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Ruth Rendell A Sight for Sore Eyes

Chapter 1

They were to hold hands and look at one another. Deeply, into each other's eyes. 'It's not a sitting,' she said, 'it's a standing. Why can't I sit on his knee?' He laughed. Everything she said amused or delighted him, everything about her captivated him from her dark-red curly hair to her small white feet. The painter's instructions were that he should look at her as if in love and she at him as if enthralled. This was easy, this was to act naturally. 'Don't be silly, Harriet,' said Simon Alpheton. 'The very idea! Have you ever seen a painting by Rembrandt called The Jewish Bride?' They hadn't. Simon described it to them as he began his preliminary sketch. 'It's a very tender painting, it expresses the protective love of the man for his young submissive bride. They're obviously wealthy, they're very richly dressed, but you can see that they're sensitive, thoughtful people and they're in love.' 'Like us. Rich and in love. Do we look like them?' 'Not in the least, and I don't think you'd want to. Ideas of beauty have changed.' 'You could call it "The Red-haired Bride".' 'She's not your bride. I am going to call it "Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place" - what else? Now would you just stop talking for a bit, Marc?' The house they stood in front of was described by those who knew about such things as a Georgian cottage and built of the kind of red bricks usually called mellow. But at this time of the year, midsummer, almost all the brickwork was hidden under a dense drapery of Virginia creeper, its leaves green, glossy and quivering in the light breeze. The whole surface of the house seemed to shiver and rustle, a vertical sea of green ruffled into wavelets by the wind. Simon Aipheton was fond of walls, brick walls, flint walls, walls of wood and walls of stone. When he painted Come Hither outside the studio in Hanging Sword Alley he placed them against a concrete wall stuck all over with posters. As soon as he saw that Marc's house had a wall of living leaves he wanted also to paint that, with Marc and Harriet too, of course. The wall was a shining cascade in many shades of green, Marc was in a dark-blue suit, thin black tie and white shirt, and Harriet was all in red. When the autumn came those leaves would turn the same colour as her hair and her dress. Then they would gradually bleach to gold, to pale-yellow, fall and make a nuisance of themselves, filling the whole of that hedge-enclosed paved square and the entire backyard to a depth of several inches. The brickwork of the house would once more be revealed and the occasional, probably fake, bit of half-timbering. And in the spring of 1966 pale-green shoots would appear and the leafy cycle begin all over again. Simon thought about that as he drew leaves and hair, and pleated silk. 'Don't do that,' he said, as Marc reached forward to kiss Harriet, at the same time keeping hold of her hand and drawing her towards him. 'Leave her alone for five minutes, can't you?' 'It's hard, man, it's hard.' 'Tenderness is what I want to catch, not lust. Right?' 'My foot's gone to sleep,' said Harriet. 'Can we take a break, Simon?' 'Another five minutes. Don't think about your foot. Look at him and think about how much you love him.' She looked up at him and he looked down at her. He held her left hand in his right hand and their eyes met in a long gaze, and Simon Alpheton painted them, preserving them in the front garden of Orcadia Cottage, if not for ever, for a very long time. 'Maybe I'll buy it,' Harriet said later, looking with approval at the outline of her face and figure. 'What with?' Marc kissed her. His voice was gende but his words were not. 'You haven't any money.' When Simon Alpheton looked back to that day he thought that this was the beginning of the end, the worm in the bud showing its ugly face and writhing body among the flowers.

Chapter 2

One cold Saturday, Jimmy Brex and Eileen Tawton went on a coach trip to Broadstairs. The year was 1966 and it was summer. It was the first time they had ever been on such an outing together. Their usual activities - Eileen called it 'courting' and Jimmy had no name for it - consisted of visits to the White Rose and Lion, and Jimmy occasionally coming round to Eileen's mother's for tea. But the pub came under new management, events were organised for regulars at the weekends and one of these was the Broadstairs trip. It rained. A sharp north wind roared all the way down the coasts of Suffolk, Essex and Kent before blowing itself out somewhere in the Channel Islands. Jimmy and Eileen sat under a shelter on the front and ate the sandwich lunch they had brought with them. They bought seaside rock and looked through a telescope in a vain effort to see the coast of France. At teatime they resolved on a proper meal and went into Popplewell's restaurant on the seafront. It was unlicensed, like most restaurants and cafes at that time, and Jimmy was dying for a drink. He had to be content with tea because the pubs didn't open till five-thirty. Even when they had finished their eggs, chips, peas and mushrooms, their apple pie and custard and slices of Dundee cake, they still had half an hour to kill. Jimmy ordered another pot of tea and Eileen went to the Ladies. This was a tiny, windowless and - as was usual at the time, filthy - concrete-floored cupboard from which a single cubicle opened. A washbasin hung perilously from one wall, but there was no soap, towel, paper towel or, naturally, hand drier. One of the taps dripped. A woman came out of the cubicle and Eileen went in. From in there she heard the tap running and then she heard the outer door close. Eileen had no intention of washing her hands. She had washed them before she left home that morning and, besides, there were no towels. But she glanced at her face in the bit of chipped mirror, pushed at her hair a little, pursed her lips, and in doing these things could hardly fail to take the shelf below the mirror into her vision. In the middle of it was a diamond ring. The woman who had been here before her must have taken it off to wash her hands and forgotten it. It just went to show what too much washing led to. Eileen hadn't noticed anything about the woman except that she was middle-aged and in a raincoat. She looked at the ring. She picked it up. Even to the totally ignorant, to those with no knowledge or appreciation of good jewellery, a fine diamond ring is apparent for what it is. This one was a solitaire with a sapphire in each shoulder. Eileen slipped it on to her right hand, where it fitted as if made for her. Walking out of there with the ring on her finger wouldn't be a good idea. She put it in her bag. Jimmy was waiting for her, smoking his thirtieth cigarette of the day. He gave her one and they walked along to the Anchor, where he had a pint of bitter and she a half of cider. After a while she opened her bag and showed him the diamond ring. It occurred to neither of them to take the ring back to the restaurant and hand it to the management or to go to the police. Finding's keeping's. But other ideas were in both their minds. Or, rather, the same idea. Eileen put the ring on again, but this time on to the third finger of her left hand and she held her hand up, showing it to Jimmy. Why should she ever take it off again? This she didn't say aloud, though her thought somehow communicated itself to him. He bought a second pint of bitter and a packet of crisps and, returning to the table, said, 'May as well keep it on.' 'Shall I?' Her voice was unsteady. She felt the seriousness of the occasion. It was an awesome moment. 'May as well get engaged,' said Jimmy. Eileen nodded. She didn't smile. Her heart was thudding. 'If that's all right.' 'I've been thinking about it for a bit,' said Jimmy. 'Been thinking of getting you a ring. I didn't reckon on this one turning up. I'm going to have another drink. You want another cider?' 'Why not?' said Eileen. 'Celebrate - why not? And give me another ciggie, will you?' In fact, Jimmy hadn't thought of an engagement until this moment. He had no intention of getting married. Why should he marry? His mother was there to look after him and his brother, and she was only fifty-eight, there were years of life in her yet. But the discovery of the ring was too good an opportunity to miss. Suppose he'd done nothing and just let Eileen hang on to the ring, and then one day he did decide to get engaged, he'd have to buy her a ring, a new one. Besides, being engaged was just being engaged, it could go on for years, it didn't mean you had to get married tomorrow. Eileen wasn't in love with Jimmy. If she had thought about it she would probably have said she liked him all right. She liked him better than any other man she knew, but she didn't really know any others. No men ever came into the w9olshop where she was assistant to Miss Harvey, the owner, and where she sold double-knit and baby-soft two-ply to an elderly female clientele. She met Jimmy when he and his boss came to paint Miss Harvey's flat upstairs and put in a new sink unit. That had been five years before. Though she was right-handed, Eileen served customers with her left hand for the next few weeks and held that hand up to her chin a lot and flashed the diamond about to catch the light. It was greatly admired. She and Jimmy went on going to the pub and he continued to come to tea with Mrs Tawton. Eileen had her thirtyfifth birthday. They went on several more outings under the auspices of the White Rose and Lion, either alone or with Mrs Tawton and her friend Gladys. Sometimes Eileen mentioned marriage, but Jimmy always said 'We only just got engaged' or 'Time enough to think of that in a year or two'. And they'd never be able to afford a place to live. She wasn't moving in with her mother or his. Their relationship was not a sexual one. Although he sometimes kissed her, Jimmy had never suggested anything more and Eileen told herself she wouldn't have agreed if he had, she respected him for not asking. Time enough to think of that in a year or two. Then Jimmy's mother died. She fell down dead in the street, a laden shopping bag in each hand. Loaves of bread, half-pound packs of butter, packets of biscuits, hunks of Cheddar, oranges, bananas, bacon, two chickens, tins of beans and tins of spaghetti in tomato sauce rolled across the pavement or dropped into the gutter. Betty Brex had suffered a massive stroke. Her two sons had lived in the house since they were born and neither considered moving out. Now there was no one to look after them, Jimmy decided he had better get married. After all, he had been engaged for five years. The ring, which Eileen wore day in and day out, was there to remind him. She wouldn't be lucky enough to find a wedding ring on a shelf in a Ladies but, fortunately, he had the one that came off his dead mother's finger. They married at the Registrar's Office in Burnt Oak. The Brex home was a small semi-detached house, two up and two down with small bathroom and kitchen, its outside stucco-coated and painted yellow ochre, among rows of such houses near the North Circular Road at Neasden. Because it was on a corner, access to the garden was possible from the street and here, filling most of the small area, Keith Brex kept his car. Or, rather, his series of cars, the current one at the time of his brother's marriage being a Studebaker, red and silver with fins. Keith was older than Jimmy and unmarried. Uninterested in women or sex of any kind, a non-reader, no sportsman, he was largely indifferent to everything except drink and cars. Not so much in driving them as in tinkering. Taking them apart and putting them together again. Cleaning and polishing them, admiring them. Before the Studebaker he had had a Pontiac and before that a Dodge. For use, for going to work, he had a motor bike. When his car was in perfect condition and looking at its best, he would take it out and drive it up the North Circular Road to Brent Cross, up the Hendon Way, down Station Road and back along the Broadway. And when the Studebaker Owners' Club held a rally he and the car always attended. An outing for the car meant taking the engine apart and reassembling it. In the building trade like his brother, he had long ago laid a concrete pad all over the back garden for the car and the motor bike to stand on, leaving only a very small green rectangle, a 'lawn' of grass, dandelions and thisdes. In their mother's lifetime, and earlier in their father's, the brothers Brex had shared a bedroom. There, in the evenings, while Keith worked on his car, Jimmy had attended to his own sexual needs with the assistance of Penthouse magazine. Now he was moving out and into what had been Betty Brex's room, another transition must be made. Jimmy, who didn't think much, supposed it could be done with ease. As it happened, it took about a year and was never as satisfactory for Jimmy as his fantasy liaisons with those centre-folds had been. As for Eileen, she accepted. It was all right. It didn't hurt. You didn't get cold or made to feel sick. It was what you did when you were married. Like vacuum cleaning and shopping and cooking and locking the back door at night. And, of course, having a baby. Eileen was forty-two. Because of her age she had no idea she could be pregnant. Like many a woman before her, she thought it was the Change. Besides, she didn't know much about sex and still less about reproduction, and she had curious notions picked up from her mother and her aunts. Qne of these was that in order to be productive ejaculation had to be frequent, lavish and cumulative. In other words, a lot of that stuff had to get inside you before anything resulted. It was rather like the Grecian 2000 lotion Keith put on his greying hair, which only took effect after repeated applications. In her marriage, applications had been infrequent and were growing rarer. So she didn't believe she was pregnant even when she put on a lot of weight and grew a big stomach. Jimmy, of course, noticed nothing. It was Mrs Chance next door who asked her when she was expecting. Eileen's mother knew at once - she hadn't seen her for two months - and expressed the opinion that the baby would have 'something wrong with it' on account of her daughter's age. Nobody talked about Down's Syndrome then and Agnes Tawton said the child would be a Mongol. Eileen never went near a doctor, none of them did, and she wasn't going to start now. A common feeling with her was that if you ignored something it would go away, so she ignored her expanding shape while giving in to her food cravings. She developed a passion for doughnuts and for croissants which were just beginning to appear in the shops, and she smoked ferociously, forty or fifty a day. This was the early seventies when the phrase 'getting in touch with one's body' was current. Eileen wasn't in touch with her body at all, she never looked at it or in the mirror at it and most of its sensations, with the exception of actual pain, she disregarded. But these pains were another thing altogether, Eileen had never known anything like them, they went on and on and got worse and worse, and she couldn't be out of touch with her body any more. Of course, the Brex family had no phone, it wouldn't have occurred to them to have one, so, in the extremity of Eileen's travail, Keith was despatched to the doctor's to get help. He went in the Studebaker which happened to be due for its fortnightly outing. There was no question of Jimmy going. He said it was all a storm in a teacup. Besides, he had just bought a television set, their first colour one, and he was watching Wimbledon. A doctor came, very angry, almost disbelieving, and found Eileen lying among her broken waters, chain-smoking. A midwife came. The Brex family, all of them, were furiously castigated and the midwife turned off the television herself. The baby, a nine-pound-nine-ounce boy, was born at ten p. m. Contrary to Mrs Tawton's predictions there was nothing wrong with him. Or nothing in the sense she meant. The kind of things that were wrong with him were unresponsive to any tests then and, largely, still are. In any case, it depends on whether you belong in the nature camp or to the nurture school. In the seventies everyone who knew anything at all believed a person's character and temperament derived so~e1y from his early environment and conditioning. Freud ruled OK. He was a beautiful baby. During his gestation his mother had lived on croissants with butter, whipped-cream doughnuts, salami, streaky bacon, fried eggs, chocolate bars, sausages and chips with everything. She had smoked about ten thousand eight hundred cigarettes and drunk many gallons of Guinness, cider, Babycham and sweet sherry. But he was a beautiful child with smooth, peachy skin, dark-brown silky hair, the features of a baby angel in an Old Master, and perfect fingers and toes. 'What are you going to call him?' said Mrs Tawton after several days. 'He'll have to be called something, won't he?' said Eileen, as if naming the child was expedient, but by no means obligatory. Neither she nor Jimmy knew any names. Well, they knew their own and Keith's and Mr Chance's next door, he was called Alfred, and their dead fathers' names, but they didn't like any of those. Keith suggested Roger because that was the name of his pal he went drinking with, but Eileen didn't like this Roger, so that was out. Then another neighbour came round with a present for the baby. It was a small white teddy bear with bells on its feet attached to a ribbon you hung inside the roof of the pram. Both Agnes Tawton and Eileen were quite moved by this gift, said 'Aaah!' and pronounced it sweet. 'Teddy,' said Eileen fondly. 'There you are, there's your name,' said Keith. 'Teddy. Edward for short.' And he laughed at his own joke because no one else did.

Chapter 3

No one ever took much notice of him. But none of them took much notice of each other. Each seemed to live in a kind of non-clinical autism, doing their own thing, wrapped up in themselves. With Keith it was his cars, with Jimmy the television. Having sold the stuff for years, Eileen developed an obsession with wool and other yarns, and finding knitting unsatisfactory, took up crochet in a big way. She crocheted for hours on end, turning out quilts and mats and tablecloths and garments. Teddy slept in his parents' room until he was four. Then he was moved in with his uncle on to a camp-bed. When he was little he was left for hours in a play-pen and his crying was ignored. Both Eileen and Jimmy excelled at ignoring things. There was always abundant food in the house and large meals of the TV-dinner and chip-shop variety were served, so Teddy was amply fed. The television was always on, so there was something to look at. No one ever cuddled him or played with him or talked to him. When he was five, Eileen sent him off to school on his own. The school was only about fifty yards down the street and on the same side, so this was not quite so dangerous and feckless a procedure as it sounds. He was the tallest and best-looking child in the class. A Teddy should be rotund and sturdy, with a pink-cheeked, smiling face, blue eyes, brown curly hair. Teddy Brex was tall and slender, his skin was olive, his hair very dark, his eyes a clear hazel. He had the kind of tip-tilted nose and rosebud mouth and sweet expression that made childless women want to seize him and crush him to their bosoms. They would have got short shrift if they had. Aged seven, he moved his bed out of his uncle's room. Nothing untoward had ever happened to him in that bedroom. There had been no encounters with Keith, not even the verbal kind. They had seldom spoken. If, in later years, Teddy Brex had had dealings with a psychiatrist, even such an expert would not have been able to diagnose Repressed Memory Syndrome. All Teddy objected to was the lack of privacy and his uncle's terrible snoring, the liquid glugs and bellows that seemed to shake the room and sounded like nothing so much as the water from ten bathtubs roaring down the drain when their plugs have been pulled simultaneously. And the smoke, he minded the smoke. Though he was used to it and had, so to speak, drunk it in with his feeding bottle, in the small bedroom it was worse, the air nearly unbreathable as Keith had his last fag of the day at half-past midnight and his first at six a. m. He moved the camp-bed himself. Keith was at work, plumbing a new block of flats at Brent Cross. Jimmy was at work, humping bricks on his hod up a ladder in Edgware. Eileen was in the living-room skilfully performing five acts at once, smoking a cigarette, drinking a can of Coke, eating a Crunchie bar, watching television and crocheting a poncho in shades of flame and lime and royal-blue and fuchsia. Teddy dragged the bed downstairs, making a ~ot of noise about it because he wasn't strong enough yet to lift it. If Eileen heard the bed bumping from stair to stair she gave no sign that she had. Nobody ever used the dining-room, not even at Christmas. It was very small, furnished with a Victorian mahogany table, six chairs and a sideboard. There was barely room for anyone to get in there, let alone sit at the table. Everything was thicidy coated with dust and if you twitched the floor-length indeterminately coloured velvet curtains, clouds of it billowed out like smoke. But because no one ever went in there the room smelt less of actual smoke than any other part of the house. Even then, even at seven, Teddy thought the furniture hideous. He studied it curiously, the swollen huboes, with which the legs were ornamented, the brass feet like the claws of a lion with corns. The seats of the chairs were covered in some forerunner of plastic, a black and brown mottled mock-leather. The sideboard was so ugly, with its wooden shelves and pillars with finials, its cubblyholes and carved panels, its inset strips of mirror and green stained glass, that he thought it might frighten you if you looked at it for long. If you woke up in the half-dark or as it began to get light and saw its walls and spires and caverns looming out of the shadows like the witch's palace in a story. That was something to be avoided. He drew patterns with his forefinger in the dust on the chairs and wrote both of the rude words he knew on the table surface. Then he stacked four of the chairs, seat to seat and legs to back, heaved up the last pair on to the sideboard to hide its horrors and made himself space for his bed. Keith noticed, but didn't comment, though he sometimes came into the dining-room, smoked a cigarette and chatted desultorily at, rather than with, Teddy about his car or his intention of going down to the betting shop. Probably neither Eileen nor Jimmy knew where their son slept. Eileen finished the poncho, wore it to go shopping in and started on her most ambitious enterprise to date, a floor-length topcoat in scarlet and black with cape and hood. Jimmy fell off a ladder, hurt his back and gave up work to go on the benefit. He was never to come off it and never to work again. Keith exchanged the Studebaker for a Lincoln convertible in lettuce-green. People down the street said that Teddy Brex started going next door because he was neglected at home. He wanted, they said, the affection, the hugs and the tenderness a childless woman like Margaret Chance would give him. Conversation, too, someone to take an interest in him and what he was doing at school, maybe a clean house, proper cooked meals. Tongues were always wagging busily about the Brex family, those cars, Jimmy's being unemployed, Eileen's extraordinary garments and her smoking in the street. But they were wrong. Neglected he might be, though he always had enough to eat and no one ever hit him, but he had no craving for affection. He had never received any, he didn't know what it was. That may have been the reason or he might have been born that way. He was quite self-sufficient. He went next door and spent long hours there because the house was full of beautiful things and because Alfred Chance made beautiful things in his workshop. Teddy, at eight years old, was introduced to beauty. In the area of garden corresponding to where Keith Brex kept the green Lincoln, Alfred Chance had his workshop. He had built it himself some thirty years before from white bricks and red cedar, and inside he kept his bench and the tools of his trade. Alfred Chance was a joiner and cabinet-maker and sometimes, in special cases, a carver in stone. A tombstone on which he had done the lettering was the first example of his several crafts that Teddy saw. The tombstone was granite, dark-grey and sparkling, the letters deeply incised and black. 'Death the Period and End of Sin,' Te&ly read, 'the Horizon and Isthmus between this Life and a Better.' He had, of course, no idea what it meant, but he knew that he liked the work very much. 'It must be hard to get the letters like that,' he said. Mr Chance nodded. 'I like the letters not being gold.' 'Good boy. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have wanted goad. How did you know black was best?' 'I don't know,' said Teddy. 'It seems you have natural taste.' The workshop smelt of newly planed wood, a sharp, organic scent. A half-finished angel carved from ash, the colour of blonde hair, leant up against the wall. Mr Chance took Teddy into the house and showed him furniture. It was not the first house Teddy had been into apart from the Brex home, for he had been an occasional visitor at his grandmother Tawton's and had once or twice gone to tea with schoolfellows. But it was the first not furnished with late-Victorian hand-downs or G-plan or Parker Knoll. The Brex house contained no books, but here were full bookcases with glass doors and moulded pilasters, with break-fronts and pediments. A desk in the living-room was a miracle of tiny drawers, an oval table of dark wood as shiny as a mirror was inlaid with leaves and flowers of pale wood equally glossy. A cabinet on shapely legs had painted doors and the design on each door was of fruit spilling out from a sculptured urn. 'A sight for sore eyes, that is,' said IVIr Chance. If there was something incongruous in housing all this splendour in a poky little north-London semi, Teddy was unaware of it. He was moved and excited by what he saw. But it wasn't his way to show enthusiasm and in saying he liked the lettering he had gone about as far as he ever could. He nodded at each piece of furniture and he put out one finger to stroke very delicately the fruit on the cabinet front. Mrs Chance asked him if he would like a biscuit. 'No,' said Teddy. No one had taught him to say thank you. No one missed him while he was next door or even seemed to notice. The Chances took him out. They took him to Madame Tussaud's and Buckingham Palace, to the Natural History Museum and the V and A. They liked his enthusiasm for beautiful things and his interest in everything, and cared very little about his lack of manners. Mr Chance wouldn't allow him to touch a saw or a chisel at first, but he let him be there in the workshop, watching. He let him hold the tools and after a few weeks allowed him to plane a piece of wood cut for the panel in a door. There was no need to ask for silence as Teddy never said much. He never seemed to get bored either, or whine or demand anything. Sometimes Mr Chance would ask him if he liked a carving he had made or a design he had drawn and almost always Teddy would say, 'Yes.' But occasionally came that cold unequivocal, 'No,' just as it had when he was asked if he would like a biscuit. Teddy liked to look at Mr Chance's drawings, some of which were framed and hung on the walls inside the house. Others were in a portfolio in the workshop. They were meticulous line drawings, clean and pure, made with an assured hand. Cabinets, tables, bookcases, desks, of course, but occasionally - and Mr Chance had done these for his own amusement - houses. These houses were the kind he would have liked to own if he could have afforded anything better than his semi next door to the Brexes. Craftsmen who make beautiful furniture and produce exquisite lettering and paint designs on tables seldom do make much money. Teddy learnt this by the time he was ten, which was also when Margaret Chance died. These were the days before mammograms. She felt the lump in her left breast and then she never palpated the place again, hoping that if she pretended it wasn't there it would go away. The cancer spread into her spine and in spite of the radiotherapy she was dead in six months. Mr Chance made a headstone for her grave out of pink granite from Scotland, and this time Teddy agreed that it would be tasteful and suitable to fill the letters in with silver. But the words 'beloved wife' and a line about meeting again meant nothing to him and he had nothing of comfort to say to Mr Chance, in fact nothing at all to say, he had already almost forgotten Margaret Chance. It was to be some time before Alfred Chance worked again, so Teddy had the workshop to himself, experimenting, learning, taking risks. No Brex ever went to a doctor. Teddy had never been immunised against anything. When he cut himself in the worjkshop and Mr Chance took him to the hospital's casualty department in a taxi, practically the first thing they did was give him an anti-tetanus shot. It was the first injection Teddy had ever had, but he was silent and indifferent when the needle went in. If Jimmy and Eileen noticed they said nothing about it. Keith didn't notice. The only person who did was Agnes Tawton. 'What have you done to your hand?' 'I cut off the top of my finger,' said Teddy casually, in the deprecating tone of someone admitting to a slight scratch. 'I did it with a chisel.' Agnes Tawton had dropped in on her way back from the shops and found her grandson alone in the house. She wasn't a sensitive or perceptive woman, or particularly warm-hearted. Nor was she fond of children, but there was something in Teddy's plight that made her uneasy. It struck her that he was often alone, she had never seen him with a chocolate bar or a bag of crisps or a can of Coke, he had no toys. She remembered the play-pen, in which he had so often been coralled like a farm animal. And, making an entirely unusual leap of the imagination, unprecedented in her life - it tired her out, doing it - she somehow understood that almost any mother of a child who had lost the top of his finger in an accident would have told her mother about it, would have been on the phone, maybe in tears. If Eileen, as a child, had hurt herself like that she, Agnes, would have told everyone. But what was to be done? She couldn't make a fuss, tell Eileen, tell Jimmy, she couldn't stick her neck out like that. It would be inteiference and she never interfered. There was only one solution. In her experience it was always the answer to everything. Money brought you happiness and anyone who said otherwise was a liar. 'How d'you get on for money?' she said to Teddy. 'Money?' 'Do they give you any, you know, pocket money?' Both of them knew 'they' didn't. Teddy shook his head. He was studying his grandmother's physiognomy and wondering how it had happened that she had four chins and no neck. When she bent over to unclip the clasp on her big black handbag the chins became part of her chest like a bulldog's. She produced a pound from a red leather purse. 'Here you are, she said. 'That's for the week. You'll get another next week.' Teddy took it and nodded. 'Say thank you, you little devil.' 'Thanks,' said Teddy. Agnes had an idea that the occasion demanded she put her arms round Teddy and kiss him. But she never had and it was too late to start. Besides, she sensed that he would push her away or maybe even hit her. Instead she said, 'You'll have to come to my house and fetch it. I can't be running round here at your beck and call.' Keith was a tall, heavy man who looked like the late David Lloyd George, with that statesman's square face, broad brow, straight nose, wide-set eyes and butterfly-wing eyebrows. He had longish yellow-grey hair and a drooping shaggy moustache. Lloyd George, when young, had been handsome and so had Keith, but the years and food and drink had taken their toll and by now, at fifty-five, he was in a state of serious decay. There was something about him that suggested a half-melted candle. Or a waxwork left out in the sun. The flesh of his face hung in waffles and dewlaps. It seemed to have waddled down his neck and sagged from his shoulders and chest to settle in stacked masses on his stomach. He wore his trousers or jeans tightly belted under the huge curve of his rotund belly. The melting, or whatever had happened to him, had left his arms and legs thin as sticks. His dyed hair had receded, but was long at the back and he had just begun wearing it in a pony-tail, fastened by a blue rubber band. By the time Teddy went to the Comprehensive Eileen had become a notorious figure in the street, more like a bag lady with no home to go to than a housewife and mother of an eleven-year-old son. Dressed from head to foot in home-made woollen garments of rainbow colours literally head to foot, since she crocheted hats and slippers as well as dresses and capes - her long grey hair fanning out from under the stripy cap to well past her shoulders, she strolled to the shops chain-smoking, often returning with only one item in her crocheted string bag. Then she would have to go back again, and sometimes stop to sit down on someone's garden wall, smoking and singing early Come Hither hits until coughing put a stop to it. The coughing maddened her, so she gave up the singing and hurled abuse at passers-by instead. Jimmy went to the pub, he went to the Benefit Office to sign on and that was about all. He had emphysema, though without benefit of medical attention he didn't know it, wheezed all day and gasped through the night. Eileen and he and Keith all said smoking was good for you because it calmed the nerves. The walls in the Brex house, and particularly the ceilings, were tinted a deep ochre colour, very much the same shade as the stain on Eileen's and Jimmy's and Keith's forefingers. No one ever repainted the housc and, of course, no one washed the walls. At the Comprehensive Teddy did well. He showed particular promise at art and, later on, at the subject called Design Technology. He wanted to learn to draw, but there were no facilities at the school for actually teaching drawing, so Mr Chance taught him. He taught him precision and accuracy and to be clean. He made him draw, over and over, circles, and told him the story of Giotto's 0, how when the Pope's messenger came to him to collect an example of his work, Giotto produced no elaborate painting but with a flourish of his brush drew a perfect circle on a piece of paper. Teddy never got to draw a perfect circle, but he didn't do badly. He liked drawing and soon he liked making things in Mr Chance's workshop, simple objects at first, then more complicated pieces and carvings. He took his GCSEs and transferred to a sixth-form college to study for A Levels in Art and Graphic Design and English. At home, of course, no one took the slightest interest in what he did at school, though his father had begun making noises about its being time for him to leave and earn money. Now Teddy was growing up, all three senior Brexes were beginning to see him with new eyes, as someone who might be of help to them, a member of the household they might use. A runner of errands, a mediator with any representative of the local authority or Gas Board, a breadwinner, even a cook and cleaner. That they had largely ignored his existence up till now weighed nothing with them. They were unaware of any lapse on their part. But, in a small way, scarcely consciously, they began courting Teddy. Eileen put cans of Coke in the fridge for him, having never noticed that he hated all fizzy drinks, and they all took to offering him cigarettes. Only he was seldom there. Or, if he was, he made his domain in the dining-room. That was where he did his homework and hung up his drawings on the walls the way Mr Chance did. He framed them himself, using Mr Chance's picture-framer's cramp. Jimmy toddled in there one evening, found his son sitting on the camp-bed reading Ruskin's The Two Paths and asked him if he didn't think it was time he took his backside down the Job Centre. 'Why don't you take yours down there?' said Teddy, barely looking up. 'Don't you speak to your father like that!' Teddy thought this undeserving of any reply, but after a while, during which Jimmy shouted a bit and banged his fist on the dusty sideboard, he said, 'I shall never have an employer.' "What? What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean?' 'You heard,' said Teddy. Jimmy came at him then with his fists up, but he was too fat and feeble to do much and all that shouting had brought on a hacking cough. It doubled him up and he stood there, in front of his seated son, bent over and heaving, obliged finally to clutch at Teddy for support. In silence Teddy removed the shuddering hands that clutched at his Oxfam-shop sweat-shirt and guided his father out of the room, holding him by the back of his jacket collar, rather as one might grasp a struggling animal by the scruff of the neck. But even Jimmy and Eileen knew about unemployment. If Teddy left school there would be no work for him to do. He would be obliged to stay at home, occupying the dining-room, a threatening presence. And a very tall and powerful one, for Teddy had grown to six feet one and though slim was well-built and strong, so when the forms came for his- university grant they signed them and did so almost with relief. Not that Teddy would be going far or living away from home. He would merely be at college up at the end of the Metropolitan Line, a tube-train ride away. So fat had Eileen grown that she could no longer wear her engagement ring. By greasing her finger with Vaseline she managed to get it off, but the wedding ring remained, becoming embedded in flesh until only a gleam of gold showed like a sequin fallen among pink cushions. She had begun upon her magnum opus, the crowning of her life's work, a lace counterpane to cover the double bed she shared with Jimmy. The thread she used was pure white but already, after she had been crocheting it only a month, the work had taken on a uniform yellowness, as if it had been dipped in tea. Keith exchanged the Lincoln for a primrose-coloured Ford Edsel Corsair, dating from the late fifties. Perhaps Americans of the time were not happy with a perpendicular gear shift or perhaps they disliked the shape of its grille, a mouth saying oooh! instead of a shark's grin. Whatever it may have been, the Edsel was a notorious failure from the start, which was possibly why Keith picked his up for only five thousand pounds from a dealer in south London. Before Keith, in spite of its age, it had had just one owner, had seldom been driven and had docked up only ten thousand miles. Nevertheless, Keith took the engine to pieces and reassembled it. He worked outside all that long, hot summer and the noise he made met no competition from sawing next door, for Mr Chance died in the July. He had no descendants and his nearest relative was a cousin. When he died this cousin was the only mourner. It never occurred to Teddy to go to the funeral. His sole concern was that now he would have nowhere to work, for the house would certainly be promptly sold. His worries were somewhat mitigated when he learned Mr Chance had left him all his tools plus a lot of wood, paints and drawing materials. He tried to stuff it all in the dining-room and when he found this impossible, experienced the first real burning rage of his life. He was a cold person, but his anger was hot and fierce, a silent interior boiling that swelled and crimsoned his face, and made veins stand out on his forehead. It was the horrible junk in the dining-room that should have been put outside to rot in rain and sun. He would have put it there if he could have got it through the narrow french windows. At one point he thought of dismantling those windows, tearing the back of the house apart, kicking out the glassand splintering the wood, but he was cautious as well as angry. They were capable, the lot of them, of fetching the police. Flow had the furniture ever got in there? Keith told him. 'It was my grandad's. My dad loved them tables and chairs. And that sideboard, that's a fine piece of craftsmanship. They don't make furniture like that no more.' 'Hopefully,' said Teddy. 'You watch your mouth. What do you know? You show me a piece of furniture that old bugger Chance made that ever come up to that. My dad bought this house - did you know that? He was just a working man, but he wasn't paying no council rents, getting into that trap. He saved. He bought his house and when this furniture come to him and he saw he couldn't get it indoors it near broke his heart. So he had it taken to pieces and put together again when it was inside. And who do you think did that?' 'Don't tell me. I can guess. 'Chance was only too happy to do it for the money. Falling over himself to do it, he was.' It was the ultimate disillusionment. If Teddy had for a while believed Alfred Chance was different, he did so no longer. People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down. They remained the same and could be an endless source of pleasure and satisfaction. There might be people, or a person, of whom that was also true, but he had never, by the age of eighteen, come across any of them. As for the tools, in the end he had no choice but to keep them in the small area of garden that wasn't occupied by Keith's Edsel. He couldn't use them out there. He had to keep them on the 'lawn', covered up under plastic sheeting. If Keith didn't live there or hadn't had that car he could have built himself a shed like Mr Chance's. But Keith did live there, though very soon Eileen didn't. Eileen came to a bad end. When she was a child her mother had often told her she would, but this particular exit was not what she had in mind.

Chapter 4

Being naughty saved Francine's life. She survived because she had misbehaved. Or that was what Julia said. Julia wasn't there, no one was but herself and her mother and, of course, the man, but Julia always knew everything. He came upstairs looking for you, Julia said. Why else would he have gone into one bedroom after another? The strange thing was that for a long time afterwards Francine could never remember what the naughty thing was that she had done. Been noisy or disobedient or rude? And yet such behaviour wouldn't have been typical of her; she had never been that sort of child. But she must have done something she shouldn't because her mother hadn't been a strict woman but quite easygoing. Making a noise or being difficult about eating bread and butter wouldn't have led to the exasperated voice saving, 'Francine, that was very stupid and careless. You had better go up to your room. Perhaps, after all, she had been that sort of child. How would she know? What had happened in the next half-hour had changed her life, made her into a different person, and she had no means of knowing if her character then had been refractory and mischievous or the same as it was now. She hadn't argued with her mother. She had obeyed and gone upstairs and into her bedroom and closed the door. It was about ten to six on a June evening, fine and warm. She hadn't yet learnt to tell the time. Her father said that learning to tell the time was harder for children now than it had once been because while some clocks had hands, others were digital and only had figures. But she knew it was ten to six because her mother had said so just before she sent her to her room. Her bedroom window was open and for a while she had leant on the window-sill, looking out across the garden into the lane. There were no other houses or gardens to look at, the nearest was a quarter of a mile away. She could see a field and trees and a hedge, and a long way away the church spire. A car had pulled up on the opposite side of the lane and parked on the verge, but she hadn't taken much notice of it, she wasn't interested in cars and afterwards couldn't even remember what colour it was. She hadn't noticed the driver or if there was anyone else in the car. A butterfly in her bedroom, fluttering against the glass, that she remembered, and how she caught it, holding it between thumb and forefinger, delicately so as not to brush the dust from its wings. It was a red admiral and she had released it out of the open window, seen it fly up into the sky and watched it until it was just a speck in the blue. Then she had come away from the window and lain on her bed, bored by this solitude, wondering how long it would be before her mother came up and opened the door and said, 'All right, Francine, you can come down now.' Instead, someone rang the doorbell. They weren't expecting anyone and that made it more exciting because a visitor calling, a neighbour, a friend, would almost certainly result in her being fetched downstairs. She got off the bed, went back to the window and looked down. From here it was possible to see someone who came to the door, at any rate to look down on to the top of his head. Once, she had looked down and seen a totally bald top of someone's head, a white, shiny moon. This one wasn't like that, but a good head of hair, brown hair, though she couldn't see any more except his brown shiny shoes. Her mother answered the door. It must have been her mother because there was no one else to do it and the door closed. She heard it close quite quietly. At first there were no voices, then she heard his voice. Rough, not very loud, but angry, very angry. That surprised her, someone coming to their house and being angry, shouting at her mother. She heard her mother's voice but not what she said, but she spoke calmly, steadily. The man asked her something. Francine pressed her ear to the door. The next thing she heard was her mother crying out, 'No!' Just that, just a single 'no', and then gunfire. A shot, followed by more shots. She had heard shots on television so she knew what they were. But whether the scream came before the first shot or between the shots or after all the shots were done she could never remember. Something fell to the ground or was turned over, it might have been a piece of furniture, a chair or, more likely, a small table, because there came a slithering sound and a crash, a tinkling of broken glass. Then noises she had never heard before, thuds, a gasping, choking groan, and one she had heard, a whimpering like her friend's puppy made when it was left alone. And after that, one more final shot. Francine thought of getting out of the window. She went to the window and looked down, but it was too far. Besides, she had to bide, and getting into the front garden wouldn't be hiding. Julia always said she hid because her instinct told her that the man would come upstairs in search of her, intending to shoot her too. But she was sure she hadn't thought like that at the time. If she had had to account for why she hid she would say it was because children always hide instinctively when there is any danger, like animals do. At the door she had listened, heard something being pulled across the floor. It was the sound a rolled-up rug makes, dragged across carpet. Once, and only once in her short life, she had seen a grown-up cry. It was her mother who had cried when her own mother died. That sound, a grown-up sob, far far worse than a child crying, she heard the man make. It was more frightening than the shots and the dragging sound. She got into the cupboard. Inside the cupboard her clothes hung on hangers and her shoes stood on the floor. There was also a cardboard box frill of toys she had got too old to play with. She pushed her shoes up against the toy box and crouched on the floor. At first it looked as if the cupboard door wouldn't shut from the inside, there was no handle, but she found she could close it by inserting her fingers between the bottom of the door and the carpet. That was an advantage of being only seven, her fingers were very small. If she had been older she wouldn't have been able to do that and the man would have found her when he came into her room. So said Julia. He did come in. She heard his footsteps on the stairs first. Hers was the door you came to immediately at the top, so he came into her room first. Came in, looked round, left again. She heard him in her parents' bedroom, opening drawers, throwing the contents on to the floor. Throwing the drawers themselves on to the floor. She was icy cold with fright and her teeth were chartering the way they had last year when she had been swimming in that cold sea. Her mother had wrapped her in a big beach towel and then in her father's jacket. There was no one to do that for her now. She heard him run downstairs. He closed the front door after him very quietly. Like a person does at night when they don't want to wake people who are asleep. Her mother wasn't asleep. She was dead. But at the time she didn't know that, she didn't know what death was, though when she crept downstairs at last and saw her lying there on the hail floor she knew the man had hurt her and that she had been terribly hurt. She knelt beside her mother, and picked up her hand and moved it about. Strangely, she didn't notice the blood then. That might have been because her mother had dark hair and the carpet was dark red. Later, she remembered that there had been blood because when she took her hand from stroking her mother's hair the palm and the fingers were red, as if painted with a fine brush. And some people who came later, men in uniform, policemen, nurses, one of them said she had been sitting in blood, her school skirt was red with it. Her father would come home soon. Usually this was at seven or a quarter to seven. She looked at the clock and saw hands pointing at incomprehensible angles. It was only when they pointed straight up or straight to the sides that she had much idea of what the time was. She sat on the floor beside her mother and watched the clock, wondering why you could never see the hands move. But if you looked away for a while and then looked back they had moved. Her teeth had stopped chattering. Everything had stopped, really. The world. Life. But not time, for when she looked at the clock again, one of the hands had crept up and was pointing straight to the side, the left side. She could tell right from left. Her father's key in the lock made a scrabbling noise, a mouse-scratching noise, and then the door opened and he was inside. Standing there, staring, Richard Hill made a sound unlike all the other sounds she had ever heard. She could never have described it, even when she regained the power of speech, it was too dreadful and too different, not a people sound at all, but the roar of an animal alone in the wilderness. She couldn't talk to him. She could tell him nothing. It wasn't that her voice was small or hoarse or whispery like her mother's had been when she had laryngitis. Her voice wasn't there, the words weren't. When she opened her mouth and moved her lips and her tongue, nothing happened. It was as if she had forgotten how to speak or had never learnt to talk. Richard Hill held her in his arms and called her his baby, said he was there now, he had come home, he would never leave her. Even at that moment he was able to tell her that all would be well, he would keep her safe for ever. But she couldn't answer him, only turn to his a frozen face and eyes which, he later said, had grown to twice their size. The psychologists got to work on her. Not Julia, not then. Later on, she understood how careful and caring they had been. The police had, too. No one had pressed her. No one had shown the least impatience with her. The psychologists had given her dolls to play with and in after years she understood this had been in the hope she would act out, in her play, the events of that evening. There was a man doll and a lady doll and a little girl doll. Francine had never been a doll person. 'She doesn't like dolls,' Richard Hill told them, 'she never has.' But dolls were the recognised tool whereby children revealed themselves and their experiences to psychologists. If they had given her toy rabbits or dogs she might have acted something out with them, but they never did. Sometimes the police came and talked to her. The women officers were the kindest, gentlest people she had ever known, so kind and gentle that they made her suspicious. She understood why they questioned her. They wanted to catch the man who killed her mother. She couldn't talk to them, she couldn't write much more than her name or read more than simple words, so there was little communication. But it wasn't for years that she found out they had suspected her father. For two days they believed Richard Hill might be responsible for the murder. He was the dead woman's husband. It was family members who were usually responsible for family murders. The police questioned him and treated him warily. Then he was cleared. Two men, one of them a stranger, came forward and said they had been in the train from Waterloo with him from six o'clock until twenty-five-past. 'I think you know Mr Grainger,' the Detective Inspector said to him. 'You saw him on the train and he has come forward and said he saw you. 'I asked him how his wife was,' Richard said. 'His wife had been ill.' 'Yes, he has told us that. Unprompted, I may add. He said hallo to you and you asked after his wife. The other man is Mr David Stanark. He knows you by sight.' I don't know him.' Detective Inspector Wallis ignored this. 'He came forward of his own volition to say he was on the train and that he saw you on the train.' Years later, because she asked, Richard told Francine all this. He told Julia what David Stanark had done for him. 'He saved my life.' 'Not your life, darling,' said Julia. 'Well, my liberty then.' 'The reality is that he just saved you from a few days' serious awkwardness, isn't it?' Julia was always saving what the reality was. After Richard's life and liberty were saved there came a limbo time. It was a time of silence and stillness. Francine no longer went to school and Richard didn't go to work. They were together all the time, day and night. He moved her bed into his bedroom, he read to her, he never left her. 'What else could he do for her? He would do anything. For a while, compensating her was his whole life. He bought her a kitten, a white Persian, and for a while that helped her, cuddling the kitten and watching it play so that she was even seen to smile a little. But one day the kitten caught a bird and brought it to her as a gift, laying it at her feet. The dead bird had dark feathers and blood dripped from it, so that she shivered and stared, clenching and unclenching her hands. A good home was found for the kitten, it was the only way. No one wanted to buy the house, though it was a beautiful place, a 'gentleman's' cottage, nearly three centuries old. Potential buyers hardly seemed to notice the lattice windows or the pretty garden, the green and gold and red Virginia creeper which half veiled its gables or that the house was in the country yet only thirty miles from London. They knew what had happened there and they came to gaze ghoulishly or to ask themselves if they could live with that knowledge. One woman stared at the hail floor as if looking for a blood-stain. In the end the house was sold for a much lower price than its market value. Because she couldn't speak, and her reading and writing skills were very limited, Francine could barely communicate with anyone. She couldn't tell her father about the video cassette or write down that she had found it. She could have handed it over to him, but for some reason she didn't do that. Even then, young as she was and mute as she was, she sensed that there was something wrong about that cassette and it would make him unhappy. Perhaps it was because it had been so careffihly hidden. She had been sure the hiding place was her discovery and hers alone, her father didn't know about it and maybe her mother hadn't known either. There was an old cupboard in the wall of the chimney which was called a wig cupboard because in olden times, before he went up to bed, the man of the house took off his wig and put it inside there for the night. Her mother had kept her sewing box in there and a pair of scissors. The floor of the wig cupboard was of wooden boards which looked as if they fitted tightly together, but if you pressed one of them in a certain way it lifted a little, you could get hold of it in your fingers and prise it out. Underneath was a small hollow space. When first she found it there was nothing inside. She wanted to use the scissors and in reaching for them rested her hand on the secret board and tilted it up. Her mother had seen her with the scissors and, although she wasn't cross, she hadn't sounded very pleased. 'You are not to use my scissors without asking first, Francine. You aren't old enough to use scissors on your own. So was that what she had done and for which she had been sent to her room? Used the scissors without asking? Perhaps. But she had never in fact used the hollow space for hiding things. She had never raised the board again until the day they moved away. On moving day, collecting up her things, she looked in the wig cupboard, but her mother's sewing box and the scissors were gone. Richard Hill was outside in the front garden with the removal men and there was no one to see her. Francine put her hand into the hollow and found inside a video cassette. Or, rather, the rectangular plastic container of a video cassette. On the outside were a picture and some large printed letters. She could read the word 'to' but that was all. She put the cassette into the bag that she would be carrying with her with all her special things in it, the things that would not be going in the removal van but coming with her and her father in the car. They were moving to a house as different as could be from the old one. About two hundred years younger, for one thing. It was a big suburban semi-detached on a wide road in Ealing. Buses ran along the road and cars were always passing. Neighbours were on the left side, neighbours were joined to the house on the right side Fand more neighbours were all along the street. Their house was number 215. It wasn't the sort of place where a man could come to the door and be let in and kill someone's mother with a gun. A few days after they had moved into the new house she talked again. It was about nine months after the murder. She had long unpacked the bag she brought with her and, without looking inside the case, had put the video cassette on to a shelf with some of her books. She and her father were still unpacking things out of the boxes and there, among combs and brushes and hair slides in a tin that had once contained chocolate bicuits, she found the broken pieces of a record, a single of Come Hither's 'Mending Love'. Richard wept when he saw it. The tears rolled down his face. 'It was her favourite,' he said. 'She loved that rune. We once danced to it., And Francine, who hadn't uttered a word for nine months, said quite clearly and with a kind of wonderment, 'I broke it. That's what I did.' His grief temporarily forgotten, Richard cried out and seized hold of her, put his arms round her, holding her tightly against him. Unwise, probably, frightening to a child, but he couldn't help himself and in the event it didn't stop her speaking again. 'It was on the record player,' she said. 'Mummy said to be careful jf I wanted to take it off, but I wasn't care fril enough and I dropped it and it broke, and Mummy sent me upstairs. I remember now. 'Oh, my darling,' said her father, 'my sweetheart, you're talking, you can speak.' The psychologists came back again with their dolls. The kind, gentle police ladies came back. They showed her hundreds of pictures of cars and played her dozens of tapes of men's voices. In her mind's eye she saw the car parked on the verge, under the overhanging branches, but she saw it like a black-and-white photograph. The car might have been green or red or blue. It looked pale grey to her, as the grass did and the, sk. She saw the top of the man's head, brown like rabbit fur, and his brown shiny shoes. She had the big room at the back of the house where her window gave on to their garden with its summer-house and swing and apple trees, and on to all the gardens next door and behind. She had her own bathroom, called en suite, and completely new bedroom furniture. But for a time, while her bedroom was being decorated, she had the small room at the front and several times she had looked down from her window and seen a man standing on the doorstep, seen his shoes and the top of his head, and she had screamed out, 'It's him! It's him!' Once it was the postman and the other times David Stanark and Peter Norris, who lived next door. Her father grew very upset when that happened and later on she found out that he had told the police and the psychologists that they must stop questioning her. They must give it up. Julia agreed with him. It was bad for her, it would traumatise her. They must close the case. But they wouldn't do that. Not, at any rate, for years. They would find him, the Detective Inspector said, if it was the last thing they did. They had a theory. The reason for the murder that they had decided on, the man's motive, horrified Richard Hill. It brought him so much shame and guilt that he wished many times that they had never told him.

Chapter 5

A week after the murder David Stanark had come round unasked to see Richard. He presented himself on the doorstep, a good-looking man of about Richard's own age with an anxious expression. He held out his hand and said who he was. 'I was the man on the train, the one you didn't know.' Usually mild and self-effacing, Richard in his grief and confusion shouted at him, 'I suppose you've come to be thanked? Is that it? You want gratitude?' David Stanark said, 'May I come in?' 'You don't know what it's like,' Richard said, 'no one does. No one who hasn't been through it knows what it's like to be suspected of murdering the person you -, his voice fell and he turned away before muttering '- love best in the world.' 'I think I can imagine.' After that David came in and the two men talked. Or, rather, Richard talked and David listened, and when that had gone on for two hours David told Richard that he too had once lost the woman he loved, that she had died violently. But it was to be some months and the friendship firmly established before Richard told him of the load of guilt that weighed on him and the shame that went with It. Flora Barker, who had been a nurse, came to look after Francine while her father was at work and away on business trips. Francine went back to school. Or, rather, she went to a new school in the new place and made new friends. She was behind in her school work, but she soon caught up because she was bright. And she liked Flora. In finding her to care for his daughter and as a mother substitute, Richard had chosen wisely. It was one of the few wise decisions he ever made. Flora was among those women who are an instant hit with children because, as well as being kind and patient and loving, they like children and enjoy their company and talking to them. Such people never talk down to children, they are too simple and too aware of their simplicity, to talk down to anyone, even supposing they knew how to condescend. They never patronise or exercise power or pull their rank. Flora would say, 'I like these new biscuits, don't you? And they're no dearer than the other lot. Go on, have another one, I'm going to.' Or, 'Let's have the telly on. I tell you what, if you'll watch EastEnders with me I'll watch your lion programme with you. She was a great one for deals. 'If you'll teach me to do jigsaws I'll teach you to knit. Jigsaws are something I've never got the hang of.' 'But they're easy!' 'So's knitting when you know how. I tell you what, if you'll sing me a song, one of your school songs, I'll make pancakes for our tea.' Julia Gregson was a very different kettle of fish. It was Flora who referred to her as a kettle of fish, a term Richard disliked. He said it was impertinent. But Julia looked like a fish, Francine said. Not a dead, slimy mackerel or cod of the kind you see on the supermarket counter, but a bright, healthy, swimming fish, a beautiful fish, a Shuhunkin perhaps, or a Koi carp. Julia had a high-browed face and a rather long nose, and she was all gold and white and red. Her skin was gleaming white and her hair gleaming yellow, her wide curved mouth painted scarlet and her nails varnished to match. It was David Stanark who recommended her. She was a child psychotherapist, or as she put it, a paedopsychiatrician. David suggested Francine see her because Richard sometimes confessed to his friends that his daughter was too quiet, too preoccupied, and that she needed to come out of herself. At first Richard was doubtful. A firm advocate of formal education and plenty of it, he wondered what mind-mending skills a woman could possibly have whose qualifications were a teacher-training certificate and a diploma from a counselling crash course. He had always been deeply disapproving of the legal loophole that allows anyone who wishes to call herself a psychotherapist and set up in practice to do so, without benefit of a medical degree or training in psychiatry. But all that changed when he met Julia. So confident was her manner, so calming her words and so excellent her timing, that you could scarcely be with her for five minutes without misting her utterly. Or so it seemed to Richard. Almost without reserve he put Francine into her hands. Julia had Francine playing with dolls. There was no escaping those dolls, Francine sometimes thought. Here, though, in the pleasant sitting-room overlooking Battersea Park, she was not apparently expected to reveal by her play any hidden knowledge of the crime against her mother, only perhaps show by the dolls' movements and interaction with each other the deep secrets of her childhood. Julia watched her and sometimes she wrote things down. She talked a lot to Francine, but not as Flora did, about the books she was reading and the television programmes she watched, about going shopping and what to cook for dinner, and whether Francine liked this friend more than that friend, and about Flora's own friends. Julia asked questions. 'Why do you like that, Francine?' 'I just do,' Francine would say. 'Why do you like ice-cream?' 'I don't know. I just like it.' 'What would you like to happen best in the world?' Francine knew but she wouldn't say. 'If you could have three wishes what would they be?' Francine's three wishes were for the man not to have come, for her mother not to have died and to live with her mother and her father in the cottage once more. And maybe have Flora living next door. She didn't want to tell Julia that. Julia ought to know it without being told, everyone ought to know it, for it was obvious. But Francine could read now, she was a good reader, and before she came to Julia for this session she had been reading a book in which a character confessed to a fear of pursuit by pirates whose treasure he had unearthed. The story was vividly told and much of it remained in her memory. 'I want to be safe,' she said, quoting directly. 'I don't want them to get me, I don't want them to find me. Julia nodded, looked grave and said that was all for now as her father would he coming for her in a moment. Her father did come and he and Julia had a quiet talk in private, while Francine sat in the other room, watching a carefully selected children's video. After a few minutes he took her home in the car. She had been asked enough questions for one day, but he started asking her more. Did she like Julia? Was Julia helping her to feel happier? Was she lonely when he was away? 'I've got Flora,' she said. 'I do like Flora.' Off he went on a trip to Glasgow, Francine went to school and Flora came to the school gates to meet her at home-going time. 'You're not frightened of being outdoors, are you?' Flora said as they walked along. 'No. Why?' 'Daddy said you found being outside a bit scary,' said Flora. At home and in her room Francine took a book out of her bookshelf. It was a collection of Roald Dali stories which Flora had given her and which she had not yet read, but was now ready to attempt. Next to it was the video cassette container. She hadn't looked at that since she put it there over a year ago. Then she hadn't been able to read much, but now she could read anything - anything printed, that is. The big print on the coloured sheet inside the container, the bit that was like a book cover, of which, when she first found it, she had only been able to read 'to', she now saw said 'A Passage to India'. There was a picture, too, of a man in a turban and an old woman outside a cave. Francine opened the container, but there was no video cassette inside. The small plastic box was full of sheets of paper with writing on them. Not printing but joined-up writing. Francine looked carefully at it, but she couldn't read a word. Grown-ups could read writing, though she sometimes wondered how, and even they probably wouldn't need to much longer. Flora said no one wrote anything any more except shopping lists and notes to the milkman. Everything else was done on computers. But this person had written with a pen on the kind of paper that came in a pad from newsagents' shops and someone at the cottage had put the paper in this box and hidden it. Not herself, and somehow she knew it wasn't her father. So her mother must have taken the video cassette of A Passage to India out of its box, put those papers into it instead and placed the box in the hollow space under the floor of the wig cupboard. Francine made no further attempts to read the writing. She put the box back on the shelf where it had been before. There are people in this world with very good brains and astute minds who at the same time have no common sense whatever. Bad judges of character and situation, unable to take the long view, they are both very clever and very unwise. Richard Hill was one of them. He had murdered his wife and child. Not with a gun, not with malice aforethought and evil intent, but as he saw it, by his own thoughtless vanity. His pride in his own achievement had brought about their deaths. The Detective Chief Inspector in charge of the case had told him the man's motive and with that telling destroyed what peace of mind Richard had managed to achieve for himself. The crime committed against his wife had been drug-related and, most probably, the result of mistaken identity and dreadful coincidence. He, Richard, was called Dr Hill, though his doctorate was a D. Phil and his home was in Orchard Lane. Another Dr R. Hill, a doctor of medicine, of an Orchard Road some ten miles away, kept considerable sums of money in the house - black money, though the police didn't say that - paid him by certain private patients. The perpetrator, suspected of being a heroin addict, certainly under toxic influence at the time of the murders, confused the two men. He had probably, the Chief Inspector said almost apologetically, found Richard's address in the phone book. And ever since then Richard had suffered inner agonies of guilt over that 'Dr' before his name in the telephone directory. For there had been no need of it. His profession and his success in it hardly required that all and sundry should know he had a D. Phil. from Oxford. He had had it inserted in the directory through pride. He was proud and vainglorious of this achievement of his and the title it conferred, and because of it, through vaunting it, he had murdered his wife. One evening, while the two men were having a drink together, he told David Stanark how he felt. David didn't tell him anything comforting. He said not a word about Richard not blaming himself, having nothing to be ashamed of, or that he should put this guilt out of his mind. Richard had rather expected he would say that, had hoped he would. David's, 'It's just something you have to live with, all you can say is it'll get less with time,' disconcerted him. 'So you do think it was my fault? I'm right to feel guilt?' 'Any reasonably responsible human being in your situation would feel guilt,' David said, and he smiled, perhaps to soften harsh words. 'You did lead this man to your house. You did so directly by your action. You call it vanity, a kinder judgement would be that it was evidence of a justifiable pride in your achievement. Whatever it may have been, it resulted in this man killing your wife. But we can't predict what our actions will lead to. Maybe if we could we'd never go out at all, put pen to paper, never even get up in the morning. That's not possible, so the answer is to try always to be very circumspect in what we do.' 'Avoid the Seven Deadly Sins?' said Richard. But he didn't like it when David nodded and said in a parsonical tone, 'Events like this one show us why Pride is one of them.' After that a coolness arose between the two men and although they still occasionally saw each other, things were not the same. Their friendship was mended only after both were married and their wives became close. Instead of David Stanark, Richard took his troubles to Julia and her reaction was more to his taste. She was - at least in her own estimation - a child psychotherapist but, having no sound belief in psychotherapy of any kind, Richard rather thought this wouldn't matter. The two beliefs were balanced side by side in his mind: the one that psychotherapy was rubbish and the other that Julia, because she was good-looking and understanding and calm and confident, must be a good psychotherapist. In fact, as he told himself, she was the only one of her ilk whom he could trust. Julia had no objection to taking him on as a client. An adult was more challenging than a child. An adult man and an attractive one confessing to you the secrets of his heart, while you sat close together in a warm room at dusk with just one lamp on, was more exciting than watching a child play with dolls. And Richard found that he could say anything to Julia, he could tell her everything. She listened, she never interrupted. She put one elbow on the arm of the sofa and, her head a little on one side, rested her rather small receding chin in the palm of her hand and, with her beautiful fish's lips slightly parted, she listened. Occasionally she nodded, in such a way as to imply that the horrors he admitted to, the weaknesses and follies, were all perfectly understandable. She knew, she understood and she pardoned. He told her of the vanity that had led him to call himself Dr Hill in the phone book and how he therefore blamed himself for the death of his wife. 'The first thing you have to understand', she said, 'is that guilt is part of the cumbersome and often dirty baggage we human beings have to carry around with us. Often it doesn't bear much relation to reality, but you'd be a strange man if you didn't have it. Suppose I said you'd have to be a psychopath not to feel guilt? How about that?' He told her how his wife and he had grown apart in the months before her death, how she had become cold towards him and he had spent more and more time away from his family, furthering his career. Now he blamed himself for that too, for being insensitive to Jennifer's needs, for failing to ask, to talk. 'What would you like best in the world?' said Julia. He didn't have to think about that. 'To undo it. To go back and do things differently.' 'But the reality is that you can't do that. No one can. If you had three wishes, three reasonable, possible wishes, what would they be?' 'To protect Francine,' he said. 'Have her grow up safe and without trauma. To sleep at night the way I used to.' 'And the third wish?' Until that moment he hadn't known what a third wish would be. ft came to him like a beam of light penetrating a dark room. Disclose it now he couldn't. He could only look at Julia, shake his head and say, 'One day I'll tell you.' She smiled. She took her hand from under her cheek and laid it on his. 'Time's up, Richard. Shall I see you next week? Same time, same place?' 'Of course.' Francine came to her next day, brought by Flora. 'It's time we talked about that day, Francine,' said Julia. What was meant by that day' Francine knew at once. She had never spoken of it with Julia, though she had with almost everyone else. She would have liked to try and put it away from her, bury it in the past and have it come back oniv in her dreams. Now Julia said that would be wrong. It must be talked over. She wasn't a rebellious child, but quiet and sweet, and above all anxious that her father should be happy. She came to Julia without protest because her father wanted her to. But she was desperate not to talk to Julia about that day. 'You think the man will lind YOU, don't you, Francine?' It had never crossed her mind. 'I know the reason why you don't want to talk about it. It is because you are afraid of the man finding you. Aren't I right?' Francine was anxious not to cry, but she did, she couldn't help herself. Julia took her into her arms and held her against her slippery white satin blouse, hugged her long and lovingly and stroked her hair. 'I will never let you come to any harm. Daddy will never let you come to harm. You know that now, don't you?' Nearly a year was to pass before Richard understood the cause of Julia's sudden decision to retire from practice, sell her house and move. At the time these seemed acts heaven-sent for his own purposes, or beautiful coincidences. One Saturday evening, when he and Francine were alone, when they had had their supper and had just finished listening to a CD of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, he said to her, 'Sweetheart, I want to ask you something. It's rather serious.' 'Is it about that day?' she said. He knew what she meant and he was taken aback. Had he been in danger of forgetting how much the past preyed on her mind? 'No, it's not about that. We've said everything there is to say about that.' She nodded, then, as if on an afterthought of doubt, shrugged her shoukiers. 'What I want to ask you is quite different. It's about the future, not the past, the time to come.' He waited, then said, 'How would you feel if I got married?' 'Married?' 'I'd like to get married. I will never forget your mother, you know that. I will never stop loving her. But I want to be married again, for your sake too. I expect you know who it is?' 'Flora,' she said. Her guesswork, as wide of the mark as could be, almost angered him. She was only a child. Still, to suppose him likely to marry an overweight frump with permed hair and red hands, a one-time State Enrolled Nurse with a Bristol accent... 'It's Julia.' He kept his patience. He even smiled, but without looking directly at her. 'I haven't asked her yet. I am asking your permission, Francine. I am saving, my dear little girl, may I marry our good friend Julia?' A parent who asks a child if he may marry again always intends to do so whatever the answer may be. It just makes things smoother if the answer is yes. Francine didn't know this, but she intuited it. If she had been five years older she would probably have said, I can't stop you, or, Do as you like, it's your life. But she was only nine and she loved the idea of seeing him happy. Once she had lost the power of speech and sometimes even now, though she had never confessed to anyone, she was afraid muteness might come back. One day she would wake up and be unable to speak. That had never happened and it wasn't happening now. Her failure to speak this time was a matter of choice. She looked at him in silence and nodded.

Chapter 6

All the years of his childhood Teddy had called at his grandmother s once a week for his pocket money. Both of them, by nature or conditioning, had cold temperaments and both were loners. Agnes Tawton had been relieved when her husband died and said so without shame. She no longer had someone living in the house whose wishes might not invariably accord with her own and who had occasionally demanded a modicum of her attention. She gave little of this to Teddy, but she gave him his pound. Sometimes his visit would pass without a word being exchanged beyond his thanks which she insisted on, which she demanded even before it reached his hand. If he stared at her in silence, his mouth clamped shut, she would snatch the money away and hold it behind her back. What do you say?' 'Thank you.' 'Thank you, Grandma.' 'Thank you, Grandma.' Often she didn't ask him in and if she did, offered him nothing to eat or drink. Their conversation, at these times, consisted in her bullying him with questions about his school work and picking his brains as to what went on in the Brex household, and in his monosyllabic if not quite dumb insolence. She was old, in her mid-seventies by the time Teddy was ten, but strong and spry. Though never invited, she occasionally came round to see her daughter, but even if this visit happened at the time. Teddy's weekly stipend was due, she would never pass over his pound. He had to call on her for that. So a relationship of a kind developed between these two apparently unfeeling people. Though each was uninterested in human nature - beyond sharing a general contempt for it - they probably knew each other better than either of them knew anyone else. As Teddy entered his teens and grew tall, and became highly personable, Agnes even softened her attitude towards him, occasionally making a remark that was neither censorious nor hectoring nor derisive. 'Cold out today,' she might say, or, with great satisfaction, 'You're going to be a lot taller than your dad.' It was therefore strange, beyond ordinary human understanding, that when Teddy was eighteen and off to college, Agnes blew it. She could have given him twice or even three times what he was getting - she could afford it - but instead, because he had his grant, she announced that his weekly pound was to stop. 'You've got more coming in than I have,' she said. Teddy made no reply, for he had no idea of his grandmother's income. 'Won't bother with me any more now, will you?' This was uttered in a tone of triumph. 'Probably not. 'Suit yourself,' said Agnes. When Keith asked why the house smelt of acetone Eileen knew for sure she shared her late father's disability. It was on her breath and perhaps coming out of her pores, but Jimmy hadn't noticed it. For a long time she had suspected. Knowing Tom Tawton's symptoms, she finally recognised what her constant raging thirst, dry skin and weariness must mean. She had been coping with thirst by drinking lager, pouring it down alternately with cans of Diet Coke. Her eves weren't what they had been either, but she had coped with that by buying herself glasses at Boots. Some degree of eyesight was essential if she was to continue with and finish the white lace counterpane. The time had come when ignoring things and pretending they weren't there was no longer going to work. She would have to do something. None of the men in the household showed any more interest in the state of her health after Keith had commented on the acetone smell. She would have been surprised if they had. In spite of the lager she had lost weight, for she had no appetite. 'I reckon I could get my ring on again,' she said to Jimmy as they were watching 'Aio, 'Aio one evening. 'You look at my finger.' But Jimmy didn't. He dodged round the hand she thrust in front of him, a hand so dry and the skin so flaky that it looked as if it had been dipped in a bag of flour. He leant in the other direction, peered at the screen and laughed throatily. Dressed in a red and grey crocheted skirt and jumper with a crocheted red cape and crocheted yellow peaked cap, Eileen set off to get the bus to her mother's. On the way she passed the doctor's surgery, newly renamed the medical centre, and she noticed it, she actually paused outside it, and read on the notice board the times at which patients could attend and directions for making appointments. But she passed on. She still remembered, after nineteen years, the fuss there had been over her failure to seek medical attention before and when Teddy was born, the contemptuous GP and the tight-lipped midwife. And she thought of what they would do if she went in there. Her knowledge of this was culled from television. She imagined the tests, the nagging, the humiliation, the adjurations to stop smoking. At the bus-stop she lit a cigarette. A woman who was also waiting fanned the smoke away with her hand and Eileen relieved her feelings by giving her a mouthful of abuse. By the time she got to her mother's she was very tired, not least because during the journey she had twice had to seek out public lavatories to cope with her lavish urination. When she heard what Eileen intended, Agnes made a feeble attempt to argue her out of it. But along with any warmth or real interest in the fate of others, she lacked persuasive powers. She wasn't sufficiently involved. 'You'll upset your insides,' she said. it's not my insides, is it? It's my leg I'm going to do it to.' 'Your dad's stuff will have gone off. It's been there five years.' But she couldn't stop Eileen going into the bathroom for the syringe and the ampoule. Eileen had watched her father do this so often that she knew exactly what it involved. Tom Tawton had left ample supplies of the stuff behind and Agnes had thrown out none of it, as the NHS practice nurse had instructed her to do. Eileen thought she could take some of it back with her and buy her own syringe. Searching through the medicine cabinet, she found a container labelled Tolbutamide. Remembering that this had once been prescribed for her father to take by mouth before his treatment had become intravenous, she swallowed a couple of capsules in water from the cold tap. It couldn't do any harm. Injecting herself was more of a challenge, but she had seen it done so she could do it. Afterwards, she went back to her mother and said she'd make them a cup of tea. She was going to stop taking sugar in her tea. 'It'll be a wrench,' she said, 'but I have to think of my health,' and then, because she had heard the phrase somewhere, or something like it, 'I owe it to Jimmy to think of my health.' In the kitchen, while the kettle was boiling, she had to sit down. She sat, felt her head swim, her vision blacken, her body quake, she slid to the floor and collapsed in a coma. Her mother, weary with waiting for her tea, fell asleep and failed to find her till five hours had passed. Home from college for the Easter break, Teddy found that the house was deserted by day. Jimmy had neglected to inform the authorities of his wife's death and continued to draw the full retirement pension for a married couple to which he had previously been entitled since he became sixty-five. At much the same time the law had changed and pubs stayed open all day. Jimmy went to the pub at ten in the morning and stayed there until six or seven in the evening. Always a hard worker Keith, who had been drawing his pension for a year longer, still worked as a plumber as '~e11, mostly for money in the back pocket. He was a serious earner, was Keith, having, for instance, made enough in the past year to take himself away on holiday to Lanzarote and build a carport on the concrete pad to shelter the Edsel from the elements. A good plumber, who will come whenever he is called on, when the tank in the loft leaks, when the lavatory cistern won't stop filling, is always in demand. So the house was empty and for the first time in his life Teddy had it to himself. He could have asked friends round, but he had no friends. Alfred Chance had been the nearest to a friend he ever had. Girls at college fancied him and made their feelings plain, but he repulsed them. He was a loner and he liked to think of himself as such. At first, when he was alone in the house, he explored and searched it in a way he had never had the opportunity to do before. It was very dirty and, because there was so much wool about and so many woollen garments, infested with moths. Woodworm were devouring the living-room furniture and from the television table had bored into the skirting board. Teddy closed his eyes and thought of the house as being eaten up by insects, boring and drilling and chewing, and he almost fancied he could hear their depredations as a range of steady hummings and buzzings on various different notes. Spiders were in the bath and silverfish wriggled across the floors. Ladybirds were concentrated in crimson clusters on the dirty curtains. From a distance they looked like scabs on skin. He went into Keith's room, not because there was anything in there he specially wanted to see or to check on, but rather in wonderment and fascinated disgust. An obscure pleasure was what he felt in simply contemplating the bed which was never made and on which the sheets were never changed. Since Eileen's death there was no one to do the washing and a heap of soiled clothes lay in one corner. Keith would wait until he had just one pair of trousers and one ragged T-shirt left and then he would put the pile of clothes into a bin-liner and take it down to the launderette. The room smelt of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, blue cheese and the dry, bitter, yellow stink of unwashed bedlinen. Normal-sized ashtrays weren't big enough for Keith and he used an old Pyrex casserole in which to deposit his ash and stub out his fag ends. It stood on the floor beside the bed. Teddy squatted down and looked underneath. From his childhood he remembered that Keith kept drink under there. He still did, a half-bottle of vodka, a whole one of gin, three cans of lager, still in their quadruple plastic collar. Keith stuck memos to himself on pink and blue Post-its all over the window-panes and the front of the tailboy. They had phone numbers of clients on them and addresses of sanitary goods suppliers. And on one wall were pinned photographs (cut out of library books) of Keith's heroes: Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, originators of the motor vehicle, and of Ferdinand Porsche standing beside his People's Car in Hitler's Germany. Their prim, serious faces and spotless dress made a ludicrous contrast with the squalor of the room. Next door, Jimmy now slept alone. The bed was a larger version of his brother's. Jimmy had had a nose-bleed over one of the pillows; to judge by the colour and texture of the stain, some weeks before. It may have been this which attracted the flies, a dozen or so of which danced and bobbed against the closed window while a bluebottle, as big as a bee, zoomed frenziedly in diagonals across the room. Teddy looked inside the wardrobe. His mother's clothes smelt of old sheep. The tracks made by moth grubs already showed on the lumpy woollen surfaces and moth cocoons, grevish-white like mildew, nestled between the stitches. It was the colours she had used which fascinated and repelled Teddy. He knew something about colour and had been taught more. He knew, for instance, that what may look beautiful in nature, a primrose against dark-green ivy leaves, a blue butterfly on a pink rose, is less aesthetically acceptable in art or in textiles. Eileen had put lime-green next to scarlet and ochre beside purple, turquoise vied with peach and crimson jostled powder-blue. These conjunctions of colours hurt his eyes and made anger well up once more inside him. He moved to the dressing-table and stood there for a while, his hands pressing down on its glass-topped surface, his eves closed. His back was to the bed now, but it was present in his mind. In here they must have, occasionally must have, at least once must have, since he was born five years after they were married perhaps often must have, had sex. From what people had said at school he knew that everyone finds the idea of their parents having sex unimaginable, but in the case of his it was more unimaginable than usual. It made him shudder. He had slept in here till he was four, he vaguely remembered it, so perhaps they had done it in his presence. He kept his eyes shut. At twenty he was a virgin and not ashamed to be. If anyone had asked he would have admitted it proudly. He had read somewhere, in a newspaper probably, that 'saving oneself, preserving a state of virginity, was becoming fashionable. For once he didn't mind being a follower of fashion. As for saving himself for something or someone, the idea of marriage was ludicrous; marriage was this bedroom, those people, the smoke and the moths and the dining-room furniture. But he could imagine keeping himself pure and intact for - what? A creature as fair and untouched as himself. Turning round sharply, he opened his eyes and stared at his reflection. The fly-spotted mirror was losing its silvering in a kind of greenish ulceration round the edges, but this only served to throw his beauty into a starker relief. His likeness to his uncle Keith he had never observed and this was just as well; he would have repudiated it with fury. lie saw only a face and figure he never tired of admiring, that square jaw, those eyes and cheek-bones, that perfect nose and mouth, that black silk hair and the slim, strong body, hips and pelvis too narrow, it seemed, to contain all that was inside them. Yet it was scarcely vanity. There was no idea in his mind of improving on his looks or dressing for them or using them. He simply derived pleasure from the contemplation of himself as he did from looking at any object of beauty. He would no more want to flaunt himself or thrust himself upon anyone than he would want to set up a beloved piece of sculpture in the front garden or invite people in to look at a treasured painting on his wall. He was his. He was the only person he cared for as much as he cared for things. The flawlessness was marred only by the damage to his left hand. He had got into the habit of holding his hand with the little finger curled round and tucked into the palm. These days, or in circumstances where parents felt some responsibility for a child, they would have found that bit of finger and taken it with them to Accident and Emergency, and it would have been invisibly stitched on again. This lack of care, of interest, was another reason for hating them. He lowered his eyes and contemplated the clutter on the dressing-table. Nothing had been moved, nothing had been dusted, since his mother died. The place was kept as it had always been, as a shrine might be, but out of indifference, not devotion. An old Mason-Pearson hairbrush, its stiff black bristles clogged with Eileen's equally wiry but greying hair, a scent bottle in which the perfume had grown yellow and viscid with age, a comb whose teeth were gummed together with dark-grey grease, a cardboard box that had once held Terry's All Gold chocolates, a glass ashtray containing pins, hairgrips, scraps of cottonwool, a dead fly, the top of a ballpoint pen and, horribly, a piece of broken fingernail. And all this sitting on a greyed and stained crocheted lace mat, rumpled in the middle and curled at its fringed edges, like an island in a dusty sea after a nuclear explosion. Teddy nearly swung out his arm to sweep it all on to the floor. His father wouldn't notice, wouldn't see anything amiss for years, for ever. Something stopped him doing that, simple curiosity as to what was inside the box. If it was still what had originally been there he imagined them coated in mould, the ghosts of chocolates, pale phantom cubes and hemispheres and shell-shapes. But the chocolates had long been eaten. This box was where Eileen had kept her jewellerv. Teddy had never seen her wear any of it, ropes of pearls with peeling surfaces, a green glass necklace, a scottie dog brooch, a copper bracelet for keeping rheumatism at bay - it said so, engraved on it - a necklace apparently woven out of plastic-covered thread. Then he saw what it actually was. So you could crochet jewellerv too. He tipped out the lot. Right at the bottom, like an orchid planted in a bed of thistles, was a ring. Just as his mother had done, all those years ago, in the Ladies at Broadstairs, he saw its worth. Not its probable value, as she had done, but its beauty. He laid it in the palm of his hand and turned it this way and that for the diamond to catch the light. The diamond was large and deeply glowing and richly flashing, with rainbows skimming its facets and rainbows cast from it to dance up and down the dirty wall. Inside the setting of the diamond and the sparkling shoulders, the ring was clogged with the same kind of epidermal detritus as Eileen's comb. He curled his lip in disgust at the dark grease caking the gold band and delicately fashioned sockets. Where had it come from? Had she ever worn it? It ought to be cleaned, he would find out how you cleaned a diamond ring. But first, after these explorations, he would have a bath. The neighbours, abandoning slanderous gossip and unkind judgements as people do when tragedy strikes, said that Jimmy's not lasting long after his wife's death went to show what a devoted couple they were. They couldn't live without each other. Not that Jimmy had died, but he had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance after suffering a heart attack in the pub. He had been standing at the bar with a pint of draught Guinness in front of him, talking to anyone who would listen about race relations in nord-i London. Or, more precisely, about the conduct of the newsagent of Indian extraction, though born in Bradford, who had sold out of copies of the Sun before Jimmy managed to visit his shop. 'So I said to Paid the blackie,' said Jimmy, using the witty sobriquet he believed was his own invention, 'I said to him, you're not in Cal-bloody-cutta now, you know, you're not among the snake-charmers and the cow-buggerers no more, and he went -well, not white, not that, do me a favour - no, he went the colour of the curry he has with his fuckin' chips and...' Pain cut off whatever Jimmy had intended to say next. He clutched the upper part of his left arm with his right hand, an action which seemed firstly to pull him forward, then double him up, and to release a low groan from his slackening mouth. The groan rose to a throaty howl as Jimmy buckled at the knees and collapsed, sprawling, to the floor. Though existing for a long time without a telephone, the Brexes had acquired one ten years before, largely for Keith's plumbing business. Keith was on the phone, talking to a woman who had water coming through her bathroom ceiling, when a policeman came to the door. Keith was in a dilemma, whether to go to the aid of the bathroom woman or get down the hospital. He came into the dining-room where Teddy was sitting on his bed, drawing a design for a footstool. 'The whole family's breaking up,' he moaned. 'You'd best get down there and see your dad, you can come on the back of the bike with me and I'll drop you off on my way to Cricklewood.' 'No, thanks,' said Teddy. 'I'm busy.' The footstool would be beautiful, a creation of simple lines and smooth, gleaming surfaces. He closed his eyes, imagining a future life from which all ugliness was banished.

Chapter 7

Back at college a few days later, Teddy attended a lecture on the Joyden School. It was given by a visiting professor and he wasn't obliged or even expected to attend. 'Fine art' had no part in his course, but he admired the work of A'Lichael Joyden, Rosalind Smith and Simon Aipheton, samples of which he had seen reproduced in a Sunday supplement, and he wanted to hear what Professor Mills had to say about it. As always spotlessly dean, with newly washed hair and scrubbed fingernails, Teddy was dressed in his usual immaculate near-rags. He had no money for clothes and shopped, when he had to, at Oxfam and the Sue Ryder shop. His mother had always dressed him from these establishments, he was used to it and took no interest in what he wore. On this day he had on blue jeans, like everyone else in the lecture hail of the Potter Building, a snowy though shabby T-shirt and a dark-blue sweat-shirt that had been bought new from C & A by the Sue Ryder donor twelve years before. The girl who sat down next to him gave him one of those appraising looks he was accustomed to. She was pretty enough. He took virtually no interest in people's characteristics or attitudes or opinions, but he always noticed whether they were good-looking or the reverse. This one had a bright, sharp-featured face and a neat little body, but to use a phrase of his grandmother's, she looked shop-soiled. As if, he thought with an inner shudder, she had been through too many grubby hands and rumbled on too many beds as smelly as Keith's. 'Hi,' she said. He nodded at her. 'I haven't seen you here before.' He raised his swallow's-wing eyebrows. 'I'd remember you, believe me,' she said flirtatiously. 'There are some people you don't forget.' 'Is that so?' It was an interrogatory he often used and it meant very little. He forgot everyone except those he was obliged to be with in daily proximity. 'Tell me something.' She was smiling now. 'Anything!' 'How would you clean a ring?' 'What?' 'How would you clean a diamond ring?' 'For God's sake, I don't know.' She gave him a resentful glance, but seemed to be considering the question. She shrugged. 'My gran puts hers in gin. Leaves it in a glass of gin overnight.' The lecturer was coming on to the podium. 'Right,' he said. 'Thanks.' Teddy had wondered how Professor Mills would show examples of the paintings and not, he hoped, by sticking reproductions up on a board. To his relief he saw that slides were to be used. The lights in the auditorium were dimmed a little and the first picture appeared on the screen. It was Michael Joyden's Come Hither Blues and Teddy hadn't seen it before. The pop group with whom Joyden and Aipheton had been friends, and whose music they had loved, appeared on the canvas in swirls of colour and flashes of light, so that strangely you could almost hear the picture. The girl muttered something about not being able to see to make notes. Teddy ignored her. Professor Mills talked about Joyden and Smith and the influence of the Fauvists, their bold style and use of brilliant colour. While Rosalind Smith demonstrated this influence perhaps more than any other member of the Joyden School, Aipheton owed more to Bonnard, Vallotton and Vuillard than to Matisse and Rouault. Some called his wor1~ retrograde, but the lecturer claimed for it a striking modernity comparable at least to Hockney or Freud. Teddy barely knew who most of these people were. Lucien Freud he knew, but thought his work ugly, no matter how good it might be. He had seen a reproduction of one of Aipheton's paintings on a flier put through the Neasden letter-box and now here it was again, as large as life up on the screen: Music in Hanging Sword Alley. Come Hither again, this time the four musicians leaned languidly against a concrete wall of the building where the recording studio was, their instruments at their feet. Marc Syre, the lead guitarist, had his mouth wide open, his head hanging backwards and his long hair steaming down his back. The date of the painting, Professor Mills said, was 1965. 'My murn's got all their old singles,' whispered the girl. 'She was a Come Hither groupie - can you believe it?' Teddy shrugged. He wasn't interested in music of any kind. All those people were probably dead by now, anyway. People recorded in paint, that was another thing. Like this next one, Aipheton's masterpiece, the most famous of the Joyden School, the one that was in the Tate, the one that was in all books of modern art and found its wax' into superior calendars. Until now Teddy had only seen it in that Sunday magazine, but it was really on its account that he had come to this lecture. Marc and Haji-jet in Orcadia P/ace. The two young people were in a sunlit garden or courtyard in front of what looked like a tree. But a tree without trunk or branches, more a curtain of leaves. All this was mere background to the man and the woman who stood a little apart, joined to each other by his extended right hand, her left, the fingertips lightly linked. He was dark, bearded, long-haired, dressed in dark blue, she a red-haired beauty, with a russet curling mane, the precise same shade as her long Regency dress. Their eves were concentrated on each other with, it seemed, a tender love and yearning. Passion informed the painting so that after all these years and in spite of the million eyes that had looked on it and the thousand commentaries made on it, this couple's love remained fresh and eternally enduring. 'Marc Syre, as your parents no doubt could tell you,' said Professor Mills, 'was a member of Come Hither and as such made himself a fortune which enabled him, as early as nineteen sixty-five, the date of this work, to occupy this house in St John's Wood and enjoy this ri's in urbe. Believe me, there is a Georgian house behind all those ivy or vine leaves, or whatever they are. Harriet Oxenholme was what we should call today his live-in girlfriend. 'But we need not concern ourselves unduly with these people, who are important only insofar as Simon Aipheton was their friend and they became, by a most happy chance for subsequent generations, his subjects. What we must look at is Aipheton's arresting use of colour, his subtle handling of light and his curious ability to convey with extreme economy powerful emotion and, indeed, sexual passion. He had in mind, of course, as template or exemplar, Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride, but before we discuss that, let us first look at the play of light and shade...' Teddy decided to take himself down to the Tate Gallery and confront the real thing. He thought about leaves and carving leaves, something like what Grinling Gibbons did, but modern, leaves for today. A picture frame of leaves or a mirror - yes, why not make a mirror? When the lecture was over and the lights went up again the girl next to him looked at the notes she had struggled to make. 'Would you call that picture erotic?' she asked him. 'Mills did.' 'Did he? Then I will. I'm Kelly. What your name?' 'Keith,' said Teddy. 'What happened to your finger, Keith?' He said gravely, 'My uncle bit it off.' This time she didn't believe. She giggled. 'Would you feel like coming out for a drink, Keith?' 'I've got a tutorial,' said Teddy. He got up and walked away without a backward glance. Why had he lied instead of just saying no? He'd say~ it next time. Of course he hadn't a tutorial and he had no essay to write. No one seemed to care in his course whether you ever wrote anything or not. He was going home to perform a task, or begin to perform a task, he had for several years longed to do. His uncle would be our, putting in a power shower in a flat in Golders Green and afterwards visiting Jimmy in hospital. Keith, who had never shown much affection for his brother in the past, or indeed for anyone, had become a faithful visitor at Jimmy's bedside. So no one would be at home to see or to hear. The Edsel, a delicate pale-yellow and spotless, its engine several times rebuilt, stood on the extended concrete pad under the new carport with its four metal posts and its gleaming roof of corrugated polvtetrafluoroethylene. It was - or seemed - the largest of any cars Keith had had, too large to be parked horizontally across the garden, its bonnet and grid like a pursed mouth facing the back fence, its huge finned boot with high taillights close up against the french windows. Next to it, underneath where the motor bike stood when Keith was at home, was a long slick of oil. The carport, designed to shelter a big car, had taken up even more of the space than the original pad and Teddy's tool collection was crowded up into a corner, in the right angle where two fences met. He lifted up the plastic sheeting and shook off the water which the previous night's rain had left in its folds. Underneath, from a box and then from their newspaper wrappings, he took a saw, a hacksaw, chisels of varying sizes and a hammer. Mr Chance had owned nothing so crude as an axe, but they had one Grandma Brex had used in distant wood-chopping days. Teddy found it, damp and blunt, among the welter of mould-coated rubbish under the sink. He carried his tools into the dining-room and began. It was five o'clock when he started and by seven-thirty he had sawn the legs off all the chairs and the arms off the carvers, sawn off their backs and prised out the seat cushions. He didn't want to stop to eat, so he sharpened the axe on Mr Chance's whetstone and started chopping. Within half an hour he had reduced the six chairs to firewood. That was when the people next door banged on the wall. They banged a few times and then the phone started ringing. Teddy guessed it was them, a yuppie couple who had bought Mr Chance's house and thought themselves a cut above the rest of the people in the street. He ignored the banging and the phone, but his axe work was done for the time being and he began sawing up the sideboard. The man next door came round and rang the bell when Teddy started chopping again at nine. Teddy let him ring a few times and then he went to the door with Kenneth Clark's Civilisation in his hand, open at the chapter called 'Grandeur and Obedience'. 'Look, what's going on? What is this?' 'My uncle's making a coffin,' said Teddy. 'He's got a deadline.' The neighbour was one of those who blush when they think they've been told a lie or are being sent up, but don't know how to handle it. 'What deadline?' he said. 'Ten p. m.' said Teddy. 'Nearly over. Good-night.' He shut the door hard and gave it a kick. Saying sorry wasn't a habit of his. Before going back to his dismemberment of the furniture he went upstairs, found the gin bottle under Keith's bed and poured an inch of it into the egg-cup he had taken up with him. Into it went the diamond ring. Teddy put the egg-cup under his own bed. He chopped up the sideboard in double-quick time, stacked a woodpile four feet high and was in the kitchen eating a large can of baked beans on three rounds of toast when Keith came in at twenty-five to eleven. 'You're eating late,' said Keith. Teddy didn't reply. Keith set down his two plastic carriers, full of bottles and beer cans, lit a cigarette with a match and dropped the match on the floor. 'Don't you want to know how your dad is?' 'What do you think?' said Teddy. 'You watch your mouth. You haven't been near your dad since he went in there and that's all of two fuckin' months. Poor old sod's on his way out and you don't give a fourpenny fuck.' 'How about you watching your mouth?' said Teddy. 'Or washing it out? With like cyanide.' He went into the dining-room and banged the door. But he started laughing when he was inside. That night he slept like a log. Or like a Brex, they were all heavy sleepers, though he was sometimes the exception. The following evening he sawed the legs off the table and chopped them up, but not the table top. Late in the day, but not too late, he saw what a fine piece of mahogany it was. He took it carefully apart and stacked the boards against the wall. The chopped wood made a pile to occupy a space roughly the size the sideboard had been. The only way to get rid of it that came to mind was to take three or four pieces with him in a plastic carrier every time he left the house. Rather like someone disposing of a body, half a leg one day, a hand another, finally the head. Fortunately - he had never thought of it as being fortunate before - the place was awash with plastic bags. They filled the kitchen drawers and flopped out when you opened the cupboard under the sink. Keith got them from the Safeway when he bought his booze and he never took used ones back. Recycling in any shape or form had no place in his life-style. When Teddy went to get the tube to college he'd take some of those bits of leg with him in a bag and put them in a waste bin. As Kelly's grandma had predicted, the gin had cleaned the ring. Lumps of grey waxy substance, one with a hair embedded in it, floated on the surface of the liquid in the egg-cup. Teddy sniffed it with a shudder. He was preserving another virginity, that of never letting alcohol pass his lips. The ring sparkled in the morning light. Teddy wondered whose it had been before it came on to his mother's hand. Grandma Brex's? Surely not. More likely it was stolen, but he doubted if his father had ever had the courage to steal anything. Perhaps he was wrong and the ring was worthless, perhaps it had come out of a Christn-ias cracker. I-lie questioned if something so beautiful could be valueless. One day he would find a woman and give~ it to her.

Chapter 8

Soon after Richard and Julia were married the police asked Richard if he would let Francine attend an identity parade. 'She only saw his shoes and the top of his head,' Richard protested. 'If you think about it,' Detective Inspector Wallis said, 'I'm sure you'll agree that no one looking down from above ever just sees the top of someone's head and his shoes. There's going to be a lot more than that. His hands, for instance, the shape and size of him, his ears, his shoulders.' Julia thought the project very wrong. Francine, in her opinion, was disturbed enough already, a frightened, traumatised child. This might send her over the edge. It was their first disagreement, hers and Richard's. Richard won it, but that was the last struggle with Julia he was ever to win. She sighed and looked sad, saying, 'I hope we aren't talking about irreparable damage to Francine's already fragile personality.' They both went with her to the police station in Surrey where the identity parade was held. Because of the peculiar nature of the view Francine had had of the man on the doorstep, she was placed in a room where she could look down on the eight men in the lineup. The glass in the window was one-way so that she could see them but they could not see her. Or so the police told Richard. It looked like normal glass to Julia. 'They would say that, darling,' she said, 'to set our minds at rest.' In any case, Francine was unable to pick out the man. She could pick out four, she said the tops of their heads all looked like the top of the head she had seen, but no particular one. What happened to the men in the line-up none of them was told, but no one was arrested. 'But he's seen her, hasn't he?' said Julia. 'That was the point of the one-way glass,' Richard said, 'so that he couldn't see her.' Julia, who was nothing if not illogical, said, 'It doesn't matter, though, does it, if he saw her or not? The reality is that he knows who she is and he knows she's the only witness the police have.' 'You're presupposing that he was one of those eight men.' 'Well, of course he was, Richard. He wouldn't have been there if he wasn't.' What motivated Julia towards her subsequent actions? Later on, this was a question Francine asked herself. At the beginning she was too young to ask. Richard didn't ask. He didn't question at all, for he recognised that Julia had a genuine fear for Francine's safety and believed that Francine herself was afraid. In embarking on her system of the protection and cocooning and insulating of Francine, she was only obeying her conscience and her knowledge of psychology. That she might be carrying out her safeguarding programme for other reasons, because she was herself childless and likely to remain so, or because she had lost her means of livelihood and profession, or because she had abandoned all other areas in which to exercise power, occurred only to her stepdaughter, and that not for another ten years. But at that time what principally troubled Francine was the departure of Flora. She might have stayed, at least as an occasional visitor or helper, or been invited to be a sitter while Richard and Julia went out in the evenings. But Richard and Julia never went out in the evenings, they never went out together. Julia thought it harmful for Francine to be in the house without either one of them. So Flora left and Francine cried. 'You can come and see me,' Flora said. 'I'm not far away. You get Mrs Hill to bring you.' But somehow Julia never had the time. She was too busy looking after Francine. Privately, she told Richard it was better for Francine to make a clean break with Flora. 'On a practical level,' she said, 'you wouldn't want your daughter picking up that accent.' It was at about this time, after Flora had gone, when Francine was nearly nine and had tried and failed to spot the man in the identity parade, that Richard read a letter to Julia from a former client's solicitor. He read it by mistake, confessed and apologised, but still, quite humbly and contritely, wanted to know what it meant. 'It means that a very vindictive, and I must say unbalanced, man has finally won his victory over me. He has succeeded in puffing me out of practice and no doubt his triumph is complete.' The explanation which followed made Richard nearly as indignant as his wife. This man's son had been Julia's client. He was a boy of ten. A tragedy had nearly ensued when, after coming home from a session with Julia, the boy had tried, and luckily failed, to hang himself. The father threatened to bring an action against Julia, was set to do so, being certain he could show evidence of damage to his son's mind directly caused by her, but had finally been persuaded to settle on payment by Julia of two thousand pounds and her promise to retire from all psychotherapeutic work. 'You should have fought it,' Richard said. 'I know. I hadn't the strength. I hadn't the courage, Richard. I was all alone - then.' She said nothing about the eminent psychiatrists who had been willing to give evidence in court. She gave no hint of the boy's testimony to his father's solicitor of the terrors, agoraphobia and recurring nightmares her questionings and suggestions had allegedly induced in him. 'I'll still be able to make use of all my knowledge,' she said quite gaily. 'There are others to benefit from it. You and Francine. Would you think me melodramatic if I said I intend to devote my life to Francine?' All children need to be looked after and at first it was only that Francine was looked after more thoroughly than most. For instance, there was the matter of her father and her stepmother never leaving her with anyone else, there was the business of Julia vetting her school friends for their suitability and there was the baby monitor. This transmitted from her bedroom to Julia's and Richard's bedroom any sounds that might indicate she was having a nightmare or even a disturbed night. Her reading matter was scrutinised by Julia and the small amount of homework she did, the occasional essays she was expected to write, studied for evidence of a disturbed psyche. Flora had left her considerable privacy. With the coming of Julia she had none. It was Julia's discovery of the video cassette box that prompted Francine's drastic action. Remarkably for her, Julia didn't look inside the box, only at the wording and illustration on its cover. 'A Passage to India is a wonderful book, Francine, and I believe a very good film was made from it,' said Julia, 'but I don't think you're quite old enough for either yet. It's best to postpone these things until you can understand them. 'I don't want to watch it,' Francine said, 'I just want to have it,' and she put out her hand for the box. 'Shall I take it downstairs and put it with the others? Then we'll know it's safe.' 'It's safe here,' said Francine as firmly as she could, but was quite surprised just the same when Julia's scarlet-tipped fingers relinquished the box and Julia gave one of her bright, colourful smiles, red lips, white teeth, the prominent blue eyes of an ornamental fish. Of course, it was not true, what she had said. The box and its contents were far from safe. While she was at school there was nothing to stop Julia coming in here and taking it and looking K, inside. Julia, certainly, could read that writing. But now, perhaps, so could Francine. A curious reluctance to look at those sheets of paper took hold of her. The idea of them frightened her. Not as an illustration in her book of Grimm's Fany Tales frightened her, so that, knowing precisely where it came in the fat volume, between page 102 and page 104, she carefully turned three pages at once when she looked into that particular story. Not like that, for she felt only a kind of distaste, a sense of wishing to avoid the contents of the cassette case in the way she wanted to avoid eating anything flavoured with ginger. It happened that she was reading a child's book of Greek myths and one of the myths described was of Pandora and how when she opened a certain precious box she released into the world a swarm of evil things. Francine didn't believe that she would let out anything similar if she opened her box, but even at ten years old she could see the analogy. Still, that same day she lifted the lid of the box and took out the now yellowing sheets of paper. And for the first time she understood that what she was looking at were letters. On the top sheet was no address, but there was a date, a day in March some three and a half years before. She read the way the letter started: 'My darling.' It was no longer difficult for her to read this handwriting, but it was still impossible to do so. For some reason, and she had no idea what, she was too frightened to read on. Her eyes refused to focus on the forward-sloping letters. She saw a blur of darkish stripes on a pale ochre background, and then she put the pages back into the box and closed the lid as hard as she could, pressing it down as if it hadn't clicked into place at once. The house had no fireplace. She was never alone in the street where there were rubbish bins. It was only at school that she was away from Julia's loving, watchful eye. She took the video cassette box to school with her in the navy-blue, yellow-trimmed backpack all the pupils of this select preparatory school carried with them, and at morning break took the letters out of the box, put them into her blazer pocket and went out into the playground. Everyone else was also out in the playground, which was really a garden with lawns and play areas and a sandpit and a mini-zoo, and Holly, who was Francine's best friend, called out to her to come and see the new baby guinea-pigs. On her way Francine had to pass one of the crimson-painted bins with swing-lid tops which were set about this part of the gardens to teach pupils the virtues of tidy litter disposal. Francine swung up a lid as she passed and pushed the letters quickly in under it. Holly was still calling her and now she waved back and ran over to look at the little curled-up blind things and their fat mother who was coloured like a tortoiseshell cat. But next morning, when Julia dropped her off at the school gates - it was only with difficulty that Francine had stopped Julia accompanying her all the way into the class-room - she had to pass that red bin with its swing lid. With a hasty look over her shoulder, to check that Julia was moving off, she lifted it up and looked inside. The bin was empty and someone had put a fresh liner inside. Sometimes Richard thought Julia too watchful. Francine had no chance to be independent or private or to develop without supervision. But he hardly knew what to believe or what to think. Perhaps the child was in danger. The man who had killed his wife was still at large and maybe he lived in fear of what Francine might one day remember, and remembering, tell. And apart from that there was the possibility of damage to her mind or her psychic self or whatever the term was. In the light of present-day thinking it was almost unbelievable that the things that had happened to Francine could leave any child unscathed. She must be damaged, even if the scarring was unapparent to him. He might be unable to see it, but that need not mean it wasn't there. He was torn in two by half-belief and dread of further selfblame, in no mood to argue with Julia or attempt to dissuade her from her excessive vigilance. Suppose he were to call off this watchdog and then find that all her warnings had been wellfounded? He thought of the story of Cassandra whose predictions were doomed to be disbelieved, yet who had been right. So when the time came for Francine to change schools, the grant-aided former grammar school where the neighbours' daughters went and that she herself favoured was rejected in favour of Julia's choice, a very select, very expensive private girls' school called the Champlaine. Holly de Marnay was going there and it was from Holly's mother that Julia gleaned all the knowledge she had about it. The Champlaine was housed in a Georgian mansion on the edge of Wimbledon Common, a long way from where the Hills lived, but it had an exemplary record of pupils going on to the best of further education. In the previous year just under ninety-five per cent of the sixth form had entered university, twelve to Oxford or Cambridge. Classes were small, academic qualifications of teachers high. Among the students - never called pupils - were an earl's granddaughter and a Thai princess. Lacrosse was played, but soccer too. The Champlaine had a large heated swimming pool, squash courts and both hard and grass courts for tennis. Its new science lab was reputed to have cost three million pounds. Fees, therefore, were extremely high and paying them would involve considerable sacrifice on the Hills' part. Julia didn't protest. If it meant no foreign holidays, no second car and few new clothes, she accepted this as the price which must be paid for Francine's safety. Though boarding was favoured by the Champlaine authorities, she was not allowed to board. Julia would never have a quiet moment. There had been a recent story in the newspaper of a man getting into a school dormitory and raping a girl. If he could rape he could kill. So Francine became a day girl and thus a member of a slightly disfavoured minority. From certain in-jokes, cult behaviour, secret societies and private rituals she was excluded. It might have been less marked if the pupils had not known her past historv and the events in the house in Orchard Lane. But they did know. Julia had insisted that the Headmistress - mysteriously known here as the Chief Executive - told the entire school and staff at an assembly before Francine arrived. 'For her own protection,' Julia explained to Richard. 'If they know they will be vigilant on her behalf. They will help to protect her.' Richard doubted if teenagers thought or behaved like that, but Julia must know. She had been a teacher before she became a psychotherapist. 'There is less to worry about when she's in the classroom,' said Julia. 'I'm thinking of when she's outside in the grounds. Her friends can operate surveillance. Francine had many friends, other day girls. It was to be a long while before she was allowed to go to their houses, but Julia allowed them to come to the Hills, once they had been carefully vetted by her. She would ring up a girl's mother and suggest they meet for lunch, then grill the woman as to her family, her husband's - and occasionally her own - profession, the number of her children, and her attitude towards crime and punishment, this to include what she thought of prisons and whether she favoured the re-introduction of capital punishment. The women didn't seem to mind too much. Julia never revealed her motives and these parents of Champlaine pupils thought she was interested in their ancestry or their claims to belong to an upper class and particular political persuasion. The result of it all was that Francine was allowed to ask one or two friends round and occasionally have them stay the night. But she was never to go out with a friend and the friend's family or on school trips. The Champlaine took the fourth form to Lake Lucerne one year and the fifth form to Copenhagen the next without her. National Theatre visits happened, but in Julia's company, not her schoolfellows'. Francine was at an age to rebel and rebel she did - a little. Why was she guarded like this? What was the point? She even said, 'I'd rather have someone attack me than be kept in prison.' The occasion was a proposed visit to the ballet with two school friends and the mother of one of them. Julia had uttered an unhesitating no. To the West End in the evening by public transport? All right, Miranda's mother would be with them and Francine would stay the night at Miranda's and phone when she got there, but suppose.. 'You have to realise you re in a special position, Francine.' 'I'm never allowed to forget it.' 'Do you think I like it?' said Julia. 'Do you think it's for my pleasure?' 'I didn't say that. But I don't think I'm at risk - I mean, who am I at risk from?' Then Julia did what she had promised Richard she would never do. She told Francine her theory. Francine turned white and began to shiver. 'But I didn't see him. I didn't see anything.' 'Francine, you have nothing to worry about if you behave sensibly, if you let us look after you. 'Can't we somehow let him know I didn't see him? Can't we - I don't know - put it in the papers, make the police tell him?' 'Now you're being silly.' Why did she do it? Julia, that is. Why? Her own explanation for her vigilance she believed. The man thought Francine could identify him, therefore he pursued Francine. If she hadn't believed that and continued to do what she did she would either have been an evil woman or a fool. Julia was neither. She was no wicked stepmother. At first, and for a long while, she had confidence in that theory of hers, but after a time her motives blurred and her aims became confused. For instance, she seldom asked herself what use she would be as a protector, how she, a not particularly athletic woman of nearly fifty, could defend Francine or convince a potential attacker she was a force to be reckoned with. She never carried a weapon or would have dreamt of doing so. By night she slept and Richard slept while Francine was alone in her bedroom, which an intruder might surely have entered as easily, or more easily, than a school dormitory. The baby monitor was long gone. (Francine, who put up with a lot, who was both gentle and stoical, had protested finally about that and demanded its banishment.) Julia, moreover, had no real knowledge of what happened while Francine was at school. She hoped, she trusted, but she didn't know whether Francine went out in her lunch-time or what she did during free periods or even if she sometimes played truant. Many did - even the earl's granddaughter. All this Julia was vaguely aware of and aware, too, that the time was coming when either Francine must be shut up, institutionalised like some helplessly handicapped girl, or else set free into the world. But it was over just this question that what good sense she had left, and what common sense, collapsed. Francine was her charge, over whom she fancied she had absolute power. She had saved her, preserved her through childhood and adolescence to the approach of womanhood, and she could not relinquish her. And during those years she had sacrificed herself for Francine. No one had asked her to do so - Richard had merely asked her to marrv him - she had done it entirely of her own volition. But it had been a sacrifice. There had been time, when she was first married, to have a child of her own, she was young enough, but that would have meant in part deserting Francine. She could have pursued one of her two careers - but that would have meant neglecting Francine. Day in, day out, during term time, she had driven Francine the ten miles through heavy traffic to school and the ten miles back and the ten miles to fetch her and the ten miles back. Not once had she been out with her husband in the evening unless they had Francine with them. Her marriage, too, she had sacrificed. She had spoilt it for Francine's sake. For things were never the same again between them after Richard found out that she had broken her promise and told his daughter. It was farcical, that theory of hers, but Francine was only fifteen years old and to lay such a burden on a child who had surely suffered enough, who had suffered a lifetime's agony before she was eight, that he thought indefensible. Julia he saw with new eyes, as predatory and overweeningly possessive, and as spiteful, too. For what other motive could she have had for telling Francine but malice? The girl had wanted a little freedom, had been, if not rude, a little too direct, and Julia had lashed back with a tale calculated to terrify. 'Malice?' she said. 'Malice? I love Francine. All I want is to make it possible for her to live as happy a life as she can in an imperfect world.' 'You are going to have to rethink your whole attitude,' he said in a sombre tone. 'You are going to have to understand that she is growing up and will inevitably grow away. Julia saw it very differently. To Francine she had devoted herself and how could she now wrench herself away or even pave the way for so doing? Besides, there was another aspect to be considered. She couldn't relinquish Francine now, give her up and see her make closer friends and take up other interests more important than her, Julia. With her sacrifice and her self-denial, she had bought her stepdaughter, she had paid a price for her and made her hers. Francine was her stepdaughter, but she was also her possession, a girl she had created out of a frightened child. In a way Francine was more her child than if she had given birth to her. And she would fight to keep her.

Chapter 9

One night after his brother had been to see him, had sat by his bed for an hour while they both watched the ward television, Jimmy Brex died. The last of his viable arteries closed up, the substance which lined it finally thickened so that the thread-breadth passage shrank to hair's-breadth, to nothing, and Jimmy, gasping, in agony, fighting for blood, breath and oxygen, passed out of life. He was sixty-seven. The neighbours said he hadn't wanted to live after his wife died. His brother registered the death, summoned undertakers, fixed up the funeral and invited a chosen few home for a beer, whisky and crisps after the cremation. His son attended, though virtually silently, surveying the place that was now his, not thinking much of it, but gratified by the possession of property, any property. After everyone had gone, Teddy said to Keith, 'I'm not evicting you, you needn't think that. I know this has been your home all your life. But I'd like you to think about being gone by, say, Christmas.' It was October. Teddy's final year at the University of Eastcote had just begun. They were in the living-room, among the heavy crowded furniture, with its throws of coloured crochet, an antimacassar over the back of an armchair, a shawl draped across the settee. Lilies, a wreath of them, brought unexpectedly by someone, lay wilting in the dust on the coffee table. Keith, heavily sedated with Chivas Regal, but recovering fast and absolutely on the ball, favoured Teddy with a slow smile. His drooping jowls and the long, now grey, moustache, gave him the look of a benign walrus. His eyes remained sharp, the eyebrows flaring in Mephistophelean arcs. 'This house belongs to me,' he said. 'To me. It's mine. You needn't look like that. Well, I mean, you can if you like. It's all one to me. My dad left me this house. My mum had a life interest and when she died it reverted to me. That's the term, "reverted". OK?' 'You're lying,' Teddy said. He didn't know what else to say. 'Let me explain. I don't fuckin' see why I should, but I will. I might as well. Your dad, God rest his soul, poor sod, your dad wasn't my dad's son. My mum was carrying when he took up with her. Well, you can guess the rest. He was OK about it, but as for getting the house, well, you've got to draw the line, right?' 'I don't believe it,' said Teddy. 'Too bad. That's your problem. I got the deeds in the bank and that's more proof than anything you believe in. However...' Keith repeated the word which he seemed to like the sound of. 'However, I'm less of a bastard than what you are. Surprise, surprise. And since you're my nephew, or my half-nephew, not much doubt about that, I'm not turning you out the way you'd have got shot of me. You'd have kicked me out at Christmas, but as far as I'm concerned you can stop here so long as you're up at that fuckin' college. How about that?' Keith wasn't averse to further explanations. His father had told him the facts of Jimmy's paternity when Jimmy was twenty-three and he was twenty-one. Brex senior was a magnanimous man and had brought up the elder son as his own. Property, though, and the inheritance of property, was another matter. The house that he had saved for and for years had a mortgage on must go to his own natural son. 'I might make a will and leave it to someone else in the family,' said Keith. 'I reckon I've got a bunch of cousins somewhere. Or I might leave it to you. If you behave yourself. Show a bit of respect. Clean the place, bring me up a morning cuppa.' He started laughing at his own wit. 'Why was I never told?' 'Why wasn't you what? Do me a favour. Your mum and dad was alive, you want to remember that. I let them live here and now I'm letting you. You're fuckin' lucky if you did but know it. A lot of men in my position'd expect you to pay rent.' Teddy walked out, slamming the door behind him. He went into the dining-room and sat down on the floor by the woodpile. He had intended, if not tonight, tomorrow, to begin clearing out the living-room and his parents' bedroom. Maybe get someone in to clear it, a second-hand furniture dealer who might give him something for the bedroom suite and the battered sofa. That was not now possible, might never be possible. He felt overwhelmed by ugliness. Everything in the house was ugly with the exception of one or two objects in this room and these, his own drawings in their pale wooden frames, his row of books between the bookends he had carved now seemed to him pathetic. His tools weren't ugly, the workbench where the sideboard had been, the two planes, the rack of saws, the hammers and the drills, but they were simply utilitarian. The smell seemed more than usually pervasive, penetrating even here. It was too cold to open the windows. The house was a hideous dump, but he had thought it was his, it was all he had. Only he didn't have it. Keith did, Keith who was one of the ugliest things in it, whose bloated body and soggy face, begrimed hands and broken, yellowing teeth, offended him every time he saw him. For a little while he seriously considered leaving. But where could he go? At his university it was possible to live in one of the two overcrowded halls of residence, but not in one's third year. There was no way he could afford to rent even a single room. His grant was inadequate for just the bare living and travelling. It occurred to him - as a matter of interest, he didn't care that much -that never in his life had he bought a new garment or had one bought for him. He'd never been abroad or to a London theatre or into any restaurant more up-market than the Burger King. His plan, scarcely formed, taken for granted, had been to sell the house. Clear it out, do it up, paint the outside and sell it. It was probably worth about as little as any thirties-vintage semi anywhere in London, but it would still fetch thousands and thousands, maybe as much as forty thousand pounds. But it was Keith's. Teddy kept the ring in the pocket of his only other jacket, the zipper one that hung on a hook on the inside of the door. He held it in the palm of his hand and looked at it. He still hadn't had it valued. If he tried to sell it the jeweller would think he had stolen it. He could try pawning it. Teddy knew very little about pawning things but pawnshops existed, he had seen them, and he had an idea a pawnbroker would give him approximately half what the ring was worth. That would be a way of getting it valued. He wasn't going to sell it. He would never sell it. Money wasn't all that much of a serious problem, anyway. He could manage, he always had. While Keith continued to provide some of their food he wouldn't starve. And he could go on making things and learning to make things, and finish his course and get his degree. He had to make something for his degree submission, some artefact that would be a sample or demonstration of his particular skills. Most of the others would produce a coffee table or a desk and there was someone who was a gifted wood carver, who Teddy knew would be making a mermaid for a ship's figurehead. His talent was in inlaid work, but he also fancied himself as an artist in painted furniture. He would make a mirror. His would have a frame of pale wood, sycamore or the darker walnut, inlaid with holly and yew, painted blue and grey and gold. If only it didn't have to be here, in this place where everything his eye alighted on was a deformity or a vulgar affront. Outside the window even the Edsel was covered up in plastic under its fourlegged plastic-roofed shelter. Keith's motor bike had a black binliner over its handlebars and another covering its saddle. The place was a storehouse for plastic bags, there was even one drifting about on the concrete, where greyish blades of grass struggled up through the cracks. Another had plastered itself up against the chain-link fencing, its corners poking through into next door as if it were trving to escape. Teddy drew the curtains. Keith was asleep in the living-room. He had been drinking more since his brother died, you could say he was drinking for two, Jimmy's share as well as his own. Quite often he didn't go to bed, but came back from whatever job he had been doing, covered up the bike with the bin-liners and moved directly into the living-room with his two plastic bags, one containing the smaller and more portable of his plumber's tools, the other his preferred Chivas Regal and Guinness for the evening. The television went on, Keith uncapped his first can or bottle and lit his first cigarette for some hours. His customers refused to let him smoke in their houses. When he saw Teddy looking, he offered an explanation. 'I'm not leaving no drink in this place while I'm out working. I wouldn't trust you round my Chivas further than I could fuckin' throw you.' Teddy made no answer. What was there to say? He never touched alcohol and Keith knew it as well as he did himself. For some reason Keith, who in days gone by had behaved rather better to him than his parents had, since their departure had become abusive, foul-mouthed and unremittingly surly. Teddy didn't care. He made no conjectures either as to whether this happened because Keith had in fact loved his brother and missed him or was disturbed by having no one to look after him and, occasionally, to talk to. It was nothing to him. He watched Keith, sometimes from the open doorway, and especially when the whisky and the Guinness had done their work, not out of interest or sympathy or pity, but with a kind of fascinated disgust. Often he stood there for ten or fifteen minutes, just looking. Not only at Keith but at Keith's surroundings, absorbing the dreadful room, the curtains coming off their hooks and pinned together with some clip or clamp from Keith's tool bag, the dust so thick that it grew off surfaces like fur, the never-emptied ashtrays, the saucers, tin lids, glass jars full of ash and fag-ends, the sagging broken furniture and square of carpet on which the seemingly floral pattern was in fact made by drink stains, mud brown on sewage grey, the discarded lampshade and bare bulb hanging from a knotted lead, until his eyes finally fixed themselves on Keith himself. His snoring was worse now than sixteen years ago. He trumpeted, he snorted, and every few minutes jolted and jumped as if jabbed with an electric probe. Then the rhythmic snoring was reestablished, regular, long drawn-out, rattling through Keith's nasal passages and expelled in a kind of juddering whistle. Once - but once only - he came fully to his senses and sitting up yelled, 'What are you fuckin' lookin' at?' It never happened again. Keith was too stunned and bludgeoned by his favoured mixture. He lay with his mouth wide open, his arms hanging over the arms of the chair and his big round belly, covered by a moth-eaten green wool sweater, reared up like some grassy hill in which speculators have dug holes. He never used a glass but drank straight from the can. The whisky he poured into a yoghurt pot, though where it came from Teddy didn't know. Crazy to imagine anyone living here ever eating yoghurt. Usually one plastic bag lay on his knees, a couple of others on the floor beside him. Quite often he didn't even bother to take the whisky out of the bag it had been bought in, but pouring it out, lifted bottle and enveloping bag together. It might be midnight, but the television would still be on. Keith would be there all night. If he needed to pee he would never make it up the stairs to the bathroom but would stagger out into the front garden. Teddy often smelt it. The yuppies next door thought it was cats. Keith snorted and gave one of his violent galvanic starts. By coincidence the characters in the Accident and Emergency sitcom on the television were on the point of administering heartstimulating shocks to a patient on a trolley. Teddy switched it off and went to bed.