4

Colette and Aldous were in the bathroom at Fernlight Avenue – Colette in the blue-tinted foamy waters of the bath, Aldous in his trousers and vest at the sink, shaving.

Aldous was a cautious, rather nervous shaver. He had a sensitive skin that was easily nicked, and he bled every morning – little scarlet puddles on his face that in the lather looked like strawberries in snow. He endured the painful ritual because he could never bear the thought of being bearded.

Once, during a wartime razorblade shortage, he’d let his whiskers grow for three days, but the itchiness had nearly driven him mad. He’d resorted to fishing a blunt blade out of the rubbish and shaving painfully with that. And any beard he grew now would be white, and a white beard was out of the question. He would look like Father Christmas, as ridiculous as the beard of lather he wore each morning before the bathroom mirror.

The greying of Aldous’s hair had begun when he was in his forties, and had been a slow process that seemed to have accelerated in recent years. It was still thick, combed straight back in a single, brimming wave that added an extra inch and a half to his height, but was now almost pure white. That the same had happened to his whiskers he could tell in the morning, when he saw them on his jowls. His beard grew slowly, and each morning there was a barely perceptible sheen of silver on his face, like dew on a lawn. It weighed him down, his hair – almost black when he was a young man, it now sat on his head like a puff of cumulus, reminding everyone who cared to look that this man hadn’t, in the scheme of the average lifespan, long to live.

It was true. Another decade and Aldous would be an old man. He should, he knew, be looking forward to retirement. Just two more years. A lump sum and a decent pension awaited him. Days free to do as he liked. Time to paint. For the first time since his days as a student, when he’d lived in lodgings with Lesley Waugh, he would be able to devote nearly all his time to painting, or listening to music, or reading, or whatever he liked. But the thought filled him with dread. Any thoughts about the future filled him with dread.

It was always the same problem. He could picture a happy future for him and his family, himself in comfortable retirement out in the garden painting the trees, his children happily married, grandchildren playing on the grass, Colette enjoying the odd glass of cider but nothing stronger, baking pies and making jam. And then he would ask himself the question – where would Janus fit into this picture? Aldous’s thoughts about the future were always clouded by Janus. If Aldous pictured a future garden in which his family was happy, Janus would always emerge darkly from the bushes, a can of strong beer in his hands, whooping like an Apache, kicking over the flowers and card tables, screaming obscenities.

It was impossible to imagine Janus married, more impossible to imagine him a father. Almost laughable. Nor could he ever seriously imagine Janus having any sort of proper job, befitting a qualified musician. Occasionally the desperate hope would present itself, that Janus might settle down as a music teacher, but the thought was ridiculous. At times Aldous even wished that his son had never touched a piano, all it had done was give him a superiority complex, and had, via pub pianism, turned him into an aggressive and obnoxious drunk.

As Aldous shaved, observing the familiar faces he made to make the process easier (the sceptical philosopher, the affronted duchess, the smirking connoisseur), he could see his wife in the mirror, mottled slightly by the condensation on the glass. In the mountains of suds (how Colette loved bubble-bath, a bottle was gone in three or four sessions), she seemed like an angel reclining on a cloud, her breasts (plumper and rounder than he’d ever known them, even when she was pregnant) shining as though under a sheen of lacquer. Now and then he exchanged glances with her via the damp mirror, and smiled.

They were both revelling in the uniqueness of the morning. They didn’t normally use the bathroom together, but this morning was special.

For the last two or three years money, never in much abundance, had been especially scarce. At times Aldous feared falling behind with the mortgage, of losing the house. He fantasized that he would have to take their tent down from the loft and live somewhere in that. Everything he earned as a teacher seemed to vanish the moment it entered his bank account, as though that repository was made of some corrosive substance that dissolved money. Out of desperation he’d tried to make money from his paintings.

Not really knowing how to sell them, he’d entered them instead for the various competitions that it seemed fashionable now for certain companies to sponsor, and he’d had some success. First prize in a competition organised by Bukta, for a landscape painting that incorporated a tent. From memory Aldous had painted, during a few lunch hours, a portrait of their own Bukta tent as it stood in the farm at Llanygwynfa, where, up until 1970, they’d spent every summer for fifteen years. The prize was five hundred pounds and a small, two-person tent. Aldous wondered if they would ever use it.

Then there was a competition organised by the makers of Tia Maria for a painting that could be of any subject so long as it included the ‘distinctive image’ of a Tia Maria bottle. Aldous dredged up from the loft an old painting he’d done some time in the early Fifties, an interior of their old house in Edmonton, executed in the thick, impastoed style of the kitchen-sink school, of which Aldous was then an unacknowledged member. In the foreground, to the left there was the perfect space for a Tia Maria bottle, so, in the same style, he trowelled the image in, waited a while for the oils to dry, then sent it off. It won a thousand pounds and a five year supply of Tia Maria. Aldous was able to buy a car with the thousand pounds, and pay off some debts, but the supplementary prize caused him some anxiety. He hadn’t really thought about it when he entered, now the idea of endless alcohol pumped into the house horrified him. A mountain of crates filling the music room, Janus permanently drunk on liquor, Colette also. What quantity of spirit would they send to meet the five year capacity of a family of drunks?

But it was not to be a one-off delivery. Instead, once every three months, a bottle of Tia Maria arrived by special delivery, and would do so for another four years. Never exactly the same day of the month, so chance dictated who answered the door and received the drink. If Janus got there first, the bottle was gone in a day and he would fall to a sickly state of drunkenness. Tia Maria, for some reason, affected Janus particularly badly, and nearly always caused him to utter a most tedious sequence of slow and nasty insults which gnawed at the consciousness of the listener until their selfhood seemed to pop, and they became someone else, equally aggressive.

Janus always maintained (quite wrongly, Aldous believed) that he never initiated the violence that erupted when he was drunk. His skill, he claimed, on those rare occasions when he would talk about it, was to incite other people to aggressive acts against him.

‘It gives me a parallel into their minds,’ he said once, holding his index fingers vertically and moving them against each other to signify two minds coming into contact, ‘provoking people to violence is like undressing their minds,’ he said, ‘if you are violently out of control you are mentally naked.’

Aldous had scoffed loudly at the idea. He no longer trusted anything his son said, sober or drunk.

Aldous now dreaded the arrival of his prize, the menstrual ingress of alcohol, uninvited, into his house. It somehow ensured that even if his wife and son gave up the bottle completely, there would always be something to tempt them back.

Recently, however, Aldous had won a rather spectacular prize. The town council of a resort on the south coast had organized a competition to design windows for its new crematorium. There were two windows, one at each end, both eight feet tall, both with triangular arches at the top. Aldous had made designs based on an ascending flock of doves, circling round a sun, on one window, and a moon on the other. Semi-abstract, expressionistic, with the textural feel of fabric designs, Aldous’s doves had won first prize, beating many hundreds of entrants, including the design departments of several colleges (including the Hornsey, Aldous’s old college), and attracting a surprising amount of publicity.

The designs had appeared in the Daily Telegraph with a short paragraph about Aldous underneath. That was six months ago. Now the windows had been made and were installed. Aldous had taken a day off school and was to travel to the south coast resort for a special lunch with the mayor and other local dignitaries to be followed by the unveiling ceremony where Aldous would see his windows in situ, and would know at last how they would appear when transparent, how well they would catch the light, something that had troubled Aldous since he had made the designs. It is, after all, very difficult to imagine how something on paper will look on glass with the sun shining behind it.

Aldous and Colette wondered if this marked a turning point in their fortunes, because shortly after the article had appeared in the Telegraph a letter came from a monastery in Durham inviting Aldous to submit designs for a fountain to decorate a monastic quadrangle. Aldous had already made a design, a scaled down version of which he was currently sculpting in terracotta, which was really a three dimensional version of his windows, with ascending doves fluttering around a central fount of water which then crashed and spilt over them beautifully, or so he hoped. As with windows, it is hard to imagine what a fountain, on paper, will look like when water is pouring through it.

Money had not yet been discussed, although the oddly named commissioner of the piece, Brother Head, had warned that he had first to seek the approval of the bishop of Durham before they could talk about fees.

What future commissions might these projects open doors to! Aldous might become a celebrated designer of ecclesiastical windows, reglazing the vandalized churches of England with many-coloured glass, the cathedrals even. How charming it would be to become part of the thousand-year narrative of an English church.

That was a hope, at least. Colette was as excited about it. She was always exasperated by Aldous’s unwillingness to exploit the lucrative side of art. Her fantasy was that they should tour the countryside, paying their way by painting pictures of any pretty pubs they happened upon, then selling them to the licensees. She half-imagined they could live like that indefinitely. But Aldous could not be cajoled into hawking his art, not because he had any qualms about the morality of the thing, he just lacked any ability whatsoever as a salesman. Now Colette hoped that her husband was beginning to be recognized for the extraordinary talent she believed him to be, so she made sure he shaved properly, closely, accurately.

And Aldous felt like singing as he dabbed and patted his uncut face dry, removed the earrings of soap that always grew on his lobes, the collar of foam that always grew round his neck and lowered a hand into the creamy, clotted water to pull the plug.

There was an unusual sound. A loud cascading of liquid, as though there was a waterfall in the room. Then Aldous felt something warm and wet pattering on his feet. Bending down he saw that the water was falling through the plughole into empty space. There was no pipe to take it away.

‘Hey,’ he said, then noticed the spread of milky water out from under the bath. Colette had just got out and had pulled the plug and the same thing was happening there. Water had been released into the unpiped open, to spread as it liked across the floor, through the floorboards, down onto the ceiling of the hall. Thinking quickly Aldous leapt over and replugged the bath, but not before a gallon or so of bathwater had escaped.

Underneath the sink Aldous found that the pipes had been cut out. Two shiny o’s of freshly sliced copper. He found the same under the bath when he removed a panel. The bath was an old tub of enamelled iron with clawed feet. The waste pipe had been sawn off.

It took Aldous and Colette a while to understand what had happened. Colette dressed herself while Aldous hurried downstairs. In the hall he inspected the ceiling. A dark stain was growing in the plaster around the light fitting. He rummaged in the cupboard under the stairs for his hand drill, found a chair to stand on and began drilling holes in the ceiling.

‘What are you doing?’ said Colette as she came down the stairs.

‘Relieving the pressure,’ said Aldous, an irritable growl in his voice, ‘The weight of water could bring the whole ceiling down if it’s just left there – then there’s the electrics to worry about – what the hell’s been going on?’

The drill, with a little jolt, had made its first hole. A needle-thin stream of water fell.

‘Get a pot or something will you darling?’ said Aldous, repositioning his chair for another go with the drill, ‘. . . get several.’

Colette went into the kitchen and returned with an array of saucepans and bowls. For a few moments the two of them wordlessly concentrated on their task of draining the water from the ceiling – Aldous drilling little holes, Colette positioning pots and pans to catch the drops. After ten minutes or so there were half a dozen tiny waterfalls pouring out of the ceiling, and no sign of an end to the water trapped up there.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Aldous, standing back to watch the strange spectacle of rain indoors, ‘why would anyone want to saw the pipes out of the bathroom?’

‘I don’t know, but don’t worry about it now, you’ve got to get to Waterloo, you don’t want to miss the train.’

Aldous, as though having forgotten, rushed upstairs to finish dressing, leaving Colette to gaze into the little, deepening pools that were forming in the hall, seeing the milky traces of soap in the water, the scum of bubbles round the rim of each pan.

‘I’ll see you tonight then darling,’ said Aldous, coming back down the stairs, making for the front door, almost kicking a pot over.

‘I wish I was coming with you,’ said Colette, kissing him.

‘Janus Brian would never get over it,’ Aldous laughed, conscious that his wife was showing a rare level of interest in his work. She never came to the door normally to see him off but would usually just sit in her chair, calling goodbye as he left the kitchen, but here she was at the front door straightening his tie and brushing the dandruff off his lapels. It wasn’t just that he was setting off for the south coast to receive a prestigious prize. She had changed since Janus Brian had entered their lives. The regular visits she now made had instilled her with a new energy, and a sense of purpose, something she’d always felt an increasing lack of as the children grew older.

‘This is going to be the start of something big,’ she said, ‘don’t worry about the bathroom now, just think about your windows.’

Aldous was finding the worry in his face difficult to dislodge, Colette could see that. After he’d kissed her he saved his last glance for the falling water in the hall, before turning his back on the house. The flood had provided a dissonant underside to their happy, late morning in the bathroom, a kind of inversion of it, its antithesis – unwanted, intrusive water that upstairs had been a desired luxury.

Anything unusual about the house, anything strange, odd, out of place, was usually the work of Janus. He came down, as always, after his father had left the house. He passed Colette in the hall, and didn’t register the falling water at all, even though dribbles landed on him as he passed through. He washed at the sink in the kitchen, made himself a cup of tea. Scipio, who’d been asleep all morning on a chair, woke up, as he always did when Janus came down, and mewed seductively at his master’s feet, curling in and out of his legs. Janus opened a tin of cat food, pulled the meat onto a saucer and put it on the floor for the cat. Feeding Scipio had been Janus’s sole responsibility for all the years they’d had the cat.

Then Janus sat at the table with his tea. But he didn’t drink his tea at first. He liked to wait until it had cooled down. Sometimes he would leave it cooling for half an hour, and then drink it all, nearly stone cold, in one go. While waiting he just sat there, one arm resting on the tabletop, the other in his lap, his legs crossed. His head was inclined forward, slightly, so that his long hair fell across it. With his thick beard his face was almost completely obscured by hair.

Since losing his job he’d spent most of his time like that – just sitting. He sat in the same place, in the same position, for hours on end – one elbow on the table, his other arm in his lap. If he left the table – to use the lavatory, to make tea, he would return to the chair as soon as possible and resume the position, with almost a palace sentry’s sense of duty, almost as if the chair and the table had become body parts without which he couldn’t survive for long. He talked very little. When the evening came he would eat the dinner Colette had cooked, then he would return to his room, and begin drinking. They would hear, from downstairs, the metallic retching of beer cans being opened. Four or five in quick succession. Then the muffled downpour of vomit falling into the lavatory. Then Janus would leave the house, primed for an evening’s boozing in The Quiet Woman. Nearly every other night he went through this routine, returning noisily around midnight, usually too far gone to be any trouble. Drinking was the only thing that seemed to animate him now. Sober he was silent and inert, drunk he was alive, vociferous, energetic. What puzzled Colette most was where he was getting the money from. He’d been out of work for nearly two months. He handed over to her around half his National Assistance. That left him about five pounds a week to spend, which could pay for perhaps one night on the tiles, but not the four or five Janus was spending each week.

Colette thought she would leave it until the afternoon before asking her son about the bathroom. Janus Brian called for her exactly on time, pipping his horn perkily outside the house, and she walked through the small shower in the hall, to meet him.

She did worry sometimes when Janus Brian came for her in his car, even though he’d promised he’d never drink prior to picking her up, and would only take her home again in the afternoon if he hadn’t had a drink in between. Colette could tell, by the quickening of his speech and the sweetening of his breath, he’d always had a drink before he’d set out. Probably just a swig of gin, a single mouthful, taken straight from the bottle, enough to prime him for life beyond the front door. But she didn’t say anything. Instead she sat down in the passenger seat of her brother’s Renault 7, still quite a new car, newer than any of the cars Aldous had ever owned and felt the soft, upholstered comfort of average luxury.

Janus Brian was unshaven, his tall head prickly with unkempt hair. As always, he did her seat belt for her, leaning across her to click the buckle into place.

‘Don’t think I’m mauling you dear,’ he said, ‘but it is better to be trapped than thrown out.’

Though only a mile separated Janus Brian’s house from Colette’s, there seemed an infinite variety of possible routes between the two. This was because their houses were on different spokes of London’s radial street pattern. Journeys across the city from one suburb to another were awkward and eccentric and involved lots of detours and short cuts through the grids of residential avenues that lead nowhere in particular. This time Janus Brian turned left at the top of the road, down Hoopers Lane, passing The Goat and Compasses, then right up the busy Goat and Compasses Lane, an arterial road, one of the spokes that brought traffic into London from the north. A sequence of nearly identical straight roads turned off from here to the left, all running parallel, leading to Owl Lane. It was down to Janus’s own whim which of these roads he chose. They were all named after places in Devon for some reason – Exeter Avenue, Honiton Road, Plymouth Drive. Janus Brian chose Wolfardisworthy Avenue, and put his foot down, a reckless burst of acceleration that had the bordering houses and parked cars flicking past with frightening velocity and which Colette endured in rigid silence. The needle passed sixty before Janus Brian took his foot off the pedal, then, turning right carefully into Owl Lane muttered, by way of explanation, ‘Nice to have a spurt occasionally.’

Later, as they passed down Taunton Road to The Lemon Tree, he talked further.

‘Would you mind, dear, if I talked about my bowel movements? I know you are not my doctor, but they have been bothering me lately. You see, I seem to have been passing live fish.’

‘Have you?’

Janus Brian shrugged, as though it was beyond explanation.

‘I mean, it is ridiculous. I know I eat a lot of fish, especially those boil-in-the-bag ones that you buy for me, but, you know, last night I was passing a motion on the toilet, not much came out, just a dribble, really, but when I looked in the bowl there was this brightly coloured – a sort of electric blue with yellow stripes – tropical fish in the pan swimming about. I don’t know if I imagined it or what, I suppose I must have, but it’s been happening for a few days now. Once I looked down and there was this little shoal of tiny red fish, absolutely beautiful, a sort of pinky red, like valentines, all turning at the same time, like a flock of birds. They swam round the U-bend as I looked, and were gone. I don’t mind really, as long as they are nice colourful ones, but they do give me a bit of a start. The thing is, would you mind having a look for me, to see if you can see them as well? To prove to me that I must be hallucinating?’

Colette nodded in a tired sort of way. She was no longer surprised by her brother’s faeces.

‘Yesterday I had . . .’ he paused briefly, as he always did before uttering any expletive or other unsavoury term, ‘what I can only describe as an, inverted commas, “wet fart”. Do you know what I mean?’ He suddenly seemed pleased with his invented term, ‘In fact that is what I seem to have nowadays instead of proper craps. But anyway, I had this wet fart yesterday, and afterwards I was absolutely sure there was a small goldfish in my pants. I could feel it wriggling there, gasping for breath. I had to pull my trousers down and have a look. There was nothing there, just a brown stain. Do you think I’m going mad?’

‘Yes,’ said Colette.

At the house Janus Brian paused on the doorstep, after opening the front door, and turned to the street below and shouted ‘Bollocks!’ as loudly as his weakened voice would allow. ‘Sorry, but I sometimes feel this incredible urge. I’m beginning to hate the people in this road. When Mary was alive they were always popping in, but since she’s gone and I’ve gone off the rails, they’ve shunned me completely.’ There was no response from the street, not even the twitch of a curtain. ‘There’s a taxi-driver a few doors down who starts his taxi up every morning at about half past six and lets it run for half an hour to warm up. Bloody thing sounds like a tractor, keeping me awake. I don’t see why I shouldn’t retaliate once in a while.’

Colette did her usual tidying up, conscious, as always, that she worked far harder at her brother’s house than she ever did at her own. At Fernlight Avenue it was Aldous who was usually lumbered, after a day’s work, with hoovering, doing the washing-up and making the beds.

Janus Brian chatted, as he always did.

‘Have you seen these new cigarettes they’ve just brought out? Reg brought me some over on Saturday. John Players Special.’ He showed her a pack. They did look unusual, packaged in shiny, black boxes with the monogram JPS in gold. The pack Janus Brian handed her was empty. ‘I’ll have to get myself some when we go to the shops today. You can get these special plastic drum packs, a sort of cylinder, same colour, must hold about fifty.’

Janus Brian always had a taste for the luxuries his modest but comfortable draughtsman’s salary would allow. He probably earned less than Aldous but without any children all his earnings, and Mary’s as well, went on themselves. This made Colette very angry when, as sometimes happened, Janus Brian would gently criticize Colette for the impoverished nature of her lifestyle; the fact that she had no fridge, telephone or washing machine, that Aldous’s cars were always at least a decade old, that they had no furniture in their house that wasn’t handed down from Nana, or from their dead sister Meg. Janus Brian had always enjoyed the newest styles and the latest gadgetry. His furniture was straight out of the Sunday supplements. He smoked Dunhills which he lit with a silver-plated Dunhill lighter, and he stubbed them out on an onyx ashtray with a spinning mechanism. He listened to Schubert and big band jazz on something called a hi-fi that he was always talking about in a jargon Colette couldn’t follow, and which irritated her.

Colette’s lack of a telephone particularly annoyed Janus Brian. He even offered to pay for the installation of a phone at Fernlight Avenue. He himself had what he called a Trimphone, a grey-green modernistic piece of plastic that warbled electronically instead of ringing.

‘I’ve told you, Janus, Aldous won’t have a phone. He just doesn’t like the idea of it.’

‘There you are, you see,’ said Janus, ‘you’re always saying it’s the kids that keep you living in the dark ages, but in fact it’s your own choice. You choose to live like that.’

As Colette spruced up Janus Brian’s house, particularly musty and dour after a weekend alone, she came upon something odd in the kitchen. In a small saucepan there was an open tin of Cherry Blossom shoe polish. The shoe polish seemed to have melted, coating the inside of the pan with a mushy, strong smelling tar.

‘What’s this mess?’ she said.

Janus Brian seemed unconcerned.

‘Sunday night. I’d run out of booze and I was going crazy for a drink. Nowhere to buy anything. Nothing open. Fucking Sundays. Pardon my French.’

‘What’s that got to do with shoe polish in your saucepan?’

‘Oh,’ he said, seeming to think that he’d already provided an explanation, ‘I tried to extract the alcohol from it. Bloody waste of time. In theory it should be possible. I ended up with a teaspoonful of brown sludge that tasted like hell . . .’

‘You mean you’ve been drinking shoe polish?’

‘Refined shoe polish, if you don’t mind. You see, if you boil it in a double boiler, catch the steam, in theory you should be able to separate the spirit . . .’

‘Janus,’ said Colette, ‘What are we going to do with you?’

Colette smiled when she heard herself uttering that phrase. The last time she’d heard it, it had been applied to herself by Mrs Lawrence, a large and loud Jamaican woman she had befriended when Julian had started going to primary school. Their children Julian and Nicky were friends, and as the Lawrences lived nearby, in a flat above a hardware shop on Green Lanes just at the bottom of Fernlight Avenue, she and Mrs Lawrence caught the same buses when they took their sons to school (another awkward non-radial journey – two buses to go less than a mile!). It was around that time that Colette began sniffing bicycle glue and taking sleeping pills, a combination that meant, some mornings, she was just too far gone to take Julian to school. Then Aldous would have to take Julian down to the hardware shop and ask Mrs Lawrence if she could take him to school with Nicky. A favour-exchanging relationship soon developed between them, and sometimes Julian would go to Nicky’s home after school and play with his toys for an hour or two, and likewise Nicky would sometimes come to Fernlight Avenue. It was when Mrs Lawrence came to collect Nicky one day that she witnessed Colette in one of her states, staggering, delirious, mumbling nonsensically, her hair awry, her glasses crooked. Mrs Lawrence had been brisk and humorous in her reaction

‘What you going to do with her, Mr Jones,’ she said to Aldous loudly, ‘You going to sell her?’

She felt sad when the Lawrences moved, just as they were getting to know them. Mr Lawrence had landed a job in America and the whole family had uprooted and gone to Florida just in time to watch the Saturn Vs taking off. Nicky had been such a sweet little boy. Colette remembered the time he’d been sick at one of Julian’s birthday parties, a pink trough of puke on the floor, and two silver tears rolling down that little brown face.

Now it was Janus Brian’s turn to be useless. And yet with him the question had a more urgent feel. What were they going to do with him? Something needed to be done, but what? Colette couldn’t go on being his housekeeper for ever. Whenever she thought he was getting better, that he was beginning to pull himself together, she would find something like this, a little home-made shoe polish distillery, and everything would be back to square one. She suspected, though couldn’t be sure, that his level of alcohol intake was steadily increasing.

Whenever she confronted her brother with the question of what plans he was making, he would always end up in a trough of suicidal self-pity.

‘Bring some cyanide with you next time you come, will you dear? This poison,’ he pointed to a gin bottle, ‘is working too slowly.’

This is what he said after she found the shoe polish. He flopped in his Mastermind chair and wept faintly. Little tears again, sweet as Nicky Lawrence’s, like silverfish scurrying down his face.

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘Well, what am I good for? I’m just waiting to join Mary. That’s all I want.’

‘Why don’t you move,’ she said, ‘sell up and buy somewhere smaller. Somewhere without all these memories.’

‘The only house I want is a wooden one,’ he moaned, ‘six feet under.’

Colette understood how central she had become to Janus Brian’s life. She was his main support. She felt like the rampart of a dam. If she weakened, if she cracked, the waters came dribbling through, and soon there was the flood. She was holding back the lake of Janus Brian’s despair.

Colette sighed, exasperated, suddenly wanting to slap her brother’s bald pate. Then she found herself thinking about Aldous. While she was sitting in this stale house, he was somewhere on the south coast lunching with dignitaries. She wondered what he was doing at that precise moment. Being chauffeured to the crematorium, like a film star, watching the curtain fall from his monumental windows. No, she thought, looking at the clock on the mantelpiece, too early. He was probably still on the train.

‘Come on, Janus,’ Colette said, with sudden assertiveness, ‘let me read you something.’

And Janus Brian brightened. He had come to adore being read to by his little sister. He himself had chosen Bleak House, suggesting the novel only half-seriously for the dark aptness of its title. Its main effect, it soon transpired, was soporific, and Janus Brian would often fall asleep after a few pages of the wranglings of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. At this rate Colette reckoned it would take about two and a half years to read Bleak House, and around half a century to read the complete works.

When Janus Brian slept, as he did that morning, Colette slept as well. Zonked out in his Mastermind chair, Janus Brian could sleep for two or three hours. Colette would go upstairs and have a long nap in her brother’s double bed, losing herself in the luxury of space, what seemed an acre of mattress in comparison to the put-u-up bed-settee she and Aldous had become used to. It sometimes struck her that that was why she enjoyed her visits to Leicester Avenue so much. Whereas she lived in a crowded house made shadowy and awkward by its accumulated objects, Janus Brian lived in a house that had few objects and little history. What there was instead was space, open reaches of carpet, walls not shrunk with shelving and cupboards, rooms that with their absence of things seemed to her like ballrooms, arenas, stadia.

But it was not how she would have liked her house. After a few hours the absence of history became as intrusive, in its own way, as stacked books or mounds of outgrown clothes. And she could never sleep deeply in the double bed, troubled by the odd space she was occupying, her brother’s wife’s, whose absence from those pillows had emptied the house to an intolerable degree, for Janus Brian. After a shallow and restless sleep the thought struck her that day – supposing as she’d slept, Janus Brian, half-cut, had come up the stairs to find her in his bed. In his state of mind he might have taken her for a ghost. The thought made her sit upright suddenly. She was stupid to use her brother’s bed. There were other beds in the house, though not as comfortable as this. And as she sat there, she had the distinct feeling that Janus Brian had visited her while she slept, she could sense it in the subtlest of spatial shifts – the door ajar by an extra half-inch, perhaps, or another millimetre of light between the curtains. She wasn’t sure, but she felt a need to go and investigate her brother’s whereabouts. She found him soon enough. He was in the bathroom, contemplating his naked self in the mirror.

Colette had become used to her brother’s nakedness, though it had shocked her the first time, when he appeared in the kitchen one evening while she was making the dinner. He’d made no excuse or apology for his nudity, he simply drifted into the kitchen, poked about in some of the cupboards, and then drifted out. Aldous recalled the same event with some amusement. He’d been in the living room, and had noticed a faint breeze rustle the pages of his Daily Telegraph. He lowered it and saw a rear view of nude Janus Brian, tall, yellowish pink, skinny, heading for the kitchen. He raised his paper and continued reading. A few seconds later another breeze set the pages fluttering and he lowered it, to see nude Janus Brian passing in the opposite direction. Without clothes Janus Brian made no sound as he walked. He was a visual event only.

At first Colette thought her brother’s nudity was a form of laziness, that he couldn’t be bothered getting dressed, even to answer the front door, but Aldous realised that Janus Brian was obtaining a certain thrill in exposing himself, and he himself confessed to her, ‘I’m afraid, my dear, that I am what is called a “narcissist”.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes. I am falling in love with my own image. I will stand before the wardrobe mirror for hours admiring myself. My body. I am sorry but I believe I am beautiful.’

Now Colette watched her brother through the ajar door of the bathroom. He was standing before the long mirror, naked except for a pair of black socks and his glasses. His back was to her, his front reflected in the mirror. He was just standing there, his arms hanging by his sides, full square before himself, unexcited, still, absorbed in self-contemplation. She tried to gauge the expression on his face. Her brother had always had one of the least expressive faces she had ever seen. It hardly seemed to move, even when he was talking, or laughing, or crying. It was no different then, naked before the mirror. His body looked unbearably feeble, like a baby’s, quite pink and solid, but totally without any visible musculature. His body was all loose skin and tendons, it seemed, and little pouches of fat.

As she watched he lifted his hands to his chest, cupped his breasts and lifted them, then pushed them together to create a wizened cleavage, then let them fall back into their shapeless repose. He repeated this two or three times, after which his hands moved down his body towards his genitals. Colette failed to avert her eyes. She was amused by the fluffiness of the hair down there and the way everything seemed neatly folded and tucked away. He lifted his flaccid penis by its foreskin, let it fall back, doing this several times as though testing for signs of life in a dead kitten.

‘When we were at school,’ said Janus Brian, showing no other sign that he’d noticed Colette’s presence, ‘we used to compare cock sizes, me and Reg. Mine was always the bigger. Mind you, he was circumcised, so mine always had the additional bulk of the prepuce. I knew I had one of the biggest, if not the biggest cock in the class. But since those days I’ve never seen another man’s cock, so it’s hard for me to know where I rank in the league of penis length . . .’ Janus Brian now turned away from the mirror and faced his sister, ‘What about Aldous?’ he continued, ‘how do we compare? I mean on a purely dimensional level?’

‘To be honest I never pay much attention to dimensions. I wouldn’t say there was much difference.’

‘That’s a pity,’ Janus sighed and turned back to the mirror. Then he said, ‘Do you think another woman will ever gaze with fondness upon this sight again?’

Colette remembered the trouble she’d gone through to find him a wife, his seeming indifference to all the possible mates she’d procured, the unusualness of Mary Moore. She thought it highly unlikely, almost impossible.

‘Maybe one day, Janus, when you’ve got over all this.’

Janus didn’t seem to hear her. He turned back to his reflection.

‘You know who I keep seeing in this mirror?’ he said. Then, before Colette could reply, ‘Our father. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately.’

Colette was tempted to say Dada was a dream, dear, but she said ‘Have you?’

‘Yes. I keep seeing him in my face in a way that I’ve never noticed before. And then I realized it was because I can’t remember him as being much younger than I am now. In fact I am now older than he was when he died. I am older than my father. Isn’t that what they call a paradox?’

‘Yes.’

‘So now I look like my father as I remember him. But I must have looked like him all my life, it’s just that I never knew him as a young man. And then I find myself thinking about his body. I never saw it. Did you?’

‘No.’

Their father took a bath once a week in the zinc tub that was kept in the scullery and was brought into the living room before the fire. When their father was bathing no one was allowed in the living room.

It disquieted her to think of it now, her father behind the oak door of the living room, in the middle of all their living room things, their books, furniture and carpet, standing, as he must have done, utterly naked. Colette can remember her father on the beach at Broadstairs, sitting stiffly in a deckchair, fully clothed even to his trilby hat, reading The Times on a hot day.

‘I keep wondering if he had my body. I inherited his mouth and his eyes and his hair. What about the rest of me?’ Colette knew what he was going to say next, she could see the mischievousness in his face, ‘I keep wondering if I’ve got a bigger cock than Dada.’

‘Well, I couldn’t say,’ said Colette.

‘If I had ever seen him naked, I don’t think I would have been so scared of him. And I feel cheated by the fact that he died before he became very old. I was denied the opportunity of cradling his weakened body in my arms. We should be able to do that to our fathers.’

‘You were very scared of him weren’t you?’

‘I was scared of something he was capable of being. I don’t know if that was him or not.’

He meant the violence.

Dada was gifted with violence. He was an expert, a virtuoso, he could modulate violence to match exactly to the prevailing situation, he could express the subtlest nuance of anger with it. He could orchestrate and choreograph his violence with the skill of a Stravinsky or Diaghilev.

There is one variation of Dada’s violence that Colette always remembered in relation to Janus Brian.

Janus Brian was scientific. As a youth he had dreams of being a scientist splitting atoms, or an engineer, building bridges. He loved the world of nuts and bolts, of test tubes and pipettes. As a boy his favourite toy was Meccano, with which he was always building elaborate contraptions. He once spent several weeks making, to his own design, a most beautiful racing car. Every day he would be at the table bolting together delicate metal plates with little nuts, bolts and washers. He saved up his pocket money for the parts, the most expensive being the friction motor that would propel it. Then the four large rubber-rimmed tyres. Janus Brian was continually modifying it, dismantling a section when he saw design faults, reassembling it until he had created a small and ingenious masterpiece of childhood engineering. Nearly two feet long, with a steering wheel that worked, it was a perfect model of a full size racing car such as those that raced at Brands Hatch.

One Sunday evening in the living room Janus was playing with the car he’d only just finished constructing, giving it its first test run. He would wind up the motor and let the car go, its flywheel rasping, so that it shot across the floor and crashed into something – the skirting board, the foot of the dresser, a chair. Dada was in the room, sitting in his armchair reading a newspaper. He showed no sign that he was at all bothered by Janus’s playing until, for the second time, the car crashed into his foot. Amongst the people in the room there descended an awkward hush. Dada’s next action was slow, deliberate and meanly purposeful. He leant over, put one foot on the front of the car, took the rear end of the car in his hand and, with a sudden, brief and violent wrenching, twisted the whole thing into a U-shape. Nuts and bolts snapped from their joints and plopped onto the floor. A wheel fell off and rolled across the carpet. Then, discarding the ruined toy, Dada settled back into his armchair and raised the white cliff of his newspaper.

How sorry Colette, then scarcely more than a baby, felt for her older brother. He didn’t show any sign of emotion but just scuttled over, picked up the warped body of his car and the scattered debris, took it back to his bedroom. The only sign of how he felt was in the manner of his handling of the car, he seemed to nurse it, as though it was a wounded animal, a bird with a broken wing.

How savagely their father had acted upon that distraction. A mere distraction. Such brute ruthlessness. He seemed to Colette as merciless as if he’d just torn the head off a kitten. And so controlled. Dada never seemed to lose his temper, his violence always seemed considered and planned, even though it was often spontaneous. And he was equally capable of violence to his sons as to objects. Always his sons. He never raised his hand against a woman. In fact, he seemed to be instinctively scared of them.

That is what Janus Brian and Colette talked about, as Janus Brian stood naked before the mirror, Colette behind him. It is something she has often thought but has rarely spoken about. Dada was afraid of women.

He thrashed his sons with a belt for the least misdemeanour; dropping food on the floor, not speaking clearly, a breakage of something in the house. Janus Brian was so terrified of him that once, after having broken a cup, he spent a whole Saturday hiding in a wardrobe, waiting for his father to go out. He didn’t even dare go to the lavatory in case his father heard him, so he went in the wardrobe. Colette still had the wardrobe. It was in Julian’s room now and she could still, more than forty years later, see the stain in its wood, and detect the odour that still lingered there.

Only women could control Dada. Sometimes the intervention of his wife or one of his daughters would save Janus or Lesley from a beating. She remembered Agatha, who could only then have been a teenager, scolding her father for excessively beating Janus, and Dada grumpily submitting to the young girl’s chastisement. It meant that a curious power structure existed in the household, where Dada was the instrument of discipline under the control of the females. The boys were the oppressed of the house, almost totally powerless, leading miserable lives.

‘I think you should get some clothes on,’ said Colette, in an attempt to distract Janus Brian from these thoughts about his father, which she could see were disturbing him.

‘I was going to have a bath,’ said Janus Brian, ‘but then I noticed this mirror. Have you noticed how no two mirrors reflect you in exactly the same way? There are several mirrors in this house, and they all show a different me. This one is the best. It seems to show me as I was twenty years ago. The one in the living room shows me as a corpse.’

‘I’ll run the bath for you,’ said Colette, turning on the taps. ‘It looks like I’ll be having my baths here in future as well.’

‘Will you?’

‘Someone’s cut the pipes out of the bathroom – the sink and the bath. Aldous thinks we’ll need a new bath, and we’ll have to wait till he retires before we could afford one of those.’

Janus Brian adopted his ‘stop talking like a mad woman’ expression.

‘What do you mean “someone’s cut the pipes out of the bathroom”?’

‘Exactly what I say. I had a bath this morning and flooded the hall. It baffles me completely – who would do such a thing, and why?’

‘My dear,’ said Janus Brian, ‘isn’t it obvious?’

‘Not to me.’

‘Were they copper?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I should think they were.’

‘So what?’

Janus Brian explained, as if to a dim-witted child.

‘Copper piping could fetch quite a few pounds at a scrap dealers.’

The penny dropped.

‘You think Janus has . . . no, surely he wouldn’t do something like that.’

‘Why not. Let’s face it dear, from all that you’ve told me, he sounds like a raving alcoholic, and he’s just lost his job. My dear, I know what it’s like when you can’t get hold of a drink. Look at what I did with the Cherry Blossom. Alcoholics turn to alchemy when they run out of money. I tried to turn boot polish into gin, your son has turned your bathroom pipes into Special Brew.’

When she returned from Leicester Avenue that afternoon Colette was slightly horrified to find that her son was sitting in exactly the same position by the table, as though he hadn’t stirred a muscle in all that time. Only slightly, because it had happened before when Janus was on the dole, that he would fall into these silent, motionless, almost catatonic states, neither moving nor talking for hours on end.

She could also tell from the moment she entered the room that he’d been drinking. It wasn’t just the ceramic mug at his elbow that a stranger would have assumed to contain tea, but which was brimful of beer. He was a different colour – redder, there was a very thin layer of sweat on his face and when he did speak his voice was fuller and louder than normal.

The sickliness of the situation struck her. That the kitchen had been untouched for four hours, so that the hurriedly displaced breakfast things of that morning were still where they’d been left, the only difference being in the falling-off of temperature, the entropic dullness of everything, and this despite the continued presence of a living thing, her son, in the room. That he should have sat there all day slowly consuming the beer he’d obtained through a deal with a scrap merchant after stealing the bathroom pipes.

In the hall the vessels were full, and some had overspilt, although the dripping seemed to have stopped.

‘You could have changed them over,’ she said, in her annoyed voice, ‘instead of just sitting there.’

Janus gave no response.

His mother sighed, tipped a panful of bathwater down the sink, refilled it with fresh water from the tap, and boiled it.

Colette paused for the first time that morning while the water grew to a slow rage in the pan, and felt, as she sometimes felt after coming back from Janus Brian’s house, that she was seeing her kitchen as it really was, and not as she imagined it. In its reality it horrified her. An uncoordinated mess of decorations, overspilling cupboards, shelves teetering on the edge of avalanche beneath the accumulation of bric-a-brac, most of it trivial. The porridge-coloured carpet had seemed a great find when Aldous brought it home from the public waste disposal site one day after having dumped some old furniture there. It had seemed nearly new, and fitted the kitchen floor almost perfectly, covering that old cracked and worn red lino that had been there for nearly twenty years. But the carpet proved almost impossible to keep clean. It had darkened to a dirty grey and was steadily accumulating scabby stains as each day’s spillages hardened. They wouldn’t budge. The ceiling seemed to mirror the floor’s defilement, registering the condensed fumes and vapours of two decades of cookery, a parchment of spreading brown stains and pockmarks like a diseased hide. Then there were the walls, four of them, each a different colour, representing four unsuccessful attempts to decorate the entire kitchen in one scheme.

‘Do you know anything about the bathroom?’ she said, as if to herself. When Janus was like this it was easy to forget he was there.

Then Janus spoke.

‘Do you know how to make a Möbius strip?’

Thinking it to be some sort of joke, of the ‘how do you make a Maltese Cross’ variety, she said ‘No, I don’t. How do you make a Möbius strip?’

‘I’ve made one, look.’

And she saw that he had a loop of paper in his hand, and learnt that a Möbius strip was a thing, not a process.

‘It’s just a loop of paper,’ she said.

‘But it’s only got one side, look,’ and as she came over he picked up a pen and handed it to her. ‘Try drawing a line along one side.’

She did so, carefully moving the paper under the pen as it scored a blue mark along the length of the strip. After a while, her pen met the beginning of the line it was drawing, joining up with itself. Colette was confused.

‘You see,’ said Janus, ‘you haven’t changed sides, and yet if you look, there is a line on both sides of the paper.’

It was true, but Colette was still more confused than astonished.

‘The loop has a kink in it, the ends being sellotaped together after a half-turn. It is a two-sided object with only one side.’

‘Is that what they call a paradox?’

‘Paradox lost,’ said Janus, browsing the book from which he’d learnt about the Möbius strip, ‘paradox regained.’

‘Is that what you’ve been doing all morning? Making this thing?’

‘No. The rest of the morning I’ve been thinking about it.’

Colette went back to the kettle, filled a cup with boiling water and dropped a tea bag into it. Tea tasted so much better from the pot, but like everyone else, she was sacrificing quality for convenience. Pouring brewed tea from a pot through a strainer aerates it in such a way as to enhance the perfume of the leaves. Tea stewed in a mug is stagnant and, moreover, the paper of the tea bag always contaminates the flavour.

‘So, can you explain what happened in the bathroom this morning?’ Now that Janus was talking she decided to try again.

‘No. What’s happened in the bathroom?’

‘Someone’s cut all the pipes out.’

‘Have they? I wondered why it was raining in the hall.’

‘Don’t try and be clever, Janus. Just admit it.’

‘Admit what?’

‘You did sell them, didn’t you? Sold them so that you could buy some drink.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Janus, drawing out the word as though it was unbelievably obvious.

‘But why?’

‘Because I didn’t have any money.’ Janus laughed the answer, again as though it was obvious. As though whenever you find yourself without any money the obvious thing to do is cut the pipes out of the bathroom.

‘Who did you sell them to?’

‘A bloke.’

‘What bloke?’

‘Just a bloke I know who buys copper piping.’

Colette was speechless at Janus’s blatantness. He went on, made a little nervous by her silence, ‘If it’s bothering you that much I’ll get a job and pay for the pipes to be put back.’

‘It’s not that easy. Daddy says the way they’ve been hacked about we’ll need a new bath and a new sink.’

‘What’s the problem. It’s not like you have a bath every day. Or even every week. You can get a bath round Janus Brian’s when you start smelling too much.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’

‘The point is that you’ve done something so awful, I’d doubt it even of you. Just to make a few quid to pour beer down your neck.’

Janus made a face, the tongue half-extended, the teeth showing, the head jiggling from side to side, that translated, roughly, as I couldn’t care less.

‘So how much did you get for them?’

‘Not much.’

‘How much?’

‘A fiver.’

‘Five pounds? And you’ve spent it all, I suppose?’

Janus reached into his trouser pocket, and after some fumbling brought out two ten-pence pieces and a penny.

‘So where have you been getting the rest of the money?’

‘What money?’

‘You’ve been out drinking every other day, where’ve you been getting the money?’

Janus shrugged, as though he didn’t actually know where the money came from.

‘Just friends,’ he said. ‘I borrow a bit here and there. I play the piano, people buy me drinks.’

‘In that case why did you need to sell the pipes?’

‘There’s only so much you can borrow. And they’ve got a juke box in The Quiet Woman now, if you play the piano people start shouting at you . . .’

It was almost an unconscious piece of deduction that led Colette upstairs to Janus’s room. She knew that if he’d resorted to cutting the pipes out, he must have sold easier, more missable things than the pipes already. And then she’d remembered the bag she’d found one day in Janus’s room, a canvas hold-all that seemed to contain all the moveable treasures of the house – James’s Woebley air-pistol, her own Agfa camera with a built-in light meter, the binoculars, the Tri-Ang stationary locomotive that had been one of Julian’s favourite toys, and many other long-forgotten objects – vases, antique heirlooms from her mother’s house, her grandmother’s house, the little cottage in Wales where Aldous’s father was born. She’d had no idea at the time why Janus should be storing all this stuff in his room and was rather touched by the care he was evidently taking in looking after these objects.

Now she found the bag in a different corner of the room. It was empty.

She took the bag downstairs to the kitchen where Janus was still sitting. She flung it at him.

‘What have you done with it all?’ she screamed.

‘All what?’

‘Everything that was in that bag – my camera, the binoculars – all those things you had in there . . .’

‘Have you been poking around in my room?’

‘It’s my house. Just answer me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You’ve sold them, haven’t you – the moving camera, that was in there – there was Nana’s marquetry, her brass vase, that statue of Our Lady, those apostle spoons, I saw them all.’

Colette was furious at having not guessed Janus’s intentions with those objects. To think she’d thought he was simply treasuring them when he’d done nothing less than burgle his own house. A swag bag.

‘They were just a few things,’ said Janus impatiently, ‘nobody was going to miss them.’

Colette reached over and hit her son across the face. His hair and beard were so thick it was like thumping a pillow, yet Janus was evidently hurt. A long strand of spittle fell from his lower lip. It took a moment for him to react. With a jerk of the whole body he pushed the table away, hemmed in as he was by it, sending everything on it crashing to the floor. The table toppled over, and being a stout piece of utility beechwood its falling seemed to shake the whole house.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Janus, holding his face and standing up.

‘Shouldn’t I?’ said Colette, who’d gathered herself after the initial shock of the table falling over. She hit Janus across the face again with her other hand, so that she struck the side of his face he wasn’t holding. She wanted him to know, to feel the depth of her anger. She could have gone on hitting his face for the rest of the afternoon, and she may have, had not Janus hit her back.

Colette had never been hit by anyone before. Even in the countless drunken tussles that broke out when Janus was drunk, he never actually struck his mother, although he had inadvertently knocked her over or caught her with a flailing elbow a few times. But he had never deliberately hit her. But now he had. A sharp blow from those piano-playing hands across the side of her face. Her glasses were knocked off. She saw a blinding light, then silence, then noise, and finally burning pain.

‘Get out of the house,’ Colette screamed when she’d recovered.

‘Why should I?’ said Janus. His voice had a tremble in it. Colette could sense he was shocked by what he’d done.

‘Get out of the house now.’

‘Why don’t you get out of the house? You’re the one causing all the trouble. You hit me first . . .’

‘But you’ve sold all those things . . .’

‘They were just things . . .’

‘They were special things, how would you like it if I sold all your music?’

And she went into the music room that was a storeroom of all Janus’s records, and music manuscripts. She went to the shelves and started scattering their contents – the old, fragile books were flung across the room, the Mozart sonatas, pieces by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, all of which bore Janus’s textual markings and notes. Then she went for the record player.

‘No you don’t,’ said Janus, who seemed fully recovered from the initial shock of striking his mother, and took her by the shoulders, pulling her backwards. She fell on the floor, amid the scattered music. Then Janus took hold of the record player, he reached into it and gripped the pick-up arm. With a few twists and pulls it came away and Janus held it, as though in triumph in his fist. Feeble wires hung from its tip, like the roots of an unusual flower.

At that moment they heard the front door go, and Julian, in his school uniform and a briefcase in his hand, stood in the doorway.

‘Is dinner ready?’ he said.

‘Julian,’ his mother gasped from the floor, unable to get up because Janus had his foot on her chest, ‘do something to stop him, he’s destroying everything.’

Julian looked at his older brother who was taking no notice of him. Janus was looking down at Colette.

‘Would you like me to stamp on your breasts?’ he said.

‘I’m going upstairs,’ said Julian, ‘tell me when dinner’s ready.’

‘Aren’t you going to do something to save me?’ screamed Colette as Julian receded, ‘don’t you want to save your mother’s life – Julian, you little coward, come back, he’s going to kill me . . .’

But Janus had finished. He took his foot off his mother, left the room, and then left the house, singing to himself.

By the time Aldous came home late that evening, Janus had been gone for several hours. In that time Colette had recovered herself, had tidied up the mess in the music room, had uprighted the table and cleared away the fallen things. The house appeared undamaged, apart from the record player, but Aldous rarely played records. He wouldn’t notice the ripped-out pick-up arm.

She made Julian’s dinner and he came down to eat it silently. She was still furious with him for not coming to her assistance. How could he have just left her lying on the floor with Janus running amok? But she didn’t say anything.

Aldous came home at about eight o’clock, flushed and bright with the acclaim of the south coast.

‘The windows looked wonderful,’ he said, ‘as the curtain fell the sun came out at just the right moment and sent a shaft of sunlight through the glass. The light came through the moving trees outside in such a way that the birds in the glass seemed to dance . . .’ He paused for breath, full of his experiences, ‘. . . do you know, I got to the station and I was looking for a bus stop when this chauffeur in jackboots whisked me off in a limousine, straight to this huge reception at the town hall, where I was guest of honour at a table sitting next to the mayor and his wife, and waiters with bow ties were serving up dish after dish, I don’t know what I ate. Beautiful stuff. Then to the crematorium, loads of press people interviewing me, asking me what other work I’d done. People kept handing me business cards saying they’d be in touch. Then the windows. I couldn’t help feeling a bit proud of them. They did look good. Makes it a bit of a shame the only people who’ll see them are people at funerals . . .’

The maiming of the bathroom hurt Colette. The damage was severe and they didn’t even dare think how much it might cost to repair. There was no cash. Aldous’s money for his windows had come and gone six months before the unveiling ceremony. So the bathroom fell into disuse. The family now washed at the large stone butler sink in the kitchen, almost as big as a bath itself while the bathroom became a desiccated, rarely visited space. Dust collected around the plug of the sink, and coated with grey the inner slopes of the bath. The bathroom gradually became a boxroom. Unused junk that couldn’t quite be thrown away was stored there – a broken chair, an old bicycle that was too small now for Julian. Sometimes Colette used the bath as a bird hospital, where the injured blackbirds that she occasionally rescued from Scipio’s claws could recuperate. Flightless, they would skip about on the porcelain for a few days, and then die. Some lasted a little longer, and one even made it back into the garden. She would cut a branch from one of the fruit trees and put it in the bath to make the sick birds feel at home. She would dig up worms from the garden, chop them with a knife into many living parts, and poke them with tweezers down the young birds’ throats. The birds, raw with their injuries, would remain motionless at first, apart from a sort of trembling, but later, if things went well, they would perk up and then hop around, and even fill the bathroom with song, in a cheeky attempt to claim it as their own territory. But there was always the longer term problem of how to get them back into the skies. Their injuries nearly always meant they’d lost their flight feathers, and Colette was never sure if these grew back, or if they did, how long they would take. Without flight, a bird in the wild is nothing more than cat food. And there was only so long a wild bird could endure the captivity of the bathroom. So Colette’s efforts nearly always ended with a little feathered corpse in the bath, which upset her more than finding them injured in the first place. The way they nearly always perked up, hopefully fluttering their useless wings, before giving in. Colette could never understand. She gave them everything they could want in the bathroom, she fed them on sops, nursery food, mashed-up Weetabix, milk, worms, a truly splendid diet, and they seemed all glossy and alive one day, but then the next they would be dead. When they had been so tenacious of life. It really puzzled her.