oh God,’ said Juliette, in a disgusted way, ‘let’s just go, Bill.’

‘Shut your face,’ Janus suddenly snapped, his lips curling, ‘Bill’s coming to the pub with me.’

‘If you’re going to the pub,’ said Juliette to her husband, ‘I’m bolting the door. You can sleep in the front garden.’

Janus by this time had managed to drag Bill to the door. Bill was shrugging to his wife apologetically, as if to say the situation was beyond his control.

‘We’re not going to the pub,’ shouted Janus, ‘We’re going to discover the source of the Limpopo!’

The last word was spoken with a rolling-eyed, growling voice, as Bill was pulled backwards through the door. Janus whooped loudly in the hall. Bill gave a loud ‘Shhh!’ Then the front door was slammed.

The kitchen was suddenly very quiet. Juliette stood up.

‘I’m going to get the bus,’ she said.

Aldous put a consoling arm around Colette’s shoulder, who seemed on the verge of tears. There was a sense of shock in the room at her reaction to Janus’s news. But she had quickly recovered herself.

‘I just can’t stand the thought of him loafing about the house all day, cadging money and fags off me, and then getting half-cut whenever he likes . . .’

‘Why don’t you chuck him out then,’ said Juliette, with the impatient air of someone who’s been through scenes like these countless times.

Colette glared at her daughter, ‘Oh it’s oh-so simple, isn’t it? – just sling him out . . .’

‘What was all that about the Limpopo?’ said James, still laughing with incredulity at the exit of Janus and Bill. Juliette raised her eyes to heaven, then shook her head in controlled despair.

‘Bill has been obsessed with Victorian explorers ever since that series on BBC2 – The Great Explorers. Stupidly I bought him the book for Christmas, now he and Janus have this silly fantasy about being Richard Burton or John Hanning Speke, or Mungo Park. It was funny at first, but like everything with Bill, he just takes it too far. One night him and Janus explored the end of Hugo and Veronica Price’s back garden, saying they were searching for the source of some river, not the Limpopo – the Irrawaddy, I think it was. They took a box of Kleenex tissues with them and left a trail down the side of the garden so they could find their way back. Another night they climbed over the barbed wire beside the New River and followed the canal for miles, Bill came home caked in mud. If he does anything like that again he can sleep in the front garden, like I said.’

‘The big kid,’ said Colette, restored to a level of calmness by Juliette’s anecdotes.

Juliette eventually left the house to catch her bus home, a look of stoical resolve on her face as she marched off down the road. James went out later to see some friends.

Aldous and Colette spent the evening alone together in the front room, Colette, a glass of barley wine by her side, reading Dombey and Son, Aldous doing some pencil sketches of the palms he’d been given that morning in church, and which he had placed in the lotus vase (of his own making), on top of the blank television. They formed a pleasing, unusual display, these tall, tapering leaves sprouting from the curled geometry of the vase. The lamp on the mantelpiece gave them a large shadow, which loomed on the wall behind them. Julian sat with his chessboard going through the moves of Capablanca v Eliskases.

It was how they spent many evenings when Janus was out. They were distracting themselves from what would be a long evening of waiting, of listening – for the footsteps on the path, for the key in the lock, trying to determine from these sounds the mood of their eldest son.

They went to bed around midnight, unfolding the bed settee on which Colette had spent the evening reading. They could have slept upstairs, in the large back bedroom, which they’d used intermittently since James had gone to university, but in truth they preferred sleeping downstairs in the front living room, they’d grown used to it in the years when there’d been nowhere else for them to sleep.

Colette swallowed six Nembutals, downed the dregs of her last Gold Label of the day, and settled down to sleep. Even with the drink and the pills it took her a long time to finally drift off. She heard noises outside, the front door open, some suppressed laughter. She instantly recognised James’s voice. He must have brought a friend home. She heard them giggling in the kitchen. Aldous heard them too. With James home there was little to worry about. He could handle drunken Janus on his own. And so they went to sleep.