Chapter 20

A fumbling among the things on her dressing-table woke Harriet rather than any untoward sound from elsewhere in the house. In the half-dark she made out the figure of Franklin. He was holding the pole with a hook on one end that opened the fanlight. 'What's the matter?' 'Quiet,' he said. 'There's someone downstairs.' The first time he said that to her in the middle of the night she had shrieked in fear. That was twenty years before. There hadn't been anyone downstairs on that occasion nor on the next or the next and, no doubt, there wasn't now. Franklin heard sounds that no one else did, he had the sort of tinnitus that was less a ringing in the ears than a buzzing and bumping. He also failed to hear sounds that others heard. Silly old man. She repeated the words scornfully to herself. Silly old man, silly old fool. He had put on his camel-hair dressing-gown and tied the cord round his middle. He opened the bedroom door stealthily, pole in hand. Once, on a similar occasion, she had put on a light, which had made him grimace and punch the air and stamp in dumb show until he got darkness again. She heard the stairs creak as he went down them. No other sound until he gave his usual challenge, uttered in commanding officer tones. 'Don't move. Stay where you are. I am armed.' After that, when he got no response - and he never had got a response - he put on the lights. She switched on the bedroom lamps. 'I suppose you realise', she said when he came back again, 'that any burglar worth his salt could overpower you in two seconds. You're an old man.' 'I've no doubt you'd prefer me to cower under the bed while the intruder raped you,' said Franklin with a knowing grin. She lay awake for a while. On the bedside cabinet beside her was the envelope containing Teddy Brex's drawings and his covering letter. She would phone him in the morning and ask him to come back and talk about the project. Of course there wasn't really a project, Franklin would have a fit if he thought some youth from Neasden intended building a cabinet in one of his Georgian alcoves and the whole thing wasn't feasible. None of that mattered because Harriet wasn't serious about it, the only one who was being Teddy Brex. Harriet would give him one more chance to understand her true intention and, if he didn't, give him and his drawings their marching orders. But, perhaps because it was the middle of the night and things always look different at night, more hopeless and depressing, she told herself that she had made a mistake about Teddy Brex. It wouldn't be the first time. Her overtures had a failure rate of about one in four, for although she had entertained over the years young construction workers in such numbers that, banded together, they could by their combined efforts (as she sometimes thought with a giggle) have built and fitted up a hundred-acre housing estate, there had always been some who turned her down. There had always been one or two, or three or four, who rejected her because they were shy or newly married or gay or even faithful to a wife or girlfriend. It was possible, too, that some simply didn't find her attractive. Into one of these categories it was likely that Teddy Brex came. If it was so it couldn't be helped. She slept after a while and woke to find Franklin standing by the bed with a piece of broken glass in his hand. The disturbance in the night had apparently been caused by someone in the mews throwing a stone over the wall and breaking one of the rear windows. Since the window was barred there had been no danger, only nuisance. 'Why show me?' said Harriet. 'I'm not going to mend it.' 'Perhaps I'm going to cut your throat.' Franklin laughed merrily to show he wasn't serious. 'You will have to find a glazier.~ 'A what?' 'A man who fits glass into window frames.' That was an idea. Failing Teddy Brex, a glazier. She contemplated herself in the mirror and felt quite pleased with what she saw. Phone Teddy, go to the hairdresser, maybe buy something new to wear in St John's Wood High Street. There wouldn't be time to go down to the West End or Knightsbridge. If Teddy agreed to come at, say, two, she could phone for a glazier at one-thirty. That way their visits wouldn't clash. Franklin brought her tea and the newspapers. She had a sudden urge to ask him if he had been faithful to her, but what was the use of such a question? You either got a lie in response or the same enquiry cast back at you. She looked at herself in the mirror. Maybe there would be a glazier advertising in the Ham and High, she thought, watching herself opening the paper. Franklin got in her way, returning to his pockets handkerchief, keys, small change and folded cheque-book. She dodged round his head and back to see how white her skin was and how red her hair. 'Why are you always looking at yourself?' he said as if he had never asked before. 'I don't look at myself any more than anyone else.' Franklin laughed. 'I'm off on my hols next week, may I remind you. So I'll want my stuff back from the dry-cleaners. You ought to have fetched it yesterday, I don't know why you didn't.' 'Are you going alone, Frankie?' 'Why do you ask? I never ask you.' She pouted at her reflection. 'One of these days,' she said, 'you might come back and find me gone.' 'True.' He didn't really think it was true. 'And you might come back and find me gone.' 'What would you do if I just walked out?' Franklin grinned. As is the case with many thin men when they grow old, his smile made a death's head of his bony face. 'Don't forget to phone a glazier,' he said. Instead, when he had gone, Harriet phoned Teddy Brex. Two o'clock would suit him. What had she thought of the drawings? Harriet had scarcely looked at the drawings, but she said she would rather not give her opinion over the phone. That was what they would talk about when he came. The hairdresser put a fresh application of Tropical Mahogany on to her hair, chatting the while about her grey roots which in places had become white roots. Harriet was relieved to see them all covered up in purple paste. In the shop next door she bought a pair of white palazzo pants and a white, pink and jade-green top, which she kept on, carrying the clothes she had been wearing home in the shop's bag. Today there were no glaziers advertising in the Ham and High, but she found a great number in the Yellow Pages, finally choosing one whose first name was Kevin. Kevins were usually a good bet, being mostly under thirty. This Kevin wasn't at home, so Harriet left a message on his answering machine which suited her very well. It would have been awkward if he had said he would come along immediately. Her earlier feelings were aroused when she saw Teddy Brex once more in the flesh. A little thrill of excitement, the kind she used to feel when she was young, ran through her. He looked her up and down, but his expression was impossible to read. She liked to think he was attracted and admiring. But again he refused a drink. The main thing was to look at the drawings together, he said, and decide on what she wanted. Harriet had left them upstairs on purpose. There had been some idea underlying this of getting him to follow her into the bedroom, but he let her go alone, his manner, she thought, growing colder and more distant by the minute. When she came down again he was standing by the broken window, looking out at the paved area, the back of the garage and the gate into the mews. 'How did that happen?' He indicated the broken pane. 'Someone must have thrown a stone in the night.' He nodded. 'You want to get that boarded up.' He didn't say why or offer to do it. She stood close beside him, pretending to examine the window. He bent down to pick up something from the floor. It was a pebble that long ago and on some distant beach the sea had worn smooth. Their heads brushed as she bent down and he straightened up. If anything could have told Harriet she was wasting her time his movement of recoil did. He sprang away, the stone clutched in his fist as if he meant to hurl it at her. Flushing, for she was not totally thick-skinned, she sat down at the dining-table and spread out the drawings listlessly. Even someone less observant than Harriet, or less inclined to take an interest in people other than as sex objects, would have noticed Teddy's eyes light up at the sight of his own work and something that was almost adoration alter the whole expression of his face. But the adoration was plainly not for her and, besides, she was already humiliated and sore. She said suddenly, 'I don't really think so. These aren't what I want.' The look he turned on her was not a nice one. Contempt was in it and a savage dislike. 'What?' 'I said this stuff isn't what I want.' 'It's what you asked for.' 'I can't help that. It still isn't what I had in mind. It's all wrong.' She was half enjoying herself now. 'These designs just aren't very good,' she said. 'I do know about these things. You've only to look around this house to see that. Your designs - well, they aren't up to the standard of the house.' It was his turn to flush, but he didn't. He turned very pale and his long fingers, perfect but for one that was mutilated and deformed, closed into fists. He got up. Somehow she knew he wasn't going to speak another word to her and she was surprised when he did. His tone was brittle and icy. 'Can I go out the back way? I've left my car in the mews.' 'Go any way you like,' she said. 'It's all the same to me.' She watched his departure as if she suspected him of stealing something on his way out. Not that there was anything to steal out of that little paved yard but a stone pot with a juniper in it and the white wrought-iron garden furniture, most of it too heavy to lift. He opened the gate, gave her a sullen look over his shoulder and went out into the mews, closing the gate behind him. Harriet waited until she heard his car engine start up. Then she went down to the gate and bolted it. The back of the house was even more thickly covered with that creeper than the front, its leaves reddening now. How many leaves would there be on this one plant? Millions - well, hundreds of thousands. Eleven Manvantaras and one Krita make one Kalpa, she repeated to herself. Thinking in this way wasn't like her. What did it matter how many leaves there were? She went into the house and to the nearest mirror to study her image. Franklin had once told her, in their early days, catching her staring at herself, how no one ever sees themselves in a mirror as they really are. They always pout a little or raise the corners of their mouths or lift their chins, pull in their bellies, straighten their shoulders, open wide their eyes or soften their expressions to wistful idiocy. That was why it was absurd to look at oneself in the glass except to check quickly for nearness and make sure one's flies or skirt zip were not unfastened. But she had gone on looking in spite of these remarks of his and as she looked now, she did all the things he had cited and more besides, half closing her eyes so that the lines about her mouth were blurred and putting up one hand to hide the parallel ridges that ran horizontally across her neck. In those conditions it was a pleasing picture that she saw, a woman absurdly young for fiftyodd, and while she was admiring herself the phone rang. It was Kevin the glazier. Could he come tomorrow midmorning? Gladly, Harriet said he could. He sounded about nineteen.

Chapter 21

They went to a pub. It was the nearest one to where Francine lived, a red-brick thirties roadhouse on a crossroads that looked huge from the outside but was quite small within, packed with fruit machines, smoky and noisy. He drank water and she drank orange juice. He talked to her about the pub, how ugly it was, what an offence that such places could have been built, could still endure. They should be pulled down, all such places should be demolished, everything that was as hideous as this and things half-way as hideous should be flattened, bulldozed, razed to the ground. Only beautiful things should be allowed to exist so that everywhere one looked one's eye was pleased and one's senses satisfied. She listened and nodded because he talked well and seemed to know about these things. And somehow she understood, if he didn't, that this was his way of courting her and that his praise of beautiful things was a displacement of his admiration for her. 'I wish I lived somewhere beautiful,' she said, 'but I don't. Do you?' He didn't want her to see it - ever. He shook his head. A surge of anger rose in him as he thought how he had nowhere to take her that was fit for her, nowhere he wouldn't be deeply ashamed of. 'I did once,' she said and she thought of the cottage whose prettiness was spoilt for her by what had happened there. 'Do you live at home?' Where else could one live? Where one lived was home, wasn't it? 'With your parents, I mean?' 'My parents are dead.' 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I know what that's like. My mother's dead.' She would never tell him how her mother had died, she would never tell him about hiding in the cupboard and hearing the man come and the shot. Her friendship with him, if friendship it turned out to be, she would keep clear of that. She began talking instead of the year she was taking out before going to university, of the job she had had and of possible future jobs. He listened, he didn't ask. She had no means of knowing that it was her voice he listened to, the tone and timbre of it, her beautiful Champlaine School accent like an actress in a play on television, not her words or her meaning. 'I told her I was going out with a girlfriend,' she said. 'I said I was with my friend Holly. You remember my friend Holly?' 'Do I?' 'At the exhibition.' 'Yes,' he said, 'yes,' and added, 'She's a dog.' Francine was shocked. 'She's not, she's very good-looking. Everyone says so. She's very attractive to men.' 'Seeing you with her', he said, and his voice was serious and intense, 'was like a - a princess and a toad!' She laughed at that and after a moment he laughed too, a grim laugh as if he didn't express his feelings this way very often. They soon walked back, but on the way went into a little park and sat on a seat. It was a mild evening, not yet autumnal. Because he was silent and seemed to be waiting for her to speak she remembered why she had made that phone call to him in the first place. Because she needed someone to confide in and someone who was not one of those impatient school friends, someone new, someone who - and the word came strangely into her head - would treasure her. So, sitting beside him on this park bench in the dusk, she talked to him about the way Julia imprisoned her and acted the vigilante, watched her every movement and tried to worm her way into her heart and soul. And how she was afraid Julia and her father would finally close in upon her, find some way of confining her to indoors and prevent her going up to Oxford. He didn't interrupt. He listened and sometimes he nodded. She expected solutions of the kind Holly and Miranda offered and she dreaded them, but he produced no answers. He was like what psychotherapists should be, listeners, receivers, absorbing everything the better to understand. Real ones, not the Julias of this world. When they walked on he took her hand and held it. No one, she felt, had ever performed for her such a much-needed gesture at precisely the right time. If he had kissed her before they parted she would have been afraid and perhaps shocked. He didn't, but only said as if there could be no doubt about it, as if it were arranged and scheduled by some higher authority or by fate, 'I'll see you tomorrow then.' 'Where?' she asked him. 'Here. Right where we are now. Under these trees. At seven. Julia was waiting just inside the door. It swung open seconds before she reached it. There is always something ominous and almost sinister about a door opening before one has rung a bell or inserted a key in the lock. It suggests reproaches to come. And reproaches there were. Julia said in a high voice, 'How did you get home? I didn't hear a taxi.' 'I walked.' 'Do you mean you walked from the tube station, Francine? You mustn't do that. Not after dark. You know that. I thought you were learning to be more responsible. If you haven't enough money on you for a taxi you only have to ask the driver to wait while you fetch me and I will pay him.' Francine went up to her room. Mrs Trent chose a sickly pale-green and a muddy ochre-yellow for her rooms. Teddy didn't like applying it to the walls, but he had to. It was his first lesson in understanding that if you work for other people for money you must do as they ask. Who pays the piper calls the tune. He thought as he worked. Harriet Oxenholme had almost vanished from his mind except, occasionally, as a source of wonderment. That she could be the Harriet of Aipheton's painting still astounded him. A cause of greater concern was that he had left his drawings behind in her house. If he had been able to afford it he would have made photo-copies of those designs, but he couldn't and he hadn't. He wanted them back and he wanted to go to the house again. Presumably, she lived there alone. No mention had been made of any other occupant. A kind of day-dream began to unfold in which he took Francine to Orcadia Cottage and the place was empty but for them. Harriet had gone away and left it to them. Francine was in the bedroom in that bed and he came up to her... Teddy could hardly bear to pursue this fantasy, for all his strong young man's need and desire, so long unacknowledged, overcame him. His body became too much for him, the physical was all, and his mind nothing but a red heat and light. He cooled himself, breathing deeply. This possession of Orcadia Cottage was something he mustn't think about, it was useless to dwell on the impossible. He must think about using the place, he must ask himself if the solution which occurred to him was a practicable one. Home again, instead of relaxing he cleaned the house. In his eyes it still looked horrible. But where could he bring her if not here? If he had a car it would be easier, but with that thought he put away the vacuum cleaner and stationed himself at the french windows. The high, finned rump of the Edsel gleamed a deeper gold in the sunset light. Even if it were not burdened with its cargo of Keith he couldn't imagine her in it, her exquisite refinement in its vulgarity. The only future for the Edsel was to sell it and perhaps buy something less offensive with the money. First the contents of the boot must go. His eyes fixed on the car, he thought how afraid he would be to open that boot. He admitted it to himself, he would be afraid. Six months had passed, seven, since that night. What had happened in that time? Decay, certainly, but what was decay? He remembered his grandmother approving cremation when his mother died, saying something about that way you wouldn't be eaten by worms. Were there worms in that plastic bag, or some kind of liquefaction or what? He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He couldn't open that boot; yet he would have to open it. An idea came to him of years passing, of the Edsel standing there for years on end, the boot never opened, of himself everlastingly watching over it until a decade or two had gone, and then one day lifting the lid to find a bagful of dry grey bones. It was another version of his dream. He knew it could never be, he could never tie himself to this place for a lifetime. And what of her? What of bringing her here with that a few feet away from his bed? He went out to meet her under the trees and took her to another pub. She wanted to know all about him, his childhood, his parents, his friends, the people he knew. Telling the truth about Jimmy and Eileen was impossible, but invention was beyond him. Instead, he told her about Keith and his cars, and the great car-makers who were his idols. She wanted to know where his uncle was now and he said, retired to Liphook, he had bought a bungalow in Liphook. 'And left his car behind? Won't he come back and fetch it?' That nearly made Teddy shudder. Grey, bony Keith, in a stage of decay, lumbering in through the gates to drive away his car... 'I know Liphook quite well,' she said. 'My mother came from there. I've got relations there.' A shadow seemed to pass across her face and he was glad of it, not interested in knowing the cause, only pleased that she wasn't pursuing the Liphook connection. He gazed in silence at her, the folded lips like a red flower, the big dark eyes, the black hair which, parted in the centre, fell in two smooth curtains on either side of her face. He might have taken her hand, but he was afraid to do it in case the touch of her was too much for him and he pulled her to him, seized her, there in front of these indifferent drinkers. 'About the mirror,' he said. 'The exhibition's over. Will you come with me to fetch it?' 'I won't be able to tomorrow or the next day, I'm sure I won't.' 'I'm talking about Saturday.' 'All right.' She thought for a moment, then said, like a much younger girl than she was, 'And then can I come and see your house and the crazy car?' There was no help for it. He had to be alone with her and where else was there? He had to be alone with her and somehow make her want him as much as he wanted her. How to do that he seemed to have no idea. But standing with her under the trees, where they had parted last night and met this evening, he understood something that made things simple. When you are young and the other person is young and you are both good to look at, words are of no account, nor does cleverness or experience matter. Nothing more is necessary than to look. All you need do is look, then long, then touch. And what follows is an electric charge that brings you together into a desire each to be engulfed by the other, perhaps, even, to be the other. Their kiss was a natural part of this. Kissing her, he didn't want to stop, he wanted to go on to a complete possession and without words he knew she felt the same. A tide seemed to break over them, a wave that threatened to drown them. It was he who broke apart, pushed her away and heJd her at arms' length, gasping while she gasped. He stared into her eyes and she into his. They were both breathing like people who have run a race. He put his hands to her face, cupped it and murmured his goodbyes. Then he ran. He ran down the street towards the tube station as if fleeing something, as if instead of embracing a girl who wanted his kiss as much as he wanted to give it he had committed some violent assault and was escaping the consequences. They had made no arrangements for Saturday. While he was wondering what to do she phoned him. Her father would be home at the weekend and had told her on the phone he wanted to take her and her stepmother on a visit to some friends in the country, but she had said she couldn't, she had this engagement with Isabel. Her stepmother had tried to persuade her to cancel, but she wouldn't, she had told her father she was too old to tag along on outings with him and Julia. It was a world of which Teddy knew nothing. These people were beyond his comprehension. He asked Francine to meet him at the Tate Gallery and then he went off to Mrs Trent's to paint her living-room pale-green. His own house - he thought of it as his own, though without pride - was as clean as could be, everything neat, washed and scrubbed, the windows sparkling. But could he bring her there? He must. She should come for one visit while the Edsel and its boot contents stood outside those windows, but only one. After that, as soon as possible, he would do what had to be done. Then, and only then, the place would be truly clean and he free.

Chapter 22

The young man with the horrible voice was sitting in the bus shelter. He was there again, in spite of having been warned off by her and by Noele. Julia watched him from the window. She had to be sure he was the right one. By that, of course, she meant the wrong one, everything about him was wrong, his voice, his appearance, his manner, his insolence. But was he the one who phoned Francine, talked to Francine and called at Noele's? If he had a car, why was he waiting in a bus shelter? That was easy, he wasn't waiting for a bus, but for Francine. He would have parked that car somewhere. Julia put on her coat and ran across the road, having to stop in the middle for cars going the other way to pass and hear a driver swear at her. By this time the young man was standing up, pretending to read the bus timetable on the shelter wall. Julia sat down on the seat and studied him. She wanted to make sure she would know him again. His black hair was curly, which she hadn't noticed that first time, and his eyes were brown. Probably he was Asian or half Asian. The fact that he talked cockney meant nothing. No doubt he had been born here. He was dressed in a suit, dark blue with a pinstripe, and he had a white open-necked shirt on. A ridiculous combination, Julia thought. She would have liked to ask him his name, but she lacked the nerve. There was hardly anything Julia would not h2ve done to save Francine and protect her from harm. Still, going up to a stranger and asking who he was daunted her. If the time came when she had to she would, but not now. A complete picture of him imprinted on her memory, Julia walked round the corner into the street which turned off this main road just past the pedestrian crossing. She was looking for the young man's red sports car and she had to walk quite a long way before she found it. The street climbed up a fairly steep gradient and she climbed with it and on top of the hill she found a red sports car parked. It didn't surprise her, she had known it would be somewhere. There was no one about. As is usually the case the street was populated with cars, not people. She walked round the car, looking in at the windows. On the dashboard shelf lay a brochure, a railway timetable and on top of them an envelope with an enclosure. The name typed on the envelope was Mr Jonathan Nicholson and the address was Fuiham, 5W6. Julia returned home well-satisfied with her detective work, but otherwise deeply troubled. She wondered where Francine had met this man. Been introduced to him by one of those friends of hers, she supposed, one of the Hollies or the Mirandas. She acknowledged to herself that Francine had won a great victory that day she left Noele's and for the first time, when told to go to her room, disobeyed. Since then she had gone out when she pleased, her only concession to authority that she still came home reasonably early. How had it happened? How had she allowed it to happen? As surely as she knew her own name and where and who she was, Julia knew that through this freedom Francine had snatched for herself she would come to grief. It would be the ruin of her. She would be destroyed and if not die, eventually be confined in a psychiatric ward. Julia would do anything to avoid that. Francine was up in her room. If only she, Julia, could just go up there and lock the door. Francine, after all, had her own bathroom, she wouldn't be put to any undue suffering. She could use the bathroom and get water. Julia imagined having a new door fitted to Francine's room with a window and a hatch in it. She had seen such arrangements in programmes about prisons on television. The hatch door could be opened and closed only from the outside. The aperture would be big enough for Francine's meals to be passed through. You read stories about people being shut up in their rooms by anxious parents and such incarcerations enduring for years. Julia had read them and thought such things outrageous, but now she was less sure. The phone rang. It was her friend Laura who had won the Lottery. She and her husband were setting up a business on the proceeds, an hotel and restaurant, and hoped to open in a month's time. If Julia was still looking for a job for Francine, there might be an opening for a good-looking well-spoken girl as a receptionist. Julia thought of the people Francine would meet in such a situation, of how attractive she would have to make herself to the male guests, and she said a decisive no, trying to keep the shudder out of her voice. She found herself pacing the floor. It happened a lot these days. The only benefit derived from it might be a weight loss but Julia was not losing weight, rather the reverse. She paced, not because she wanted to but because she couldn't keep still. Her restlessness wore her out. She often wished she smoked or had recourse to some other prop to the nerves. After a while Francine came downstairs, wearing her black leather jacket and with her hair tied back. Julia asked her where she was going and Francine said, 'To the shops.' Even a few months ago that could never have happened. Julia went upstairs and watched her departure from the bedroom window. She expected her to cross the road to where Jonathan Nicholson was waiting, but Nicholson had gone and the bus shelter was empty. Francine had remained on this side and was walking in the direction of the High Street. Julia left the window and went into Francine's bedroom. She had once been an honourable woman, but now had no compunction about searching Francine's room and prying into her things. The mobile phone was there, on charge, plugged into a socket by Francine's bed. Bitterly, Julia saw that this object, which had been bought and bestowed to ensure the girl's safety and to keep tabs on her, now had its backlash. Because of it Francine could make private phone calls in secret. Julia opened drawers, looking for she hardly knew what. She found an address book and scrutinised it but, strangely perhaps, jibbed at looking inside Francine's engagement diary. A hot wash of shame flooded over her at the thought. She went into Francine's bathroom, noticing how clean and neat it was. And this, obscurely, added to her discomfiture. But she opened the cabinet over the basin to see what was inside. Although she possessed a diaphragm, Julia had never taken oral contraceptives and didn't know what the pill looked like. The only item in the cabinet that might possibly be the pill turned out to be paracetamol. She had heard there were some brazen girls, that Holly, she was sure, who actually carried condoms about with them for their boyfriends' use, but those she would have recognised and there was none in Francine's room. She closed the door behind her, found that she was shaking all over and going downstairs again, clinging to the bannisters, poured herself a tot of brandy. This was almost unprecedented. Julia didn't drink. The brandy burned her throat and filled her head with fire. Food provided greater comfort. She went to the fridge and stuffed into her mouth a slice of cheesecake, a piece of pizza and some potato salad, devouring it in gulps as if speedy eating would lessen the quantity and its effects. She sat down on the chair in the hall, the one by the telephone. There, rabked by the burning sensation of heartburn, she wrung her hands and moved her head from side to side. Francine came back after she had been sitting there for about an hour. 'Is something wrong?' she said. Julia stared at her and at the small gold studs in her ears. 'You've had your ears pierced!' 'That's right.' Francine smiled. 'About time, don't you think? My friends had it done when they were twelve.' 'I suppose you realise you'll get AIDS?' 'No, I won't, Julia. They use a fresh needle from a sterile pack.' 'I don't know what your father will say.' Francine went upstairs. Still sitting in the hall, Julia wondered what she would do if Francine came down again and accused her of searching her room. Of course she would justify herself, she could do that, she had every right when it was a question of Francine's protection. But Francine didn't come and eventually Julia began to think that she should get lunch for the two of them. She was as hungry as if she hadn't eaten that pizza and that cheesecake. She pottered about in the kitchen, making a salad, cutting bread and almost cutting herself. Two o'clock had come and gone before it was on the table. Julia called upstairs in a tremulous voice and Francine appeared, looking calm and happy. She began talking about Holly, who was moving out of her parents' house and into a flat which she would share with another girl, and about Isabel's trip to Thailand. Julia said, 'What are you trying to say, Francine?' Francine looked at her in bewilderment. 'If you are hinting in a roundabout way that you should be allowed to do those things I wish you wouldn't, I wish you'd come straight out with it. I hate this deviousness. You've become very underhand lately, did you know that?' Instead of getting up from the table and leaving the room, Francine forced herself to stay there and speak gently. 'Julia, I was making conversation, that's all. I thought it was interesting.' 'Please don't feel you have to make conversation with me.' 'All right. Let's leave it, shall we?' They separated for the afternoon. Music could be distantly heard from Francine's room, Oasis and then Elton John. The sound of Richard's key in the lock brought Julia rushing out into the hall. He closed the front door behind him and she threw herself into his arms, crying and sobbing, beside herself with inexplicable grief. Teddy was waiting for her on the steps of the Tate Gallery. She had wondered how to greet him, what she should do and what he would do. Would he kiss her? Embrace her? The memory of that long passionate kiss came back to her with a strange unfamiliar thrill of excitement. He surely wouldn't kiss her like that now. She walked up the steps towards him. He smiled, held out his hand, took hers and pulled her to him. They stood close for a moment, looking into each other's faces. Then, 'Come on,' he said. 'I want to show you a picture.' Marc and Harriet in Orcadia Place. She read it aloud from the description on the wall. 'Simon Alpheton,' she said. 'Didn't he paint a picture of a pop group?' 'They were called Come Hither,' said Teddy. 'The painting's called Hanging Sword Alley.' She looked away, said in a troubled voice, 'My mother had a CD of Come Hither,' and then, 'No, it wasn't a CD, not then, it was a record. I broke it. I didn't mean to, but she was awfully upset. "Mending Love", it's called.' He didn't see the tears in her eyes. He wasn't interested. No kind of music meant anything to him. 'What do you think of it?' he said, directing her attention once more to the girl in the red Fortuny dress, the boy in the blue suit, the house behind in its glowing cloak of green. 'I don't know anything about painting.' He began explaining, recalling what Professor Mills had said, talking about its accuracy, its breadth of construction and Alpheton's treatment of light and shade. For her there was only one thing to be noticed. 'You can see they were in love,' she said. He made no reply. For a few more minutes he continued to gaze at the painting. Then, 'I wanted to show it to you,' he said. 'I've been to that house. With all the leaves. We'll go now. We'll go and fetch my mirror.' Someone had packed it very carefully and boxed it in hardboard. She expected him to have a taxi to take them and the mirror to his house, she was used to taxis, but they took the bus to Sloane Square station and then the tube. He wouldn't let her help him with the mirror. She could see by the ease with which he carried it that he was very strong. 'My dad and my stepmother have gone out for the day to friends,' she said. 'I wouldn't go. I wanted to be with you.' 'It's a dump I live in. I'm warning you, so don't be surprised.' But it wasn't a dump. It was the cleanest, neatest place she had ever been in. Everywhere was painted in soft, pale colours, the windows shone, the floors, of plain wooden boards, had been stained and waxed. Of furniture there was very little, most of it being in the downstairs front room, where clean faded cotton curtains hung at the window. Teddy's drawings, in black frames or frames of natural wood, hung on the walls, designs for the mirror, designs for a table, line-and-wash representations of great houses, pastels of statuary. On the table, spread out, portrait drawings. 'You are very clever,' she said. 'Those drawings are me, aren't they?' 'Yes.' 'No one ever drew me before.' She went into his own room where his bed was and the coffee table he had made and his bookends, where his tools were and where the flaring rump of the Edsel pressed up against the window. 'Can we go outside and look at it?' 'If you like.' She didn't find the car ugly. Her enthusiasm for it seemed to him to open a gulf between them. The pouting mask that was its bonnet made her laugh. She walked round the car, admiring its size and its colour, but when she laid her hand on the boot lid he couldn't restrain himself. 'Don't touch it!' He had spoken so roughly that she pulled her hand away as if the yellow metal had burnt her. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean 'It's dirty,' he said. 'I don't want you to get dirt on you. While she was looking at the rest of the house he unpacked the mirror. She came downstairs and went into the front room and there it was, propped on a chair. He said, 'It's for you.' 'Oh, no, I couldn't!' 'I want you to have it. You must have it.' He put his arm round her and led her to the mirror. She remembered what he had said about giving it to his woman for her to see her face in. A deep blush spread across her cheeks and up to her forehead. She looked at the blush in the mirror, at her fiery face, her shining eyes, and then she turned to him. He kissed her, the way he had under the trees. He pulled her down on to the settee. Her body felt weak and a wave of heat came over her as if it were a hot summer's day. 'I've never done this before,' he said. 'Nor have I.' He took the white dress off her. He pulled her underclothes off as if he disliked them, as if they were too functional. She covered her breasts with one arm, laid her other hand across her pubic hair, then seeming to realise the absurdity of it, pulled her hands away and showed him. He was trembling, she could actually see him shake. She wrapped him in her arms and lay down with him. 'You must show me how to do it right,' he whispered. 'But I don't know myself.' Then she found she did know. 'Like this - is that right? And this? Tell me.' 'Yes, oh, yes...' 'And if I kiss you there, is that all right? And do this?' But she was becoming aware, without knowing what rightness would be, that this wasn't tight. His hands had been eager and his mouth urgent, but there should be more to it than the tender touch of fingers and the warm probing of a tongue. She knew very well what there should be and it wasn't this limp shrinking of the flesh, the yielding of his body into apathy. Her own warm wetness -unexpected this, no one had told her of this - dried and cooled. He muttered something. She thought he had said, 'I can't.' 'It doesn't matter.' Only it did, rather a lot. She found herself supplying excuses for him, not knowing that these were the kind woman's reassurances uttered since time immemorial. 'You're tired, it's been a strain. I know it has for me too. All this hiding and tension, and having to be secret. It will be different next time.' Richard and Julia cancelled their lunch engagement. They had planned to drive down with Francine into Surrey to visit Roger and Amy Taylor. Roger Taylor, Richard and Jennifer had all been at university together, but Roger had married much later than his friends, not until after Jennifer's death, and Jennifer had never known his wife. She, however, had joined the number of Julia's women friends. Julia had been looking forward to seeing Amy, though she hadn't, in her own words, 'much time' for Roger, but even the prospect of half a day with her friend couldn't be contemplated when it was a question of Francine's safety. 'We shall be back here before she is,' Richard said. 'She has a key. You know what they're like at that age, she'll only come in and go straight up to her room. She may as well do that on her own, she doesn't need us there.' But Julia put forward all sorts of arguments against this. Suppose 'something happened' to Francine, her friends or the police or the hospital wouldn't know where to find her parents. Then there was the danger of this boy. Julia had told her husband all about this boy, how she had seen him several times waiting for Francine in the bus shelter, and how she had found his car with his name and address on an envelope on the dashboard shelf. 'Why was he waiting for a bus if he has a car?' said Richard. 'I've told you. He wasn't waiting for a bus. He was waiting for Francine.' 'You actually saw him meet Francine? You saw her get in his car? Is that what you're saying?' Julia shook her head in exasperation. 'I am afraid I think it quite possible Francine may bring him here while we are out.' 'What are you suggesting, Julia?' 'She's human, isn't she? She's young. 'Not Francine,' said Richard. 'She wouldn't do anything like that.' But he phoned Amy Taylor and cancelled their visit, wincing when she was abrupt with him and when she asked why he couldn't have let her know sooner. 'You don't really believe Francine would - well, have relations with this boy, do you? Anyway, I thought she had gone out for the day with Isabel What'shername. Hasn't she?' 'I don't know,' Julia said tightly. 'Why ask me? She never speaks to me. 'Julia, Francine couldn't handle anything like that. She may be old in some ways, but in others she's very young for her age. You don't really think she would let him.. 'Fuck her?' It was an expression Julia had never in her life used before. She had barely heard it used except on the television. But she uttered it in a vicious snap and saw her husband gasp. 'Why not?' she said. 'She's unstable, we've always known that. People like her, traumatised people, they've no moral sense and they're oversexed, it's a well-known fact. Of course she'd let him.. 'For God's sake, don't use that word again!' They spent a miserable day. There was very little food in the fridge, Julia had eaten it all, so since she refused to leave the house, Richard had to go shopping. He came back and attempted to watch Rugby Union on television, but Julia came in and switched off the set, saying that he was heartless to amuse himself like this when she was beside herself with anxiety. Pacing had become habitual with her, but he had never before seen her pace. It taught him that this nervous habit is one of the most irritating and upsetting one human being can contemplate in another. He shut himself in their bedroom and lay on the bed to get away from it and he longed for Tuesday when he was due to get on a mid-morning flight to Frankfurt. It wasn't late when Francine came home. She was probably the only girl from her class at school who arrived home by ten that Saturday night. She hadn't wanted to come. She hadn't wanted to leave Teddy and would have loved above all things to have stayed the night with him. He wanted that too. In both their minds was the same thought. If she stayed it would be all right, she would be receptive again, he x~~ould make love to her. But the difference was that he couldn't understand that she had to go and tried physically to hold her back. 'I have to,' she said. 'I know you don't understand and I don't know how to make you. It's just a fact. I have to go home.' 'I'll come all the way with you. I'll bring the mirror.' Then she had to explain that she couldn't take the mirror. Not even if she had a taxi all the way. The mirror was something she couldn't explain to Julia and her father. Julia was capable of breaking it. He understood that, she saw a kind of shadow cross his face at the prospect. 'You keep it for me. I'll see it when I come to see you. She phoned for a taxi. It amazed him that she had that kind of money. While they waited for it he ironed her white dress for her, for he said he couldn't bear to see her in anything creased. On the front-garden path, watched from an upstairs window by the neighbours he called vuppies, he kissed her so long and so intensely that the cab driver shouted at them to give over as he hadn't got all night. Francine sat shivering in the back of the cab. So much had happened that she felt almost as Julia constantly forecast she must feel, that life could swiftly overpower her. Almost, but not quite. And when she was home and had paid the driver, she found herself walking quite calmly up to the front door and letting herself into the house as serenely as if she had really made love and had triumphed and been gloriously satisfied. It was Julia who disturbed her equilibrium by rushing out into the hall and throwing her arms round her, burying a tear-drenched face in Francine's shoulder. 'Oh God, oh God, you're home! Thank God you're home.' For a moment Francine was afraid. Some chord from the pas1~ had been struck. 'It's not Dad, is it? Something hasn't happened to Dad?' A voice that was both weary and cheerful - perhaps a forced cheerfulness - greeted her from the living-room. 'I'm in here, darling. I'm fine.' Had he ever called her darling before? She couldn't remember. But when she looked into Julia's wet, crumpled face she didn't like what she saw there. Many times before in her thoughts, and once or twice to Holly and Miranda, she had lightly called Julia mad. Now she knew that in saying it she hadn't known, until this moment, what madness was.

Chapter 23

In his dream the mirror ceased to be a mirror and became a framed portrait. By some curious chemical or magical process, because Francine had looked into it so many times, her image was imprinted and fixed inside the glass, it was now a picture of her. His own face wasn't reflected back at him. He looked at hers and worshipped. But that was the good dream. In the bad dream she laid her small white hand on the boot lid of the Edsel and the substance of which it was made, the gleaming lemon-coloured metal surface, melted and dissolved like soft butter. Her hand passed through and reached down, down, into grey decay and wet vile putrefaction... Teddy awoke, shouting so loudly that when, later, he went outside to the dustbin, Megsie put her head over the fence and asked him what was going on. She and Nige had heard this awful scream in the night, they'd thought someone was being murdered. 'Not this time,' said Teddy. 'Don't you make a habit of it, will you? It was touch and go Nige and me didn't call nine nine nine.' Francine had been to the house four times and every time he thought of what was in that boot and of her proximity to it, of her beauty and perfection, and of that horror. The time had come to do something. She wasn't coming over until the afternoon. At ten in the morning he went up to Orcadia Place. The house looked different. For a moment he couldn't decide in what respect. Then he understood that autumn had come. The leaves that canopied the house, back and front, were changing colour, from green to a gingery gold or to a reddish purple. The creeping tendrils were the soft, delicate pink of a rose. Without knowing anything about gardens or gardening or plants, he realised that there had been frosts and he saw that Harriet Oxenholme (or her gardener) had cut down the flowers or uprooted them, that the earth in the tubs was fresh and the earth in the borders turned and newly planted. A lover of order and neatness, he almost preferred this spruce look to the wild abundance of blossom. He rang the bell. The first thing he noticed when she opened the door was the two suitcases standing in the hall, a blue one and a black one, each with an airline's label attached to its handle. She frowned at him. 'I thought you were someone else. What do you want?' 'My drawings,' he said. 'I left them here.' She was dressed, in his grandmother's phrase, 'up to the nines'. The long silvery grey skirt and fine silver knitted top would have looked good on Francine. It had been designed for someone under twenty-five and the low boat-shaped neckline, which would have shown off the tops of Francine's smooth white breasts, showed her brown, scrawny, freckled chest. Her fingernails were painted silver and there was some kind of sparkling greasy substance on her mouth. Teddy looked a little away and repeated what he had said. 'I left my drawings here. Can I come in?' 'What drawings?' she said. 'The designs for the cupboard you said you wanted.' 'My God, you don't suppose I kept them?' He said hoarsely, 'You burnt my drawings?' 'Of course I didn't burn them. What century are you living in? I put them out for recycling.' He had counted on getting into the house and on doing what he had done before, departing by the back way and leaving the back gate unbolted. That was impossible now. And she had destroyed his drawings! He would have liked to kill her. But his eye fell once more on the two suitcases. She was going away. And soon, by the look of it. He said no more, but turned away, refusing to look back even though he could tell she was still there, she hadn't closed the door. A van had drawn up outside. On the side of it was lettered: G. Short, Water Softener Maintenance. A man of about Teddy's age, tall, dark-skinned, got out of the driver's cab. Teddy ignored him. He made his way round to the mews at the back and tried the gate. Of course it was bolted on the inside. But she was going away. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, soon. Rooting among Keith's papers, he found on a brochure the name, address and phone number of a dealer in Balham from whom Keith had bought the Edsel. The company was called Miracle Motors. It was probably too much to hope that they would buy it back for the same sort of money. But would they buy it at all? He phoned them. Rather to his surprise they said that they would like to see the car and when could he bring it. Not today, he thought, and not tomorrow. How about Friday? They said Friday would be fine and he managed to tell them the Edsel was in excellent condition just as they rang off. Before he drove it to Miracle Motors he ought to clean it, wash, wax and polish it, and buff up the chrome. He walked out into the garden and examined the Edsel for possible scars and scratches, but there was none. It was in as perfect condition, its bodywork as glossy and unmarked, as on that day in 1957 when it had come off the Ford assembly line, a ton and a half of pristine metal and glas~ that, though forty years old, seemed to have been endowed with the secret of eternal youth. He thought it strange that something so sleek and cared-for, so carefully designed and lovingly made, should also be so ugly. Bending over the boot, his hands resting on those gull's-wing tail-lights, he tried to detect if there was any smell. And when he brought his face close to the rim of the boot lid where it met the bodywork a slight whiff of something distantly horrible came to his nostrils. He thought 'distantly' because it seemed far away, no more than a hint of horror, yet it wasn't distant, it was only inches from him. He snirfed again and there was nothing, he had imagined it. The idea of Francine in the car's vicinity disgusted him. He had even suggested they meet somewhere near where she lived, go to a park, go to the cinema, have a meal. But she had wanted to come to him, be alone with him. And as for him, he could hardly bear the prospect of being with her yet unable to touch her. She must come and this time he must succeed in making love to her, this time there must be no ignominious failure. It was the presence of the Edsel that enfeebled his flesh, he was sure of it, for nothing else could account for failure when desire was so great. All he could do was keep her out of his room where the Edsel's rear end filled the lower half of the windows. It reminded him of something he had once seen on television, in a wildlife programme: a huge ape turning its back on an enemy and rearing up its rump in a gesture of derisive contempt. Sometimes he felt that about the Edsel, that because of its size and its colour, and its dreadful contents, it was mocking him. Even Megsie, looking at it one day from the bottom of her garden, had commented with a giggle, 'That Elgin's got a sort of face, hasn't it?' 'Edsel,' said Teddy. A pursed mouth, wide-set eyes, sideburns... He shut his own eyes and turned his back on the car before opening them again. She probably wondered why he didn't use the Edsel, come to Neasden tube station in it to meet her for instance, instead of going down there on foot. There was no explanation he could think of. She would have to wonder, very likely she wouldn't ask. The Edsel would soon be gone, out of the way, forgotten, and maybe he'd get enough money to buy a small modern car, something with elegant lines in a quiet, dark colour... He saw her before she saw him. She came out of the station rather tentatively, almost shyly, looking for him. Jeans today and a blue shirt. He was disappointed. Not deeply disappointed, but simply taken aback because he thought of her always in dresses, totally feminine, delicate, a princess. Concealed in a doorway, he watched her. She stopped still and waited for him. His eves took in the exquisite modelling of her head, its shape enhanced rather than hidden by water-straight fine black hair that lay on it like a veil, the slight angularity of her shoulders, the narrow span of her waist, the slender length of her legs and the arch of her insteps. The idea came to him that he would like to keep her with him always to look at, never let her out of his sight, touch her but not speak to her, undress her and dress her again in fine linen or a Fortuny dress that was not red like Harriet Oxenholme's but pure white. She had been looking, with a touch of bewilderment, in his direction. When she turned aside he came out from his hiding-place and called her name. 'Francine!' Her smile and the flush that came to her cheeks transformed her face. Briefly, he thought that he liked her better snow-pale and grave. He put his arms round her and kissed her mouth, the kiss beginning lightly but becoming intense, deep, searching. She broke away first, but unwillingly and only to say, 'Can we go to your house?' 'Where else?' 'It was just that you said something about the cinema or having a meal.' 'I've got food in,' he said, 'and I've got wine for you. Let's go.' Dilip Rao stayed so long at Orcadia Cottage that Harriet became apprehensive. Franklin had signified his intention to come home early. He had a few last-minute tasks to perform before driving himself to the airport. Dilip was virile and ardent and only twenty, and seemed to see no reason why he and Harriet shouldn't remain in the four-poster till the following morning. He didn't listen while she explained and eventually she had to get up, pull the covers off him and dump his clothes on his naked body. He left at twenty-past four and Franklin came home at half-past. While he made those phone calls that were apparently essential before he could leave the country, hurling cushions on to the floor before perching on the sofa arm, Harriet sat in the kitchen. She brought herself round from a sex and alcohol daze with a strong cup of tea. Dozing earlier, she had fallen into a premonitory dream, not rare with her but still upsetting. These omens were nearly always fruitless, the events they forecast, death, disaster, loss of income, crippling or fatal disease, seldom if ever came to pass, but still they left behind them a feeling of disquiet. She couldn't get out of her head the whispering voice that had uttered 'Last time, last time', though whether it had referred to some previous occasion or to a final instance she couldn't tell. But it left her wondering if it could have meant she had entertained a young lover for the last time or had sex for the last time or would shortly be seeing - saying goodbye to - Franklin for the last time. There was always the possibility of his not coming back from one of these holidays of his, of his remaining with the woman who had been his companion. If there was a woman - how was she to know? She was suddenly stricken with a sense of loneliness. Once Franklin came back she would be taking her own holiday, her second of the year, they always took two holidays each, but still the fortnight ahead stretched very emptily. Dilip would come back, of course, would probably not even wait to be invited, but Harriet was not at all sure she wanted to see Dilip again. Franklin came into the kitchen to ask her if she had seen the going of his luggage strap. 'It's in your wardrobe. On the top shelf. Frankie, why don't I come with you?' 'Because we take separate holidays,' he said. 'Always have, always will.' 'You mean you don't want me.' 'Go up and get that luggage strap for me, will you?' Harriet went. After he had brought the car round, put his suitcases into the boot and driven away, she picked up the cushions and started phoning people, acquaintances, the few they called their friends. For a long time now she had noticed that in a marriage or a partnership, when the woman goes away offers flood in to entertain the man and have him to dinner. Things are very different when the one left behind is the woman. No one invites her anywhere and she is lucky not to be ignored completely. Although she had long ago lost touch with Storm and Anther and Zither, she knew where to find them. They had reverted to their true names, become respectable and set up a company doing market research. Storm had married Zither and Anther had the top flat in their house in Brondesbury. Fourteen Manvantaras and one Krita make one Kalpa, Harriet thought to herself as she listened to the dialling tone. Then Zither's voice came on, saying they had all gone to Hanoi, which Harriet guessed was their idea of a joke, meaning merely that they were down at the pub or possibly in Bournemouth. Simon Alpheton came into her head. She had looked up and her eye alighted on his painting, the still life which that little bugger Teddy Brex had admired. The oranges and the cheese, and the white mouse looking at it so longingly. Simon lived in Fulham and probably alone. Harriet had read about his divorce in the papers. It was an 0181 number she had for him in her book. If you lived in London you had to have an 0171 number, Harriet had long decided, anything else meant you lived in the sticks, an 0181 number was as bad as not having a W in your postcode. But Simon was different, Simon was the exception. A certain amount of courage had to be plucked up before she phoned him. I am his Jewish Bride, she told herself, his red-headed lady in Orcadia Place, rich and loved. 'Maybe I'll buy it,' she had said while he was painting, and Marc had said, 'What with?' She took a deep breath and dialled the number. Simon Aipheton sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her. She reminded herself that he was something she hadn't often come across in her life, a nice guy. He asked her to have dinner with him on the following night. 'I've got something for you,' Teddy said. 'You've already given me something,' said Francine. 'You've given me the mirror. 'You sit there and look in the mirror and I'll go and fetch it and put it on you. It was several weeks since he had looked at the ring. Now he saw that it was even more beautiful than he remembered. It was beautiful enough for her. He held it in his left hand, in his fist, and went downstairs to her. It was past dusk and he had the lights on, but only a single lamp in the front room. She wasn't facing the mirror, as he had instructed her, but had her back to it. He felt a little spark of irritation, a feeling similar to what he had had when he saw those jeans and that shirt. At least she wasn't wearing them now but was wrapped, as he had wrapped her, in the dozen metres of stone-coloured silk he had bought to make curtains out of. 'Turn round,' he said. She obeyed him, but smiling. He didn't want her to smile. 'Gaze at yourself,' he said. 'There isn't anything in the world better worth looking at. No, don't smile!' He stood behind her, put his arms over her shoulders, took her hand and set the ring on it. Her third finger was too little for its circumference. She would have to wear it on the middle finger. 'It's beautiful,' she said. 'I can't take it.' 'Yes, you can. You must. I've been saving it for you. I've been saving it for years.' 'But you haven't known me for years!' 'I've known you were somewhere, my perfect woman, waiting for my ring.' He laid his hands on her shoulders, tucking in his damaged little finger so as not to spoil the image. She looked at the ring, then at herself in the glass, then up at him. He kissed her. 'I can't take it.' 'Then I won't let you go. I'll keep you here.' 'But it's an engagement ring.' 'It's a lover's ring,' he said, and then she said she would take it and wear it. It was time for her to go home. He unwrapped the silk and let it fall in a pale shining heap on the floor. The awful clothes she intended to wear offended him. He would have liked to keep her naked, a living statue, for him to adore. But she put on the jeans and the shirt and a wool cardigan, the same one that she had worn when he folded back the sleeve and wrote his phone number on her wrist. He lifted her hand and admired the ring. It was dark now, after nine, and he wouldn't let her go on the tube alone. 'Couldn't you take me in your car?' 'I hate it,' he said. 'I never use it. I'm going to get rid of it and buy a small one.' So he went with her on the tube down to Bond Street and changed with her on to the Central Line and left her only when they were under the trees near her house. All the way, in the trains, he kept his arm round her, holding her close, and holding too the hand that wore the ring.

Chapter 24

Midnight was past by the time he got back. He tidied up the house, washed her wineglass and the plates and cups they had used, put the rest of the wine back into the fridge. It was careless of him to have left that silk lying in a heap on the front-room floor. The result would be creases he might have difficulty in eradicating. He folded the silk once and then once again and hung it over the bannisters. Lying in bed he thought about Francine as she had been, seated in front of his mirror, swathed in stiff silk, her reflected face looking gravely back at her real face. She must easily be the most beautiful girl in the world. A sight for sore eyes. Alfred Chance had once used that expression and it had stuck in his mind. About an object, though, not a person. It meant that looking at beauty took away pain and hurt, and made you better. Francine made him better and his eyes were sore when they couldn't feast on her. He had never seen anyone to touch her. But there must be changes made, in his life and hers and the way they were together, and in the places they lived in. For one thing, he wanted her with him all the time. And dressed the way he wanted her to be, not in that hideous denim, that blue cotton, those boots. He began to think, not of Alpheton now and the Joyden School, but of Gustav Klimt and the women he painted in glittering gowns of lame and sequins or velvet and fur, the jewels that hung in heavy ropes round their necks or supported swathes of their hair. He would like to dress Francine like a Klimt woman and decorate her with necklaces and bracelets and collars of pearls. And live with her somewhere beautiful, a fit setting for her. On that thought he fell asleep and slept late next morning. He was up and counting what remained of the advance payment he had had from Mrs Trent before he remembered that today was the day. Today, or this evening, was when he was going to do it. But still he counted the money and found that he had something under a hundred pounds left. There had been no more replies to his advertisement and he had decided not to re-insert it. He couldn't afford to advertise - or, for that matter, not to advertise. The Edsel, what he got for the Edsel, was his only hope. Surely prices must have risen in all the years since Keith had bought the car. Might it now be worth as much as ten thousand pounds? He filled a bucket with hot water, got his sponges and cloths and brushes, and went outside to clean it. Nige, who never went out to work these days but did it all from home on a computer and a modem and e-mail and things like that, put his head over the fence. Megsie had told him she'd seen Teddy's girlfriend and she was a real looker and next time she came round would Teddy like to bring her in for a drink? Teddy said, maybe. He thought Nige would go indoors again, but he didn't. A white cane garden chair was brought out of Mr Chance's workshop that they called the 'pavilion' and Nige sat down in it, enjoying the Indian Summer. Teddy was polishing the windscreen when a tap on the french window made him jump. His grandmother was standing in his room, looking out, wearing her red sugarloaf hat and with a heavy bag of shopping on either side of her. He hated her having a key, but she had had one since his mother died. For all he knew she had taken it off his mother's body, she was capable of that. He knew no way to get it from her. She opened the french window and came out. 'Keith not back yet, then?' she said. 'He's not coming back.' 'You'd think he'd want his car. What does he get about in? Relies on that motor bike, does he?' 'No, he doesn't,' came Nige's voice. 'He got Teddy here to sell that to one of our chums.' 'Who asked you to put your spoke in,' said Agnes under her breath. But Teddy thought she gave him a funny look. They went into the house together and Agnes insisted on going all over it, admiring the decorating he'd done since she was last there. She looked at the stone-coloured silk hanging over the bannisters and said there was a good chance her pal Gladys would run up a pair of curtains for him in exchange for him painting her outside toilet. On the arm of a chair in the front room she found a fine black hair, a good eighteen inches long. For someone in her eighties she had miraculous eyesight. 'Who's been here, then?' 'My girlfriend,' said Teddy and, liking the sound of it, said it again. 'My girlfriend.' For some reason that stuck Agnes as uproarious and she started laughing. 'You take her about in that car, do you?' she said. 'I'm driving it down to Keith in Liphook tomorrow,' said Teddy coldly. 'Right,' said Agnes. 'I thought something must account for you cleaning it. You're not famous for doing things for other people unless there's anything in it for you. He paying you, is he?' Teddy got rid of her as soon as he could and returned to polishing the Edsel. At lunch-time Megsie came home, bringing four other yuppies with her, and they all stood about in the garden drinking Buck's Fizzes and calling over the fence every five minutes for him to join them. ('Leave that old Edwin, why don't you?' as Megsie put it.) Cleaning the car thoroughly took Teddy all of three hours and he still, naturally, had done nothing about the interior of the boot. In the afternoon Francine phoned him on her mobile. They had made no arrangement to see each other that day, but they would meet again on Friday. He hadn't much to say to her, the things his head was full of were not for her to hear and the things she had to tell him, about her stepmother and some job her stepmother didn't want her to take, didn't interest him. But he loved the sound of her voice. He could have listened to it all day even if it had been speaking a foreign language. If he got a sizeable sum for the Edsel maybe he could find a place for them with the money. Rent a flat in some nice place, a flat with gorgeous rooms in it like the ones in Orcadia Place. He imagined a drawing-room with glass doors giving on to an Italian garden, surrounded by evergreen trees with dark-green pointed leaves, tubs on the paving stones full of lilies and cypresses. A stone seat, a round pond with goldfish, bronze dolphins whose spouting mouths made a fountain. Francine would sit on the seat in her white Fortuny dress, trailing one hand in the clear water... At seven in the evening he phoned Harriet Oxenholme. The answering machine replied, Harriet's voice uttering a bare sentence, none of your detailed or facetious stuff, but simply repeating the number and saying, 'Would you like to leave a message?' He would not. He was satisfied that she had gone away. It was necessary to wait till it was dark, but not till the midnight hours. One terrible difficulty remained and one uncertainty. Should he open that boot and look inside before he left? Or wait until he was up in the mews behind Orcadia Place? He understood now that in some half-unconscious part of his mind, some subliminal region, he had been asking himself that question all day. Under the fantasies of Francine and the Italian garden, under the plans for selling the Edsel and finding a place for him and her to live, had lain that question. If he opened the boot lid here, there was always the possibility of Nige and Megsie looking out of an upstairs window and seeing th~ contents. Perhaps, of course, seeing no more than the plastic bag, a grey shiny thing tied up with masking tape. But would a smell be released? That was what he had to think of, the chance of a smell. If Nige and Megsie would only go out, he would be safe to do it, but he knew they weren't going out. Throughout the course of the afternoon, the Buck's Fizz drinking, the comments on the Indian Summer and eventually the alfresco eating of deep-pan pizzas, he had several times heard them say they intended to put their feet up and watch their Trainspotting video. He dared not open that boot with them only yards away. But to go to Orcadia Place without knowing what he would find when he eventually opened it? His imagination, always powerful, pictured for him a sodden mass, something like the contents of a drain he had once seen when walking past roadworks, grey, wet, like mud vet full of sticks and stones. There might be powerful acids in a body that could eat through plastic. It was eight months now since Keith had died. In the end he made a decision and at ten, when their lights showed him that Nige and Megsie were in their front room, watching their video, he got into the driver's seat of the Edsel and turned on the ignition. He had to make several attempts before the engine would fire and he realised that cars had batteries and batteries could go flat. Still, it was all right. He reversed out of the carport, turned and emerged through the double gates into the street. A nasty moment was when the curtains parted in the front-room window next door and Megsie waved to him. He waved back, making a sort of salute. Not for the first time he wondered what it was those two wanted of him, why did they seem to like him when he had repulsed every overture they made? The night was dark and moonless, but bright up here with white and yellow chemical light. He drove down one of the roads that border Gladstone Park and there, with open space and shady trees on one side and houses fairly distant on the other, he parked and got out of the car. No one was about. Most of the houses were well lit but some only had lights on in upstairs rooms. He walked to the back of the car and stood looking at the boot lid. In those moments he was there he asked himself if even now it might be possible just to ditch the Edsel, drive it somewhere out in the country and dump it in a wood or on the edge of a field. Who would know whose car it was or whose the body in its boot was? But it wasn't as easy as that. Megsie and Nige would know. His grandmother would. Miracle Motors would. The police would enquire of the car dealers, of all London dealers in that kind of car, if not of the others. And, anyway, if he dumped the car he wouldn't be able to sell it and get his five, or maybe ten, thousand pounds. He put the key into the boot lock and turned it. His hand rested for a little while on the chrome clasp of the boot lid just above the number plate. Then he opened it quickly. He shut his eyes, lifted the lid and opened his eyes. Nothing was changed. Inside the boot it looked exactly the same as it had when he closed the lid eight months before. As far as he could tell in the not very strong light. He had been consciously not breathing in, or, rather, breathing only through his mouth. Now he drew the air in through his nostrils. There was no smell, nothing. He began to feel sick, nauseous, even though there was no smell. He bent over a little, approached nearer, and then there came to him, as if from a far-distant charnel house, borne on a gust of wind, a faint dreadful breath. Quickly he closed the lid. He locked it. He got back into the car and drove off towards the Edgware Road. The Edsel attracted a lot of curious or admiring glances while he was stopped at lights. Someone crossing the road behind him, weaving his way through the cars, slapped the boot lid with the flat of his hand. A shudder ran through Teddy. From Hall Road he turned into the mews. Here the street lamps were the old-fashioned kind, up-ended lanterns on black-painted iron posts, and there were only two of them. As far as he could tell, all the garage doors were shut and all the gates. Two cars only were parked. It was Saturday night and people were either out or had gone to their places in the country. He parked the Edsel with its rear end up against the double doors of the Orcadia Cottage garage. Climbing over the gate or the wall to unbolt the gate would be easy, but he dared not take the risk. It was one thing to be seen pulling a bag of something out of a car boot and moving it in through an open gateway, quite another to be caught in the burglar act of climbing a wall. Still, the unlikelihood of his being seen at all gave him confidence. No windows overlooked this part of the mews, the flats were over garages a good fifty yards away. The only people likely to see anything would be drivers of cars coming home or the drivers of these two parked cars, come to fetch them. Carrying Keith's toolbag, a torch and a walking stick that had been his grandfather's, he walked round to the front of the house and let himself into the front garden by the wrought-iron gate in the wall. Once inside, he or anything he did couldn't be seen from the street. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get from this front garden into the back yard without passing through the house. He had been almost sure of this last time he was there and now it was confirmed. Inside the enclosed garden it was quite dark. No lights were on in the house. The myriad leaves that covered it hung still and dark, but each, it seemed, with a tiny surface gleam. He looked up to see if any windows were open on the upper floor, when a light coming on in the porch over his head gave him a fright. All the leaves suddenly became acid-green. He waited for the sound of running feet, the door to be thrown open, but there was nothing. Then he understood that the light had been on a time-switch. Another had come on inside one of the downstairs front rooms. Did she have an alarm system? He thought he remembered a keypad on the hall wall. She was scatty enough to have one and not use it. She was feather-brained enough not to have turned the key in the higher of the two locks on the door. The light was a help to him. It would ensure he made very little noise. He closed his eyes, remembering the layout of the door on the hall side, the shape of the square-headed knob whereby the door was opened, the position of the letter-box and, above all, that there was no second interior box covering its opening on the inside. Slowly and very carefully, he inserted the walking stick, hook end first, through the letter-box. When it and his forearm were fully pushed through, he bent his arm round and felt with the hook for the knob. The hook tapped against the woodwork, then caught on the knob. He pulled the walking stick towards him, the lock clicked and the door came open. Dropping the stick on the floor inside, he picked up the toolbag and went in. As he had thought, the suitcases were gone. She was gone. The place was very silent and quite warm. She was the kind of person rich enough to leave the central heating on while she was away. Now what to do first? Unbolt that gate or explore the cellar? Well-off as he must be, Simon Alpheton didn't throw his money about when it came to choosing a restaurant. He never had, Harriet remembered. Still, she had supposed that the acquisition of wealth would have changed his habits. La Ruchetta sounded all right, though she had never heard of it before, and the Old Brompton Road was all right, so long as the place you were going to was at the eastern end of it. The further her taxi took her westwards the more Harriet~s misgivings increased. The driver set her down in Earl's Court outside a poky Italian restaurant between a betting shop and a tapas bar, its window full of fishing nets and packets of dried pasta. Simon, who was already there, said it was his favourite place. In the days when he was poor he had lived just round the corner. Harriet thought he looked awful, his hair quite white and down on his shoulders, his belly spreading expansively above the top of his jeans. Jeans! She was wearing a black and white striped silk dress and jacket, the skirt of the dress four inches above her knees and the jacket lapels very wide and thickly encrusted with red and black bead embroidery. But she could see they thought a lot of him at La Ruchetta. The proprietor came up to their table and made him a sort of bow and called him 'Maestro'. People at the other tables nudged each othe~r and stared. Simon's picture had been in the paper the previous week. He had done a big interview for The Times on the occasion of his new exhibition. 'Must be ten years,' he said to Harriet, without telling her she hadn't changed or looked younger than ever, or anything like that. 'How's Franldin?' 'Gone to San Sebastian on his hols,' said Harriet. Whatever might have been the rejoinder to that was lost when a gushing woman holding an album came up to Simon and asked if she could have his autograph for her daughter who was at the Chelsea College of Art. Simon signed and smiled at her and was very gracious. They both ordered the risotto and then the veal, and Harriet had to admit it was very good. The Frascati was very good and so was the Chianti. She was beginning to wonder what would have happened if she'd rung Simon in those distant days after Marc and before Otto and if she'd married him instead of Franklin, when Simon suddenly remarked that he had something to tell her. That was why he had responded to her phone call by asking her here. He wanted to try something out on her. Before he could say whatever it was there came into the restaurant and approached their table the most beautiful young man Harriet had seen for years. He was tall and slender and dark, with the features of Michelangelo's David and the smile of Tom Cruise, and he put Otto, Zak and Dilip, not to mention Teddy Brex, in the shade. A wild idea rushed into Harriet's head that Simon was doing her some kind of long-deferred favour, was for some reason of gratitude or simple generosity producing this boy for her. Disillusionment replaced it. Simon put out his hand and the way he squeezed the other's hand and looked into his dark eyes left no room for doubt. 'I am going to out myself, Harriet. This coming week. I'm actually holding a press conference - can you believe it? I really want to know what you think, about the wisdom of that, I mean. Not the wisdom of our relationship, I'm not in any doubt about that. Oh, by the way, this is Nathan.' 'But you're not gay!' said Harriet. 'Well, no, I wasn't. Or I thought I wasn't. People change with time.' He looked at Nathan again and said fondly, 'Look at him, he's enough to turn Casanova gay!' They had some champagne. Harriet felt chagrined, though she hardly knew why, for she didn't want Simon herself and she knew from experience the hopelessness of making overtures to such as Nathan. 'So am I making a wise move?' Simon asked her. She wanted to say that she didn't know and she didn't care. Instead that strange mantra or text she had first come across nearly thirty years before rose to her lips and she uttered it aloud. 'Fourteen Manvantaras and one Krita make one Kalpa.' 'Does that mean yes or no?' Simon asked. 'It means do as you like,' she said. He could tell he had upset her, but without knowing how could only say that he would stick to his decision. Harriet said rather spitefully that at least it would be something to read about in the papers and she looked forward to seeing what the gossip columnists made of it. A deep loneliness engulfed her, a sense of being left out of everything, and the prospect of the solitary homeward journey, the solitary homecoming, filled her with dread. She realised that she had anticipated something very different for the evening and when she was in the taxi that Simon had had the restaurant call for her she understood, in a rare moment of insight, that she had been looking for a friendship. Perhaps, more accurately, for the renewal of friendship, for someone to like and who would like her, as against someone to lust after. In the dim back seat of the cab she confronted her future and knew that the encounters with the Zaks and the Dilips must in the nature of things soon end. This year or next year and probably -she clenched her hands - with some instance of gross humiliation. That was when friends would be needed, but she had no friends beyond those social acquaintances of Franklin's, beyond the always a unavailable Anthers and Zithers of this world. An abyss seemed to open before her, the vacant hollow of the years ahead. In this mood of despair she let herself into Orcadia Cottage and went straight upstairs. A frightening feeling was replacing her loneliness, a sensation that she had no idea of what to do, no notion of how to pass the time, the night, there was absolutely nothing she wanted to do. Not eat, drink, watch television, read, listen to her phone messages, if any, not even go out again - where could she go? Not go to bed, not sleep, not even induce sleep with a sleeping pill. But she walked into her bedroom, took off her coat and threw it on the bed. Close up against the mirror she looked into her own face before turning sharply away. Far from weakening her, despair made her feel full of a wretched energy so that now she longed to do something active, even violent, attack a punchbag, kick at something soft and yielding. Or break the mirror and see her face and her body and the whole room crack and shiver and collapse. If she had been inclined to such things she would have gone running. Run around the block, stopped somewhere and worked out the way she had once seen a man exercise in Regent's Park, doing step aerobics up and down one of the seats. But she wasn't and she couldn't. She stretched out her arms, raised them above her head, thought of screaming. Then she heard it. The door that opened on to the top of the cellar stairs. Someone had come into the house by that door and closed it behind him, very nearly slammed it. It must be Franklin. Only Franklin had a key. For some reason he had come back. His woman had failed to be there to meet him. No one else, no intruder, would move with such confidence, make so much noise. Yet he never went near the cellar or the cellar stairs. She might almost have said he didn't know the cellar was there. An undefined anger filled her, rushing through her veins, heating her face. What was he doing? Why was he here? Knowing her to be out, guessing she would go out the moment he was gone, he was putting into action some plan that involved the cellar, that involved deceiving her. He must be hiding something there, and hiding it from her. Or even setting some sort of trap for her. That would be like him, she thought, envisaging his rictus grin and hearing his teasing voice. She looked for the pole with the hook that opened the fanlight and found it in the landing cupboard. It amused her to think of hitting him with it, striking him, perhaps mortally, and explaining afterwards that she thought he was a burglar, had been frightened out of her wits. She started down the stairs. The time-switch had caused the porch light to come on and should have done the same by the light in the dining-room. Inexplicably, it hadn't. But the light at the head of the cellar stairs had come on through human agency. The door at the head of the cellar stairs, which was never opened, which hadn't been touched for years, was open now. She forgot her anger in her desire to frighten him, simply to give him a shock. She wouldn't hit him -well, that depended on what he was doing. She took one step down, looked down and spoke Franklin~s phrase in Franklin's menacing tone. The commanding officer bidding reluctant troops go over the top. He had gone outside by the kitchen door, having turned off the dining-room light on his way. The courtyard that separated the house from the mews was an oblong, its entire area paved in natural limestone. On each side was a narrow border planted with a number of small silver-leaved shrubs. Teddy had not looked at it properly on his previous visit, then noticing only the manhole cover. This was roughly in the K centre of the courtyard, though rather nearer to the gate than the house. Now he saw that the wall which separated the area from the road on one side, the wall which divided it from the garden next F- door and the wall at the mews end were made of what looked, in the dim, hazardous light, like yellow brick. The height of all these walls had recently been increased and the new brickwork was a slightly different shade. A garden table and four chairs, cast iron painted white, stood in one of the corners at the house end and in the opposite corner was a large marble urn with a pointed tree growing in it. Something he hadn't noticed last time was that the back of the house, like tl~ front, was covered in those same luxuriant all-conquering leaves. More than the front, in fact, for here not a scrap of brickwork was visible and if those pinkish tendrils crept across the surface, leaves concealed them also. Only the windows, shining black rectangles, peered out, eye-like, and the barred glass doors. The two lamps in the mews gave enough light to show all this, but to show it in dark monochrome, black and charcoal and grey and flickers of silver on the leaves. He drew back the bolts on the gate. Then he tried to lift the cover off the manhole. This was of some sort of metal incised with the maker's name, Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke, inside a laurel wreath. He pulled at the metal ring embedded in its centre but to no effect and he soon realised that no failure of his own strength was the problem but rather that something on the other side, probably a bolt, was holding the manhole cover in place. He would have to go down into the cellar from the inside. First he checked the Edsel and the mews. No one was about. The two parked cars were still there. Distantly, he could hear traffic in Maida Vale, crossing the hump over the canal. He went back into the house, opened the door at the top of the cellar steps and pressed the light switch. Nothing happened. By the light from the top of the stairs he could make out an unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling. It pleased him that it didn't work, that the bulb was used up and had never been replaced, for it confirmed what she had said about never going into the cellar. He could tell that he was not quite tall enough to reach that bulb hanging on its six inches of lead. From a table lamp in the dining-room he undid a hundred-watt bulb, took it down into the cellar and changed it for the defunct one. The light came on at once and showed him what he had come to see. The rest of the house was very clean, almost up to his own standard. Down here, if not exactly dirty, it was dusty and untended. Spiders' webs hung from the ceiling and clustered in its corners. The place was empty, no more than ten feet square, its floor of rough concrete, its walls plastered and painted white. Or they had been painted white long ago, but that white had cracked and faded to grey. In the wall to the right, the one at the rear end of the house, was a door, bolted at the bottom, composed of rough wooden boards from which the white paint was peeling, and in the lower half of which was a hatch. In the days when coal was delivered from outside to fill the hole, Teddy supposed, the hatch would be raised from the inside and coal pour through. A job for some servant with bucket or scuttle. The mess it must have caused, the filth, made him shudder. He drew back the bolt. The space he stepped into was perhaps half the area of the cellar proper and consisted of a cuboid chamber about eight feet deep. No coal remained, but the floor was black with coal-dust and a bitter carbon smell hung in the close air. He switched on his torch and its beam sent a spider scuffling away into a dark corner. At the top of the chamber the torch showed him the inside of the manhole cover. As he had expected, it was secured in place by a heavy steel bolt. Teddy was tall enough to reach it with his fingertips, but it would have taken a man of six feet six to be able to get sufficient purchase for the task of sliding back the bolt. He needed something to stand on and also, in case of need, a spanner and a wrench for the bolt. For a moment he forgot where he had left Keith's toolbag. Had he taken it outside? He came up the cellar stairs again, carefully brushing coal-dust off his shoes before entering the hall. The idea of dirtying this exquisite place was very distasteful to him. The door into the hall was one of those that slam shut at the least pressure. Then he remembered. He had left the toolbag just inside the back door when he went out to unbolt the gate. Now to find a pair of steps or failing that - and it almost certainly would be failing that - a chair or stool. Nothing suitable in the kitchen. He doubted if he could have brought himself to stand on one of those beautiful gilded chairs from the dining-room. A cast-iron chair from the courtyard would' do. He fetched one of these. It was heavy, it must weight twentyfive pounds. Carrying the chair and with the toolbag in his other hand, he returned the way he had come to hear a woman's shrill voice say, 'Don't move. Stay right where you are. I am armed,' and end with an hysterical giggle.

Chapter 25

For a moment he doubted it was a real voice. It must be coming from the radio or the television. Or the device that set lights to go on after a cunning delay could be programmed to switch on a tape. He thought that, but he came on, out into the hall, stepping softly on the thick carpet. The silence and then the sound of an indrawn breath told him it was a real woman who had spoken. It was she, Harriet. He saw her. She was wearing shoes with heels of an extravagant height, shoes for a teenage model on a catwalk, stiletto heels four inches high. At the top of the stairs she stood, looking down, her back to him, wobbling on those spiky heels, some sort of stick or staff in her hand. It was immediately clear that she thought he was down there. Wherever she had been in the house, and perhaps she had been here when he first entered it, she had heard the cellar door close and believed it had closed behind him as he went down the stairs. He stood absolutely still. The Edsel was in the mews, the gate unbolted. If she summoned help, if she called the police, he would be taken away, the car taken. He closed his hands tightly round the leg of the chair he held, the handle of the toolbag. She said, 'Come out, you fool. What the hell are you doing?' Adrenalin poured into his blood. He felt it zing in his head. She knew who it was, she was insulting him again. He drew in his breath and let it out in a roar, 'Turn round!' Never before had he seen anyone jump. Heard of it happening, yes, but never seen it. The start galvanised her, he could have sworn her feet left the ground. She spun to face him, cried out, 'You!' and at that he threw the toolbag at her. He hurled it with his left hand and the chair with his right. The bag caught her in the chest, the chair across her legs. She fell backwards and turned over and over, somersaulting down the cellar stairs, her hands grappling with the empty air. A wailing cry came from her and the pole she was holding flew out of her hand, wheeling in an arc out of his sight. He heard the clatter as it fell to the floor and the softer smash of her body. That it was a body and not the living woman, injured but alive, he hardly knew until he went down there. He even had a momentary anxiety - what to do if she was alive. But she had struck her head a violent blow on the floor, rather as if she had dived from a height into the sea, unaware that the water was shallow and the bottom unyielding rock. His first thought after that was a strange one. He need not touch her now. If anything were to stop him killing it would be the necessity of touching your victim first. Two people had died at his hands without his touching them. He smiled, the idea was so peculiar and so unexpected. He picked up the chair. Paint had chipped off it, but otherwise it was intact. Nothing had happened to the toolbag except that a screwdriver and a pair of pincers had fallen out of it. He looked at the body dispassionately, the dark-red blood on her dark-red hair, the waxen white of her face under the make-up. What had brought her home? It looked as if she had been away for just two nights. Two big suitcases for two nights away? Maybe, for a woman like that. Probably that was where she had been when he first opened the front door, upstairs at the back out of earshot, unpacking those two cases. Satisfied with his solution, he carried the chair into the coalhole, got up on to it and, using the pincers, wrenched back the bolt. It felt as if it had been rammed into that position years before and never touched since. The steadiness of his hands pleased him. He was almost unshaken. So much the better. He pushed against the manhole cover and it rose quite easily. He went upstairs again and into the hall, looked about him and, seeing her handbag on the small table just inside the front door, put it in the toolbag. To be on the safe side in case a cleaner or someone else with a key came into the house. He returned to the backyard, opened the gate and went out into the mews. One of the parked cars had gone. Most likely, it had belonged to someone visiting friends in a flat or house higher up the mews. He knew very little about dinner-parties or any social calls, come to that, but he calculated that this was about the right time to be leaving a place you had visited on a Saturday night. Now for the grand secret. Who used to say that? He had surprised himself with the words that rose unbidden in his mind. His grandmother perhaps, or his long-dead grandfather. Now for the grand secret. A sight for sore eyes. Or a sight to damage healthy eyes? He lifted the Edsel's boot lid, shut his eyes, opened them. With both hands he gripped the top of the big plastic bag that was Keith's shroud, grasped it just below where the masking tape secured it and lifted it. A smell there was, but not a strong, terrible, foetid odour, nothing like that. If the plastic were to be punctured, it would be a different story, he knew that. To tear it would be fatal, a disaster. He heaved the bag and its contents over the lip of the boot and down on to the flagstones. When it was out, no longer in that boot but on the ground, and the bag was still intact, he knew the worst was over. He dragged it through the gateway and up to the manhole. Then he went back to close the boot lid and shut the gate. The presence of a man and a woman in the mews, appearing it seemed from nowhere, suddenly materialising, gave him a shock. They were walking in th~ direction of the remaining parked car. How much had they seen? Probably nothing. He was sure they hadn't been anywhere in the vicinity while he was dragging that bag. And their behaviour seemed to confirm this, for as he unlocked his car the man called out to him, 'Lovely night!' Teddy nodded. He never knew how to answer remarks like that. 'Good-night, then.' 'Good-night,' said Teddy. He closed the boot lid. He tried to behave as a householder would who lived in a place like this. Check the interior of the garage, make sure the car was all right - there was no car, which didn't surprise him - examine the stack of bricks in there which must be left over from raising the height of the walls. Retreat through the gateway with a confident tread, born of years of practice of going in and out of here at midnight. But he was unable to resist looking over his shoulder as the car passed. The woman in the passenger seat rewarded him with a friendly wave. The gate shut and bolted, he raised the manhole cover, lifted it out and laid it on the flagstones. His principal worry now was that the bag might split as he lowered it down through that aperture. Still, it was hardly the end of the world if it did, only it would be -unpleasant. The end of the world had been averted and the worst of everything was past. He shoved and heaved the bag to the manhole. The dead-body hole, he thought. He pushed it through, feet end first, holding on to the head-and-shoulders end. Letting go wasn't an option until he could feel the feet end at least graze the stone floor down there. Holding on, breathing deeply, he hung over the edge, his arms stretched to a sense of bursting, until he felt the weight lessen, the tension slacken. The bottom of the bag was on the ground. He let go and there was a slithering, shuddering thump. For a brief second he thought he was going with it, but he managed to keep a grip on the flagstones with the muscles of his chest and thighs. He had left the iron chair down there and the bag fell across it and subsided, as if the body in its slippery shroud had sat down. He shivered. A strong press-up brought him to his feet. He replaced the manhole cover, checked that everything in the backyard was as he had found it and went back into the house. A sheet or a tablecloth, something like that was what he needed. Upstairs, in a cupboard on the landing outside the bedroom she had taken him into, he found both in abundance. The clean, crisply ironed white sheets pleased him. He would like linen like that for his own bed, his and Francine's, fresh on every day. And why not? The work needed to ensure that was nothing compared with the benefits. A blanket might be better for his purpose, though. There were several, blue and white, fluffy, spotless, on the bottom shelf. He pulled out a blue one and descended into the cellar once more. There was no more blood, it had stopped flowing, as he thought he had heard it did when you were dead. Unfortunately, quite a lot of blood had. got on to the floor. No doubt it would also stain this lovely clean blanket. But he had no choice. He laid the blanket on the ground and rolled Harriet's body up in it, not a difficult task, she must have been less than half Keith's weight. At this point an idea came to him, a wonderful plan. It was simple and beautiful, it solved everything. Rather than put Harriet's body in the coal-hole with Keith's he would bring Keith's out here. Thus, the coal-hole would be empty, a safety measure in case anyone ever lifted the manhole cover, and as for the cellar... Could he? He was sure he could. The thought made him smile, then laugh out loud. His laughter echoed in that subterranean place. First he pulled out the iron chair. He kept his eyes shut while he did it, but he couldn't shut his ears to the squelching sound of the body sliding to the floor. This was the last time he would ever drag it, though, this was the end. There had been some considerable disturbance of those contents and anyone would have been able to smell it now. He stood and smelt it. Horrible, really. How disgusting human beings were, in life, in dying and in death... He closed the coal-hole door and fastened the bolts. Harriet's blood made an almost black sticky patch on the cellar floor. He considered fetching water and scrubbing brush and cleaning it up, it was very much in his nature to clean up after himself whatever might be the task he had performed, but finally he decided against it. He was dirty enough already. As it was, he felt begrimed from all the energy he had expended and from coal-dust and spiders' webs. He could smell himself, a powerful oniony stink. It was more distasteful than if he had smelt it on somebody else. Why not do what he longed to do? He was alone, everything was done, the Edsel awaited him, his car, a strange car that attracted curious glances, but only a car and one that could now bear the scrutiny of any authority. So why not go upstairs and have a bath? He had a choice. A bathroom en suite with her bedroom, another opening out from the landing. Hers had a claw-footed tub standing on a tiled dais, the other a sunken bath of blue-green marble, and that was the one he chose, filling it with steaming, foaming water into which he poured a stream of orange-scented essence. He used a loofah to scrub himself - it was the first of its kind he had ever seen - and soap that smelt like a basket of citrus fruits. The towel was pale orange, fluffy on one side and velvety on the other. When he was dry he dried the bath and rubbed a facecloth over the taps to polish them. When he had noted the time, ten-past one, and checked that her handbag contained a key to the house, he left by the front door and walked round to the mews where the Edsel was waiting.

Chapter 26

There was much more in that small quilted leather handbag than a key to the house. The bunch of credit cards might be of use to him. He would have to think about it. But he also found in the wallet nearly a hundred pounds in notes and a small leather-bound address book, as well as the usual women's stuff, pressed powder, lipstick, a phial of perfume. The handbag itself he tried to imagine Francine using, but the image he conjured up was all wrong. High heels went with it and a mincing step, red nails and slave bracelets. Shuddering, he put the handbag in his waste bin. The day gone by and the night seemed like a dream to him now, and so surreal was the memory of it, so bizarre the events, that he had to go outside as soon as he woke up and check that the Edsel's boot really was empty. It looked innocent and ordinary - if anything about the Edsel was ordinary - a clean, empty space that seemed as if it had never held anything more sinister than a suitcase. Of the thing that had been inside it for nearly eight months there was no sign or hint. Any smell there was had gone with Keith into the cellar. Inside that garage, he remembered, had been a stack of bricks. To someone who knew about these things it was clear what had happened. The rear wall had been considered too low and at some point, recently a further two feet had been built on to it. The calculations had allowed for more bricks than were needed and hence the pile in the garage. He would need some ready-mixed cement and maybe a flagstone. Stone, he knew, was very expensive but perhaps there was an alternative... He closed the boot lid, stepped back and viewed the car. Would it help to clean it once more before he took it to Miracle Motors? Megsie appeared suddenly on the far side of the fence, seeming to materialise as if she had sprung from a trapdoor in the ground. 'I've never seen you open that boot before,' she remarked conversationally. 'I said to Nige, I've never seen him open that boot before, and he said, neither have I, never.' 'I'm selling it for Keith,' Teddy said, more expansively than usual. 'He said to sell it if I can get a good price.' 'You'd think he'd got something in there he doesn't want us to see, I said. And Nige said, yeah, maybe he's got drugs in there with a street value of untold millions. Funny the things you think of, isn't it? Many's the time I've cursed that Esme, taking up the whole garden, but I don't know, I reckon I'll miss it when it's gone.' 'Edsel,' said Teddy, more as a matter of form than because he thought she would learn. If cleaning the car meant doing it under her eyes he decided against it. Whatever happened, he had a busy day ahead of him. The phone rang and he was sure it must be Francine. There had been some talk of his going with her to look at that Holly's new flat, and then he and she and Holly and some guy called Christopher going out somewhere. He hated the whole idea, but he would do it if that was what she wanted. It wasn't Francine on the phone but a man in Highgate who had come upon Teddy's old advertisement, had noted it down at the time or kept the paper or something, and wanted to know if he could have an estimate for a couple of built-in wardrobes. Having long ago decided to turn nothing down with the exception of rough labouring, Teddy told Mr Habgood of Shepherds Hill that he would be along at three in the afternoon. The man he saw at Miracle Motors wasn't the one he had talked to on the phone. This was the manager, or perhaps the managing director, and when Teddy said he had practically had a promise of a sale he pursed his lips and began shaking his head from side to side in a discouraging way. Then the one he had talked to came out and behaved very differently from what Teddy had expected. 'Now if it was part exchange,' he said, 'that would be a whole different ball game.' The manager stopped shaking his head and started nodding it. 'Then we could be talking a couple of K, right, Mick?' 'Two thousand pounds?' said Teddy, aghast. 'That's about the size of it' 'And I'd have to buy another car from you?' They looked amused. Then Mick said quite sharply, 'Frankly, I'm surprised Mr Brex wants to sell. Or maybe what I mean is I'm surprised he didn't come himself if that's what he wants. Where's he got to, anyway?' 'He's living in Liphook,' said Teddy. 'Is that right? He's down there and you're up here with his car?' Both men looked him up and down. They looked at him in the way people in their forties and fifties do look at young men, with a mixture of contempt and envy and suspicion. A layabout, they were very likely thinking, a drawer of benefit and probably a fiddler of benefit, on the fringes of crime. 'If we're talking about a straight purchase,' said the manager and, from having exhausted his gaze on Teddy, turned at last to eye the Edsel, 'a grand is the kind of area that'd be realistic.' Appalled, he thought of the ten thousand he had had in mind. But to be rid of the thing, for it no longer to be the first object he saw when he woke up in the morning, no longer to fill his garden and press its rear against his windows. Even its colour was becoming his most hated colour, that insipid pastel-yellow... 'Would you give me a thousand for it, then?' 'I take it you've got the vehicle registration document with you, the MOT and a valid certificate of insurance?' He had never even heard of these things. What was the MOT? He dared not ask. 'I'll tell you what, you get Mr Brex to come in here and have a word with us himself. Franldy, I'd rather do business with Mr Brex in person. Liphook's not at the end of the world. You take that motor away for the time being and maybe if Mr Brex puts in a personal appearance we can come to a more satisfactory arrangement for all.' Teddy said nothing. He walked towards the Edsel. 'You tell him Wally says all the best,' the manager called after Mr Habgood lived in one of those sixties townhouses without a single cupboard. He had just moved there from a Victorian villa that was amply supplied with storage space. Teddy looked at the bedrooms, measured up, lost his enthusiasm when the client said chipboard would do for the doors, he didn't want any fancy stuff, not a lot of expense, but again he felt that he could barely afford to turn down anything of this nature. 'That's quite a vehicle you've got there,' Habgood said, showing him out. 'You must be in a fair way of doing, getting your hands on a nice job like that at your age. Drinks juice, I bet.' Teddy was almost too angry to speak. But he told himself that if Habgood believed him successful he would be likely and willing to pay more and he resolved to ask double what he had first intended. On the way home he stopped at a DlY centre and bought ready-mixed concrete. It was a strange sensation using the Edsel's boot for a legitimate purpose, actually puffing something into that space which had been for so long a forbidden area. Petrol was the next requirement. As he served himself he watched the car drinking juice. With its ugly fish mouth and its cocked-up tail, it had something animal-like about it and it was easy to imagine it greedily slurping up the oil that sustained it. He wouldn't have been surprised to see a yellow tongue pop out of its mouth. Thank God for the money in the handbag. But it brought him almost physical pain to see so much of it vanish into the service station's till. He was experiencing that sensation of hopelessness that follows when we plan to be rid of an encumbrance, are positive it will vanish if certain steps are faithfully followed, anticipate the relief that will result from its disappearance, only to find ourselves back in the situation as before, the position that has always been. It can't be done. The best-laid plans have failed. The thing, whatever it may be, the rash of pimples on one's face, a plague of flies, the next-door neighbour's night-long hi-fl, is still there. So it was for Teddy. Deep humiliation was what he felt as he drove the Edsel back through the gates and under the hated carport. His shame was exacerbated by his remembering, at exactly that moment, that he had told Nige and Megsie he was selling the car. Yet here it was, back where it had always been. For a while he tried manoeuvring it backwards and forwards in an attempt to find a new position for it, but all he could achieve was to leave a couple of yards instead of a couple of feet between its tail and his window. He was so preoccupied with the Edsel and his money problem that a curious, even terrible, thing happened to him. When Francine phoned a few seconds passed by before he knew who it was. It simply failed to register. Her voice spoke to him and she spoke her name and he could almost have asked, who? Then he collected himself. She, his woman, the wearer of his ring, she who saw herself in his mirror, came back to him. But it was with actual relief that he heard her say she couldn't come over that evening, she really couldn't. Her father had gone away again, would be away for a week, and her stepmother - here Francine hesitated, searching for the right term - was 'in a nervous state', she had begged her not to go out and had made wild threats. This was all beyond Teddy's comprehension. He made no effort to understand. If she wanted to stay at home with that crazy woman, that was all right with him; as it happened he needed no distractions this evening. A fficker of anxiety was teasing him now, the remote possibility of someone else entering Orcadia Cottage and opening that cellar door... Naturally, he said none of this to Francine, merely that he would see her the next day. 'Then can we go and see Holly's place? And go out with her and Christopher? We could go to the cinema. I can't go to a club because Julia will fuss - well, she'll fuss anyway, but if I'm out late she'll go mad.' For the sake of peace and to keep her happy, he agreed. If it had been left to him he would have stayed at home with her or, maybe, if they had to go out, taken her for an afternoon at the V and A. 'You are a dear,' she said. 'You're so good to me.' 'I'll see you tomorrow then,' he said. It was a funny thing, but unless he could see her she was scarcely there. Asleep, gazed at appreciatively, she was more real than this disembodied distant voice. He felt suddenly angry and resentful, he didn't know why, it must be the prospect of the company of Holly and Christopher. Again the notion of someone coming into the house came to him. But who could? There was no one, Harriet had lived alone. In the unlikely event of a cleaning woman arriving, the dirty state of the cellar was evidence that she never went down there. But the sooner he was back there the better. He got the Edsel out again. By the time he reached Orcadia Place it was growing dark, the gleaming damp dusk of a London autumn evening. Lamps shone like beads of amber against the far backdrop of a hazier chemical light on Grove End Road. The sky was reddish-purple, an ugly colour. This time he was seen as he drew up at the garage doors. But there was no element in it of being caught out. A woman with two small fluffy dogs on leads smiled at him, or smiled at the car which she evidently recognised. Probably she thought he was a mechanic returning it after a thousand-mile service. Now he was well-supplied with keys, he could enter the house by the back door. Carrying his toolbag, he paused inside the kitchen and listened. Somehow he thought that if anyone had been there, even if someone had been and gone, he would know, he would sense it. But all was emptiness and silence. Nothing was disturbed, not even the air in the place. He opened the cellar door and looked down, but without putting the light on. In the dimness he saw a silvery sheen on the plastic, the pale fun-mess of the blanket and, less comfortably, protruding from it, Harriet's foot. Not long, though, and he would never have to see it again. No one would see it, ever. He spread newspaper on the floor and set out his tools. The first thing he did was remove the screws on the hinges and take off the door. An ordinary sort of door, consisting of six panels and with a brass handle. Perhaps he could find a use for it. The next stage would take longer. Using his mallet, he set about freeing the architrave from the brickwork and plaster. It was a noisy task, but Orcadia Cottage stood on its own, a road to one side of it, its nearest neighbour twenty feet away and separated from it by a wall and a fence and bushes and trees. There were no Megsie and Nige next door and no common wall for them to bang on. For all that, the heavy hammer blows made him uneasy, even though he knew that people in London are rarely alerted by building work going on in a neighbour's house. It was different up in Neasden. Almost as disconcerting was the mess he was making, splintered wood lying everywhere and plaster dust making him choke. He realised quite suddenly that he was going to have to make a new skirting board, even perhaps carve it if he couldn't find the right beading to match the existing one. Once the door frame was off, he could clear up for the night. There would be no more noise. Soon there would be no more cellar. He found a broom, dustpan and brush and a roll of bin-liners, and swept up meticulously. Then the vacuum cleaner came out and he removed the last vestiges of dust. Should he transport the bricks in preparation for tomorrow's work? He decided yes. It would have to be done in the morning as he was going on this horrible visit in the afternoon. His anger returned, flickered. Outside in the backyard the night was growing cold, there was frost in the air, reminding him of the night Keith died. He needed a bricklayer's hod but must manage without. His father had been a bricklayer and presumably had had his own hod, but where it was, what had happened to it, Teddy didn't know. He felt an obscure resentment at the disappearance of that hod - along with the absence of so many things which should by rights have been his. Something he had forgotten, mat white wall paint to match the existing paint. He must buy some on his way in the morning. Bringing bricks into contact with the beautiful velvety carpet or the hardwood floor at the top of the steps pained him. He hunted around until he found a stack of magazines, Vogue, Ha7per~, Hello!, and spread their glossy pages on the floor before carefully depositing the bricks on them. It might be best to dispose of the cellar door and door frame splinters at once. He carried them outside to the Edsel. The door would have failed to go into the boot if it had been a centimetre longer. Returning, looking at the manhole cover, he had a thought which made him smile and then laugh. It was another beautiful idea, almost amounting to genius. Julia worried Francine and made her increasingly uneasy. It was not only that she was like an animal of uncertain temper, which must be constantly placated, but that her behaviour in many small details became more and more bizarre. A lot of this was hidden from Richard, Julia purposely hid it, but Richard was away and in his absence all her strangeness was allowed to show. At home, for she had nowhere to go without Teddy, Francine wimessed for the first time Julia's pacing. Up and down, up and down, she could hear it even upstairs in her room, but when she came down Julia stopped and sat stiffly in a chair, as if exasperated, as if obliged to give up for the sake of someone else's whim an essential task. Francine tried to talk to her, asking her what she thought of some item in the morning's newspaper or if she fancied this new film that was so prominently reviewed, but Julia only nodded or shook her head impatiently. Her eyes she kept on the window, staring out into the busy road. Then, suddenly, without warning, she jumped up and ran out into the hall, snatched a coat off the hall-stand and rushed out of the front door. Francine saw her pause perfunctorily for a lorry to pass, then run across to the island in the middle of the road, pause again before running to the other side. There was someone sitting in the bus shelter and she spoke to him, seemed to harangue him, gesticulating with her hands. Francine watched her return, said when she came back into the room, 'What was all that about?' Julia's reply was the disturbed person's gesture of sharply turning away her head like a peevish child. She marched to the other end of the room, wheeled round, came back and sat down heavily on the sofa. She had put on still more weight and when she lowered her body into a chair or settee the springs groaned. Francine wondered if she was a secret eater, bingeing for comfort in some sorrow. But what sorrow? Julia suddenly began to talk. 'You don't know what men are like, Francine. The decent ones like your father are few and far between, let me tell you. Any boy you are likely to go out with will only want you for one thing, and he'll get as much of that as he can, as much as you give him, and then he'll get tired of you and you won't interest him any more. They are all like that.' 'But you said some are like Dad,' said Francine. 'I've given my life to you, to protecting you and looking after you and trying to make you understand that a special person like you can't go out into this world and mix with filthy creatures; you're not prepared for it; I can't prepare you, though God knows I've tried. I've wished we lived in another age when parents had rights over their children and could compel them to be obedient. The filthy creatures are everywhere out there, there was one of them over in the bus shelter. You know what he was there for, don't you?' 'No, Julia, I don't.' Francine felt a chill in the air, the shiver the unknown brings with it. 'I don't know what you mean.' 'I wish you wouldn't lie to me. I only want you to be honest. You know very well he was waiting for you.' Francine crossed to the window. The young man was still there, but now he had been joined by another. She was unable to see clearly across that distance, but she thought they had both lit cigarettes. 'I don't know those people, Julia.' Julia let out a loud derisive snigger. 'You're a barefaced little liar, aren't you?' She had got to her feet, a tall, heavy woman who carried her increased weight on the front of her, big bolster-like breasts and full stomach without the intervention of a waist. Her face had become jowly, her cheeks cushions and her casque of yellow hair sat on her head like a brass helmet. She took a step and then another, her head threateningly lowered, and Francine remembered that one occasion on which her stepmother had struck her. She refused to retreat and stood her ground. And Julia's intention was quite different. A weak smile softened her face, made it slack and spongy. She put out her arms in what seemed a pleading gesture, then enfolded Francine in them, holding her, then hugging her suffocatingly tightly. Francine, when she could tactfully escape from this embrace, laid her hand on Julia's upper arm and stroked it gently. 'Can't we try to be nice to each other, Julia? We used to get on so well when I was little.' Did they? Had they? It seemed best to pretend they had. 'I promise I will be honest with you. I don't mean to deceive. Really. But I'm not meeting that boy over there or his friend, I've never seen either of them before.' Julia began to cry. 'Please don't cry. Let's go out somewhere together, shall we? I'm not going anywhere, so we could do something together. I'd like to have a look at the Globe theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, wouldn't you? Or we could go shopping, you said you wanted a winter coat.' 'I don't feel like it,' Julia said. 'I'm too ill. You've made me ill.' After that, Francine felt reluctant to go out anywhere on her own. She went up to her bedroom and sat there thinking about Julia and what was happening and what she might possibly do to change things. The irony was that in those childhood days she had spoken of it was she who had been sent to Julia for psychiatric help, while now she felt it was her function to seek therapy for Julia. The only way, obviously, was to try to talk to her father about Julia's state, persuade him that Julia was having some kind of breakdown. But her father was in Strasbourg. She picked up her mobile phone and tried to call Teddy, but there was no answer. He was the only person she knew who had no answering machine. But recorded voices weren't much comfort to you, she thought, when she had tried Isabel and Miranda, and Holly's new number only to be told of absence or unavailability. Teddy's ring, which she had been wearing hung on a ribbon round her neck, she took off and slipped on to her finger. The third finger of her right hand. Perhaps one day, in the distant time to come, when all this with Julia had somehow been made to come right, when she had been to Oxford and was an independent professional woman, when Teddy was a successful artist, then and only then she might move that ring on to her left hand. He had heard, he couldn't remember where, of slaves sleeping across the doorway of a master's room. And the idea tempted him, though he wasn't a slave and those dead weren't his masters, but to be a guardian of them, a watchdog, to protect them from whoever might come, that was strangely attractive. Until the wall was built and the cellar, to all intents and purposes no longer there. But no one would come and he wouldn't do it. He bathed, went to bed in Harriet's bed and dreamed he was dismembering furniture, the way he actually had taken apart the dining suite. But when he came to carry the pieces out, daily depositing another segment or joint into a waste bin, he looked into the bag and saw not a carved piece of stained and polished wood, but a severed hand and Harriet's foot in its high-heeled shoe.

Chapter 27

Bricking up the hole in the wall would have been a quick and simple task if there were no question of how the final result looked. If, for instance, a wall of rough, bulging, uneven masonry would serve as well as a smooth one. Teddy wanted to do a proper job. He wanted to make it look beautiful and as if no doorway and no door had ever been there. So he worked slowly and meticulously, laying his courses of bricks in perfect alignment with the existing structure. One surprising discovery he made was that his father's trade was not the child's play he had always believed. There was skill in it, there were techniques and methods which he had never learned. But he managed, with a good deal of trial and error, and by lunch-time when he was due to leave and meet Francine six courses of bricks were in place. Holly de Marnay's flat was in a street off Kilburn High Road, which the agents described as 'West Hampstead borders'. It was a shabby place of late-Victorian terraced houses, streets which had been tree-lined but were now car-lined as well. Fallen leaves and plastic litter were blown about on the pavements by the wind. Teddy felt a scornful wonder that anyone who had the chance of living where Holly's family did, in a fine big house by Ealing Common, could choose to slum it in this place. For independence? He had had independence all his life and it was a precarious, troublesome business. What you want if you can get it, he thought, is a beautiful home with people to look after you, which she had had and rejected. The house where the flat was looked one of the worst-kept in the street, with broken steps going up to the front door and two dilapidated pillars at the foot of them, on one of which sat a headless stone lion and on the other a child's woollen glove, no doubt picked up in the road. He rang the bell that looked as if it might be the right one. He was expecting Holly to answer it, but it was Francine who came down. She was wearing a dress, a long black dress with a light rose-coloured jacket over it and a long chain of pink beads. Her hair was plaited into a loose braid. She took his hand and led him in, put up her face for a light kiss, but her beauty was too much for him and he took her in his arms in the dark hall, kissing her deeply. All his vague sensations of disappointment in her were gone. She was perfect. She was his beautiful treasure. Her skin was softer than velvet, smoother than wax. While he had her he could care less than nothing for whoever and whatever awaited him upstairs. Holly came up to him in her aristocratic manner, holding out her hand and saying, 'Hi, how do you do? We met at that exhibition, do you remember?' Teddy nodded. Of course he remembered. That was where he had met Francine. The room they were in appalled him. For one thing it was filthy, a great cavernous one-time drawing-room, with folding doors and a ruined hardwood floor, scuffed and stained and pitted, and a hugely high ceiling hung with a grey metal chandelier and, too, with festoons of dusty cobwebs. The smell was a mingling of aromatherapy oils and marijuana. Christopher was there, reclining on a settee covered in a polyester tiger skin, and there were two girls of the kind Teddy actually disliked letting his eyes rest on. One was fat with curly black hair and silver rings clipped all over her ears and her left eyebrow. The other was a waif-like creature, straw-coloured skin and wispy hair, wearing washed-out blue denim overalls and brown suede knee boots. He didn't catch their names, which hardly mattered since he had no intention of using them. 'I'll show you the rest of it if you like,' Holly said. 'Of course he'd like,' said Francine, linking her arm in his. 'And I'd like. I've been waiting for him to come so that I can see it. Was she implying that he was late? He glanced suspiciously at her. He was never late. They went out into the hall and through a door into a bedroom. You could see that one big bedroom had been made into three bedrooms and another into two. 'Who put those partitions up?' said Teddy. 'Bodger and Leggett?' Appreciative laughter greeted his old joke. Perhaps Holly really hadn't heard it before. 'If Francine comes to be our fourth girl you can carry out some much-needed improvements. Be our builder.' 'You didn't tell me,' he said. She squeezed his arm. 'Because there's nothing to tell. I'm not coming. I can't. They'd never let me.' Holly laughed. 'Can't you abduct her, Teddy?' The bedrooms were all the same, ugly cupboards, three of them with mattresses on the floor. When you had to do that it was another story, but to do it from choice...! The bathroom had a claw-footed bath, but not the latest fashion kind. This one had been put in when bathrooms were a daring innovation and since then had taken about fifteen coats of paint. Flakes of it, peeling off, disclosed a pattern of black islands in a green sea. 'Occasionally,' said Holly, 'you get out of the bath a most peculiar bruise colour, as if you'd been beaten up. She talked like an actress in one of those British films of the forties you sometimes saw on television. He had nothing to say to her or to Christopher. But while they ate their lunch in a pizza place in West End Lane he made the effort for Francine's sake. He told them about the work he was doing, leaving out the part about painting Mrs Trent's house and stressing his cabinet-making. The temptation to talk about Orcadia Cottage was very strong, he hardly knew why, perhaps because, apart from Francine, it was all he thought about at present. 'I've got a contract for a conversion,' he said. 'It's a house in St John's Wood. I'm doing it while the people are away.' 'I wish you'd do a conversion for us,' Holly said. 'Would you? When you've got time? Our landlord's my uncle's friend and I'm positive he'd say yes if I ask him terribly nicely.' 'Yes, we've never actually known anyone who can do this sort of thing, have we, Holl?' said Christopher. 'We have no skills, poor us, and we do tremendously admire someone who has.' He had an idea they might be sending him up, but afterwards, when he asked Francine, she said no, they really meant it. He mustn't be suspicious of people, lots of people were really nice. Not in his experience, he thought, but he didn't say that. Holly and Christopher drank a lot, spirits as well as wine, vodka mainly. What was there about that stuff that looked like thick water? He liked to see Francine with a glass of cold white wine in her hand, not so much drinking it as holding the chilly glass, frosted with droplets, her parted lips touched by a gleam of wine. Like a girl in a cover photograph on one of those magazines that were too expensive for him to buy. Like a girl in a foreign film, in Paris maybe or Madrid, sitting outside at a table, waiting for her lover, waiting for him. The one they went to see wasn't like that and there were few young people in it. Teddy couldn't understand why anyone would want to see a film about Queen Victoria falling in love with an old servant and Francine's enthusiasm he found incomprehensible. For most of the second half of it he kept his eyes shut, dreamed about acquiring ten thousand pounds and taking Francine shopping to expensive clothes shops in Knightsbridge, and buying her black dresses and white dresses made by top designers and floor-length velvet coats with big fur collars. Back at Holly's, they all wanted him to take them for a ride in the Edsel. It puzzled them that he hadn't mentioned arriving in it. While they had been in the restaurant and the cinema someone, a child probably, had scored the words 'Shit yank car' across the top of the boot with a rusty nail. Christopher was loud in his indignation. He wanted to call the police. Teddy found he cared very little about the damage to the Edsel's bodywork, the sentiment written there was very much his own, and he knew the police would treat such a complaint with incredulity. They had other things to do, especially in this neighbourhood. But he took them all round the block and up and down West End Lane, Holly waving graciously to passers-by like a member of the Royal Family. It was still only seven when he was able to take Francine away. She gave him an unpleasant surprise when she said she wouldn't come back home with him. He found a place where he could pull in and park and he sat staring at her. 'I'm sorry, Teddy. If I do I'll have to leave again almost immediately. There's no point in my coming back with you if I can't stay. 'Then why', he said, 'did we waste the whole day with those people?' 'Is that how you saw it, as a waste? They're my friends.' He picked up her hands. They were exceptionally pretty hands, of a narrowness usually only seen in Asian women, long-fingered, the nails perfect ovals, and creamy white. But what he liked best about them was the pure smoothness of the skin, not a line and scarcely a crease, the veins, instead of root-like, pale-blue shadows under the milky surface. He brought them to his lips, kissing the nails, the knuckles, the delicate membrane between forefinger and thumb. 'It's my place, isn't it? You don't like my place. I don't blame you, I said it was a dump.' She was amazed and somehow disconcerted. To have her feelings so entirely misunderstood wasn't a new experience for her, but she hadn't expected it from Teddy. 'It's a horrible hole,' he said, 'and it's not fit for you to be in. I know that. I never wanted to take you there, but I didn't have a choice. 'Teddy, it's not that. I love your house. Haven't I said so over and over? I love it. 'If you really did you'd come back with me.' 'I can't. Julia's alone. I'm afraid of what she may do.' 'Why do you need these people?' he said. 'These so-called friends? This woman? You have me. I have you and you have me. We don't need other people.' She said breathlessly, 'Give me back my hands.' Her face was flushed. She was excited and he had excited her. His heart began beating with steady, heavy thuds. 'You don't ever need to go back. You can stay with me day and night.' She snatched her hands from him, turned away her face. 'Take me to a tube station. Please.' He said lifelessly, 'I'll drive you all the way home.' He couldn't afford it, he couldn't really afford to drive the Edsel at all. But he turned round a roundabout as soon as he could and drove her along the North Circular Road out to Ealing and let her out under the trees where they had parted that first time. She gave him one kiss, and then she jumped out of the car and ran. The garage was large, but not large enough to accommodate the Edsel. It was a pity as he would have preferred not to leave it out there in the mews, attracting attention as it always did wherever it might be. Not that there was anyone's attention to attract on this evening. There seldom was. On Monday morning he would find a place where they sold spray paint in cans and see if they had a pale primrose one to cover up those incised letters on the boot top. He entered through the back gate and closed it behind him. It occurred to him then that from the rear the house didn't look like a house at all but like a square bush with eyes in it. They were well into October now - wasn't it time those leaves fell off? Or were they the kind that didn't fall? The street lamp shone in here, but he switched on his torch. He squatted down and examined the manhole cover. A beautiful piece of work, he noticed for the first time: Paulson and Grieve, Ironsmiths of Stoke, and a laurel wreath that someone had designed with considerable skill and taste. He wouldn't junk it, he'd keep it, it was worth keeping. Somewhere, among all these paving stones, front and back, hidden perhaps or half-hidden by overhanging plants, must be one of just the right size which he could prise up and fit into the gap removing the cover would leave. Fit in and cement in place. That was a task for another day, for later in the coming week. He had other things to do first. He let himself into the house by the back door and returned to his courses of brickwork. There he worked steadily, takingit slowly, but growing accustomed to the task and also becoming more expert. To be content only with perfection was his aim. If a brick jutted even a millimetre out of truth he took it down and started again. By the time he had completed a wall to fill the space where the doorway had been it was midnight. But they were sealed up in there, those two. It was almost as if they no longer existed, as if by creating a doorless tomb for them he had magicked them into the dust he swept up and vacuumed away. Tomorrow he would set about plastering over the brickwork. And when that was done, perhaps even before it was done, he would bring Francine here. That was the solution to all their problems. He couldn't rent the elegant apartment he had had in mind, he didn't have the money or the means of raising any, but he had something better and it was free and available. No one lived here. The owner of the house was gone for ever. In a way it was the Keith situation all over again. Just as he had seen to it that Keith died so that he could occupy Keith's house, so Harriet too had died and left him in possession. Those properties weren't his and, as far as he could see, never would be. But they were more his than they were anyone else's, there was no one to dispute his occupancy and, provided he paid the services bills that must inevitably arrive, no one to evict him. He would bring Francine here. Tomorrow. He could continue with the work that had to be done. Now the hole in the wall was bricked up she would never guess a door had ever been there, but simply suppose the plaster needed renewing. A plan began taking shape in his mind. He would tell her he had acquired the place in exchange for certain essential work that must be done. It would, of course, be preferable to make her believe that the house was his, but there were too many difficulties in the way of that. Harriet~ s clothes in the wardrobe, for instance. All the valuable furniture and ornaments and pictures she would know he couldn't have afforded to buy. His lack of familiarity with the workings and arrangements of the house. She must be taught to believe he had taken on some sort of lease... She would love it. It was so exactly suited to her as if it had been designed and built and furnished for her. And once she had seen it all and lain in that gorgeous bed with him, seen herself in those mirrors, felt the soft carpets and the slippery silk hangings, she would forget about having to go home early. She would stop telling him lies about this Julia woman. And once he had her here he would be able to make love to her. These surroundings were what he needed, he couldn't understand why he hadn't thought of it before. His failure wasn't due to the presence of the Edsel, for the Edsel was clean now and empty, just an ordinary rather big and grotesque car, but to that squalid place where, although they were dead and gone, his parents and Keith remained as ugly and inhibiting presences. Here everything would be different. He must be the kind of man, and he rather liked the idea of himself in this role, who could only perform the act of love with a beautiful woman in a beautiful environment. The former he had, no one was lovelier than Francine, and now he would place her in the setting fit for her. Then and only then would he find with her complete possession. He drove home and put the Edsel back in its place in the garden, under the carport.

Chapter 28

Many times Julia wished she had made a note of Jonathan Nicholson's address. All she knew was that he lived somewhere in Fulham, but when she looked in the telephone directory she could find no J. Nicholson in SW6. Perhaps she could find his car again and perhaps that envelope would still be on the dashboard shelf. She could only go out looking for it while Francine herself was out, for she still adhered to her principle of never allowing the girl to be in the house alone. And the difficulty there was that when Francine was out the car would not, of course, be parked in this vicinity. Francine and Jonathan Nicholson would be out in it somewhere, would probably have gone in it to his house in Fulham. Julia believed that if only she had had a chance to hunt for the car while Francine was at home she would certainly have found it. Her opportunity came when Richard arrived back in England and took two days off at home. Julia said she was having lunch with Jocelyn and didn't feel it would be right to cancel the engagement. She disliked lying, but told herself that the end justified the means. She spent two hours searching for the red sports car, walking up and down the parallel streets which radiated from this main road like ribs from a spine, and twice she thought she had found it. Perhaps she had found it, she couldn't be sure. The disappointing thing was that in neither car was there an envelope on the dashboard shelf addressed to Mr Jonathan Nicholson. When she got back Richard said Francine had gone out. She had an interview for a job and afterwards she was seeing a friend. He hadn't liked to ask her who the friend was and where they were going. 'I would have,' said Julia, and then she said, 'What's this about a job?' He looked unhappy. 'Waitressing, I think it is. In that little coffee and sandwiches place at the other end of the High Street.' 'She can't be a waitress. How could you let her? Why didn't you stop her?' 'I can't stop her, Julia. She's an adult. Besides, she must do something and the job with Noele didn't work out. We've been through all this before.' 'Men will put their filthy hands all over her,' said Julia in a strange high voice. 'Up her skirt and down her blouse. They will slobber over her. They'll fondle her. And she won't say no, not she, she won't know how to, she won't want to, she's too highly sexed. The reality is that there's such a thing as nymphomania, you know, even if it's not politically correct to say it. I'd call her a classic case of nymphomania.' Richard looked at his wife in horror. He thought he could see a shifting in her face, a curious lopsidedness, and the iris of her left eye seemed to loll into the corner of the white. When she had finished speaking her lips wobbled. He could think of nothing to say to her. She stared at him, then wheeled round and left the room. The ridiculous thought came to him that she couldn't be mentally disturbed because she had been a psychotherapist. As if such people must be exempt from the disorders they treated. But she couldn't be disturbed, she couldn't be, he said over and over to himself. Not Julia, who had always been - he uttered the disloyalty in his mind - so boringly sane. An image of Jennifer came to him. It was the nearest he had ever come to seeing a ghost, this conjuring of his first wife before his eyes. She was Li the room and yet she was not, a floater on his retina, a cobweb dangling in his vision. He closed his eyes. He wanted her as a little boy wants his mother. To hold him and hug him. To protect him from madwomen with obscene sexual fantasies. If, in that last year they had together, he had loved Jennifer as he once had and had awakened love in her, would she ever have died? For instance, he could have got home earlier that evening, just as he could have all those evenings. With him in the house she would have been safe. He couldn't have said how he knew this, for the murderer had come looking for money derived from drug dealing and would have killed anyone who got in his way, but he did know it. By instinct or intuition, he knew. He opened his eyes and Jennifer's ghost had melted away as swiftly as it had materialised, and when he next saw Julia she was her old calm and rational self. She intended to go up to Oxford again in a few days, she would take Francine with her, and if they settled on a house it might be time to put this one on the market. He was tired, he was perhaps rather overwrought. It must have been his imagination that an insane woman had come in here and harangued him, accusing his sweet and gentle child of sexual hysteria. Or he had dreamed it during the sleep he fell into after his lunch, just as he had dreamed Jennifer's visitation. 'I didn't get the job,' Francine said. Teddy was relieved. 'You don't want a job like that. It's beneath you.' 'I have to do something. I have to learn about going out to work and earning money. That's part of the point of this gap year. The cafe didn't think I was tough enough for the job - they didn't quite say that, but it's what they meant.' 'You're not tough enough and you never can be.' He had met her in the Edsel half a mile up the road. Now he was going to surprise her, if she would let him, if she failed to notice the change from the route he usually took. But her knowledge of London geography was elementary and when he turned off Park Road for Lisson Grove she noticed only the street name. 'Eliza Doolittle came from Lisson Grove,' she said. 'Who?' 'Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. It's a play by Shaw. She came from this street. Professor Higgins could tell by her accent.' 'Accents matter a lot to you, don't they?' 'What do you mean?' 'Never mind,' he said. 'Forget it.' A cloud had passed across his pleasure. It hung there, dulling things. She put her hand on his knee. 'Where are we going, Teddy?' 'You'll see.' 'This isn't the way to your house.' 'It's the way to a house.' From Grove End Road he turned into Melina Place, crossed the mews into Orcadia Place. They would leave the car here, he said, there was a parking space provided for the house. No one would come and clamp it. He handed her out of the car, which was something he had never done before, and they walked round the corner. When she saw the house the expression on her face was far from what he had expected, or rather, what he had hoped for. She seemed to look warily at its ancient bricks, its latticed windows, the Della Robbia plaque, the curtain of leaves, now crimson and gold. As they came up to the front door and he took the key out of his pocket, took it out with pride as if he really did own this place, a terrible thing happened. In fact, it was an ordinary thing, a nothing, but to his bewilderment it was terrible for her. A butterfly, a poor bedraggled thing, the last of summer, fluttered from one of the dark-red leaves. Its wings were transparent in places where the velvety dust had worn away, but it was still distinctly a black butterfly with a bright-red and white border to its wings. It half flew, half staggered on the wing to flutter limply against Francine's shoulder. She recoiled with a cry, warding it off with her hands. 'Oh, no, oh, no, please - I can't - no!' He caught her in his arms, drawing her back. 'What is it? What's wrong?' 'That thing, that's a red admiral. Oh, I'm Sony, I'm sorry to be such a fool.' 'The butterfly was on the ground, feebly moving its wings. Teddy stamped on it. He thought this decisive action, obviously necessary, would please Francine. It was clearly what she wanted. She burst into tears. 'You didn't have to kill it, the poor thing, the poor thing!' He muttered, 'It was going to die anyway. Why do you care so much? It was only an old butterfly,' and he unlocked the front door. She stepped inside, her head bent and her hands covering her face. It was not an auspicious beginning for their arrival at Orcadia Cottage. And it took a little while before things became better. Francine 's face wore the same wary look when she looked round the hall and was taken by him into the drawing-room, the dining-room, shown the curved white staircase. She had been silent from the moment they entered and he closed the front door behind them. Her face was red and her eyes swollen from crying, and for the time being she was not the beauty he worshipped and loved above everything to gaze at. The perfection of her white skin was spoilt and she sniffed once or twice in a too human way. He had never supposed her capable of sniffing. Added to his dismay at her clothes, the jeans again and a heavy dark sweater, these new doubts half panicked him. That she was making efforts for his sake escaped him. He didn't see her brace herself. The smile she forced he saw as wholly natural wonderment at the interior of this place. 'Whose house is it, Teddy? Why are we here?' He had prepared his answer. 'I'm doing a job, plastering, stonework. The woman who owns it has let me live here while that's going on. It's a kind of lease really. She won't be back.' 'But she will be one day?' He dredged up a phrase he had read or heard somewhere. 'Maybe in the not unforeseeable future.' He laughed. 'Or the zmforeseeable future. Anyway, it's not our problem. It's ours for now. Come upstairs.' The house reminded her of the cottage where they had lived and where her mother had died. It was quite different really, not so old for one thing, and inside far more elaborately and expensively furnished. That house had been silent with the quietness of the country, while even inside here you could hear the distant throb of traffic, the hum of London. But she had felt the similarity, some identifying atmosphere, from the first moment she and Teddy had stepped on to the flagstones of that enclosed court that was the front garden. All those leaves, the red and yellow creeper that blanketed the house, they had had one like it on their cottage. Then had come the unpleasant though ridiculous incident of the red admiral, to remind her further, and Teddy's brutal act which for a few moments had seemed utterly to alienate him from her. She had wept and hoped he would comfort her, but he had only been impatient. She sensed that he was disappointed in her reaction and she did her best to show an enthusiasm she didn't feel. Somehow, in spite of her lack of experience, she understood that because of his failure with her he was under an increasing strain and she sensed that here, in this place he so obviously deeply admired, he would triumph. It was to be, she supposed, in this splendid film star bed, the kind of thing you saw in photographs in glossy house interiors magazines, all white silk draperies and gilding and insertions of classical paintings. 'Do you like it?' he kept saying, and 'What do you think of it?' She wanted to say, because it was true, that she had liked his house, the way it was done. The word, she imagined, was 'minimalism'. In that case, the expression for this must be 'baroque'. But she said none of it. 'It's lovely.' 'I wanted to see you in this bed. I thought it was made for you, this whole room, this bed. Please.' A strange feeling took hold of her. It was if she were learning things she couldn't, at her age and with her very limited experience, possibly know. Yet the knowledge was very strong and deeply troubling. For example, an understanding was there that her first love affair shouldn't be conducted in this way, that there was something perilous about it, something damaging to her and to him. And this, too, that she was not a thing of perfect beauty, an icon, an ornament to be adored, but a real and very young woman. What would he do if he tried and tried but, after everything was the ideal way he wanted it, still failed? What would she do? She felt cold and reluctant, but she took off her clothes and got into the bed, expecting him to join her. Instead he stood watching her with an expression of almost cruel concentration. It was late on a November afternoon, dusk almost, and the room was dim and shadowy. She rather liked this twilight that kept some things half secret but now that she was in the bed, positioned by him to face herself in the mirror, the bedclothes drawn from off her so that she was white and naked in that white silk place, he switched on all th'~ lights, making a violent blaze. She recoiled from it, blinking her eyes. Her hands had closed into fists and in the mirror she saw a frightened girl with huge eyes and a look on her face of appeal, almost a cry for rescue. But she did nothing and said nothing, only let him watch her, drink in his fill of her. For a moment - and she would have hated this - she thought he would fall on his knees like someone before the image of a goddess. Instead, though after a long time, he turned off the brightest of the lights, undressed and came into the bed beside her Then followed the gentle kissing and caresses she loved. She had even told him it was enough for her, though this wasn't strictly true. He had told her quite roughly that she was lying, that must be rubbish, she didn't have to be kind to him, only be with him. But it was her nature to be kind and when, now, he tried again and failed again, she held him in her arms with great tenderness and kissed 4 him and stroked his hair. 'Let's go to sleep,' she said, 'just lie here and go to sleep.' In the late evening when they woke he became more cheerful. He showed her the rest of the house, wanted to know again and again if she liked it, if she really liked it. And he seemed resigned to her going home early so long as she promised to come back next day. He walked her to the tube at St John's Wood, it wasn't far, kissed her on the pavement outside the station with all the mastery and power of the successful lover. It was only nine o'clock. She would be home in good time. It was a new feeling Teddy had. When he was a child, long, long ago, he had known it, but it had passed away with time because it was useless. It saved him from nothing, secured him nothing, brought him no comfort and nothing was changed by it. He couldn't afford to have it, so in his desperate battle to survive it had been cast aside. Or buried deep. But now it had surfaced. The feeling was fear. He was very afraid. Of himself, mostly. His body which, apart from that mutilated finger, was such a perfect and trouble-free machine, not only obeying him in everything he asked of it; but performing superlative acts beyond what was expected - look how he had lifted Keith's body and how he had moved the stone - now failed lamentably and in an area where at his age and with his strength it should most have gratified him. For a few moments that afternoon he had come close to hating Francine. It was easy for her, everything was easier for her. His desire for her filled every part of his body and his mind, flooded him with urgency and longing and utter need, so that everything else emptied itself out and drained away. Why was it, then, that while he looked at her and adored he was erect and strong, a current flowing through his veins, but as soon as they touched and she was in his arms he wilted and shrank like a poisoned tree? Slowly he walked back to Orcadia Place. He would spend the night there, sleep in that bed. If she had stayed, eventually all would have been well, he thought. He thought it resentfully, though by now he had forgotten his near-dislike of her in the memory of how beautiful she had looked in that room, better even than he had anticipated. Before meeting her that afternoon he had put the finishing touches to the brickwork. Alone now, in the silent and otherwise dark house, he began the task of plastering. It was far from the simple job he had thought. In fact, try as he would, taking it slowly and methodically, using the tools he had bought, the diamond-shaped plasterer's trowel and the rectangular one, he was unable to achieve an absolutely smooth and regular surface. It irked him to fail at something which fools like the men his father had worked with did easily every day. But those men had had years of practice and to him it was new. Still, he refused to be content with a botched job and, scraping off the plaster, began again. This time was better. Practice was all. At last the result was close to what he aimed at, acceptable even to a perfectionist like him. Tomorrow he would paint the wall he had made and do it before he went to fetch Francine. After he had taken a bath in that free-standing claw-footed tub, he found that his mind was still stirred up with a million thoughts and fancies. He was sure he would be a real man, a potent man, if he had more money. At the back of his mind, however much he resisted it, was the fear that Francine despised him. For his class, his accent, his home background and his poverty. How could you make satisfactory love to a woman who felt only contempt for you? Picking up his clothes from the floor - he would wash them next day in the Orcadia Cottage machine - he felt in his jeans pocket and brought out the small leather-bound address book that had been in Harriet's handbag. Strange, he thought he had thrown it away when he discarded the bag. Returning to the white silk bed where he and Francine had lain that afternoon, he flicked through the pages of the address book, but only one name meant anything to him: Simon Aipheton. He dropped the address book on the floor. It was two in the morning. Several clocks in the house told him so, but in silence; none of them chimed the hour.

Chapter 29

The woman who accompanied Franklin Merton on his holidays, and who had by this time been his companion on several of these trips, he had met in the Green Park one sunny afternoon in June. Met, that is, meaning encountered, for they had first been introduced to one another some forty-five years earlier. Franklin was on his way from Green Park tube station down the Queen's Walk to have lunch with a friend at his club in St James's when he saw ahead of him, gambolling on the grass, an Irish setter. As such dogs invariably did, this one reminded him of O'Hara, whom he had been obliged to relinquish to Anthea when he went off with Harriet. In subsequent years he often thought it had been a poor exchange. The dog came up to him, Franklin put out his hand in a gentle and friendly way, the dog approached, and in that moment a woman appeared, as it seemed, from nowhere. It was Anthea. He hadn't seen her for eighteen years. In the decade prior to that he had only seen her twice. He knew she had married two years after their divorce, that her husband had been well-off, that he had died and left her a house somewhere in Mayfair. 'Hallo,' he said. 'Hallo.' 'What's the dog called?' 'De Valera.' She had worn very well, he thought. She must be sixty-five or -six but she looked younger than Harriet. A comfortably plump woman, she had a smooth, unlined round face and her grey hair, untinted, shone like newly polished silver. If she wore make-up it was discreetly applied. The only signs of her wealth were the large diamond rings on both her hands, for the tweed suit she wore, though obviously once expensive, had seen better days. She put out her hand and when the dog came to her, held him by the collar as if to keep him from the cajolements of strangers. 'Come and have a drink,' said Franklin. 'What, now?' 'I know a nice little pub off St James's Square.' 'So do I,' said Anthea. 'Probably the same one. We always had a lot of tastes in common. How's your wife?' As Franklin returned a rather clipped answer to this question he was thinking that she would refuse his invitation. He found himself quite intensely minding this. 'Do come,' he said. She put the dog on the lead. In the pub they gave De Valera a bowl of water and there returned to Franklin's mind a similar scene in a pub when he was nearly thirty years younger, but then the woman was Harriet and the dog was O'Hara. He also remembered, rather later, the friend he was meeting and he phoned the club and said he had flu. After a couple of dry martinis Anthea said, 'I'll just take Dev back to Half Moon Street and then I'd like to give you lunch.' No woman had ever before paid for any meal eaten by Franklin. It was a novel situation and strangely exciting. When they parted he asked if he could see her again and two months later they went on holiday together to Lugano. That had been five years before. Now, in a borrowed villa outside San Sebastian, or rather, at that precise moment, sitting on the terrace of a restaurant and looking at the great curved bay and the cresting waves, Franklin said not very romantically, 'Shall we give it another go?' 'I beg your pardon?' 'We don't have to get married unless you're fussy about that. Nobody cares these days. But we do rub along rather well together, don't you think?' 'We always did,' said Anthea, 'until you took up with that red-haired cow.' 'Calling names doesn't help. I think she's got a teenager in tow, very young anyway. I've seen all the signs.' 'She'll take a lot of keeping. From what you say she's an expensive bitch. I could help with that, but I draw the line at someone else's toy boy.' Anthea looked speculatively at him over the rim of her glass. 'You're sure it's me you want and not De Valera?' Franklin smiled his death's-head grin to take the sting out of what he had to say. 'If we wait much longer the poor old boy will have gone to the Happy Hunting Ground.' Recalling from somewhere or other that new plaster must be left to dry, for at least a day and perhaps more, Teddy got to work next morning on the backyard. He had woken early, for a few seconds with no idea where he was. Then he remembered, lie was up and dressed and outside soon after seven. It was still dark. The day ahead would be misty and damp. Without too much difficulty he lifted the manhole cover and laid it on the flagstones. A good many solutions to the problem of the open manhole had suggested themselves to him: a flower-bed planted in a fibreglass liner with maybe one tree in it or a rosebush, a birdbath on a plinth or a second marble urn, another paving stone set in cement like the rest of the components of the courtyard. He thought wistfully of creating something beautiful and of transforming this rather dull backyard. What he would have liked best was a statue, a figure, for instance, of Francine in bronze or marble. That was impracticable, he wasn't a sculptor and the materials in any case would be too expensive. A flagstone inserted in the opening would be the best and safest idea. By the time daylight had come, a pearly cold daylight that seemed to bear no relation to a risen sun, he had found what he was looking for, not in this courtyard but on the edge of the paved area at the front of the house. The flagstones up against the flower borders on either side were loose and had simply been laid flat on the soil below. However, only one of them was approximately the right shape and size. Teddy realised that he would have to make a wooden frame to insert in the aperture, rest the stone on it and cement it in place. He prised up the stone and watched the woodlice he had disturbed running all directions. A couple of snails adhered to its underside. He brushed them off and when he looked back on the doorstep had the satisfaction of seeing a thrush intent on cracking the shell of one of them, beating it against the flags. Crumbs of soil and flakes of stone made a trail through the house as he passed. He would clear it up later, have a good clean. It was essential to maintain the house in immaculate condition, in a better state, in fact, than that in which he had found it. The frame he would make of oak, for this was a wood which was practically indestructible, everlasting and undamaged by water, drought or time. He took measurements, hid the flagstone under the silvery grey shrubs at the side of the courtyard and replaced the manhole cover. His next task would be the purchase of mart white vinyl paint and more ready-mixed cement. A piece of oak he had at home would do for the frame. If not, that would be something else to buy. He washed his hands thoroughly, found a dustpan and brush and the vacuum cleaner, and removed from the floors all traces of the passage of that flagstone through the house. Then he drove home, stopping for the paint and the cement on the way. Luckily, he had a piece of oak he thought might be big enough. There was no time to waste and he got busy with his saw. He was meeting Francine at three. While he worked he thought about Harriet Oxenholme's bank card. Not the two credit cards, the Diners Club and the American Express, but the Visa Connect card which, from observing the behaviour of other people at cash dispensers, he knew might be used for extracting money from a bank account. How did it work? What did you do? Half an hour was all the time he needed to complete the drawings for the built-in cupboards in the Highgate house. He put them in an envelope with his estimate, addressed the envelope to Mr Habgood and went out to buy a stamp. The bank next to the Post Office had a cash dispenser beside its front entrance. Teddy eyed it speculatively. He only had to wait a few minutes. A woman, a young girl really, approached the dispenser and looked over her shoulder to the right and the left before taking a card out of her bag. Trying to be streetwise, Teddy thought. Well, he wasn't going to lay a finger on her. The idea made him shudder, for although she was about the same age as Francine, she was in every way inferior, overweight, spotty and with stubby red hands. He watched those hands, the fingers with the bitten nails. She put the card into a slot and a lot of green letters came up on to the screen. He got as close behind her as he dared and just made out that the machine was asking for a number. That must be what she punched in. She suddenly looked round sharply and he retreated to be on the safe side, started walking away. Looking back over his shoulder he saw the card reappear and, with a sudden feeling of envy, a wad of cash come out. So you had to have a number. Just a number the bank gave you? Or your phone number? Your date of birth, if there weren't too many digits? Somehow, he knew Harriet wouldn't have used her date of birth. What would she have used? If he could find that number his worries were over. All that morning Julia's sufferings had been terrible. She had no belief in Francine's story that Miranda's father might be offering her a job and she was going to see him. Why would a man like that, a tycoon, have a job for an untrained eighteen-year-old anyone could see was emotionally disturbed? She had begun her pacing just after Francine left the house. On one of her marches to the front window she saw a young man sitting in the bus shelter. He was fair-haired and of a heavy build, but that didn't fool Julia. Jonathan Nicholson was clever and would stop at nothing to get Francine. Disguise was an area in which he was an expert and to lighten his hair and flesh out his body was child's play to him. If he was bent on defying her she was not going to rise to his bait so easily. Instead of going immediately across the road, she opened the window, leaned out and stared at him. He stared back. He had seen her, he knew she was watching him. She moved slowly, in a deceptively casual manner, no manic rushing this time, put on her coat, buttoned it, wrapped a scarf round her neck, opened the front door. He was still there, but standing up now. She hesitated, thought, suppose he attacks me? Suppose he strikes me, pushes me into the road? It was a risk she had to take. For Francine's sake, to save Francine from him. Nothing he could do to her mattered when it was a question of Francine's safety. She walked briskly across the road to the island. A stream of traffic held her there. The last vehicle in it was the bus. That was just her luck. To be so near to her quarry and have him get away yet again. She couldn't cross until the bus had gone and he, of course, had gone with it. Or had he? She hadn't seen him get on it, only its arrival, a big red screen before her eyes, and seen its departure wipe him away. He might simply have hidden himself, calculating that she would believe him gone with the bus, while in fact he was hiding behind that fence or in that garden or down that side turning. Julia searched for some time. She went into several gardens and even lifted the lid off someone's wheelie-bin to see if he was lurking inside. The householder put a head out of an upstairs window and shouted at her. Then she went up and down the street looking for Jonathan Nicholson's car. Of course, she failed to find it because he had been using the bus, hadn't he? His car must be in for a service or perhaps he had sold it, got rid of it because it was such a giveaway and he knew she was on to him. Eventually she went back home, but an hour or so later she understood that he had been there all the time, for she saw him back in the bus shelter, his hair restored to its natural dark, his extra weight shed. This time he was accompanied by several others. Bodyguards, she thought, heavies was what they called them. She didn't go back. She found Miranda's number in Francine 's address book and called it. A girl who certainly wasn't Miranda answered, thus confirming Julia's worst fears. Julia asked to speak to Miranda's father and the girl said he was at his office and then, hastily and obviously untruthfully, that she'd heard Francine was seeing him about a job. It was just the sort of lie a young girl would tell, confident that by so doing she was serving her friend. Because she didn't want Jonathan Nicholson to see her go out and thus leave the field clear for him, Julia waited until he and his companions had gone once more into hiding and then she took her shopping bag and went down to the High Street. In the continental patisserie she bought olive ciabatta and date bread and chocolate croissants and several packets of white chocolate finger biscuits. Much of this she ate for her lunch, gorging until she felt sick. When Richard phoned in the late afternoon she put on a bright, sweet manner, telling him everything was fine, it was a lovely day for late November and Francine - imagine - had gone out with Miranda. 'I thought you were going to say, with that boy,' said Richard. 'He'd like to. But she's not having any, or that's how I see it. The reality is, he's been watching for her from that bus shelter most of the day.' 'He's what?' 'I'm afraid he does a lot of that. He's quite obsessed.' 'He's not stalking her, is he?' Julia suddenly felt very frightened. Of course Jonathan Nicholson was stalking her, but if she admitted that to Richard he would bring the police in, maybe take legal advice. She didn't want interference with her management of Francine, she didn't want busybodies coming in and taking away her control. Her denials poured out. 'Oh, no, no, what an idea! I wouldn't have that, I'd stop that. Let me have a look... He's gone now, disappeared. Somehow I have a feeling, an actual gut feeling, darling, that he won't come back.' 'I hope you're right. I should be home by six. Will Francine be home?' 'Oh, yes, quite early. She promised:' 'If you stayed here and slept here and were here all the time it would be all right.' Teddy spoke sullenly, in a grudging, accusing tone. 'I could do it right if you were here with me.' His grim looks troubled her. He ceased to be handsome or fun or attractive when he drew his black brows together and pushed out his lower lip. Paradoxically, he then looked much younger than his real age, like an overgrown naughty child. 'You won't do what I want,' he said. 'I only want you to do what I want, it's not much to ask, it's simple enough.' 'But I do do what you want, Teddy. I let you wrap me in all those silk things and draperies and whatever, and shine lights on me and put all that jewellery all over me, I do let you, but I can't do it all the time. It makes me feel - well, awkward, I don't know, uneasy. I can do it for a bit, but not for hours and hours.' 'Then what do you want?' 'Maybe go for a walk sometimes, have a meal somewhere, go out in the car, talk. I'd really just like to talk. We never talk.' They were in Harriet's bedroom, Francine on the bed whose sheets he had changed, puffing on the pillows white organza slips he had found in a cupboard. She had been naked at his request, hung only with all the many pearl necklaces he had discovered among Harriet's jewellery, but now, disconcerted by something she didn't know the name of, his obsessive gaze, she had wrapped herself in the white embroidered bedcover. 'I'm sorry, Teddy, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I don't think it's quite right you dressing me up, or not dressing me up really, and stating at me. It's -, she nearly said 'sick' but stopped herself '- not the way it should be.' Instead of answering he said, 'If we're in the complaints department I'd just like to say that I hate the way you dress. I hate your clothes, jeans and shirts and jackets a guy might wear on a building site. The first time I saw you you had a dress on. 'I can wear a dress if that's what you want.' 'Find something in the cupboard. Go on. There are plenty. She won't want them. I've got a job to do - remember? I'd best get on with it.' Left alone, Francine put on her underclothes and opened the wardrobe door. The interior reminded her of Noele's shop. Here hung the dresses and suits of a middle-aged woman of flashy taste, one partial to pearls, sequins and rhinestones. The colours were mostly red, black and white, but one dress of velvet was a startling emerald. Even if she had liked them she wouldn't have wanted to put on any of these garments. They weren't hers and she couldn't believe their owner wouldn't object to her wearing them. She expected the second wardrobe to contain a more casual line of clothes, but the things inside it were all men's. Suits, sports jackets, trousers, a camel-hair winter coat and the sort of raincoat policemen wear in television serials. A man's clothes, but not a young man's. It was no business of hers, Francine decided, and remembering what Teddy had said about her jeans and her shirt, after some small hesitation she put on a black silk dressing-gown. Whether Teddy wanted her to be with him while he worked she wasn't sure, but there was nothing else to do in this house. She went downstairs and, guided by the strong and heady smell of paint, found him in a corner of the hall at the back near the kitchen door. When he saw her he jumped. 'I didn't hear you.' She laughed. 'Julia would say you had a guilty conscience. Well, she'd more likely say you'd a guilty super-ego.' He didn't smile. 'Where did you find that dressing-gown?' 'It belongs to your friend - employer, client, whatever she is. Teddy, did you know that other wardrobe is full of men's clothes? You said she lived alone.' He put down the paint roller. He thought about what she had said. 'They must be Marc Syre's.' 'But he died before either of us was born.' 'I don't know, then. Does it matter?' She wasn't frightened of him, only puzzled. He followed her up the stairs, switched off the light, went into the kitchen to clean his paint roller and wash his hands. 'What shall we do?' she said, like a child. 'Do?' 'I mean, you've finished working, so what shall we do for the rest of the day?' Instead of answering, he dried his hands, turned to her and snatched her into his arms. It was like that, a seizing of her, rough and sudden. He pushed the dressing-gown down off her shoulders and kissed her neck and her breasts. He held her waist in his two hands as one might hold a bunch of flowers. 'It'll be all right now, he kept whispering. 'Come with me now, it'll be fine now.

Chapter 30