The Bridesmaid Ruth Rendell

1

Violent death fascinates people. It upset Philip. He had a phobia about it. Or that was what he called it to himself sometimes, a phobia for murder and all forms of killing, the wanton destruction of life in war and its senseless destruction in accidents. Violence was repellent, in reality, on the screen, in books. He had felt like this for years, since he was a small child and other children pointed toy guns and played at death. When it had begun or what began it he didn't know. A curious thing was that he wasn't cowardly or squeamish, he was no more nor less frightened by it than anyone else. It was rather that unnatural death neither entertained him nor exercised a ghoulish attraction. His reaction was to shy away from it in whatever form it might be presented to him. He knew this was unusual. He hid his phobia, or tried to hide it. When the others watched television he watched it with them and he didn't close his eyes. He had never got into the way of denouncing newspapers or novels. But the others knew and had no particular respect for his feelings. It didn't stop them talking about Rebecca Neave. Left to himself, Philip would have taken no interest in her disappearance, still less speculated about her. He would have turned off the set. Of course he would probably have turned it off ten minutes before and avoided Northern Ireland, Iran, Angola, and a train crash in France as well as a missing girl. He would never have looked at the photograph of her pretty face, the smiling mouth and eyes screwed up against the sun, the hair blown by the wind.

Rebecca disappeared at about three on an autumn afternoon. Her sister spoke to her on the phone on Wednesday morning and a man who was a friend of hers, a new friend who had been out with her just four times, phoned her at lunchtime on that day. That was the last time her voice was heard. A neighbour saw her leave the block of flats where she lived. She was wearing a bright green velvet tracksuit and white trainers. That was the last anyone saw of her. Fee said, when the girl's face appeared on screen, 'I was at school with her. I thought I knew the name. Rebecca Neave. I thought I'd heard it before.' 'I've never heard it. You've never said you had a friend called Rebecca.' 'She wasn't a friend, Cheryl. There were three thousand of us at that school. I don't suppose I even spoke to her.' Fee was staring intently at the screen while her brother made as conscious an effort not to look. He had picked up the newspaper and turned to an inside page where the Rebecca Neave story had not penetrated. 'They must think she's been murdered,' Fee said. Rebecca's mother appeared and made an appeal for news of her missing daughter. Rebecca was twenty-three. Her job was teaching ceramics to adult classes but needing to supplement her income, she advertised her services as a baby-sitter and house-sitter. It seemed possible that someone had phoned in answer to her advertisement. Rebecca had made an appointment for that evening - and kept it. Or that was what her mother believed. 'Oh, the poor woman,' said Christine, coming in with coffee on a tray. 'What she must be going through. I can just imagine how I'd feel if it was one of you.' 'Well, it's not likely to be me,' said Philip who was well-built though thin, and six feet two. He looked at his sisters. 'Can I turn this off now?' 'You can 'i stand anything like that, can you?' Cheryl had a ferocious scowl she seldom bothered to restrain. 'She may not have been murdered. Hundreds of people go missing every year. 'There'll be more to it than we know,' Fee said. 'They wouldn't make all this fuss if she'd just gone off. It's funny, I remember her being in the same crafts group as I was for 0 Levels. They said she wanted to go on and be a teacher and the rest of them thought it was funny because all they wanted was to get married. Go on, turn it off, Phil, if you want. There isn't going to be any more about Rebecca anyway. 'Why can't they put nice things on the news?' said Christine. 'You'd think they would be just as sensational. It can't be that there aren't any nice things, can it?' 'Disasters are news,' said Philip. 'but it might be an idea to try your kind for a change. They could have a list of today's rescues, all the people saved from drowning, all those who'd been in car crashes and didn't get killed.' He added on a more sombre note, 'A list of kids who haven't been abused and girls who've got away from attackers.' He switched off the set. There was a positive pleasure in seeing the picture dwindle and swiftly vanish. Fee hadn't gloated over Rebecca Neave's disappearance but speculation about it obviously interested her far more than discussing one of Christine's 'nice things' would have. He made a rather artificial effort to talk about something else. 'What time are we all supposed to be going out tomorrow?' 'That's right, change the subject. That's so like you, Phil.' 'He said to be there by about six.' Christine looked rather shyly at the girls and then back to Philip. 'I want you all to come out into the garden a minute. Will you? I want to ask your advice.' It was a small bleak garden, best at this time of the day when the sun was setting and the shadows were long. A row of Leyland cypresses prevented the neighbours from seeing over the fence at the end. In the middle of the grass was a circular slab of concrete and on the concrete stood a birdbath and a statue, side by side. There was no moss growing on the concrete but weeds pushed their way through a split under the birdbath. Christine laid her hand on the statue's head and gave it a little stroke in the way she might have caressed a child. She looked at her children in that apprehensive way sh~e had, half-diffident, half-daring. 'What would you say if I said I'd like to give Flora to him for a present?' Fee seldom hesitated, was invariably strong. 'You can't give people statues as presents.' 'Why not, if they like them?' Christine had said. 'He said he liked her and she'd look nice in his garden. He said she reminded him of me.' Fee said as if their mother hadn't spoken, 'You give people chocolates or a bottle of wine.' 'He brought me wine.' Christine said this in a wondering and gratified tone, as if taking a bottle of wine to the house of a woman you were having~dinner with, was exceptionally thoughtful and generous. She moved her hand along Flora's marble shoulder. 'She's always reminded me of a bridesmaid. It's the flowers, I expect.' Philip had never looked closely at the marble girl before. Flora was just the statue which had stood by the pond in their garden at home ever since he could remember. His father, he had been told, had bought her while he and Christine were on their honeymoon. She stood about three feet high and was a copy in miniature of a Roman statue. In her left hand she held a sheaf of flowers, with the other she reached for the hem of her robe, lifting it away from her right ankle. Both her feet were on the ground yet she seemed to be walking or dancing some sedate measure. But it was her face which was particularly beautiful. Looking at her, Philip realised that generally he didn't find the faces of ancient Greek or Roman statues attractive. Their heavy jaws and long bridgeless noses gave them a forbidding look. Standards of beauty had changed perhaps. Or else it was something more delicate that appealed to him. But Flora's face was how a beautiful living girl's might be today, the cheekbones high, the chin round, the upper lip short and the mouth the loveliest conjunction of tenderly folded lips. It was like a living girl's but for the eyes. Flora's eyes, extremely wide apart, seemed to gaie at far horizons with an expression remote and pagan. 'I've thought for ages she was wasted here,' said Christine. 'She looks silly. Well, what I really mean is, she makes the rest of it look silly.' It was true. The statue was too good for her surroundings. 'Like putting champagne in a plastic cup,' said Philip. 'That's it exactly.' 'You can give her away if you want to,' Cheryl said. 'She's yours. She's not ours. Dad gave her to you.' 'I think of all the things as being ours,' said Christine. 'He's got a lovely garden, he says. I think I'd feel Wetter about Flora if I knew she was in her proper setting. Do you know what I mean?' She looked at Philip. No amount of proselytising on the part of her daughters could persuade her of the equality of the sexes, no pressure from newspapers, magazines or television convince her. Her husband was dead so she looked to her son, not her eldest child, for decisions, rulings, counsel. 'We'll take her with us tomorrow,' Philip said. It didn't seem so very important at the time. Why should it? It didn't seem one of those life or death decisions like whether or not to marry, have a child, change a career, have or not have the vital surgery. Yet it was as significant as any of those. Of course it was to be a long time before he thought of it in those terms. He tested Flora's weight, lifting her up an inch or two. She was as heavy as he had expected. He suddenly found himself thinking of Flora as a symbol of his mother, who had come to his father on his marriage and was now to be passed on to Gerard Arnham. Did that mean Christine was contemplating marrying him? They had met the previous Christmas at Philip's uncle's office party and it had been a slow courtship, if courtship it was. That might in part have been due to the fact that Arnham was always going abroad for his company. Arnham had only once been to this house, as far as Philip knew. Now they were going to meet him. That made it seem as if things were taking a more serious turn. His mother said, 'I don't think we'd better take Hardy.' The little dog, the Jack Russell Christine had named after Hardy Amies because she liked the clothes he designed, had come into the garden and stood close beside her. She bent down and patted his head. 'He doesn't like dogs. I don't mean he'd be cruel to them or anything.' She spoke as if an antipathy to dogs often implied a willingness to torture them. 'He just doesn't care for them much. I could tell he didn't like Hardy that evening he was here.' Philip went back into the house and Fee said, 'Seeing Flora reminded me Rebecca Neave once made a girl's head.' 'What do you mean, made a girl's head?' 'At school. In pottery. She made it in clay. It was lifesize. The teacher made her break it up, she wouldn't have it put in the kiln, because we were supposed to be making pots. And, just imagine, she may be lying dead somewhere now.' 'I'd rather not imagine, thanks. I'm not fascinated by these things the way you are.' Fee took Hardy on to her lap. He always came wooing people at this hour, hoping for a walk. 'It's not that I'm fascinated, Phil. We're all interested in murder and violence and crime. They say it's because we've got elements of it in ourselves. We're all capable of murder, we all sometimes want to attack people, strike them, hurt them.' 'I don't.' 'He really doesn't, Fee,' said Cheryl. 'You know he doesn't. And he doesn't like talking about it, so shut up.' He was carrying Flora because he was the only male among them and therefore presumably the strongest. Without a car it was a terrible journey from Cricklewood to Buckhurst Hill. They had got the bus down to Kilburn station, the tube from Kilburn to Bond Street and there waited ages for a Central Line train. It had been just before four when they left the house and it was ten to six now. Philip had never been to this part of metropolitan Essex before. It reminded him a little of Barnet where living had been gracious and the sun seemed always to shine. There were houses in the street they were walking up but they were hidden by hedges and trees and it might have ben a country lane. His mother and sisters were all ahead of him now and he hurried up, shifting Flora on to the other side. Cheryl, who had nothing to carry but was wearing high heels with her very tight jeans, said in a moaning way, 'Is it much further, Mum?' 'I don't know, dear. I only know what Gerard told me, up the hill and the fourth turning on the right.' Christine was always saying things were nice. 'Nice' was her favourite word. 'It's a very nice part, isn't it?' She was wearing a pink linen dress with a white jacket. She had white beads and pink lipstick and looked the sort of woman who would scarcely stay single for long. Her hair was soft and fluffy and the sunglasses hid the lines under her eyes. Philip had noticed that though she had her wedding ring on - he had never seen her without it - she had left off her engagement ring. Christine prob ably had some unexpressed dotty reason for doing this, such as that engagement rings represented the love of a living husband while wedding rings were a social requirement for widows as well as wives. Fee, of course, was wearing her own engagement ring. The better to show it off, Philip conjectured, she carried something she called a clutch bag in her left hand. The formal dark blue suit with a too-long skirt made her look older than she was, too old, Arnham might think, to be Christine's daughter. He hadn't taken any particular pains over his appearance. His efforts had been concentrated on getting Flora ready. Christine had said to try and get that green stain off the marble and he had had a go with soap and water but unsuccessfully. She had provided tissue paper to wrap the statue in. Philip had wrapped her in a second layer of newspaper, that morning's paper, which had the Rebecca Neave story spread all over the front page. There was another photograph of Rebecca and an account of how a man, unnamed, but aged twenty-four, had spent all the previous day with the police 'helping them with their enquiries'. Philip had quickly rolled the statue up in this paper and then bundled it into the plastic bag that Christine's raincoat had been in when it came back from the cleaners. This hadn't perhaps been a good idea, for it made a slippery package. Flora kept slipping and having to be hoisted up again. His arms ached from shoulder to wrist. The four of them had turned, at last, into the road where Arnham lived. The houses weren't detached as theirs in Barnet had been but terraced in curving rows, 'town houses' with gardens full of shrubs and autumn flowers. Philip could see already that one of these gardens would be a more suitable setting for Flora. Arnham's house was three-storeyed, with Roman blinds at the windows and a brass lion's head knocker on the dark green Georgian front door. Christine paused at the gate with a look of wonder. 'What a pity he's got to sell it! But it can't be helped, I suppose. He has to share the proceeds with his ex-wife.' It was unfortunate, Philip thought later, that Arnham opened the front door just at the moment when Cheryl said loudly, 'I thought his wife was dead! I didn't know he was divorced. Isn't that yucky!' Philip would never forget his first sight of Gerard Arnham. His first impression was that the man they were visiting was far from pleased to see them. He was of medium height, strongly built but not fat. His hair was grey but thick and sleek and he was good-looking in what Philip thought of, without being able to explain why, as a sort of Italian or Greek way. His handsome features were fleshy and his lips full. He wore cream-coloured slacks, a white shirt with an open neck and a lightweight jacket in a large but not over-bold check of dark blue and cream and brown. The look on his face changed from dismay to an appalled disbelief that made him briefly close his eyes. He opened them again very quickly and came down the steps and hid whatever it was that was upsetting him under hearty politeness. Philip expected him to kiss Christine, and perhaps Christine expected this too for she went to him with her face held up, but he didn't kiss ner. He shook hands with everyone. Philip put Flora down on the step while he shook hands. Christine said, 'This is Fiona, m~y eldest. She's the one i told you is getting married next year. And this is Philip who's just got his degree and is training to be an interior designer and this is Cheryl - she's just left school.' 'And who's this?' Arnham said. The way Philip had set Flora down she did look like a fifth member of their party. Her wrappings were coming off. Head and one arm poked out of the hole in the cleaning bag. Her serene face whose eyes seemed always to be looking beyond you and into the distance, was now entirely uncovered as was her right hand in which she held the sheaf of marble flowers. The greeen stain on her neck and bosom had suddenly become very noticeable as had the chip out of one of her ears. 'You remember her, Gerard. She's Flora who was in my garden and you said you liked her so much. We've brought her for you. She's yours now.' When Arnham didn't say anything, Christine persisted, 'For a present. We've brought her for you because you said you liked her.' Arnham was obliged to make a show of enthusiasm but he didn't do it very well. They left Flora out there and went into the house. Necessarily, because there were four of them and the hallway was narrow so that they had to proceed singly, they seemed to troop into the house. Philip felt glad they at least hadn't brought Hardy. This was no place for a dog. It was very beautifully decorated and furnished. Philip always noticed these things. If he hadn't he probably wouldn't have been taking the training course at Rose-berry Lawn Interiors. One day, a day that was necessarily far off, he would like a living room in his house like this one with ivy-green walls and drawings in narrow gilt frames and a carpet whose glorious deep soft yellow reminded him of Chinese porcelain seen in museums. Through an archway he could see into the dining room. A small table was laid for two. There were two pink table napkins in two tall pink glasses and a single pink carnation in a fluted vase. Before he could fully realise what this meant Arnham was ushering them all into the garden by a back way. He had picked up Flora, very much as if, Philip thought, he feared she might dirty his carpet, and was swinging her along like a bag of shopping. Once outside he dumped her in the flowerbed that was the border of a small rockery and making an excuse, disappeared into the house. The Wardmans stood on the lawn. Fee looked at Philip behind Christine's back and behind Cheryl's back, put up her eyebrows and gave the kind of satisfied nod that is the equivalent of a thumbs-up sign. She was indicating that she approved of Arnham, that Arnham would do. Philip shrugged his shoulders. He turned to look at Flora once more, at the marble face which certainly wasn't Christine's face or that of any real woman he had ever known. The nose was classical; the eyes rather too wide apart, the soft lips too indented, and there was a curiously glazed look on the face as if she were untroubled by normal human fears and doubts and inhibitions. Arnham came back apologising and they set Flora up in a position where she could contemplate her own reflection in the waters of a very small pond. They wedged her in place between two grey stones over which a golden-leaved plant had spread its tendrils. 'She looks just right there,' said Christine. 'It seems a shame she can't stay there for ever. You'll just have to take her with you when you move.' 'Yes.' 'I expect you'll have another nice garden wherever it is. Arnham didn't say anything. There was a chance, Philip thought, for he knew his mother, that Christine would say a formal farewell to Flora. It would be like her. He wouldn't have been surprised to hear her say goodbye and bid Flora be a good girl. Her silence gratified him, the dignified way she preceded Arnham back into the house. He understood. There was no need to say goodbye to someone you would soon be living with for the rest of your life. Had anyone else seen or was he alone in noticing that the little table in the dining room had been stripped of cloth, silver, glass and pink carnation? That was why Arnham had come back into the house, to clear this table. Much was made plain to Philip. Christine had been expected on her own. His mother and sisters seemed not to understand that any social solecism had been committed. Cheryl sprawled on the settee, her legs apart and stuck out on the rug. She was obliged to sit like that, of course, because her jeans were too tight and her heels too high to permit of bending her knees and setting the soles of her feet on the floor. Fee had lit a cigarette without asking Arnham if he minded. As she looked round for an ashtray, conspicuously absent among all the variety of ornaments, little cups and saucers, china animals, miniature vases, and while she waited for Arnham to come back with one from the kitchen the inch of ash fell off the end of her cigarette on to the yellow carpet. Arnham didn't say anything. Fee began talking of the missing girl. She was sure the man who had been helping police with their enquiries must be this Martin Hunt, the one the papers and television said had phoned on the day of her disappearance. It was what they always said, the terminology always used, when they meant they had caught a murderer but couldn't yet prove he had done it. If the papers said any more, gave the man's name for instance, or said he was suspected of murder, they might risk a libel action. Or be breaking the law. 'I bet the police grilled him unmercifully. I expect they beat him up. All sorts of things go on we don't suspect, don't they? They wanted a confession from him because they're too thick often to actually get evidence like detectives in books do. I don't suppose they believed he'd only been out with her four times. And it's hard for them because they haven't got a body. They don't even know for certain she's been murdered. That's why they have to get a confession. They have to extort a confession.~ 'We have the most restrained and civilised police force in the world,' Arnham said stiffly. Instead of denying this, Fee smiled a little and lifted her shoulders. 'They take it for granted when a person gets murdered it's l~er husband if she's got one or her boy friend. Don't you think that's awful?' 'Why do we have to think about it?' Cheryl asked. 'I don't know why we have to talk about it. Who cares about those revolting things, anyway?' Fee took no notice. 'Personally, I think it was the person who phoned in answer to her advertisement. It was some mad person who phoned and enticed her to their house and killed her. I expect the police think it was Martin Hunt putting on a false voice.' Philip thought h~ could see disgust and perhaps boredom on Aruham's face, but perhaps this was only a projection of his own feelings. He risked Fee's telling him he was changing the subject and said quickly, 'I was admiring that picture,' he began, pointing to the rather strange landscape over the fireplace. 'Is it a Samuel Palmer?' Of course he meant a print. Anyone would have known he meant that but Arnham, looking incredulous, said, 'I shouldn't think so for one moment if Samuel Palmer is who I think he is. My ex-wife bought it in a garage sale.' Philip blushed. His efforts anyway had done nothing to stem the tide of Fee's forensic narrative. 'She's probably dead already and they've found the body and are keeping it dark. For their own reason. To trap someone.' 'If that's tru. e,' Arnham said, 'it will come out at the inquest. In this country the police don't keep things dark.' It was Cheryl who spoke, who hadn't uttered a word since they came back from the garden. 'Who are you trying to kid?' Arnham made no reply to that. He said very stiffly, 'Would you like a drink?' His eyes ranged over them as if they were a dozen people instead of four. 'Any of you?' 'What have you got?'~This was Fee. Philip had a very good idea this wasn't a question you asked people like Arnham, though it might have gone down perfectly well in the circles Fee and Darren moved in. 'Anything you will be able to think of.' 'Then can I have a bacardi and coke?' Of course that was something he didn't have. He dispensed second choices, sherry, gin and tonic. To Philip's astonishment, though he knew she could be strangely insensitive, Christine seemed unaware of how frigid the atmosphere had grown. With a glass of Bristol Cream in her hand, she continued along the lines Philip himself had set and made admiring comments on various items of Arnham's furniture and ornaments. Such and such a thing was nice, everything was very nice, the carpets were particularly nice and of such good quality. Philip marvelled at her transparency. She spoke as one humbly grateful for an unexpected munificent gift. Arnham said harshly, smashing all that, 'Everything will have to be sold. There's a court order that everything has to be sold and the proceeds divided between myself and my ex-wife.' He drew a long breath that sounded stoical. 'And now I suggest you let me take you all out for a meal somewhere. I don't think we can quite manage anything here. The local steakhouse - how will that suit?' He took them in the Jaguar. It was a big car so there was no difficulty about their all getting into it. Philip thought he ought to feel grateful to Arnham for taking them all out and paying for their dinner but he didn't. He felt it would have been better for him to have come out with the truth, said he had only been expecting Christine and then entertained Christine on her own as he had originally planned to do. He and Fee and Cheryl wouldn't have minded, they would have preferred it - at any rate he would - to sitting here in the glowing dimness, the pseudo country manor decor, of a second-rate restaurant above a supermarket, trying to make conversation with someone who was obviously longing for them to leave. People of Arnham's generation lacked openness, Philip thought. They weren't honest. They were devious. Christine was the same, she wouldn't speak her mind, she would think it rude. He hated the way she praised every dish that came as if Arnham had cooked it himself. Away from his own home Arnham had become much more expansive, talking pleasantly, drawing Cheryl out as to what she meant to do now she had left school, asking Fee about her fiance and what he did for a living. He seemed to have got over his initial disappointment or anger. The interest he showed in her started Cheryl talking about their father, the least suitable of all possible subjects, Philip thought. But Cheryl had been closer to Stephen than any of his children, hadn't, even now, begun the process of recovering from his death. 'Oh yes, it's quite true, he was like that,' Christine said with a shade of embarrassment after Cheryl had spoken of their father's love of gambling. 'Mind you, no one suffered. He would never have had his family go without. Really, we benefited, didn't we? A lot of the nice things we've got came from his gambling. 'Mum got her honeymoon paid for out of Dad's Derby win,' said Cheryl. 'But it wasn't only horses with Dad, was it, Mum? He'd bet on anything. If you were with him waiting for a bus he'd bet on which would come first, the 16 or the 32. If the phone rang he'd say, "Fifty nee it's a man's voice, Cheryl, or fifty pee it's a woman's." I used to go to the dogs with him, I loved that, it was so exciting sitting there drinking a coke and maybe eating a meal and watching the dogs go round. He never got cross, my Dad. When he felt one of his bad moods coming on he'd say, "OK, what'll we have a bet on? There are two birds on the lawn, a blackbird and a sparrow, I bet you a pound the sparrow flies away first." 'His whole life was gambling,' said Christine with a sigh. 'And us.' Cheryl uttered it fiercely. She had had two glasses of wine which had gone to her head. 'We were first, then the gambling.' It was true. Even his work had been gambling, so to speak, speculation on the Stock Exchange, until one day, the result perhaps of a lifetime of anxieties and stress, chain-smoking, long days and short nights, sitting with the phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his heart ruptured and stopped. The heart disease, of long standing but concealed from his wife and children, had meant. there was no life assurance, very little provision of any kind and a mortgage on the Barnet house which was covered by no insurance policy. With no reason to expect it, he had planned to live for years, to amass in that time by speculation among other forms of gambling, a fortune to maintain his family after he was gone. 'We even got Flora through a bet,' Christine was saying. 'We were on our honeymoon in Florence, walking along a Street that's full of antique shops, and I saw Flora in the window and said wasn't she lovely? The house we'd had built had a little garden, not the big garden we had in Barnet, but a nice little garden, and I could just imagine Flora standing by our pond. You tell him what happened, Cheryl, the way Dad told you.' Philip could see Arnham was quite interested. He was smiling. After all, he had spoken about his ex-wife, so why shouldn't Christine talk of her dead husband? 'Mum said she'd be terribly expensive, but Dad was never one to care about things costing a lot. He said her face was like Mum's - but I don't really think it is, do you?' 'Perhaps a bit,' Arnham said. 'Anyway, he said he liked her because she looked like Mum. He said, "I'll tell you what, we'll have a bet on it. I bet she's Venus, I bet she's the goddess Venus. If she's ,,, not I'll buy her for you. 'I thought Venus was a star,' said Christine. 'Stephen said not, she was a goddess. Cheryl knows, she's done all that at school.' 'So they went into the shop and the man in there spoke English and he told Dad she wasn't Venus, Venus is nearly always bare above the waist, sort of topless. 'You needn't tell him that, Cheryl!' 'Dad didn't mind telling me - it's art, isn't it? The man in the shop said she was a copy of the Farnese Flora. She was the goddess of spring and flowers and her own flowers were may blossom. That's what she's holding in her hand. Anyway, Dad had to buy her after that and she cost a lot, hundreds of thousands of whatever their money's called, and they had to have her sent home because they couldn't carry her in the aircraft.' The conversation had come round to its starting point in Arnham's house when the statue had first been presented to him. It was this which was perhaps the signal for him to call for the bill. When Cheryl had finished he said, 'You make me feel I shouldn't have accepted her.' He seemed to be doing sums in his head, converting lire perhaps. 'No, I really can't accept her. She's much too valuable a gift.' 'Yes, Gerard, I want you to have her.' They were outside the restaurant by the time Christine said this. It was dark. Philip heard the words, though Arnham and Christine were walking a little apart from them and Christine had taken his hand. Or he had taken Christine's. 'It means a lot to me for you to have her. Please. It makes me happy to think of her there.' Why had he got the idea into his head that Arnham meant only to drive them as far as Buckhurst Hill station? Nothing had been said. Perhaps he really was in love with Christine and put himself out for her as a matter of course. Or it might be that he felt under an obligation on account of Flora. Philip thought the earlier awkwardness had quite passed. Christine sat in the front and chatted to Arnham about the neighbourhood and where she used to live and where she now lived and about whether or not she should take up hairdressing again, which had been her job before she married. Because they needed 'a bit more coming in', which was all very artless but made Philip wince. It did seem as if she were throwing herself at him. She was really 'waiting to see what happened' before she definitely made up her mind to start a hairdressing business from home. Arnham talked pleasantly enough about his own plans. The house had to be sold and all the furniture. He and his ex-wife had agreed it should be auctioned with all its contents and he hoped this might happen while he was out of the country on business. A flat wouldn't suit him, he would have to buy himself another house, but in the same district or not far away. What did Christine think of Epping? 'I used to go to Epping Forest on picnics when I was a child.' 'You've been very near Epping Forest today,' Arnham said, 'but I meant Epping itself. Or Chigwell even. I might stand a chance of finding a smaller place in Chigwell Row.' 'You could always come up our way,' said Christine. Cricklewood, that was, and Glenallan Close where Christine, newly widowed, had been obliged to move. The most optimistic of estate agents would hardly have called it desirable. Philip reminded himself that Arnham had been there before, the clumps of red-brick houses with their flat metal-framed windows, pantiled roofs, wire fences and skimpy gardens, would come as no shock to him. Darkness and the shining mist from Street lamps shrouded in leaves concealed the worst. It was no slum. It was only poor and barren and shabby. Philip and Fee and Cheryl, as if by mutual understanding, hurried into the house, leaving Christine and Arnham to make their farewells. But Christine was very quick about it, running up the path just as the front door came open and Hardy rushed out, hurtling himself at her with yelps of joy. 'What did you think of him? Did you like him?' The car had scarcely gone. Christine stood watching it depart, Hardy in her arms. 'Yes, he's OK.' Fee, on the settee, was hunting for the latest on the Rebecca Neave affair in the Evening Standard. 'Did you like him, Cheryl? Gerard, I mean.' 'Me? Sure, yeah. I liked him. I mean, he's OK. He's a lot older than Dad, isn't he? I mean, he looks older.' 'I put my foot in it, though, didn't I? I realised as soon as we were in the door. I'd said to him, you must meet my children sometime, and ~he sort of smiled and said he'd like to and the next thing he said was to come over to his house next Saturday, and I don't know why, I took it he meant all of us. But of course he didn't, he meant me alone. I felt awful. Did you see that little table laid for just two with the flower and everything?' Philip took Hardy round the grid of streets before going to bed. He came in the back way and stood there for a moment, looking at the empty space by the birdbath on which light from the kitchen window was shed, where Flora had stood. By then it was too late to undo what had been done. Returning to Buckhurst Hill on the following day, for instance, and retrieving Flora - that would have been too late. In any case, he had no feelings of that sort then, only a sense that things had been mismanaged and the day wasted.

2

A postcard came with a picture on it of the White House. This was less than two weeks after the visit to Buckhurst Hill and Arnham was in Washington. Christine had been typically vague about what job he did but Philip found out that he was export manager for a British company in a building near the head office of Roseberry Lawn. Fee brought in the post on Saturday morning, noting the name of the addressee and the stamp but honourably not reading the message. Christine read it to herself and then read it aloud. 'Have come on here from New York and next week shall be in California or "The Coast" as they call it over here. The weather is a lot better than at home. I have left Flora to look after the house! Love, Gerry.' She put the card on the mantelpiece between the clock and the photograph of Cheryl holding Hardy as a puppy. Later in the day Philip saw her reading it again, with her glasses on this time, then turning it over to look closely at the picture as if in the hope of seeing some mark or cross Arnham might have made there, indicative of personal occupancy or viewing point. A letter came in the following week, not an air letter but several sheets of paper in an airmail envelope. Christine didn't open this in company, still less read it aloud. 'I think that was him on the phone last night,' Fee said to Philip. 'You know when the phone went at - oh, it must have been all of eleven-thirty. I thought who's ringing us at this hour? Mum jumped up as if she'd been expecting it. But she went straight to bed afterwards and she never said a word.' 'It would have been half-past six in Washington. He'd have finished his day's work and be ready to go out for the evening.' 'No, he'll be in California by this time. I worked it all out, it would have been early afternoon in California, he'd just have had his lunch. He was on the phone for ages, it was obvious he didn't care what it cost.' Philip thought, though he didn't say so, that Arnham would have put the cost of phone calls to London on his expense account. The fact that he had had plenty to talk to Christine about was more significant. 'Now Darren and I have fixed on next May for getting maried,' Fee said, 'if he and Mum got engaged at Christmas, why shouldn't we be married at the same time? I don't see why you shouldn't have this house, Phil. Mum won't want it, you can tell he's rich. You and Jenny could take over this house. I mean, I suppose you and Jenny will get married one day, won't you?' Philip only smiled. The idea of the house was inviting and something he had never thought about before. He wouldn't have chosen it but it was a house, it was somewhere to live. That this was a real possibility he came to see more and more. His fears that their unexpected invasion of his house might have changed Arnham's feelings for Christine or at least made him proceed with caution seemed unfounded. No more postcards arrived and if there were letters Philip didn't see them, but another late phone call came and a few days later Christine confided in him that she had had a long conversation with Arnham during the afternoon. 'He has to sPy on a bit longer. He's going to Chicago next.' She spoke on a note of awe as if Arnham were contemplating a space tour to Mars or as if the Valentine's Day massacre had taken place quite recently. 'I hope he'll be all right.' Philip was never indiscreet enough to say anything about the house to Jenny. He managed to contain himself even when one evening, as they were walking back from the cinema along an unfamiliar street, she pointed out a block of flats where several were advertised to let. 'When you've finished your training... It was a flat ugly building, about sixty years old, with peeling art deco adornments over the front entrance. He shook his head, said something about an exorbitant rent. She held on to his arm. 'Is it because of Rebecca Neave?' He looked at her in astonishment. A month and more had passed since the girl's disappearance. Theories, whole articles of speculation, appeared from time to time in newspapers outlining their authors' ideas of what had become of her. There was no real news, there had been no leads that could be called firm. She had vanished as surely as if she had been made invisible and spirited away. The name for a second meant nothing to Philip, so securely had he banished it from his mind, hating to dwell on these things. The identity of its possessor came back to him uneasily. 'Rebecca Neave?' 'She lived there, didn't she?' Jenny said. 'I had no idea.' He must have spoken very coldly, for he could sense her looking at him as if she thought he was pretending to something he didn't truly feel. But this phobia of his was real enough and sometimes it extended to the human beings who allowed violence to occupy their minds. He didn't want to seem smug or prudish. Because she expected him to do so, he looked up at the building, bathed in the orangeade sticky light of stilt-borne street lamps. Not a window was open on the facade. The front doors swung apart and a woman came out briskly and got into a car. Jenny was unable to say exactly which flat had been Rebecca's but she guessed its windows were the two in the very top right-hand corner. 'I thought that was why you didn't fancy it.' 'I don't fancy living all the way up here.' North of the North Circular Road, he meant. He thought of the surprise it would be telling her of his acquisition of a house rent-free, but something stayed him, some inner prudence held him back. It might be only a matter of weeks before he knew - until then he could refrain. 'Anyway, I ought to wait till I've got a proper job,' he said. The last time he knew Arnham had phoned Christine was at the end of November. He heard her speaking to someone quite late at night and call him Gerry. Soon after that he expected Arnham home - or Fee did. Fee watched their mother as once a mother might have watched her daughter, looking for an air of excitement, for changes in her appearance. They wouldn't ask. Christine never questioned them about their private affairs. Fee said she seemed depressed but Philip couldn't see it, she was just the same as far as he knew. Christmas passed and his training course came to an end. He was on the Roseberry Lawn staff now, a very junior surveyor-planner, on a salary of which he was obliged to part with a third to Christine. When Fee went it would be more than a third and he must learn not to mind that either. Christine, quite quietly and not making any fuss about it, began earning a little by doing the neighbours' hair at home. If his father had been alive, Philip thought, he would have stopped Cheryl working at Tesco on the checkout. Not that this endured for long. She only lasted there three weeks and afterwards, instead of trying to get another job, went on the dole with indifferent acceptance. In the living room in Glenallan Close, a room which had once been two - very tiny poky rooms they must have been, for combined they measured not much more than six metres - the postcard with the White House on it remained on the mantelpiece. All the Christmas cards had been taken down but Arnham's card remained. Philip would have liked to take it down and throw it away but he had an uneasy feeling Christine treasured it. Once, looking at it sideways in sunlight, he saw that its glossy surface was covered with her fingermarks. 'Perhaps he just hasn't come back yet,' Fee said. 'He wouldn't be away on a business trip for four months.' Cheryl said unexpectedly, 'She's tried to phone him herself but the number's unobtainable. She told me so, she said his phone was out of order.' 'He was going to move,' Philip said slowly. 'He told us - don't you remember? He's moved without telling her.' At work, when he wasn't out visiting clients and prospective clients, he divided his time between the showrooms in Brompton Road and head office which was near Baker Street. Often, after parking his car or on his way out to lunch, he wondered if he might run into Arnham. For a while he hoped this might happen, perhaps only because the sight of her son might remind Arnham of Christine, but as he began to lose hope he shied away from a meeting. It had begun to be embarrassing. 'Hasn't Mum aged?' Fee said to him. Christine was out walking Hardy. In front of Fee on the table was a pile of wedding invitations. She was addressing envelopes. 'She looks years older, don't you think?' He nodded, hardly knowing what answer to make. And yet six months before he would have said their mother looked younger than at any time since Stephen Wardman's death. He had concluded that she was a woman with the type of looks which only youth suited, as Fee herself would be. That white and pink skin with its velvety texture was the first kind to fade. Like rose petals it seemed to turn brown at the edges. Pale blue eyes lost their brightness soofler than the dark sort. Golden hair turned to straw, to ash - particularly if you reserved none of the bleach you put on your customers' hair for yourself. Fee didn't pursue it. She said instead, 'I take it you've split up with Jenny? I mean I was going to ask her to be one of my bridesmaids but I won't if you've split up.' 'It looks like it,' he said, and then, 'Yes, we have. You can take it that's all over.' He didn't want to explain to her. This was something he felt he wasn't obliged to explain to anyone. There was no need for solemn announcements as if he had been in a permanent relationship and his marriage or even his engagement had broken up. In fact, it wasn't that Jenny had tried to pressurise him into marriage. She wasn't like that. But they had been going out together for a year and more. It was natural that she wanted him to move in with her, or rather, for the two of them to find a place where they could live together, as on the evening when she had shown him the block where Rebecca Neave had lived. He had to refuse, he couldn't leave Christine. Come to that, he couldn't afford to leave Christine. 'You and Mum both,' said Fee with a sigh. 'It's a good thing Darren and me are solid as a rock.' It was an expression that applied rather too accurately to Fee's future husband, Philip thought. Even Darren 's undeniably handsome face had something rock-like about it. He hadn't tried very hard to imagine why Fee could possibly want to marry him. The subject was one he shied away from. It might be that she would do anything to get away from the responsibilities of Glen-allan Close and all they involved. 'Then I expect I'll have to ask Senta,' Fee said. 'She's Darren's cousin and Darren's mother wants me to ask her, says she'll be hurt if I don't. And then there'll be Cheryl and Janice and another cousin of his called Stephanie. I'm longing for you to meet Stephanie, she's absolutely your type.' Philip didn't think he had a type. His girl friends had been tall and short, dark and fair. He found it hard to keep up with the ramifications of Darren's large extended family. So many of its members had been married two or three times, producing children each time and gathering in stepchildren. His father and his mother each had an ex-wife and an ex-husband. They made the Wardmans look rather sparse and isolated. His eyes went back to the card on the mantelpiece and without actually reading it again, he recalled the line about leaving Flora to look after the house, repeating it over and over to himself until it became meaningless. He began to notice too the empty space in the garden where Flora had formerly stood. One day, in his lunch hour, he found the building where the company Arnham worked for had its headquarters. He passed its doors as he was walking back to head office, by a slightly different route than usual, from the cafe where he had his sandwich and cup of coffee. For some reason he was sure he would meet Arnham, that Arnham too, at this hour, would be coming back from lunch, but although he didn't meet him, he came, in a way, near to doing so. He saw his car, the Jaguar, parked in one of the marked slots in a small parking area designated for employees of the company whose building abutted on to it. Philip would have said, if asked, that he didn't remember the index number of Arnham's car but as soon as he saw it he knew it was the number. His mother was in the kitchen doing a client's hair. Philip thought this was one of the things he most disliked about living at home, to come in and find the kitchen turned into a hairdresser's salon. And he always kn~w from the moment he let himself into the house. The smell of shampoo was rich and almondy in the air, or a worse smell if, as occasionally happened, she had been doing a perm. Then it was rotten eggs. He had remonstrated with her and asked what was wrong with the bathroom. Of course there was nothing wrong with the bathroom but it had to be heated and why go to the extra expense when the kitchen, with the Rayburn going, was warm anyway? As he hung his jacket up he heard a woman's voice say, 'Ooh, Christine, you've taken a nick out of my ear!' She wasn't a good hairdresser, she was always having little mishaps of that sort. It gave Philip nightmares sometimes when he imagined a customer suing her over a burnt scalp or bald patch suddenly manifesting itself or, as in this present case, a mutilated ear. No one ever had so far. She was so cheap, undercutting the salons in the High Road. That was why they came, these Gladstone Park housewives and shop assistants and part-time secretaries, as pinching and scraping and saving as she, as on the look-out for new ways to skimp. What with the cost of the hot water and the electricity, lighting the Rayburn when they needn't have, not to mention all those mousses and gels and moisturising sprays, he doubted if his mother was much better off than if she had stayed what she said she was not long ago, a lady of leisure. He gave them five minutes. That was enough to get his mother used to the fact that he was in. Fee was out somewhere, round at Darren's place probably, but Cheryl was at nome and in the bathroom. He could hear her transistor and then the water glugging out. He opened the kitchen door, making a throat-clearing sound first. Not that they could have heard him. His mother had the hand drier on. Philip's eyes went straight to the client's ear, to the lobe of which adhered a~ lump of bloody cotton wool. 'I expect Mrs Moorehead would like a cup of tea,' Christine said. This, with the sugar she would ladle in and the cake she would eat, was another source of erosion into the four pounds fifty Christine got for a shampoo, trim and blow dry. But it was hateful thinking like this, despicable having to think like it. He was as bad as his mother and, if he wasn't watchful, it would drive him to the extreme of offering the bloody woman a glass from their hoarded sherry stock. He could have done with one himself but had to be content with tea. 'Did you have a good day, dear? What did you do?' She had a quality of a kind of tactlessness, of saying, with the best intentions, the wrong thing. 'It's a treat for us two old women to have a man to talk to, isn't it, Mrs Moorehead? It makes such a nice change.' He could see the client, blonded, painted, fancying herself young still, draw herself up, her mouth pinch in. Quickly he began telling them about the house he had visited that day, the proposed conversion of a bedroom into a bathroom, the colour scheme. The kettle came to the boil, spluttered and bounced. He put an extra teabag in, though he knew the waste troubled Christine. 'Where was that, Philip? In a nice part, was it?' 'Oh, Chigwell way,' he said. 'This is a second bathroom, is it, dear?' He nodded, passed the client her cup, set Christine's down between the Elnett spray and a can of baked beans. 'We should be so lucky, shouldn't we, Mrs Moore-head? I'm afraid that's beyond our wildest dreams.' Another wince, the Moorhead woman's scalp knocking against the nozzle of the drier. 'Still, we must be thankful for what we do have, I know that, and Philip's promised me a new bathroom here one day, a really luxurious one, and quite a cut above what we're used to in this street.' Mrs Moorehead probably lived a couple of houses down. She had an angry aggressive look, but that was very likely habitual with her. He talked about bathrooms and traffic, about the springlike weather. Mrs Moorehead departed, off to some Rotarians' function, saying unnecessarily, Philip thought, that she wouldn't give Christine anything over the odds because 'you don't tip the boss'. Christine started tidying up the kitchen, stuffing wet towels into the washing machine. He guessed there were potatoes baking inside the Rayburn and with a sinking feeling knew they would once more be having her favourite standby, a can of beans emptied over a split-open jacket potato. Cheryl came in, dressed for going out. She sniffed, shivered. 'I don't want anything to eat.' 'I hope you're not getting to be anorexic,' Christine said worriedly. She peered at her daughter in that way she had. It was as if by extending her neck and bringing her face within inches of the other person, symptoms disguised by distance would startlingly manifest themselves. 'Will he buy you a meal?' 'Who's "he"? There's a crowd of us going bowling.' Cheryl was nervous and very thin, her wispy fair hair touched here and there with green and standing up like a bottle brush. She wore skin-tight jeans and a bulky black leather jacket. If she wasn't his sister, if he didn't know her and what she was really like, if he had met her in the street, Philip thought, he would have taken her for a tart, a slag. She looked horrible, her face gleaming with gel, the lips almost black, her fingernails quite black like attachments of patent leather. She was on something, he thought, but he didn't want to think of it. He almost trembled when he wondered if it might be hard drugs. How could she afford it? What did she do to be able to afford it? She hadn't a job. He watched her standing by the counter, investigating Christine's bottles and jars, notably a new type of foamy stuff for 'sculpturing', dipping in a black nail and sniffing it. If anything at all interested her it was cosmetics, what she called the 'beauty scene' but still she wouldn't apply for the beautician's course Fee had suggested. Over her shoulder hung a scuffed black leather handbag. Once, a week or two ago, he had seen it lying about open and notes spilling out, tenners and twenty-pound notes. He had forced himself next day to ask her where the money came from and she didn't flare at him or get on the defensive. She just opened the bag and showed him its emptiness, the purse with fifty pee in it in loose change. Philip was jerked from this reverie by Cheryl's slamming the front door. He wandered into the living room, carrying his refilled teacup. In this room he never specially noticed the furniture but he noticed it now. It was recalled to him, as it were, by the reversion of his mind to the past, by the shock of the re-encounter with Arnham's world. The furniture was too good for the room which held it - well, all but the rented television set. Christine had been obliged to sell the house and most of what she had, but not her living-room furniture, the settee and armchairs covered in hide, the mahogany dining table and chairs, the three or four antique pieces. It all looked incongruous in here, oversized, contrasting curiously with the tiles of the thirties' fireplace, biscuit-like in shape and colour, the unpanelled doors, the wall lights of pink glass platelets. Curled up in the armchair where he wasn't supposed to be, Hardy lay asleep. Seeing Arnham's car had at last shown him what he avoided facing. The man was home, had very likely been home for months. He had moved house without giving Christine his new phone number. He had ditched her -'jilted' her would probably be the term Christine's own generation would use. The evenings were beginning to grow light and it was possible to see from the french windows the birdbath and the patch of concrete where Flora had stood. Philip stood at the window, remembering Christine's enthusiasm at the idea of bringing the statue to Arnham as a gift. She came into the room with the plates of potatoes and beans. Water had slopped on to the tray from overfilled glasses. He quickly took it from her. His mother did her best. It was only - dreadful accusation! - that she did nothing well except emotional things. She was good at loving a man and good at making children feel safe and happy. Those functions came naturally to her. She couldn't help being expensive to keep, a waste-maker, one of those people who cost more by earning than they would by doing nothing. They watched television. This obviated for a while the need to talk. It was still only seven. He looked unseeing at the screen where a dancer in lame and feathers capered about. Christine, he noticed, her tray balanced on her lap, had surreptitiously opened her Brides magazine again and was looking longingly at ridiculous photographs of girls in white satin crinolines. Even Fee herself didn't want that, was resigned to a home-made wedding dress, and what the caterers called a 'finger buffet'. They would all share the cost but even so... And there was Christine still hankering after a thousand quid's worth of bridal gown, a sit-down dinner and a disco. She was looking at him. It occurred to him that in the whole of his twenty-two years of life he had never known her to be angry. And when she anticipated anger from others her face wore that particular expression it wore now, the eyes afraid, the lips parted in the beginnings of a hopeful, mollifying smile. He said to her, 'Is there any point in leaving that card there any longer?' It was a roundabou* way of asking what he didn't want to ask and knew the answer to, anyway. She turned pink, looked away. 'You can take it down if you want to.' Would she have given him that terrrible yet naive reason for her continued hope if Fee hadn't come in at that moment? But Fee did come in, sweeping in swiftly like a human breeze, the front door banging first, then the living room one behind her. She looked at their trays, turned up the television, then turned it off, dropped into an armchair, her arms hanging down over its sides. 'Have you had anything to eat, dear?' Christine said. If Fee had said no and what was there, Christine would have been hard put to it to produce even a sandwich. But she routinely enquired and Fee almost always gave an impatient shake of the head. 'I can't understand why people don't do things. Why don't they do what they say they'll do? Can you believe it, Stephanie hasn't even started on her dress yet and she's supposed to be making Senta's as well.' 'Why can't Senta make her own?' Philip asked, though he wasn't much interested in the activities of his sister s bridesmaids. 'If you knew Senta you wouldn't have to ask that. It's quite funny actually, the idea of her sewing anything.' 'Is that the one that's Darren's cousin?' Fee nodded in the way she had that made you think your enquiry irritated her. And then she grinned, wrinkling up her nose, looking at him as if they were conspirators. He realised quite suddenly how much he dreaded her departure from this house. There were only three weeks to go to her wedding and then she would be gone, never to return. Cheryl was useless, Cheryl was never at home. He would be alone with the responsibility of Christine and what guarantee had he now that this state of affairs would ever end, that he would ever be free? He kept seeing Arnham's car, parked there at the foot of the windowless, ivy-clad wall. Perhaps, like Christine, he had believed, or half-believed, that Arnham had never come back, that he was unaccountably still in America. Or ill. Ill in hospital somewhere for months and unable to get in touch. Or even that he had died. He jumped up and said he was going to take Hardy out, take him a bit further than the usual evening ambulation round the block. Would Fee come too? It was a fine mild evening, very warm for April. They walked along the pavements between the grassy patches with budding trees growing in them and the boundary walls of little square gardens. The grid of streets extended half a mile this way and half a mile that and then merged into Victorian sprawl. At one of the crossroads, waiting while Hardy investigated with exploratory sniffs a pair of gateposts and ceremoniously lifted his leg against them, Philip began to talk about Arnham, about seeing his car that day and therefore knowing now that he had simply deserted Christine. He had become indifferent to her. Unexpectedly, Fee said, 'He really ought to give Flora back.' 'Flora?' 'Well, don't you think he ought? Like giving back an engagement ring when you break things off, or returning letters.' Fee was an ardent reader of romantic fiction. She would need to be, marrying Darren, Philip sometimes thought. 'She's valuable, she's not a plastic garden gnome. If he doesn't want to face Mum, he ought to send her back.' This seemed ridiculous to Philip. He wished Christine had been less impetuous in the first place and never decided to present Arnham with this unsuitable gift. They crossed the road, the dog obediently by their side until they reached the opposite pavement where he beg, an to run on ahead, but decorously, his tail maintaining a constant cheerful wagging. Philip thought how strange it was, the different lights in which people saw things, even a brother and sister as close as he and Fee. He saw Arnham's offence in his encouraging Christine to love him and his abandonment of her. Then Fee surprised him by showing how nearly they did see eye to eye. She also shocked him. 'She thought he'd marry her, she thought that for ages,' Fee said. 'And do you know why? I don't suppose you do, but you know Mum, how sort of strange she is, like a child sometimes. I may as well tell you. You could say she confided in me but she didn't say I wasn't to tell you. 'Tell me what?' 'You won't let on to her I told you, will you? I mean, I think she told me because of being her daughter. It's sort of different, a son, isn't it? She just came out with it, out of the blue. It's why she was certain he'd marry her.' Fee's eyes returned to his face. They were almost tragic. 'I mean, any other woman wouldn't feel that way or she'd think just the reverse, especially someone her age, but you know Mum.' Philip really didn't have to be told any more. He felt a flush spread up his neck across his face. His face was burning and he put his cold hand up to touch the skin. If Fee noticed she gave no sign of it. 'That time he came here and she cooked a meal for them or got takeaway or something and we were all out somewhere, well, he - they - had sex, made love, whatever you call it. In her bedroom. Suppose one of us had come in? It would have been very embarrasssing.' He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked, looking down. 'I wish you hadn't told me.' The turmoil inside him frightened him. It was as if he were jealous as well as angry. 'Why did she tell you?' Fee had put her arm through his. He gave her no answering pressure, he was suddenly upset by physical contact. The dog ran on ahead. It was the hour of dusk when, briefly, everything appears clear and defined but with an unearthly, very chilly pale light. 'I don't know really. I reckon it was on account of Senta. Her mother's ten years older than Mum but she's always having affairs. She's got this new lover, Darren was telling me, and he's not thirty, and I told Mum, and that's when she came out with it. "I had an affair with Gerard," she said. "Well, just the once." You know how she gets expressions just that little bit wrong. "We had an affair that evening he came round with the wine and said he liked Flora.~~ He said nothing. Fee lifted her shoulders. He felt movement against his own but he didn't look at her. Without saying a word to each other, the idea came to them 5irnultaneously to turn back. Fee called to Hardy and put him on the lead. After a little while she began talking about her wedding, the arrangements at the church, the times the various cars would come to the house. Philip felt confused and angry and inexplicably terribly upset. When they returned to the house he knew he would be incapable of facing Christine again that night and he went straight upstairs to his room.

3

As a place to sleep in it was rather small, but it would make a~ spacious bathroom. It wasn't for him to ask why Mrs Ripple should wish to sacrifice her third bedroom in order to have a second bathroom, though he tended to wonder about these things. In other people's homes' as he so often was these days, Philip found himself speculating about all sorts of oddities and incongruities. Why, for instance, did she keep a pair of binoculars on the windowsill in here? To watch birds? To observe the behaviour of neighbours? The dressing-table was very low and there was no stool. If a woman wanted to do her hair or put make-up on in front of the mirror, she would have to sit on the floor. In the small bookcase were nothing but cookery books. Why didn't she keep her cookery books in the kitchen? He took his tape measure from his pocket and began measuring the room. Four metres thirty by three metres fifteen, and the ceiling height two metres fifty-two. He wouldn't be doing the design himself, he hadn't progressed so far yet. In any case, there would be nothing inspired or ambitous about it. Champagne bath and basin, she had chosen, a vanity unit with black marble top, and milk-colour tiles with a black and gold floral pattern. The window was to be double-glazed. He took his measurements with concentrated care. Roy would want to know widths and lengths to the nearest millimetre. The figures written down in his neat small hand in the Roseberry Lawn Interiors notebook, Philip leaned on the windowsill and looked outside. A collage of gardens lay below him, all the same size, each one separated from its neighbours by fencing with trellis on it. It was the most beautiful time of the year and the ornamental trees were in fresh new leaf, many of them in blossom, pink or white. Tulips were in bloom. These were among the few flowers he knew by name. The velvety brown and gold things which filled the end of Mrs Ripple's garden he thought might be wallflowers. Beyond the gardens which backed on to those on this side was a row of houses, their rear aspects facing him. No doubt they had started off all the same but various additions, a loft 'made into a bedroom, a conservatory built on, an extra garage, now differentiated them and made each an individual. Only one seemed still as the builder had built it but it had the best garden, with a pink may tree halfway down where the lawn was broken into by a rock garden. Over this spilled and sprawled a carpet of purple and yellow alpine plants. Surveying this tumbled spread of flowers, sheltered to some extent by the branches of the tree with its rose-coloured blossom, stood a small statue in marble. Philip couldn't see it very clearly, it was too far away, but something in its attitude seemed familiar, the angle of its slightly upraised face, the outstretched right hand holding a bunch of flowers, the feet that though planted firmly on the ground yet seemed to be dancing. He wished very much that he could get a closer look at it. Then he realised that he could. The binoculars were here on the windowsill. He took them out of their case and raised them to his eyes. A certain amount of adjustment was needed before he could see clearly - and then, suddenly, the vision they afforded him was amazing. They were excellent glasses. He could see the little statue as if it were no more than a metre away from him. He could see her eyes and her lovely mouth and the waves in her hair, the diagonal weave in the fillet which bound it, the almond curves of her fingernails and the details of the flowers, their stamens and petals, in the sheaf she carried. And he could see too the green stain that travelled from the side of her neck to where her robe covered her breasts, and the tiny chip out of her left ear lobe. He had made that chip himself when he was ten and a stone fired from his catapult had clipped the side of her head. His father had been angry, taken away the catapult and docked his pocket money for three weeks. It was Flora. Not a look-alike or a copy, but Flora herself. As Fee had pointed out, she wasn't one of those mass-produced plaster ornaments to be seen in their dozens at every motorway junction garden centre. She was unique. He remembered, rather incongruously, what Cheryl had said of her while talking to Arnham about their father. She was the Farnese Flora who was traditionally associated with may blossom. Philip replaced the binoculars in their case, put away his measure and his notebook and went downstairs. Some clients you had to search for, cough, knock on doors to summon them. Mrs Ripple wasn't of that sort but alert, spry, hawk-eyed. She was a middle-aged woman of great spirit and vigour, very sharp-tongued and, he suspected, critical. She had a shiny, sore-looking face and a lot of dark hair with threads of grey in it like fuse wire. 'I'll be in touch when the lay-out is completed,' he said to her, 'and then you'll see me again when work commences. It was the way they were taught to speak to customers at Roseberry Lawn. Philip had never actually heard a human being snort but that was the kind of sound Mrs Ripple made. 'When's that going to be?' she said. 'Some time next year?' There had been a delay about sending her their brochures, Roy said, adding that he didn't think she was likely to forget it. Philip assured her, with as radiant a smile as he could manage, that he hoped it would be no more than four weeks at the outside. She said nothing in reply, left him to open the front door and close it after him. Philip got into his car, a three-month-old blue Opel Kadett, thinking as he sometimes did that it was the only nice thing he possessed, and he didn't really possess it, it belonged to Roseberry Lawn. Instead of driving back the way he had come, he took the first left-hand turning and then turned left again. This brought him out into the street where the row of houses whose rears the back of Mrs Ripple's faced must be. They looked very different from this aspect. He hadn't counted precisely where in the row the house with the statue in its garden came but he knew it must be fourth or fifth from the block of flats with green pantiled roof. It was also the only one without additions. And here it was, this must be it, between the house with the window in its roof and the house with two garages. Philip drove past slowly. It was gone five, his day was over, so he wasn't wasting the firm's time, something he was still conscientious about. At the end of the road, at a T-junction, he turned round and drove back. Opposite the house he parked the car by the kerb and switched off the engine. The front garden was small with a rosebed in which the roses were not yet out. Three steps led up to one of those Georgian front doors with a sunburst fanlight. A feature of the house - Philip was sure it would be called a feature -was a small circular stained-glass window a little way above the front door. Through one of the panes of clear glass in that window, a lozenge shape in the pretentious coat of arms which formed the design, a woman's face could be seen, looking out. She wasn't looking at Philip, who in any case was invisible inside his car. She moved away and he was about to start the engine when her face reappeared, and the upper part of her body, at a casement of leaded lights which she opened. She wasn't all that young by his standards but still he could see she was young. The afternoon sun shone full on her face and it was handsome in a bold aggressive sort of way, the mass of dark frizzy hair. springing back from a broad white brow. She was a good distance from him but he saw the sun catch and flash fire from a diamond on her left hand and that told him she was Gerard Arnham's wife. Arnham had married and this was whom he had married. Anger bubbled up in Philip the way blood bubbles up through a sharp cut in skin. Like that blood flow he couldn't immediately control it, there was no cold tap to hold his rage under, and he cursed silently in the closed car. Philip's anger made his hands tremble on the wheel. He wished he hadn't come, he wished he had driven back from Mrs Ripple's the way he had come, through Hainault and Barkingside. If things had gone differently, his mother might have been living there, surveying the street from that stained-glass shield, opening that casement to feel the sun. He couldn't meet Christine's eyes. He was uneasy when he was alone with her. Sometimes he could hardly frame the words of some simple routine sentence, something about the dog or had she paid this or that bill. This was the first time he had experienced a mental preoccupation which had become obsessive. In the past there had been his grief at his father's death. He had worried a bit about exams, then been in suspense while waiting to hear if he was to be offered a place in the Roseberry Lawn training scheme. Another cause for anxiety had been his doubt that permanent employment would follow when his training was complete. But none of those invasions of his equilibrium had overwhelmed his waking thoughts as this knowledge did. It frightened him too because he couldn't understand what was happening to him. Why did he care so much that his mother had slept with a man? He knew she had slept with his father. He knew that if she had married Arnham they would have slept together. Why did he have to think about it so much, torment himself with pictures of the two of them together, repeat in his mind over and over Fee's words, Fee's awful revelations? The postcard was still on the living-room mantelpiece, he had never carried out his threat of throwing it away, and it was always the first thing he saw when he went into the room. It was as if, instead of a small piece of card with a commonplace photograph on it, it had become a huge picture in violent oils depicting some scene of sadism and sexual depravity; the kind of thing you don't want to look at but which compels your eyes and stretches them from their sockets. Somehow their roles had been reversed. He had become her father and she his child. He was the father who wants revenge on his daughter's seducer or for her seducer to marry her. Pity for her wrenched at him when he looked at her sitting there quietly, stitching away at Cheryl's bridesmaid's dress. If she had gone alone to Arnham's house that day they took Flora, would she be Mrs Arnham now? Philip couldn't help thinking that the arrival of all of them on that autumn evening instead of Christine on -her own, had been a decisive factor in Arnham's marriage plans. The other woman, the one with the dark hair and the diamond ring, might also have been a candidate at that time, and he had chosen her because she wasn't accompanied by a bevvy of children and a marble statue. She asked him if he minded her putting the television on. She always asked. He tried to remember if she had done that while his father was alive and he didn't think she had. One of the items on the nine o'clock news was a sighting of Rebecca Neave by someone in Spain. It was nearly eight months since her disappearance but reminders of her came into the papers and on television from time to time. A man who sounded responsible and honest claimed to have seen her in her green velvet track-suit in a resort on the Costa del Sol. It was a place where, according to her parents, Rebecca had twice spent holidays. The man had probably imagined it, Philip thought, or was one of those who will say and do anything to get publicity. He hadn't meant to return to Mrs Ripple's house, had felt strongly that Chigwell was a corner of the outskirts of London he would be happy never to see again. But in the middle of the week before Fee's wedding, Roy who was designing the new bathroom, came up with a problem about the tiling. He needed Mrs Ripple's consent to certain changes he proposed in the design as well as further wall measurements, notably distances between window frames and door architraves and the ends of walls. Philip found himself saying that he could make a very good guess at those measurements and the householder's consent could be obtained by phone. 'That's the sort of reply I expect of certain other newly graduated trainees, ' said Roy, 'but not of you.' His hard dark eyes swam behind the thick glasses he wore. When he wasn't making cynical unfunny jokes, Roy talked like a brochure. 'It's thoroughness and attention to the smallest detail which has established Roseberry Lawn's distinguished reputation.' Philip realised there was no escape from going to Chigwell but he told himself that he need not drive along the street where Arnham lived or even, come to that, take a second look at Flora through the binoculars in Mrs Ripple's back bedroom. When he left home Christine s first client of the day had already arrived, a woman who was having copper-coloured low lights put into her hair. For once Philip was glad his mother wouldn't be carrying out this project in the bathroom. As it was he would come home to find the kitchen floor covered with orange splash marks. 'I want to make enough money to pay for Fee's flowers myself,' Christine whispered as she saw him off at the front door. She pulled on the rubber gloves that were to keep her hands stain-free for Saturday and stuck her thumbnail through the left-hand one. Customers of Roseberry Lawn often behaved as if visits from employees of the company they had engaged to renovate their homes were a gross intrusion of privacy. Philip had been told of one householder who had taped up the doors on the kitchen he was having converted and obliged the fitters to climb in and out through the window. It was commonplace to be refused the use of lavatory or phone. Mrs Ripple, alerted to his coming, though not by him, opened her front door with alacrity. It was as if she had been waiting just inside it. He had scarcely set foot inside the hall when she said to him in a savage tone, 'What right do you think you had to use my husband's field glasses?' Philip was briefly dumbstruck. Had she tested them for fingerprints? Had some neighbour reported seeing them in his hands? 'Caught you there, haven't I?' she said. 'You thought you'd got away with that one.' Philip said he was sorry. What else could he say? 'I expect you're wondering how I found you out.' This was uttered the reverse of roguishly, Mrs Ripple's thick brown eyebrows drawing tpgether like a pair of furry caterpillars meeting, but Philip nevertheless hazarded a smile. 'I place them on that windowsill just so,' she said, 'in the corner and with the long side precisely parallel to the wall.' The caterpillars leapt apart and sprang towards her hairline. 'I've my own reasons for doing that which I shan't go into. But that's how I knew. They had been replaced out of alignment.' 'I won't touch them,' Philip said, making for the stairs. 'You won't get the chance.' She had removed the binoculars. Philip felt quite shaken by this encounter. Like most people, he was frightened by madness even when manifested in its milder forms. Did she perhaps suspect her husband of using the glasses to watch women undressing or something like that? And if so, what good did having her suspicions repeatedly proved sound do her? At least temptation had been removed from him. He wouldn't be able to take a close look at Flora without them. The guesses he had made at the measurements were so nearly accurate as to confirm his opinion that he was wasting time coming here. But denied the use of the binoculars, he perversely found himself longing to look at Flora again. He opened the window and leaned out. The may tree had bloomed and shed most of its blossoms. The grass and paving stones were pink with fallen petals, the purple rock garden sprinkled with pink as if covered by a rosy veil. Petals lay on Flora's shoulders and on her outstretched arm and the flowers she carried were no longer stone but a bouquet of may. But she seemed very far away from him. The distance rendered her features and the details of sculpture invisible. He retreated, closing the window, wondering as he did so if Mrs Ripple had placed a hair across the catch. Perhaps she would come up after he had gone and sprinkle the window frame with fingerprint powder. Then woe betide him when he came to inspect the work in progress as he might easily have to do. She was waiting for him at the foot of the stairs. She said nothing and her silence and long cold basilisk stare had the effect of making him speak in a nervous hearty way. 'Well, thank you very much, Mrs Ripple. That's done. You'll be hearing from us in due course. We'll keep you up to date with progress.' He passed her, left her behind his line of vision, felt her eyes following him. Half-way down the path he saw Arnham's car go by. Not the Jaguar but a second car, he would have a second car. The Jaguar probably belonged to his company the way the Kadett belonged to Roseberry Lawn. The woman in the passenger seat, the nearside which was nearest to him, was the woman he had seen at the window. It was a warm day and the car window was open on her side. Her arm rested along the rim of the glass panel. On the hand was the diamond ring and on the wrist the diamond watch. Arnham he could see only as a dark heavy silhouette. The direction they were going in was away from their house. It was this which made up Philip's mind for him - if his mind could be said to be made up, if his mind entered into it. The Kadett even seemed to drive itself. Caution and reason returned sufficiently to make him park it a little way down the road. There was no one about. There never was, in suburbs in the afternoons. Philip could remember his father telling him of the time when he was a child and there had been people about in streets like this one, quite a lot of them, people on foot because cars were few. These houses might have been uninhabited, their garages closed, their front gardens empty. All down the road the green of foliage and grass, the whiteness of buildings, was patched with laburnums in full bloom, a pure glistening yellow. The sun shone on to stillness and silence. Philip went into Arnham's garden by the gates to the garage drive and made his way to the wooden door that evidently led to a passageway between garage and house. If it was locked that would be the end of the enterprise, but it wasn't locked. Once inside, in a narrow defile with brick walls on either side, he realised he had brought neither container nor covering with him. And he knew that if he went back to the car to find something suitable he would never return, he would give up and drive away. At the end of the passage was a yard or terrace of concrete slabs. A very commonplace coal bunker on one side, a pair of dustbins on the other. Arnham had changed the Buckhurst Hill house for something distinctly inferior. Of course he had had to divide the sale price with his former wife. Protruding over the rim of one of the dustbins was a blue plastic bag, provided no doubt by the local authority's refuse collection service. Philip helped himself to that bag. He crossed the lawn to where she was. Close to, the fallen may blossom on her shoulders and the crown of her head gave her a neglected look. He brushed them off, lightly blew away a petal from her ear, the same ear that once, long ago, he had chipped with a stone from his catapult. Squatting down close in front of her, he observed as he had never quite done before, the remoteness of her gaze, the way her eyes seemed to stare past those who looked at her, to fix themselves on some distant and perhaps glorious horizon. Of course she was a goddess, she was above earthly things and human needs. His thoughts surprised him. They were as fanciful as if he were dreaming or in a fever. This was the way he had thought and imagined things while in the throes of that bad bout of flu he had had in the winter. But why on earth had Arnham told Christine Flora looked like her? Or had that perhaps been wishful thinking on her part? She looked like no real woman Philip had ever seen, though he thought quite suddenly - and rather madly - that if he ever saw a real woman with that face he would at once fall in love with her. He reached for Flora and lifted her up. Some of the pink petals fell off the bunch of marble flowers. She seemed even heavier than when he had carried her up the hill from Buckhurst Hill station. He drew the blue plastic bag over her head, laid her on the grass and tied a knot in the top of the bag. Carrying the bundle in his arms, he might have been holding a length of piping or some garden tool. It was when he was half-way across the grass towards the passageway and the wooden door that he saw he was watched. A man in a window next door was watching him. Philip told himself he was doing nothing wrong. Flora didn't belong to Gerard Arnham. Or, rather, he thought somewhat obscurely, she might have belonged to him if Arnham had done the right thing by Christine, loved her and married her, but she certainly didn't in the present circumstances. Arnham, by his behaviour, had forfeited the right to own her. Philip had read somewhere that if you borrow an object and hold on to it the only person who has a right to take it from you is the true owner. That was the law. Well, he was the true owner. Flora had been lent to Arnham. She was his conditionally only on his marrying Christine, that surely was an understood thing. Nevertheless, he quickened his pace. In spite of the weight of her, he ran down the path to the garage gates. His arms full, it took him a moment or two to get them open. A voice behind him, from the other side of the fence, said, 'I say, excuse me, what exactly do you think you're doing with that?' The words were very similar to Mrs Ripple's. Philip didn't even turn his head to take a look at the enquirer. He ran. Gasping because Flora was so heavy, he ran down the street to where his car was parked. He heaved her into the back seat and struggled into his safety belt. The man hadn't followed him. Philip was certain he had done the more sensible thing and gone back into the house to phone the police. He saw his job lost, a conviction recorded against him for a criminal offence. But be reasonable, keep your head, the man hadn't seen his car, hadn't taken a note of the number. Philip's hands shook on the wheel but he made a mammoth effort and steadied them. He began to drive, took the left-hand turn, then a right. There was no one behind him and no one ahead. Out on the big road, heading for Barkingside, he heard the siren of a police car. But why assume it was for him, that it had anything to do with him? A police car with a howling siren wouldn't turn out because a man had been seen coming out of a garden with something in a plastic bag. They would be more likely to send an officer round on a bike. Perhaps because his mother was so helpless and his sisters often liable to irrational fears, Philip had grown up a cool-headed person. He was like his father, who had been a practical man, and though endowed with plenty of imagination, he had learned to keep it in check. Therefore, he didn't let himself become a prey to all kinds of unreal speculations, and by the time he reached Gants Hill and the big roundabout on the A12 he was quite calm again. Flora had bounced about a bit on the back seat. When he reached the Ilford showroom where he was due to call on his way back to the office, he transferred Flora from the back of the car to the boot, wedging her comfortably between the spare wheel and a cardboard crate of wallpaper sample books he was carrying with him. There in the car park at the back of the showroom he was unable to prevent himself taking a look at her. He pierced the plastic with the tip of his pen, his fingernails having failed to do it, and made a split long enough to reveal her face. She still gazed into Olympian distances, still maintained that grave but serene expression. Well, it would be something to get steamed up about if she didn't, thought Philip. Driving home rather later than usual - Roy had handed him a list of customers, some of them angry or indignant, to telephone and placate - Philip reflected on his act of the morning. Why had he taken the marble girl? Suppos edly, because he felt she was rightly his or his family's. It was as if Arnham had perpetrated some kind of con trick in order to gain possession of her. People shouldn't be allowed to profit from their deceit. But having taken her, what was he going to do with her now? Not replace her in the garden at Glenallan Close. Too many explanations would be required if he were to do that. And there was Christine to consider. He would have to tell Christine where Arnham now lived and how he had seen Flora there. It was dangerous ground this, an area he continuously shied away from. Could he perhaps say she wasn't Flora but a Flora look-alike he had happened to see in a shop or garden centre and had bought? Hopeless, with that chip out of her ear and that green stain. Even getting her into the house without being seen and questioned would be a problem. They weren't one of those families whose individual members led their own private secret lives, unnoticed by and of little interest to the others. They were a close-knit family, each concerned about the others, prepared to enquire into any oddity of behaviour, each knowing pretty well where the others were at any given time and what they were likely to be doing. He imagined himself encountering Cheryl on the stairs with his arms full of Flora and her amazement and her questions. As he thought that, while waiting in a queue of cars in the Edgware Road, watching the red light, he glanced to the right side of the street and saw Cheryl. Her name and a kind of vague picture of her had been in his mind, and then he saw her. She was coming out of what looked to him - he couldn't see very clearly, only a crowded glittering conglomeration of colours and shapes - like a video shop or music centre. So much for always knowing where the others were and what they were doing. Cheryl was dressed in her customary jeans and black leather and she had a cowgirl's hat on, broad-brimmed, steep-crowned, with a fringed leather band. There was no reason why she shouldn't be there. She was free, she wasn't doing anything she shouldn't be, or as far as he could see she wasn't. Philip had to drive on, he had to take his eyes from her, as the lights went to red and amber and a moment's delay would set the drivers behind him all braying on their horns. There was nothing to trouble him in her presence here, but in her appearance and stance there was. She had moved out of that doorway like a girl drugged or drunk - or exhausted or driven out against her will. The cause of her exit might have been any of those. And she was crying, the tears were running down her face. He saw her bow her head and put her fists in her eyes, and then he had to turn his eyes back to the road and put the car into gear and move fast away from her.

4

The five girls took up their pose against the drawn curtains at Christine's french windows. These curtains had come from her old home and they were of rich dark brown velvet, lined and interlined, light-excluding. The May sunshine showed itself only as a single thin bright line on the right-hand edge of the window, and this vanished when the photographer fastened the curtain to the window frame with a piece oC scotch tape. Philip, a little uneasy in his Moss Bros morning coat and striped trousers, first put his head round the door, then came in and stood at the opposite end of the room. The photographer's lights made it very hot. The photographer was an oldish man, his clothes reeking of cigarette smoke. At first the appearance of the girls dismayed Philip. He knew he had good taste, an eye for the stylish and elegant colour combinations. If he hadn't he probably wouldn't have been in his present job or have wanted it. Who had so badly advised Fee that she had got herself up in white satin, a bluish, Arctic white, stiff and gleaming as a sheet of ice? But perhaps it was all her own choice. Couldn't she see that this patrician dress with its high throat and lean arum lily sleeves, its narrow bell skirt, was designed for a tall thin woman with a flat chest? Her hat was the sort of thing lead actresses wore in period films of the forties. Philip had seen plenty of them on television. A kind of bowler sported by ladies sidesaddle on horseback, only this one was whit~ with the wrong length of veil. And it was arum lilies she carried. Funeral flowers, he thought, remembering a wreath on his father's coffin As to the bridesmaids, being commanded to smile now, to look, not at the camera, but all adoringly at Fee, he would have laughed at their costumes - what other word for them was there? - if he had seen them in a magazine. A kind of tunic, each in a different colour, rose, coral, lemon, apricot, great puffy sleeves of some net stuff with orange spots, and bursting from tunic hem at hip level, puffball skirts of the same spotty net. Pink and orange circlets of some unidentifiable flowers on their heads. They were grotesque. Well, he thought, surprising himself, they were all grotesque but one. Cheryl, Stephanie and Fee's old school friend Janice were absurd figures of fun but the other one, she was different. She was - words failed Philip as he stared at her. This must be Senta. She didn't look as if connected with that family, she didn't look as if related to anyone of their sort. She was extraordinary. This wasn't in her height or something startling about the shape of her, for she was shorter than the other girls and very slender. Her skin was white but not what people mean when they talk about white skin, very fair or pale or creamy but whiter than milk, white as the inner side of some deep sea shell. Her lips were scarcely less pale. He couldn't tell the colour of her eyes but her hair, which was very long, nearly waist-length, straight and smooth, was silver. Not blonde, not grey, but silver with here and there streaks of tarnish on it. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about her to him, the most exciting thing, was her resemblance to Flora. Her face was Flora's, the perfect oval contour, the straight, rather long nose which described an unbroken line from its tip to the top of her forehead, the widely separated calm eyes, the short upper lip, the lovely mouth that was neither full-lipped nor narrow. If that silver hair had been piled on to the back of her head and bound with ribbons she would have been Flora's image. She carried herself with patient confidence. While the others fidgeted, patting their hair between camera shots, adjusting bra straps, resettling bouquets, Senta stood as still as a statue. She was as calm and unruffled as the marble girl, thought Philip, whom three days before he had managed to sneak into the house and up the stairs while Christine finished off a trim in the kitchen. Her figure alone was not like Flora's, her body's bone structure delicate, her waist capable of being clasped in a pair of hands. Then, as the photographer commanded them all to look at the camera and smile for the last time, she turned fully to face him and gave him an unwelcome shock. Her smile was horribly forced and unnatural, a grimace rather. It was almost as if she were deliberately mocking or sending up this whole rite. But surely she couldn't be, surely that wasn't a purposely ugly sneering grin? If it was, no one but he seemed to notice. The photographer called out, 'Lovely! Hold it, girls, this is positively the last one. ' The picture was taken, the record made. It would have its place no doubt along with the rest in Fee's wedding album. Now Fee only was left to pose for what the photographer called 'two exclusive portraits of the lovely bride'. She had scarcely settled herself into position and allowed Stephanie to arrange the folds of her train, when the door was pushed open and Hardy came in. 'Oh, I must have one shot with him,' Fee exclaimed. 'Look at him, he's so sweet. It'll be quite all right to hold him, he's just been shampooed.' Two of the bridesmaids had seated themselves on the settee which was pushed back against the wall, but white-faced Senta, her strange metallic hair now cloaking her shoulders, hesitated only for a moment and then walked slowly across the room to Philip. She walked as if she were a much taller woman, up straight with her head held high, but at the same time very gracefully. Before she spoke to him he looked at her mouth and thought it was the most beautiful mouth he had ever seen in a girl's face. What could the voice that came from that mouth be like? The lips parted. She spoke. 'What a peculiar dog,' she said. 'He has orange spots. He looks like a miniDalmatian.' Philip said slowly, smiling at her, noticing something for the first time, 'He matches your dresses.' 'Did you do it on purpose?' That made him laugh, her seriousness. 'What happened was my mother splashed him a bit while she was tinting someone's hair. It wouldn't come out when she washed him.' 'I thought he must be some rare breed.' He had expected a low voice but hers was rather high-pitched, the vowels rounded and pure, the tone cool. She sounded as if she had been taught to speak instead of picking speech up. He noticed that the hands which held her absurd Victorian posy of orange tulip heads and pink carnations, were very small and blunt-nailed, like a child's. She had turned upon him almost colourless eyes, clear as water in which a single drop of dye is spreading in streaks and whorls its dark greenness. 'Are you Philip? Are you Fee's brother?' 'That's right.' He hesitated. 'I'm got up in all this gear because I'm giving her away.' She said, speaking very precisely as if someone were writing her name down, 'Senta Pelham.' 'I've never met anyone called. Senta before. It sounds foreign.' Her voice took on a cool edge. 'Senta is the name of the girl in The Flying Dutchman.' Philip wasn't sure what or who the Flying Dutchman was - something musical, an opera? - and he was glad of Christine's voice urgently calling his name, 'Philip, Philip, where are you?' 'Excuse me.' She said nothing. He was unused to people who looked you straight in the eye without smiling. He closed the living-room door behind him, found Christine in the kitchen, panicky, fraught with anxieties, but looking prettier than she had done for months. Her sudden resurgence of good looks embarrassed him and he would have liked to close his eyes tightly. She was in blue, always her best colour, with a small round hat made of swathed silk in peacock's feather turquoises and lavenders. 'The car is here for me and your aunties and the one for the bridesmaids!' 'That's all right. Everyone's ready.' She is nicer than Arnham's wife, he thought, she is more of a woman, sweeter and gentler - and surprised himself by his thoughts. Her sisters came down the stairs, one mushroom hat, one parrot's wing, stilt heels, twenty-denier nylons, every ring and bracelet and necklace to be found in their jewel boxes, accompanying clouds of Tweed and Fidji. 'You won't forget to shut Hardy up in the kitchen before you leave, will you?' Christine said to him. 'Otherwise he'll go and do a wee-wee on the white rug. You know how he always does that when he's excited.' He was alone with Fee. If only she had looked romantic, beautiful! There was nothing in her appearance to inspire a brother's emotion, to raise a lump in the throat, call forth memories of a shared childhood. Her face was creased up, petulant with a myriad small anxieties. She stood in front of a mirror, seeing or imagining she saw, dots of mascara adhering to the skin under her left eye, rubbing with a finger whose cuticle she had bitten in stressful moments before the photographer turned up. 'Don't forget to put your engagement ring on your other hand.' She pulled it off impatiently. 'I look awful, don't I?' 'You look fine.' 'If it doesn't work out we can get divorced. Most people do.' I wouldn't get married if I thought like that. He didn't say it aloud. It seemed to him that he had begun keeping everything from her, his views, opinions, feelings. She neither knew that Flora was upstairs in his wardrobe nor that he had seen Cheryl come weeping out of a shop in the Edgware Road. Soon she would have someone else to confide in, tell her innermost thoughts to, but who would he have? She stepped back from the glass and turned to pick up her sheaf of arums from the table. But instead of doing this she stopped in mid-act, as it were, and threw herself upon him and into his arms. Tense currents seemed to vibrate through her body. It was as if she were full of wires that thrilled with electricity. 'Come on,' he said. 'Come on. Calm down.' He held her in a hug that wasn't tight enough to crush the icy satin. 'You've known him for years, he's the one for you.' What else could he say? 'The original childhood sweethearts.' He heard the car coming, the brakes, a door close slickly, then footsteps on the front path. 'D'you know what I keep thinking?' she said, disengaging herself, drawing herself up, smoothing her waistline, 'I keep thinking if only that bloody Arnham had done right by Mum we could have been having a double wedding.' He had made his speech, conscious while he brought out the stiff phrases of praise for Fee and Darren, of Senta Pelham's eyes resting on him. They seemed to rest there in a cold and speculative manner. Every time he looked in her direction, which was often, he found she was looking at him. He asked himself why this should be. Did he truly, as he feared, look ridiculous or unsightly in the grey morningcoat, white shirt and silvery tie? It seemed to him, for all his fears, that the coat in fact fitted rather well. He knew - he couldn't help knowing - that he was good-looking and attractive to girls. Luckily, wherever that gene of shortness and dumpiness came from in his family, it had passed him and Cheryl by. He looked rather the way Paul McCartney had done when young. An old record sleeve of one of the Beatles albums showed him his own face smiling. The party would break up soon. They only had St Mary's Church hall, an ancient hut smelling of stewed tea and hymn books, until six. The guests, uncles and aunts and cousins and school friends and workmates past and present, would leave as soon as Fee and Darren had gone. Christine was talking to a rather good-looking middle-aged man, another of Darren's innumerable relatives. Giggling, behaving naturally for once, Cheryl stood eating wedding cake with two boys whose shoulder-length hair looked odd with their formal clothes. He accepted a piece of cake handed him by Stephanie and raising his eyes, met those of Senta, of Flora's double. They seemed to have darkened, the green staining that drifted through their watery depths having curiously intensified. Somewhere during the course of the afternoon she had shed the wreath of flowers which had encircled her head and her hair, unconfined, hung in two gleaming curtains between which the soft seductive features were enclosed. Her eyes widened as they held his and, still gazing at him, she parted her lips and ran her tongue slowly and deliberately over the upper lip and then the lower. The lovely mouth was the pale pink of fruit blossom but her tongue was red. He turned sharply away, convinced she was mocking him. Fee and Darren came back dressed as no one had ever seen them dressed before, each in a suit, his dark grey, hers white It would be impossible for anyone they encountered on their journey tonight to an hotel, tomorrow to Guernsey, to mistake them for other than a honeymoon couple. This had been the first wedding Philip had been to since he was a child and he was unprepared for the feeling of anti-climax he experienced as he got into the car. Once the bride and groom were gone, their trim suits smothered in confetti, their car decorated with slogans and a tin can tied on behind, came an immediate sense of let-down. Everyone was going. The evening yawned emptily ahead. Christine would be spending it with one of her sisters. It was left to Philip to drive the bridesmaids back to Glenallan Close where their everyday clothes were. All but Senta who, standing by the bar in conversation with a man Philip didn't know, sent him a peremptory message by Janice that she would find her own way back to the house, she would get a lift. She would need to, Philip thought aggrievedly, for after the bright start to the day and sunny afternoon, a heavy rain had begun to fall. It made returning home and entering the empty house an even more gloomy business. The three girls went up to the room that Cheryl and Fee had shared and now was Cheryl's alone, while Philip let Hardy out of the kitchen. He changed into jeans and a sweater and, as the rain seemed briefly to have lessened, took the little dog round the block, passing the departing Stephanie and Janice on his way back. Now was his chance to try and talk to Cheryl. She must still be upstairs. Half-way up he heard music coming from behind her closed door and he went into his- own room. He would give her ten minutes or so. Philip's room was very small, too small to hold more than a single bed, a clothes cupboard, desk and narrow upright chair. And although he worked for a firm which specialised among other things in making the most of tiny boxrooms like this one with space-saving fitments and built-in furniture, he had never felt inspired to do something of that kind here. This was partly because he didn't want Glenallan Close improved. Make it more attractive and Christine - and therefore himself - might be tempted to remain there for ever. On the other hand, it would have been a different story if Christine was Mrs Arnham living in Chigwell and this house had been made over to him. He would have smartened it up then all right. He opened the clothes cupboard and lifted Flora out. She was still wrapped in the blue plastic bag with the split in it for her face to show through. Philip untied the knot in the bag and pulled it off over her head. He stood her in the corner by the window. It was interesting that just having her there immediately improved the look of the room. Her white marble skin seemed to gleam in the grey, rain-filtered light. He wondered if it would be possible to remove the green stain which mantled her neck and breast. Her eyes looked beyond him and her face seemed alight with pagan wisdom. Arnham and his wife would have missed her as soon as they looked out into their garden. Probably the neighbour would have told them as soon as they returned about the thief he had seen carrying a log-shaped bundle and they would have put two and two together. But Philip didn't think they would connect the removal of Flora with him. If Arnham remembered him at all it would be as he then was, a recent student, a newly recruited Roseberry Lawn trainee, who had presented a very different appearance from the man the neighbour would have described as short-haired and wearing a suit. Arnham might even be relieved at the loss of Flora, while perhaps superstitiously unwilling to get rid of her himself. He was, wondering whether to try working on that stain with paint stripping fluid or to talk to Cheryl first when she spoke to him from outside on the landing. They never knocked at each other's doors but they didn't walk into rooms uninvited either. 'Phil? Are you in there?' He hung his Moss Bros clothes over the chair and pushed it in front of Flora to hide her. Opening the door, he found no one there and then Cheryl came out of her room, dressed to go out in her usual uniform, the cowgirl hat in her hand. Her hair, done that morning in soft loose curls falling from a centre parting, bridesmaid's coiffure, looked incongruous with the heavy black eye make-up and the green star she had drawn on one cheekbone. 'Will you do me a favour?' she said. The inevitable reply to that one: 'Depends what it is.' 'Would you lend me five pounds?' 'Cheryl,' he said, 'I have to tell you I saw you in the Edgware Road on Wednesday. It was around six or six-thirty. You were crying and you were sort of staggering around.' She stared at him, her underlip protruding. 'I couldn't stop, I was stuck in the traffic. You looked like you were drunk. I've been thinking lately you might be on drugs but you looked more as if you were drunk.' 'I don't drink,' she said. 'Don't you notice anything about people? Couldn't you see I didti't even drink that fizzy stuff at the wedding? A glass of wine is enough to knock me sideways.' She laid her hand on his arm. 'Will you lend me five pounds? I'll give it back to you tomorrow.' 'It's not the money,' he said, though of course up to a point it was. He had very little spare cash. 'It's not the money that's the trouble. But what do you mean, I can have it back tomorrow? Tomorrow's Sunday. How are you going to get money on a Sunday?' She was gazing at him, her eyes glaring with a kind of desperate intensity. 'Cheryl, how do you get money? Where does it come from?' 'You sound like a policeman,' she said. 'Just like a policeman would question a person.' He said unhappily, 'I think I've got a sort of right to ask you.' 'I don't. I'm over eighteen. I'm as much an adult as you are. I can vote.' 'That's got nothing to do with it.' 'Please,' she said, 'please just lend me five pounds. You'll get it back tomorrow.' 'When you get your dole on Wednesday will do.' He went back into his room and took the last five-pound note he had from his wallet in the pocket of the Moss Bros trousers. That left him with three pound coins and some odd pence. She snatched it from him. Once she held it crushed in her hand up against the lapels of the leather jacket, she managed a smile, she managed a, 'Thanks very much, Phil.' He could find nothing to say to her. He went back into his room and sat down on the bed. Her feet went fast down the stairs and he waited for the front door to slam. Instead he heard her speaking to someone, a brief exchange of indecipherable words. Their mother perhaps had come back for something she had forgotten. Forgetting things, money, keys, a coat, suitable shoes, was a commonplace with Christine. The door slammed rather less violently than usual. The house didn't shake from foundations to roof. He took the hired clothes off the chair, emptied the pockets, placed them on hangers and hung them inside the cupboard. The rain had begun again, buffeted against the glass by the rising wind. Someone knocked at the bedroom door. But no one in the household ever did. He thought, supposing it is the police, sent after me for taking Flora, just suppose it is. A cold thrill went down his spine. But he didn't cover her up or put her away. He opened the door. It was Senta Pelham. He had forgotten she was coming back. She was still in her bridesmaid's dress and she was very wet. Her hair was wet, water dripping from it, and the spotted net, intended to be puffed and stiff, drooped like the petals of a rain-soaked flower. The coral satin clung to her thin, fragile-looking ribcage and to the large round breasts, incongruously big for so slight a girl. Her nipples stuck out erect at the touch of the cold wet stuff. 'Is there a towel somewhere?' 'In the bathroom,' he said. Didn't she know that? Hadn't she got herself up in that absurd garment in this house? 'I couldn't get a lift after all,' she said, and he noticed she was out of breath. 'I had to walk,' though it was more as if she had been running. 'Dressed like that?' She laughed in a throaty gasping way. She seemed tremendously nervous. She went into the bathroom and came out, rubbing her hair dry with one bath towel and with another slung over her shoulder. Philip expected her to go into Cheryl's room but instead she came into his and shut the door behind her. 'There's a hairdryer somewhere.' She shook her head, took off the towel and really shook it. The gleaming hair flew out and she ran her fingers through it. He had hardly realised what she was doing, he had hardly taken in that she was kicking off shoes, stripping off pale, wet, mud-splashed tights, before she stood up and peeled the dress over her head. She stood there looking at him, her arms hanging by her sides. The room was too small for two people in it ever to be separated by more than a few feet. As it was he found himself at no more than arm's length from this naked girl whose strange thin big-breasted body was marblewhite with at the base of her flat belly a triangle, not of silver or blonde but of flame red. Philip was in no doubt, whatever he may have felt thirty seconds before, of what was going on and what she intended. She was eyeing him with that intense yet mysterious gaze with which she had so frequently favoured him at the wedding. He took a step towards her, put out his arms and held her shoulders with his hands. The coldness of marble was what he had strangely expected, but she was warm, hot even, her skin silky and dry. Philip folded her slowly in his arms, savouring the slippery soft full and slender nakedness against his own body. As she moved her head to bring her mouth against his, the long wet hair slapped at his hands, making him shiver. She whispered to him as her tongue flickered, her hands unbuttoning his shirt, 'Into bed. I'm cold, I'm cold.' But she felt as hot as a body on a tropical beach, the heat shimmered from her. It warmed the cold sheets. Philip pulled the duvet over them and they lay pressed into each other's bodies in the narrow little bed. The rain began crashing against the window. Suddenly she started to make love to him with a greedy passion. Her fingers dug into his neck, his shoulders, she moved down his body, kissing his flesh, licking him with a curious gasping savour. Bowed over him, arching up the quilt, she swept him with her curtain of hair, teased him with her tongue. Her lips felt tender and rapturous and gentle. He gasped, 'No!' and then, 'No!' because it was too much, it stretched him to explosion point. Behind his head and inside his eyes was a red rolling light. Groaning, he pulled her on to him and entered her, her white body, now streaming with sweat, sinking on to his with a strange quivering rhythm. She held him in a total clutch, holding her breath, then relaxing as she expelled it, drawing breath again, gripping him, releasing himself and her with a final expulsion and a little thin scream. Her silver hair which draped his shoulders, hung like the rain he could see falling straight and glittering beyond the glass. He felt a deep extraordinary profound satisfaction, as if he had found something he had always been searching for and found it finer than he expected. There were things he thought he ought to say but all that came to mind was 'thank you, thank you,' and he sensed that to utter this aloud would be wrong. Instead he took her face in his hand and turned it to his and kissed her mouth long and very gently. She hadn't spoken a word since saying she was cold and they should go to bed. But now she raised her head and laid it on the arm which held her. She took his right hand in her left one, interlocking their fingers. In that high pure tone of hers she said, 'Philip...' She uttered his name reflectively and as if she were listening to the sound of it, as if she were putting it to the test to see if she liked it. 'Philip.' He smiled at her. Her eyes were close to his, her mouth as close to his face as it could be without their lips touching. He saw every detail of its soft and tender curves, the sweetly tucked-in corners of it. 'Say my name,' she said. 'Senta. It's a beautiful name, Senta.' 'Listen to me, Philip. When I saw you this morning I knew at once that you were the one. I knew you were the only one.' Her tone was deeply solemn. She had raised herself on one elbow. She was looking deeply into his eyes. 'I saw you across the room and I knew you were the one for me for always.' He was astonished. This was not at all what he had expected from her. 'I've been looking for you for a long long time,' she said, 'and now I've found you and it's wonderful.' Her intensity had begun, slightly, to embarrass him. He could only handle this awkwardness by speaking lightly, almost facetiously. 'It can't be all that long. How old are you, Senta? Not more than twenty, are you?' 'I'm twenty-four. You see? I'm going to tell you everything, I'll keep nothing from you. You can ask me anything.' He didn't particularly want to ask her things, just to hold her and feel her and have this glorious pleasure. 'I've been looking for you since I was sixteen. You see, I've always known there was just one man in the world for me and I knew that when I saw him I'd know.' Her lips brushed his shoulder. She turned her face and printed a kiss where the muscle swelled beyond the collarbone. 'I believe that souls come in pairs, Philip, but when we're born they are split in two and we spend all our lives trying to find our other half. But sometimes people make a mistake and get the wrong one. 'This isn't a mistake, is it? It wasn't for me. 'This,' she said, 'is for ever. Don't you feel that? I saw you across the room and I knew you were the twin to my soul, the other half. That's why the first thing I ever said to you, the first word I spoke, was your name.' Philip thought he remembered the first word she had spoken was to say Hardy was a peculiar dog but he must be mistaken. What did it matter anyway? She was in his bed, had made love with him more gloriously than any girl ever before, and would do so, almost certainly, again. 'For ever,' she whispered, a slow hieratic smile spreading across her face. He was glad of that smile, for he didn't want her becoming too serious. 'Philip, I don't want you to say you love me. Not yet. I shan't tell you I love you, though I do. Those words are so commonplace, everyone uses them, they're not for us. What we have and are going to have is too deep for that, our feelings are too deep.' She turned her face into the hollow of his shoulder and ran her fingers lightly down the length of his body, quickly exciting him again. 'Philip, shall I stay the night here with you?' He hated having to refuse that. Christine wouldn't come into his room that night but she would in the morning, she always did, bearing with her the cup of tea slopped into its saucer, the encrusted sugar bowl with the damp spoon stuck in it. She wouldn't criticise him, she might not even mention that she had found him with a girl in his bed, she might only look dismayed and terribly embarrassed, her eyes wide and her hand going up to her pursed lips, but he wouldn't be able to bear it. It would be too much for him. 'I'd love you to, more than anything, but I don't really think it's on.' Without yet knowing her very well he anticipated an immediate scene, fury perhaps or tears. She surprised him by her radiant smile, the way she took his face in her hands and planted a tiny light kiss on his mouth. In a moment she was out of bed, shaking her hair, drawing her fingers through it. 'It doesn't matter. We can go to my place.' 'You've a place of your own?' 'Of course. It's yours as well now, Philip. You understand that, don't you? It's yours as well.' In Cheryl's room, absent for an instant, she changed into the clothes she must have arrived in that morning, a long full black skirt, a long loose sweater of silvery knitted stuff the colour of her hair. These garments hid the shape of her as nearly as the burka hides the contours of the Islamic woman. Her slender legs, tiny ankles, were in black tights, her feet in flat black pumps. She came back into his room and saw Flora in the corner for the first time. 'She looks like me!' He remembered what he had thought in Arnham' s garden before he stole her, if he ever met a girl like her he would fall at once in love. His eyes went from Senta to the statue and he saw the resemblance. So often when you thought someone looked like someone else or like a picture, say, the likeness disappeared when they were together. This didn't happen. They were twins, in stone and flesh. It made him shiver a little as if something solemn had happened. 'Yes, she looked like you.' He realised he had spoken quite gravely. 'I'll tell you about her sometime,' he said. 'Yes, you must. I want to know all about you, Philip. I want to know everything. We must have no secrets from each other. Get dressed and come with me now. I'm scared of seeing other people - oh, your mother, your sister, I don't know. I just don't want to meet anyone else. I think our first evening should be sacred somehow, don't you?' The rain lifted for them just before they left and when they came out into the streaming street, the setting sun showed. The sun made all the puddles and sheets of water shine like a paving of gold. She had hesitated a little before leaving the house, as if to go out was to take some kind of plunge. Perhaps it was, for the street was like a shallow river bed. Once inside the car, she drew in her breath and sighed as if with relief or perhaps just with happiness. He sat beside her and they kissed.

5

This was a part of London he hardly knew, lying in westernmost West Kilburn and north of the Harrow Road. It was growing dark and after the rain the streets were empty of people. Opposite a huge sprawling school building, dating from the beginning of the century, surrounded by a high brick wall, was a food supply centre for down-and-outs, a soup kitchen. On its steps a queue of men waited and one old woman with a basket on wheels in which a dog sat. Philip drove past a church set in a churchyard dark and dense as a wood and turned into Tarsus Street. Only the plane trees, breaking into leaf, soon to be abundant, concealing and overshadowing fissures in the pavement and broken fences, saved it from being a slum. Their tender unfolding leaves cad'ght the light from street lamps as a gilding and shed vine-like sharpedged shadows. The house where Senta lived was in a terrace of plum-coloured brick. All the windows were flat and rectangular and recessed in the facade. A flight of ten steps led to the front door, a heavy panelled wooden door, once, many years past, painted dark green, and now so pitted with chips and actual holes that it seemed as if someone had used it for target practice. From these steps it was possible to look over the plastered wall which served them as a balustrade and into the area, clogged with rubbish, tin cans, paper, orange peel, that fronted the basement window. Senta unlocked the front door. The house was large, with three floors above the basement, but as soon as he was inside Philip sensed, without knowing how, that they were alone in it. This didn't mean, of course, that Senta had sole possession of the house. The two bicycles leaning up against the wall, the pile of junk mail lying on a dilapidated mahogany table, made this improbable. All the doors were closed. She led him along the hall and down the basement stairs. The smell of the place was new to Philip. He couldn't have defined it except to say it smelt very subtly of an accumulation of various kinds of ancient dirt, dirt that was never removed, never even shifted from one surface to another, one level to another, of food crumbs years old, fibres of unwanted clothes, dead insects, cobwebs, grains of mud and shreds of excrement, spilt liquids long dried, the hair of animals and their droppings, of dust and soot. It smelt of disintegration. The basement had once been a self-contained flat. Or so it seemed. Its rooms, all but one, were used to store things, the objects that were perhaps partly responsible for the smell. Old furniture and crates of bottles and jars and heaps of old newspapers and piles of folded darkish woollen things that had once been blankets but which moths were reducing to a crumbling grey flocculent mass. An ancient lavatory with an overhead cistern which could be made private by drawing a sketchily rigged-up shower curtain. There was a clawfooted bath and a single cold tap of brass coated with a green crust and bandaged in rags. Senta's was the only inhabitable room. It was at the front of the house, the room whose window could be seen beyond the area. It contained primarily a large bed. This bed was six feet wide with a sagging mattress and made up with purple sheets and pillowcases that smelt as if they hadn't been changed for rather a long time. There was also an enormous mirror, its frame adorned with plaster cherubs and fruit and flowers, from which much of the gilding ~s well as the occasional limb, twig and petal, had been chipped or had disappeared altogether. On a low table stood a burnt-out candle in a saucer full of wax with an empty wine bottle beside it. There was a wicker chair draped with discarded clothes and a dying plant growing out of a brass pot full of dust. No curtains hung at the window but it could be covered by a pair of wooden shutters. A greyish watery light was shed into the room between these shutters but it was insufficient to see by. Senta had lit the lamp which had a bulb of low wattage under a parchment shade. That first evening, having looked wonderingly at the room, shocked by it and therefore feeling unsure of himself, he had asked her what she did. 'I'm an actor.' 'You mean an actress.' 'No, I don't, Philip. You wouldn't talk about a doctoress or a lawyeress, would you?' He conceded that. 'Have you been on television?' he asked. 'Would I have seen you in anything?' She laughed but in a kindly way, an indulgent way. 'I was at RADA. Now I'm waiting for the kind of part someone of my sort needs to make the best beginning. It would be letting myself down to take just anything, don't you think?' 'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't know anything about it.' 'But you will. You'll learn from me. I want you to have opinions about me, Philip, that's going to be the most important thing in my world, our world, what we think about each other. A spiritual interchange is going to be the essence of our life together.' But there had been nothing very spiritual that evening. Soon after that they had got into her bed. When you were lying in her bed you could see the legs of people walking along the pavement outside the window. That meant that if they bent down they could see you. She laughed at him when he got up to close the shutters but he closed them just the same. The lamp with its fringed shade gave a brownish dim light that laid a mysterious glaze on their love-making, a coat of gold to their moving limbs. She seemed to have an inexhaustible ardour, an inventiveness she pursued with a frown of concentration until she broke into high breathless laughter. She laughed a lot, he already loved her laughter. He already loved her extraordinary voice, high without shrillness, smooth and pure and cool. He had meant to get up and go home at midnight but used and repeatedly ridden by her, devoured and chewed and grasped and drawn in, expelled only with desperate reluctance, excavated with a child's little strong fingers and excoriated with a tongue as coarse as a cat's, he had whimpered and sighed and slept. The last thing he remembered hearing her say before that deathlike sleep came was, 'I don't just want to have you, Philip, I want to be you.' Next morning, Sunday, he had walked in at ten - he hadn't awakened till past nine - to find Christine and Cheryl on the point of calling the police. 'I thought,' his mother said, 'how awful it was going to be if I'd lost a son as well as a daughter.' She didn't ask him where he had been and that wasn't tactfulness or discretion. Now she had him back she simply didn't think of where he might have been or what he was doing. He walked into the living room and the postcard was gone. Because he had spoken about it to her or Fee had? On the rug in front of the fireplace lay a tiny bruised pink rosebud. It must have come from one of the bridesmaids' wreaths or bouquets, perhaps from Senta's. It was a funny thing, though, that you couldn't think of Senta in the sort of way, a sentimental or romantic way. You wouldn't think of needing a flower that had been hers to remember her by. He picked it up and smelt it and it said nothing to him. But why should it? He had Senta and would have her again tonight, he had the real woman herself with her tarnished silver hair. Cheryl came into the room and handed him a five-pound note. He felt differently from yesterday, fourteen or fifteen hours ago only, an entirely different person, and Cheryl's troubles if such existed, were remote from him, not his business. 'Thanks,' he said, and in such a preoccupied way as to make her stare at him. He would have liked best to tell her about Senta. Well, he would have liked best of all to tell Fee if Fee hadn't been on her way to St Peter Port. Senta, in any case, had said no. 'I don't want anyone knowing about us yet, Philip. Not yet. For a little while it must be our sacred secret.' That had been a week ago. And since then he had seen her every day. By Tuesday he was telling Christine he would be staying away for the night, at least for tonight and maybe the next one, because Roseberry Lawn were involving him in a project of theirs at Winchester and were putting him up in an hotel. Now, for the first time, he understood the value of having a mother like Christine. That vagueness and unworldliness which had formerly irritated him, and worse, troubled him as to what this would mean for her future welfare, that apparent lack of knowledge of any sort of conventional response, now appeared a godsend. Senta had no phone. There was a phone on that table in the hall half-hidden among the litter of junk mail but seldom anyone at home to answer it. Other people must live in the house but Philip had never seen them, though one night, awakened by it, he had heard dance music above his head and the sound of waltzing feet. He went home to eat the meal Christine had prepared for him, took Hardy for a walk round the block, then drove to Kilburn. It was a relief one morning when Christine said she thought of spending the evening with her friend but she would leave him a meal and would that be all right? The friend was someone she had met at Fee's wedding. What a lot of significant things had happened at Fee's wedding! Philip told her not to bother with a meal, he would eat out. He went to Senta's straight from work and for the first time they ate out together. It was a change, it was more like reality. Up till then he had been parking the car in the street at eight-thirty or nine, worrying a bit about it because this was a rough area. He would run down the basement stairs, his heartbeat racing. The smell was strongest here, in the well of the staircase. But inside Senta's door it faded. There the damp sour smell of decay was overcome by the perfume of incense sticks, one of which was usually smoking in her room. She would be waiting for him, sitting in the window or cross-legged on the floor. Once she was reclining naked on the bed, reminding him of a picture someone had once sent Fee on a postcard, the Olympe of Manet. To go out with her to a restaurant was a new experience. He discovered her to be not merely a vegetarian but a vegan. It was fortunate he had chosen to eat at an Indian place. She wore a strange old dress that might have belonged to her grandmother, grey with silver threads woven into it, the belt missing, though you could see there should have been a belt, and a crumpled rose of grey silk on the bosom. Her silver hair hung like a veil bought to match it. She had painted her eyes green and her mouth dark purple. He didn't know whether he liked this kind of dressing but it disturbed him, it excited him, to look at her thus caparisoned. In the cheap Indian restaurant where a tape played sitar music and the walls were papered with a design of turbanned men and elephants, where the lights were dim, she looked like a goddess of mystery and the arcane. The mouth though - he hated to see it concealed under that layer of greasy purple. Tentatively he had asked her to wipe it off, her mouth was so beautiful. Why had he expected defiance? She wiped her lips clean with a piece of toilet paper, said to him in a tone that was humble, 'I'll do whatever you want. Whatever you like is right.' 'Tell me about yourself,' he said. 'I don't know anything about you, Senta, except that you're an actress - sorry, actor - and you're Darren' s cousin. Though I find that hard to believe,' She smiled a little, then began laughing. She could be intensely serious, in a way he would have found embarrassing if he had tried to copy it, and she could laugh more freely and gaily than anyone he had ever known. He could understand she might not want to be too closely associated with the Collier family, a beefy-faced jolly crowd of sport-mad men and bingo-addicted women. 'My mother was an Icelandic woman,' she said. 'My father was in the Navy, you see, and he met her when they put in at Reykjavik.' 'What do you mean 'was', Senta. Your mother's still alive, isn't she?' She had told him her parents were separated, each now living with a new partner. 'You said your mother had a boyfriend you don't much like.' 'My mother died when I was born.' He stared at her, it seemed so strange. He had never heard of anyone dying in childbirth except in old books. 'It was in Reykjavik, I was born there. My father was away at sea.' Her expression had grown suspicious, slightly displeased. 'Why do you look like that? What are you thinking? They were married, if that's what you're thinking.' 'Senta, I didn't mean...' 'He brought me back here and soon after that he married Rita, she's the woman I call my mother. My real mother's name was Reidun, Reidun Knudsdatter. It means Canute's daughter. Don't you think that's amazing? Not 'son' but 'daughter'. It's an ancient matrilinear system.' That evening too she told him how she had won a scholarship to drama school and come out top student of her year. During the holidays, in her second year, she had gone to Morocco and taken a room for two months in the Medina of Marrakesh. Because it was difficult to be a western woman alone there she had worn Moslem women's dress, the veil which allowed only her eyes and forehead to show, and a floor-length black dress. Another time she had gone with friends to Mexico City and been there during the earthquake. She had been to India. Philip felt he had little to tell her about himself in return for these accounts of remarkable or exotic experiences. The death of a father, responsibility for a mother, worries over Cheryl, were a poor exchange. But once back in the basement room, sharing a bottle of wine he had bought, he did tell her about Christine and Gerard Arnham and Flora. He gave her a detailed account of what had happened after he saw the marble girl from Mrs Ripple's bedroom window. She laughed when he described how he had stolen the statue and been seen by one of Arnham's neighbours, and even asked exactly where this was, what was the name of the street and so on, but still he had a feeling she hadn't listened as closely to his narrations as he had to hers. Reclining on the big bed, she seemed preoccupied with her own image in the mirror. This relic of some vanished once-elegant drawing room, its gilded cherubs missing a leg or arm, its swags of flowers denuded of their leaves, reflected her mistily, as if she were suspended in cloudy greenish water, her marble-white body spotted by the flaws in the glass. If she hadn't concentrated on what he said, he soon thought, this was due only to her desire for him which seemed as great as his for her. He wasn't used to this with girls who, in the past, when his need was insistent, were tired or 'not feeling like it' or having periods or peeved by something he had said. Senta's sexual impulses were as urgent as his. And, blessed relief from those girls of the past, she was as quickly and easily satisfied as he. Uniquely, no long-drawn out patient attention to a partner's needs were here required. His needs were hers and hers his. On the last night of the week, the night before Fee and Darren were due home from their honeymoon, he began to get to know her. It was a breakthrough, that evening, and he was glad of it. They had made love and rolled apart from each other on the bed. He lay spent and happy, the only alloy to his contentment being the niggling concern which now wormed back into his mind: how could he broach the subject of getting her to change the sheets? How could he do this without offence or seeming to criticise? It was such a silly small thing, yet the smell of the sheets upset him. Her silver hair covered the pillow. Tresses of it here and there she had made into little plaits. She lay on her back. The hair in her crotch was a bright fiery unnatural colour and he could see that vivid red patch twice, both on her white body and reflected in the mirror, which hung at a wide angle, its top jutting~at least a foot from the wall. Almost without thinking, on an impulse, taking her hand in his and laying it on the bright fuzzy triangle, he said with laughter in his voice, idly, 'why do you dye your pubic hair?' She sprang up. She flung his hand from her, and because that hand had been relaxed and her movement utterly unexpected, it struck his chest a blow. Her face was contorted with rage. She trembled with anger, her fists clenched as she knelt up over him. 'What do you mean, dye it? Fuck you, Philip Wardman! You've got a fucking nerve talking to me like that!' For a second or two he could scarcely believe what he was hearing, those words uttered in that pure musical voice. He sat up, tried to catch her hands in his, ducked to avoid the blow she aimed at him instead. 'Senta, Senta, what's the matter with you?' 'You, you're the matter. How dare you say that to me about dyeing my pubic hair?' He was nearly a foot taller than she and twice as powerful. This time he did get hold of her arms, did subdue her. She breathed in gasps, wriggling in his hold. Her face was twisted with the effort to escape. He laughed at her. 'Well, don't you? You're a blonde, you can't be that colour down there.' She spat the words at him. 'I dye the hair of my head, you fool!' Laughter made him relax his hold on her. As he did so he expected an onslaught, put up his hands to cover his face, simultaneously thinking, how awful, we're quarrelling, what now, what now? She took his hands away gently, held his face, brought soft warm lips on to his, kissing him more sweetly and lengthily than she ever had, stroking his face, his chest. Then the hand she had let fall to slap him with its knuckle bones, she took in her own and laid it delicately on the region of her body that had caused their strife, on the red hair and the thin white silky skin of her inner thighs. Half an hour later she got up, said, 'These sheets do niff a bit. Go and sit in the chair for a minute and I'll change them.' And she had, purple to emerald green, the soiled ones stuffed into her carpet bag for carrying to the launderette. He thought to himself, we are getting close, she read my mind, I like that, I love her, temperamental little spitfire that she is. But some time after midnight, leaving her asleep and covered by the quilt in its clean green cotton cover, climbing the dark smelly stairs, it came to him that he hadn't believed what she said about dyeing the hair of her head. She must be making that up. Of course she bleached it and put something on it to make it silvery, you could see that, but no one with red hair would dye it metal colour. Why would they? He experienced a pang of something he quickly recognised as fear. It frightened him that she might tell him lies. But it was after all a very small lie, a matter of no importance, the sort of thing all girls perhaps failed to tell the strict truth about, and he remembered Jenny saying her tan was natural when in fact she had been having daily sessions on a sunbed. Jenny - it was a long time since he had given her much thought. He hadn't seen her or heard her voice since they had quarrelled back in January. She had wanted them to be engaged, had started on about it while they were away on holiday in Majorca together the previous October. I can't get married, he had said to her, I can't think about getting married for years. Where would we live? Here with my mother? If we were engaged, she had said, I'd feel I meant something to you, I'd feel we were together, a couple. And then of course it had come out, the true reason behind it: I don't think I should sleep with you if it's just casual, I don't think it's right, if we aren't going steady. She had naggtd him to make her a promise he couldn't, then wouldn't, make. Parting from her had been a far greater wrench than he expected but now it seemed the wisest thing he could have done. Strange comparing, or rather contrasting, her with Senta. Driving home, he found himself laughing aloud at the thought of Senta asking to go steady, to get~ engaged. Her idea of permanency was something Jenny in her mousey little suburban way had never dreamed of, total commitment, utter exclusivity, the perfect unparalleled union of two human beings embarking on life's adventure. The return of Fee and her husband served to show Philip something amazing, that he had known Senta only a fortnight. Fee and Darren had been absent for two weeks and when they were last here Senta was virtually a stranger to him, a girl in an absurd orange-spotted dress who looked at him across a crowded room in certain mysterious ways which he, fool that he was, had been unable to interpret. Her daily society since then had made him believe, all experience to the contrary, that Darren, being her cousin, must be a far more interesting and clever person than he remembered. He must have been wrong about Darren. Perhaps it was natural to feel no man was really good enough for one's sister. But now he was in the company of his new brother-in-law he realised he hadn't been mistaken. Thickset and at twenty-four with a fat belly already developing, Darren sat guffawing at some television serial which it seemed imperative for him to see, never to miss, even though he might be in someone else's house. He had insisted on watching it the two Sundays they were away, Fee said in the proud tone of a mother talking of her baby's feeding requirements. Returned home the day before, they had come to tea, though tea as such wasn't a meal ever eaten in the Glen-allan Close household. Christine had supplied one of her culinary masterpieces in the shape of sliced ham sausage and canned spaghetti rings. Afterwards she was going to do Fee's hair, was childishly delighted because Fee, for once, was permitting this. Philip thought she was looking rather nice. There was no doubt she had looked better, younger and somehow happier, since the wedding. It couldn't be relief at getting the wedding over and Fee married, for she had once or twice suggested - she never did more than suggest - that Fee, at her age, could easily afford to wait a couple of years before settling down. It must be the new friend, having the companionship of someone her own age. She had pink lipstick on, rather well-applied and not muzzy at the edges, and had given her hair one of those golden rinses that had hitherto been reserved for clients. They disappeared to the kitchen. Philip heard his mother compliment Fee on the navy-blue jumper she was wearing and say wasn't it funny to buy a guernsey actually in Guernsey. Fee's patient explanation that the garment took its name from the island, as jersey did, gave rise to cries of wonderment. Cheryl, as usual, was out somewhere. Philip was left alone with his brother-in-law. Denied further television, Darren was talkative on the subjects of international sport, the new Fiat and congestion on the roads, and expansive on his honeymoon location. The cliffs of Guernsey were the highest he had ever seen, they must surely be the highest in the British Isles, he couldn't begin to estimate their height. And the currents in the Channel were particularly treacherous. He wondered how many swimmers had come to grief through those currents. Philip, who had been abroad on several package tours, thought Darren would be one of those tourists who are always asking the guide how old or new something is, how deep this water, how high this mountain, how many bricks did it take to build this cathedral, how many men to paint this ceiling. Photographs were produced, though no colour slides yet, thank God. Philip longed to speak to Darren about Senta. Here, he had thought, while the women were absent, was his opportunity. Of course, he didn't intend to break his word to Senta and reveal their relationship. In a way there would be something delightful in speaking of her while concealing that she was any more than an acquaintance. But so far Darren, talking non-stop, entranced by his chosen subject of conversation, gave him no chance. Philip had to bide his time. He had already discovered the joys of speaking her name to others and had mentioned her, in a light-hearted indifferent sort of way, to his mother and Cheryl. 'Senta, that girl with the sort of silvery-blonde hair, who was Fee's bridesmaid, I bet she'll come out well in the photographs,' and, rather more daringly, 'You wouldn't think that girl Senta who was Fee's bridesmaid was related to Darren, would you?' Her father was his mother's brother. It was hard to believe. They had no feature, no shade of skin, hair or eye in common. They were of totally different build and might have belonged to different races. Darren's hair was yellow and thick and rather rough, like new thatch. He had blue eyes and strong handsome features and ruddy skin. One day wine-coloured jowls would hang over his shirt collar and his nose would become an outsize strawberry. He was a square man, the jack on a playing card. Philip said suddenly, filling the brief silence which fell while Darren was putting all his photographs back into the yellow envelope, 'I'd never met your cousin Senta till the wedding.' Darren looked up. For a moment he didn't say anything and it seemed to Philip that he was staring in astonishment. Philip had the extraordinary notion, coupled with the start of panic, that he was going to deny having a cousin or even say, 'Who? You mean Jane, don't you? She only says she's called that.' But it wasn't astonishment. It wasn't wonder or indignation or anything like that, just Darren's habitual slowness at comprehension. Gradually a sly smile spread across his face. 'You fancy her then, do you, Phil?' 'I don't know her,' Philip said. 'I've only met her once.' He realised he had told his first lie for Senta and he wondered why he had done it. But he plunged on. 'She's your first Cousin?' This was too much for Darren who said with some bewilderment, 'First, second, I don't reckon I've been into all that. All I know is my mum is her auntie and her dad is my uncle and that makes us cousins in my book. Right?' He returned to safer and better-known ground. 'Come on now, Phil, you do fancy her.' The knowing look and sophisticated smile were all Darren required and these Philip, without too much strain, supplied. Darren responded with a wink. 'She's a funny piece, Senta. You should see the place she lives in, a real rat-hole, a dump. Fee wouldn't set foot there when they were fixing up about the dresses and whatnot and I don't know as I blame her. And she could have a nice home with Uncle Tom in Finchley, she must want her head tested.' Although he felt he was betraying himself with every word, Philip couldn't stop yet. 'Fee doesn't know her very well then?' 'Don't let that worry you, old lad. I know her. I can get you in there if that's what you're after.' He wasted no more words on Senta but reverted to Guernsey and his passion for heights, depths, weights, measures and extremes of temperature. Philip let him run on, then excused himself. He was due at Senta's at nine. Before leaving the house he had something to see to upstairs. It had occurred to him that Fee might go into his room if she was still in the house after he had gone out. She never had gone in there during the days when she lived in Glenallan Close and there was no reason for her to do so now. But he had been struck by some kind of premonition or simple apprehensiveness. The marble girl still stood, uncovered, in the corner between clothes cupboard and window wall. It was ten to nine but not dark yet and the glimmering light made her marble skin very radiant, pearl-like yet human too, as if she lived. She was Senta to the life. Was not that calm yet starry gaze at distant horizons hers alone? Those folded lips set in exquisite proportion to the straight delicate nose? She had even done her hair like that when they went out together, bound closely around her head in little waves from where the plaits had crimped it. He had a sudden desire, which he recognised as absurd and to be quickly suppressed, to kiss that marble mouth, to press his own lips against the lips that looked so soft. He wrapped the statue up again, not in the cold slippery plastic, but in an old Aran sweater and thrust her into the back of the cupboard. Talking of Senta, hearing her declarations confirmed -he felt treacherous there, but it was true, he had doubted and feared - tasting her euphonious name on his lips and hearing it spoken so idly by another, somehow fired him with a newer, fiercer ardour. He could hardly wait to be with her and he was breathless in the car, cursing at the red traffic lights. Down the dirty stairs he ran, his body taut and tense with longing for her, his fingers fumbling the key in the lock, the scent of smoking joss stick coming to him as the door slid open and admitted him to her pungent, dusty, mysterious domain.

6

Under the may tree from which all the flowers had long fallen, which was now just an ordinary green tree, stood a figure of Cupid with his bow and quiver of arrows. Philip couldn't see it very clearly, for the binoculars were still missing from the room. Everything else was missing too. Mrs Ripple had carried Out Roseberry Lawn's requirements and had the interior stripped of cookery books, fireplace, extraneous woodwork and floor covering. It was now a shell. The Cupid amused Philip. He knew this was the god of love and he wondered if Arnham had chosen it for this reason or simply because he liked it. A month ago he would have been affronted, incensed by the presence of this substitute for Flora. But in those intervening weeks he had changed a lot. He could hardly remember why he had stolen Flora. He found he no longer minded about Arnham, he had become indifferent to him, even felt friendly towards him. His anger was all gone. Why, if he were to meet the man now, he would say hallo to him and ask him how he was. His mission on this Saturday, generally accepted as a day off, had simply been to come here and inspect Mrs Ripple's house, to check if what she had said on the phone about the room being ready - you couldn't trust these customers - was accurate. The Roseberry Lawn fitters would be coming in on Monday. Philip closed the door behind him and went downstairs. Mrs Ripple was waiting for him at the foot. 'I shan't be able to make tea for them.' 'That's quite all right, Mrs Ripple, they won't expect it.' They would, but what was the use of arguing? There seemed no point either in anticipating trouble by telling her that if she didn't give them a mid-morning and mid-afternoon drink the fitters would take half an hour off at eleven and half an hour off at three to go down the cafe. 'You'll find them very easy and I think you'll be pleased by the way they clear up after themselves.' 'I won't tolerate smoking or transistors.' 'Of course not,' said Philip, thinking she could argue it out with the workmen. He knew who would win that battle. The door slammed behind him. No wonder she had cracks in her ceilings. He went down the path to the car where Senta sat waiting for him in the passenger seat. This was the first time she had been out with him since that Indian meal, which had never been repeated, though with the exception of an evening a week unwillingly spent at home with Christine, he had been with her every night. There was no point in eating out, she said, and he could tell food didn't mean much to her, though she liked chocolates and she liked wine. Nor had she ever cooked for him. He often remembered Fee's remark when, before he knew her, he had asked why Senta couldn't make her own dress. Fee had said he wouldn't have asked that if he had known Senta. Well, he knew her now and he wouldn't ask. The same applied to cooking or any domestic task. She lay in bed most mornings, she had told him, until noon or later. Her life apart from him was a mystery. If she was in on the few occasions he had tried to phone her, she hadn't answered the phone, though he had let it ring and ring to allow time for her to get upstairs. Their cloistral life together, half of every night spent in her bed, was wonderful, the most marvellous experience of his life, but he sensed somehow that it wasn't right, it wasn't real. They should be together for talk and companionship, not just for sex. Yet when he invited her to come out with him on this trip to Chigwell, get the call on Mrs Ripple over and then have lunch somewhere, maybe drive out into the country, he had anticipated refusal. He was surprised and pleased when she said yes. He was even more delighted to hear her echo his own thoughts and tell him they should be spending all their spare time together, all the time they weren't working. 'But you never do work, Senta,' he had said to her, his tone half-teasing. 'I went for an audition yesterday,' she said. 'It's for quite a good part in a feature film. I didn't get it, Miranda Richardson got it, but the director liked me, he said I was remarkable.' 'Miranda Richardson!' Philip had been impressed. Even for Senta to be considered in the same breath, so to speak, as Miranda Richardson said a lot for her ability. He had found out a bit about RADA too since she told him she had been there. It was the drama school, it was like saying you'd been to Oxford. But since then he had doubted. It was awful to think like that when you felt about someone the way he felt about Senta, but nevertheless, deep in his own mind, he doubted. It was her telling him that to keep herself fit and at the ready she went down to a place in Floral Street most afternoons, worked out and did ballet, which sparked off his doubts. She met all sorts of famous people there, actors and actresses and dancers. One afternoon, she told him, she and a couple of people she knew had had a cup of tea with Wayne Sleep. He couldn't quite believe it. She was embroidering the truth, that was all. Probably she had walked through Covent Garden and seen Wayne Sleep across the street. Once perhaps she had been to a health club and tried out the aerobic dance class. There were people like that, people for whom the truth was too stark and bare, who needed to p~retty it up. It wasn't lying, you couldn't call it lying. Very likely she told her friends, whoever they might be, about him. But you could bet your life she didn't say he was a junior surveyor with a company that built new bathrooms and kitchens and who lived at home with his mother in Cricklewood. In her account he would be transformed into an interior designer from Hampstead. Thinking this made him smile, and she, turning her head towards him as he got into the car, asked him what amused him. 'I'm just feeling happy. It's great being out with you like this.' For answer she leant sinuously towards him and pressed her soft warm pink lips against his. He wondered if Mrs Ripple were watching from the window. 'We'll soon be always together, Philip,' she said. 'I'm sure of it. I believe it's our hidden karmic destiny.' A few days before she had drawn his horoscope and this morning she had told him the single key number of his name was eight. Now she began talking of numerology, telling him how his number vibrated to the planet Saturn and represented wisdom, learning through experience, stability, patience and responsibility. Philip turned the corner into the street where Arnham's house was and pointed it out to her. She didn't pay it much attention but turned to him with a displeased look. He felt guilty, for it was true what she said, that he hadn't been listening very closely to her. 'You eight people,' she said, 'often appear cold and undemonstrative with those you ought to love and trust.' 'Cold?' he said. 'Undemonstrative? You must be joking. You are joking, aren't you, Senta?' 'It's because you're afraid of being considered weak. To be considered weak is the very last thing you eight people want to happen.' They had lunch in a country pub and forgot what Senta called the secret codes of the universe. Afterwards they parked the car somewhere out in a part of Essex where the lanes were narrow and few tourists came, and Senta led him in between the trees and they made love on the grass. He asked himself if he loved her, if he was in love with her. She had told him that first time not to say he loved her, not to talk in that way. They were to be together always, they were to be one, they had found each other. But was he in love? Did he even know what that expression, so widely and constantly used, so trite and stale, really meant? Desire, lust if you liked, passion, an absolute overpowering need to possess and re-possess her, he had all that all right. And he thought of her all the time. She occupied his thoughts on his long drives, on his visits to houses Roseberry Lawn was converting, when he was with Roy, at home with Christine and Cheryl, even in his own bed in Glenallan Close, though by that time, having come back from Kilburn in the small hours, he was usually too tired for anything but heavy sleep. Sometimes, inside his head, he talked to her. He told her his thoughts and fears as, for some reason, he couldn't tell the real woman. The real Senta, though silent while he spoke, seemed not to listen. And when some rejoinder was due from her, as likely as not it would be a remark about mystical meanings of polarity points or some strange affirmation that he and she were united souls with no need of words for communication. How could he be the other half of her, a twin soul, if he wasn't sure that he loved her? At the end of June Christine and Cheryl went away on holiday together. Philip was glad now that when he broke up with Jenny and cancelled the package tour to Greece they had arranged to take together, he hadn't arranged to go away with his mother and sister. He would have two weeks alone with Senta. In a way it was unfortunate he had to stay in Glenallan Close. But someone had to be there to take charge of Hardy. And Philip admitted to himself that although he went there every night, loved going there because Senta was there, longed for the place with a breath-catching excitement, he had never really got used to the house in Tarsus Street, had never accepted it. The filth and the smell continued to bother him. There was something sinister about the place too, the way you never saw anyone else, heard no sound ever but occasionally that music and those dancing feet. He ought really to have become apprehensive about her living there. If he was truly one of those wise responsible 'eight' people - and it made him smile to think of it - surely it should worry him to think of his girl friend, his twin soul as she would say, having her home in that part of London, in that sordid house. There were drunks on Tarsus Street at night and gangs of boys loitering on the corners, derelicts lying on the pavement or crouched in doorways. Why didn't it worry him? Was it because - awful thought -she seemed to belong there, to be as suited to the place as they? Once, going to her at nine at night, as he drove into her turning, he had seen a strange girl coming towards him along the pavement, gliding along in a black dress that touched the ground, her head wrapped in a red striped cloth like an African woman's. She had touched his arm as he got out of the car and smiled into his face before -he knew it was Senta. For an awful moment he had thought it was some prostitute soliciting him. Christine and Cheryl were going to Cornwall. Philip hadn't given much thought to Cheryl lately - so much for being wise and responsible! - but now he wondered how she would handle this habit of hers, whatever it might be, while she and Christine were in Newquay. Drink or drugs - well, they were available anywhere, he thought. Remembering his experience in that squalid street with the disguised Senta, he wondered if his unexpressed fears were after all justified, and Cheryl raised the money for her habit by prostitution. Uneasily, he recalled the flyer she had returned to him so promptly, no more than a night and a morning after she had borrowed it. He drove them to Paddington Station. Christine wore a dress of floral cotton with a white cardigan she had knitted herself during the long winter evenings. From a distance you couldn't see the mistakes in the pattern. He told her she looked nice (her word) and it was true that the contrast between her and Cheryl in jeans, Mickey Mouse tee shirt and black leather, was almost laughable. Cheryl no longer looked young or much like a girl or even very human. The skin of her face looked stretched and rough, her eyes were bitter. She had had her hair shorn off close to the crown. 'You've had a crew cut,' was all Christine said. 'I don't know what a crew cut is. This is a suede head.' 'I expect it's very nice if you like it,' - the nearest Christine would ever get to criticism. Leaving them there on the ramp with their suitcases, it was hopeless to think of finding a place to park, he drove back up to Cricklewood wondering what would become of his sister. She was trained for nothing, had no job or prospect of one, was terrifyingly ignorant, had no boy friend or any other kind of friend, and appeared hooked on some habit whose nature he was afraid to discover. But, as was always the case now, these thoughts were soon replaced by Senta. As soon as he had taken Hardy out for a walk he would be off to Kilburn to spend the rest of the day with her. He wanted to persuade her to return to Glenallan Close with him for the night. Hardy got a proper walk for a change, he deserved it. The poor dog had been obliged to put up with too many quick traversings of the block lately. Philip drove him to Hampstead Heath and walked through the woodland between the Spaniards Road and the Vale of Health towards Highgate. June was being a cool month, dry and grey. The bright green of the grass, the darker richer colour of the foliage were soothing to the eyes, curiously pacifying. Ahead of him the little dog ran along, stopping sometimes to push an excited snout into rabbit holes. Philip thought about Senta, her body as white as marble, those over-large breasts, nipples that were neither brown nor rosy but the palest pearl-pink,, and that rosy-bronze cluster under her belly like red flowers... He switched his mind and its image-making on to her face with Flora's pagan eyes. On to her voice and the things she said. Now he could think quite tenderly of the silly little untruths she had told him, about dyeing her hair, for instance, about being auditioned for that film and meeting Wayne Sleep. That stuff about her mother being Icelandic and dying when she was born, that too was probably made up. Hadn't Fee said something once about Senta's mother having this young lover? So much for dying in childbirth. She had fantasies, that was the truth of it. No harm in that. Some of the things she told him had been invented to impress him and that was very very flattering. That a girl like Senta should want to impress him was an enormous compliment. Fantasies, he had read somewhere, were what people had whose lives were rather empty, for whom reality was inadequate. He felt protective towards her when he thought like that and tenderly loving. Considering her like this, he had no doubt he loved her. Reaching these conclusions in a very level-headed way made Philip feel comfortably sophisticated. It almost seemed that this numerology stuff might have something in it, for perhaps he was one of those who learned by experience and grew wise. He would not care to have been taken in for long by fantasising, but as things were, he was neither duped nor disillusioned and that was fine. She wasn't deceiving him and, to be fair, perhaps that wasn't her intention, but only to appear to him more glamorous and exciting than she really was. It was impossible, he thought, for her to be more exciting, and as for the glamour - he liked best to think of her as the little girl with a sweet loving nature which she truly was underneath all that, the passionate lover who was at the same time an ordinary woman with an ordinary woman's doubts and uncertainties. On the way to Tarsus Street he went shopping. He bought a Chinese takeaway. If she wouldn't eat it, he would. He bought biscuits and fruit and two bottles of wine and a big box of Terry's Moonlight chocolates. Senta didn't cost him as much as Jenny had because they so seldom went out. He liked to splash out on the things he brought her. Outside her house an old man wearing what looked like a woman's raincoat tied round his middle with string was rooting through one of the plastic bags piled on the pavement. Despite notices on lampposts informing them that littering the street constituted an environmental hazard, the people down here piled their rubbish bags outside the broken railings in ill-smelling mounds. The old man had retrieved half a sliced loaf in cellophane wrapping and, thrusting his hand back in again, was perhaps in search of a lump of green cheese or the leftovers from a joint. Philip saw him fumbling with the crimson sticky bones of what had once been a wing of Tandoori chicken. The luxury foods he was carrying made him feel even worse about the old man than he normally would have done. He felt in his pocket for a pound coin and held it out. 'Thanks very much, governor. God bless.' The possession of the coin did nothing to prevent further excavations in the stack of rubbish bags. Should he have made it a flyer? Philip ran up the steps and let himself into the house. As usual it was silent, dirty. During the previous night it had rained heavily and someone, it was plain to see, had walked across the tiled floor toward the stairs in wet shoes whose deeply indented soles made a pattern in the dust. The scent of her joss stick was powerful today. He could smell it on the basement stairs where it fought with the permanent all-pervading sour reek of that dark well. She was waiting for him just inside. Sometimes, and today was one of those times, she wore an old Japanese kimono in faded blues and pinks on the back of which was embroidered a rose-coloured bird with a long curving tail. Her hair was looped up and fastened on top of her head with a silver comb. She put out her arms to him and held him in her slow, soft, all-the-time-in-the-world sensuous embrace, kissing his lips lightly, daintily, then drawing his mouth into a deep, devouring, enduring kiss. The original painted shutters were still attached to the window frame and these she had folded across the glass. The uneasy light of the June day, the watery sun, was excluded. Her lamp was on, the shade tilted, to shed yellow light on to the bed that was as rumpled as if she had just got out of it. A candle was burning too beside the sandalwood incense stick smouldering in its saucer. In the mirror the whole room was reflected, a frosty dusty purple and gold, and it might have been midnight, it might have been any time. Traffic grumbled out there and sometimes there came the clack-clack of a woman's heels on the pavement, the trundling sound of pram or bicycle wheels. He opened the wine. She didn't want to eat, she wouldn't eat meat. She sat cross-legged on the bed, picking out of the box the chocolates she liked best, and drinking the wine out of one of a pair of cloudy bottle-green glasses she had. Philip wasn't a wine drinker. He didn't like the taste of it nor the effect which left him with a swimming head and a bad taste in his mouth. Alcohol in any form he found rather distasteful with the exception of an occasional half of bitter. But Senta liked him to share the wine and he sensed she would have felt guilty if allowed to drink alone. It was easy, though, with coloured glass. You couldn't see if there was wine in there or water. And if it was inescapable that he pour himself a measure he could usually manage to get rid of it into the pot which held her only houseplant, a kind of imperishable aspidistra. This plant, having long survived darkness, drought and neglect, was beginning to flourish on its wine diet. She consented to go out to eat with him, though as always she seemed reluctant to leave her room. It was about ten when they got back to Tarsus Street. They hadn't taken the car to the restaurant, an Italian place in Fernhead Road, but had walked there and back, their arms round each other's waists. On the way back Senta became very loving, stopping sometimes to hold him and to kiss. He could feel the urgency of her desire, like rays, like trembling vibrations. In the past Philip had often seen couples who embraced in the street, oblivious apparently of those around them, mutually absorbed, kissing, fondling, seemingly gloating over each other with an intense exclusivity. He had never done that himself and had sometimes felt a kind of prudish disapproval of it. But now he found himself a willing, an ardent, partner in one of those couples, glorying in the pleasures of kissing in the street, in the lamplight, the dusk, against a wall, in the shadowy embrasure of a doorway. Back there in her basement room, she couldn't wait. She was greedy for him and for love, sweat gleaming on her upper lip, her fotehead, her white marble skin bearing a hectic flush. Yet when they were in bed together she was sweeter and more generous than she had ever been, yielding instead of overwhelming, giving rather than taking. Her movements seemed all for his delight, her hands and lips and tongue for him, her pleasure held and delayed until his came. A slow tide of joy, lapping in tender tiny waves, increasing, crashing like falling towers, broke upon him and the room, making the mirror shudder, the floor move. He groaned with the glory of it, a groan that became a cry of triumph as she held him and pressed and undulated swiftly and drew from him at last her own success. He lay thinking, next time I will give her what she has given me, she shall be first, I will do for her from the fullness of my happiness what she has done for me. There was no way he could have known that in a moment or two, by a tiny action, an ill-coloured word, he was to destroy the chance of this. Her hair spread out on the pillow beside his face in silvery points. It glittered like long brittle slivers of glass. The flush had faded from her face and it was white again, pure, lineless, the skin as smooth as the inner side of an ivory waxen petal. Her wide open eyes were crystals with the green fluidity tinting them like weeds in water. He ran his fingers through her hair, holding the tresses of it in his fingers, feeling the sharp healthy harshness of the strands. The lamp he had turned round and tilted the shade so that the light should fall on their faces, their passion-expressing eyes. That light was now shed on to the crown of her head. He peered more closely, lifted a silver gleaming lock, and exclaimed without thought, without pause, 'Your hair's red at the roots!' 'Of course it is. I told you I bleached it. Well, I have it bleached' Her voice wasn't angry, only faintly impatient. 'It needs redoing. I should have had it done last week.' 'You actually have it bleached? You have it made that silver colour?' 'I told you, Philip. Don't you remember I told you?' He laughed a little, relaxed, easy, happy. He laughed, shaking his head. 'I didn't believe you, I honestly didn't believe a word of it.' What happened next was very quick. Senta sprang up. She crouched on the bed on all-fours. She was like an animal, her lips drawn back, her hair hanging. There should have been a long feline tail swinging. Her eyes were round and glittering and a hissing sound came from her between clenched teeth. He had sat up and drawn back, away from her. 'What on earth's the matter?' It was a different voice, low, coarse, vibrating with rage. 'You 'don't trust me! You don't believe me!' 'Senta... 'You don't trust me. How can we be one, how can we be joined together, one soul, when you've no trust in me? When you've no faith?' Her voice rose and it was like a siren howling. 'I've given you my soul, I've told you the deep things in my soul, I've exposed the wholeness of my spirit, and you - you've just shat on it, you've fucked it over, you've destroyed me!' Then she came at him with pounding fists, aiming for his face, his eyes. He was a man and he had a foot of height advantage over her and weighed half as much again as she. But for all that it took him a while to subdue her. She writhed in his grip, tossing herself this way and that, hissing, twisting to bite his hand. He felt sharp teeth break the skin and the blood come. He was surprised she was so fit. Her strength was wiry, like electrically charged wire. And like wire when the current is switched off, it suddenly died. She weakened and collapsed like something dying, like an animal whose neck has been wrung. And as she shuddered and yielded so she began to weep, great sobs tearing through her, roaring out of her, as she caught her breath on gasps like an asthmatic, breaking afresh into sobs of passionate misery. He held her in his arms, horribly distressed.

7

He couldn't leave her. He stayed the night. There was some wine left and he gave her the rest of it in one of the green glasses. She hardly spoke, only cried and clung to him. But she surprised him by falling immediately asleep once the wine had been drunk and the duvet pulled over her. Sleep came less easily to him. He lay awake hearing the feet begin their dancing above his head. One two three, one two three, and the tune throbbed, the 'Tennessee Waltz', something of - L~har, was it? - he seldom knew the names but Christine had records. The room always grew cold at night. It was summer and outside had felt like a warm muggy night but in here a dank chill crept from the walls. Of course it was below ground. After a while he got up, folded back the shutters and opened the window at the top. With the extinguishing of the incense stick the sour smell of the house always returned. Their faces and curled bodies, their shapes under the lumpy bundled purple cotton, showed in the dimness of the mirror so that it appeared not like a reflecting glass but an old, soiled, dark oil painting. Overhead the feet danced on, one two three, one two three, pim-pQm-pom, pim-pom-pom, from the window wall across the floor to make the mirror tremble, then over to the door, back to the window. Their rhythm and the music sent him, at last, to sleep. In the morning he had to go home to see to the dog. Things were always so different in the morning. A freshness had come in through the open window, a light green scent perhaps from one of the back gardens that weren't filled with dismembered motor vehicles and builders' junk. Philip made instant coffee, set out bread and butter and oranges. She was sullen and quiet. Her eyes were heavy with a swollen look. He feared he had a black eye where one of her flying fists had got him and the cloudy spotted mirror showed him a bloodshot white and a blue bruise starting. His wrist was swollen where she had bitten him and the teeth marks had turned purple. 'I'll be back in a couple of hours.' 'Are you sure you want to come back?' 'Senta, of course I want to. You know I want to. Look, I'm sorry I said that about not believing you. It was tactless and stupid.' 'It wasn't tactless. It showed me you don't understand me at all. You don't feel at one with me. I searched all my life for you and when I found you I knew it was my karma. But it isn't for you, I'm just a girl friend to you.' 'I'll convince you if it takes me all day. Why don't you come back with me? That's a better idea. We don't want to stay in this room all day. Come back with me.' She wouldn't. He thought resentfully as he climbed the stairs that he was the injured party, not she. A dentist had once told him, while filling one of his molars, that a human bite is more dangerous than an animal's. Of course it was ridiculous thinking like that, he wouldn't come to any harm from the bite. He just wondered how he could hide it from view until it healed. Hardy got his walk and, because Philip felt guilty about him, rather more Kennomeat than was strictly correct for a dog of his size. He had a bath, put a piece of sticking plaster on the bite and then took it off again. If Senta saw that she would think he was making an unnecessary fuss or trying to draw attention to what she had done. Anyway, he couldn't put a plaster on his eye. Roy would have some comments to make in the morning but he couldn't think about that now. Philip considered buying more wine. It might please Senta but, on the other hand, if he took nothing with him they would have a reason for going out. It was a beautiful day, the sky cloudless, the sun already hot. He contemplated spending the whole day in that underground room with dismay. For the first time since they had been together he was without desire for her, could think of her without that image being accompanied by a need to make love to her. Perhaps that was natural after the excesses of the day before. Arriving at the house, he paused before climbing the steps to look down at the basement window. She had closed the shutters once more. He let himself in and went down the basement stairs. Inside her room there was no joss stick burning today. She was back in bed, deeply asleep. He felt disappointed and rather impatient. If he had known he could have stayed longer, done some 'Sunday thing', played tennis with Geoff and Ted as he sometimes did or gone for a swim at Swiss Cottage. At any rate he could have brought a Sunday paper back with him. He sat on the single chair the room boasted and watched her. Gradually a tenderness for her, a kind of pity, brought a yearning to touch her. He took off his clothes and lay down beside her, holding one arm round her curled body. It was past one when she woke up. They dressed and went out to a wine bar. Senta was calm and quiet, preoccupied by something and inattentive to the things he said. His desire for her was still in abeyance but his enjoyment in being with her seemed to have increased. He continually surprised himself that there had been a time when he hadn't thought her beautiful. There was no other woman they saw while they were out to touch her. She had put on the silvery grey dress with the drooping rose at the bosom and silver shoes with enormously high heels that made her suddenly tall. Her hair was pushed behind her ears from which hung long pendant earrings of crystal drops like chandeliers. Men turned to stare covertly at her bare white legs and thin waist and large breasts in the clinging stuff. Philip felt proud to be with her and, for no known reason, rather nervous. On their way back she talked of the curious occult and astrological things that interested her, of harmonics and multiple-layered vibrational frequencies, of the beautiful synchronicity of the universe and of discordant patterns. He listened to the sound of her voice rather than to what she said. It must have been at drama school that she had learned to speak in that accent and with that timbre, the voice that spoke like a soprano singing. Then he remembered he couldn't really credit her having been at drama school. How hard it all was, how complicated when you didn't know what to believe and what not to! A little fear came to him as they went into the house as to how they would pass the rest of the day. Could you be ordinary with her, could you just sit and be together and do things, not love-making, with her as his mother and father, for example, had been together? She would want to make love and he thought, fearfully, that he might be incapable. It was almost a relief when she sat down on the bed and motioned him to the old wicker chair and said she wanted to talk, she had something to say to him. 'What do I mean to you, Philip?' He said simply, truthfully, 'Everything.' 'I love you,' she said. It was so simple and gentle the way she said it, so natural and childlike, that it went to his heart. She had told him not to say it, said she would not, so he knew that now the time had come when saying it was right. He leant towards her and put out his arms. She shook her head, seeming to look past him and beyond, with Flora's gaze. She touched his hand, moved her finger softly to the injured wrist. 'I said we mustn't say that till we were sure. Well, I'm sure now. I love you. You are the other half of me, I was incomplete till I found you. I'm sorry I hurt you last night, I was mad with misery, I just struck you and bit you because it was a way of releasing my misery, my unhappiness. Can you understand that, Philip?' 'Of course I can.' 'And do you love me like I love you?' It seemed a solemn occasion. Gravity and an intense seriousness were called for. He said in a steady deliberate way, as if making a vow, 'I love you, Senta.' 'I wish it were enough, saying it. But it isn't enough, Philip. You have to prove your love for me and I have to prove mine for you. I thought about that all the time you were away this morning. I lay here thinking about it, how we each have to do some tremendous thing to prove our love for each other.' 'That's all right,' he said. 'I'll do that. What would you like me to do?' She was silent. Her crystalline greenish eyes had shifted their gaze from some unknown horizon and returned to meet his. It won't be Jenny's thing of getting engaged, he thought, that's not Senta's style. And it won't be buying her something. Squeamishly he hoped she wasn't going to ask him to cut a vein and mingle his blood with hers. It would be like her and he would do it but he felt distaste for it. 'I believe life is a great adventure, don't you?' she said. 'We feel the same about these things, so I know you do. Life is terrible and beautiful and tragic but most people make it just-ordinary. When you and I make love we have a moment of heightened consciousness, a moment when everything looks clear and brilliant, we have such an intensity of feeling that it's as if we experience everything fresh and new and perfect. Well, it ought to be like that all the time, we can learn the power of making it that way, not by wine or drugs but by living to the limit of our consciousness, by living every day with every fibre of our awareness.' He nodded. She had been saying something like that on the way back here. The awful thing was he had begun to feel sleepy. He had eaten a heavy lunch and drunk a pint of beer. What he would best have liked would have been to lie down on the bed with her and cuddle her until they fell asleep. Her telling him she loved him had made him very happy and with that knowledge a sleepy desire was returning, the kind of mild lust which can be pleasantly delayed until sleep has come and gone and the body lies warm and easy. He smiled at her and reached for her hand. She withdrew her hand and held the index finger up at him. 'Some say that to live fully you have to have done four things. Do you know what they are? I'll tell you. Plant a tree, write a poem, make love with your own sex, and kill someone.' 'The first two - well, the first three really - don't seem to have much in common with the last. 'Please don't laugh, Philip. You laugh too much. There are things that shouldn't be laughed at.' 'I wasn't laughing. I don't suppose I'll ever do any of those things you said, so I hope that won't mean I haven't lived.' He looked at her, taking a deep pleasure in her face, her large clear eyes, the mouth that he could never tire of gazing at. 'When I'm with you I think I'm really living, Senta.' It was an invitation to love but she ignored it. She said very quietly, with an intense dramatic concentration. 'I shall prove I love you by killing someone for you and you must kill someone for me.' He was aware for the first time since they got back of the stuffiness of the room, the close raunchy smell of the bed and the bag overflowing with dirty washing, and he got up to unfold the shutters and open the window. Standing there with his hands on the sash bar, breathing such fresh air as penetrated Tarsus Street, he said to her over his shoulder, 'Oh, sure. Who have you got in mind?' 'It doesn't have to be anyone in particular. In fact, it'd be better if it's not. Someone in the street at night. She'd do.' She pointed past Philip out of the window to where one of the street people, an elderly bag woman, had seated herself on the pavement with her back to the railings above the basement area. 'Someone like that, anyone. It's not who it is that matters, it's doing it, it's doing this terrible deed that puts you outside ordinary society.' 'I see.' The old woman's back looked like a sack of rags someone had dropped there to be collected by the council refuse men. It was hard to grasp that there was a human being inside there, a person with feelings, who could experience joy and suffer pain. Philip turned slowly from the window but he didn't sit down. He leaned against the mirror's bruised and broken frame. Senta's face wore its intense expression, blank yet concentrated. He thought she spoke like someone - and someone not very talented - uttering lines learned for a play. 'I would know what you'd done for me and you would know what I'd done for you but no one else would. We should share these terrible secrets. We should really know each of us meant more than all the world besides to the other, if you could do that for me and I could do it for you. 'Senta,' he said, trying to keep his patience, 'I know you aren't serious. I know these things are fantasies with you. You may think you're deceiving me but you're not.' Her face changed. Her eyes shifted and returned to look into both of his. She spoke in a still cold voice, but warily. 'What things?' 'Oh, never mind. I know and you know.' 'I don't know. What things?' He hadn't wanted to say it, he didn't want a confrontation, but perhaps there was no help for it. 'Well, if you must have it, about your mother and going to all those foreign places and going to auditions for parts with Miranda Richardson. I know they're daydreams. I didn't want to say it but what else can I do when you talk about killing people to prove we love each other?' All the time he was speaking he was bracing himself to repel the same sort of attack as she had made on him the night before. But she was calm, statue-like, her hands folded and her eyes fixed on them in hieratic pose. She rai~d her eyes to his face. 'You don't believe what I say, Philip?' 'How can I when you say things like that? I believe some things.' 'All right. What don't you believe?' He didn't quite answer her. 'Look, Senta, I don't mind you having fantasies, lots of people do, it's just a way of making life more interesting. I don't mind you inventing things about your family and about your acting, but when you get to talk about killing people - it's so ugly and pointless and it's a waste of time too. It's the weekend, it's Sunday, we could be having a nice time, out somewhere, it's a lovely day, and here we are sitting in this - well, frankly, disgusting hole, while you talk about killing that poor old creature sitting out there.' She became a muse of tragedy, sombre, grave. She might have been imparting terrible news of his family to him or telling him all those she loved were dead. 'I am absolutely, utterly, profoundly serious,' she said. He felt he was contorting his face, screwing up his eyes and frowning in an effort to understand her. 'You can't be.' 'Are you serious about loving me, about doing anything for me?' 'Within reason, yes.' He said it sulkily. 'Within reason! How sick that makes me! Don't you see that what we have has to be without reason, beyond reason? And to prove it we have to do the thing that is outside the law and beyond reason.' 'You really are serious,' he said bitterly. 'Or you think you are, which in your present mood comes to the same thing.' 'I am willing to kill someone to prove my love for you and you must do the same for me.' 'You're mad, Senta, that's what you are. Her voice was stony now, remote. 'Don't ever say that.' 'I won't say it, I don't really mean it .0 God, Senta, let's talk about something else, please. Let's do sojnething. Can't we forget all this? I don't even know how we got into it.' She got up, approached him. He found himself, to his own humiliation, shielding his face. 'I won't hurt you.' She spoke with contempt. With her little hands, her child's hands, she took him by the upper arms. She looked into his face. The stilt heels had elevated her so that she had only a little way to look up. 'Are you refusing to do this, Philip? Are you?' 'Of course I am. You may not know it, you don't really know me yet, but I hate the whole notion of killing and any sort of violence, come to that. It doesn't just make me feel sick, it bores me. I can't even watch a violent film on TV, and I don't want to either, it doesn't interest me. And now you say you want me to kill someone. What kind of a criminal do you think I am?' 'I thought you were the other half of our united souls.' 'Oh, don't talk such rubbish! It's such a load of. shit, all this balls about souls and karmas and destinies and rubbish. Why don't you grow up and live in the real world? You talk about living - do you think you're living stuck in this filthy dump sleeping half the day? Making up tales to convince people how clever and amazing you are? I thought I'd heard it all, all that about going to Mexico and India and wherever and your Icelandic mother and the Flying Dutchman, but now I get told I've got to kill some poor old bloody vagrant to prove I love you. She made that hissing cat's sound and with both hands shoved him so hard that he staggered. He grabbed the edge of the gilded frame to steady himself, thought for a moment the whole great swinging dangerous sheet of mirror would come crashing down. But it was only shivering on the chain which fastened it to the wall and it stilled as he leaned against it, grasping it with both hands. When he turned round she had flung herself face-downwards on the bed, where she lay making curious convulsive jerks down the length of her body. As he touched her tentatively, she rolled on to her back, sat up and began to scream. The sounds were terrible, mechanical seemingly, short staccato shrieks tearing out of her wide open mouth from which the lips curled back in a snarl like a tigress. He did what he had heard and read about and slapped her face. It had an instant silencing effect. She went white as paper, gagged, gasped, put her hands up to cover both cheeks. Her whole body trembled. After a moment she spoke to him through her fingers, whispered, 'Get me some water.~ She sounded weak and breathless as if she were ill. For a moment he was afraid for her. He went out of the room and along the passage past the other basement rooms to where the lavatory was and next to it the relic and ruin of a bathroom. Here the single brass tap, wrapped in rags, stuck out of the green and fungus-coated wall over the bathtub. He filled the mug, drank it down himself and refilled it. The water had a dead metallic taste. He made his way back to where she was. She was sitting on the bed with the purple duvet wrapped round her as if it were a winter's day. Behind and above her, outside the window, the old woman's back, covered now by some sort of khaki-coloured jacket, could still be seen beyond the railing. She had given no sign of having heard the screams from below, having perhaps heard so much of life that she had become detached. Philip held the mug to Senta's lips and helped her drink as if she really was ill. He put his other arm round her and rested his hand tenderly on her neck. He could feel tremors passing through her body and a feverish heat on her skin. She sipped the water quietly until she had finished it to the dregs. Her neck extricated itself from his fondling hand, her head ducked away from him and she took from him the mug the water had been in. It was all done very quietly and gently which made the next thing she did shocking because it was so unexpected. She hurled the mug across the room where it crashed against the wall. 'Get out of here!' she screamed at him. 'Get out of my life! You've ruined my life, I hate you, I never want to see you again.'

8

Darren's car, an ancient banger just this side of vintage value, was parked by the kerb and the front door was open. On the step, in the sunshine, Hardy lay asleep, but he woke up when Philip appeared and ran to make a fuss of him. Now Philip remembered that Fee had said she would come on Sunday afternoon to take away the rest of her things, and as he entered the house she came downstairs with a pile of clothes over one arm and a teddy bear clutched in the other. 'Whatever's happened to your eye? Have you been in a fight?' 'Someone hit me,' he said, trying to be truthful; then, untruthfully, 'They mistook me for someone else.' 'I've phoned about fifty times since yesterday morning.' 'I've been out,' he said. 'I've been out quite a bit.' 'I realise that. I thought you must have gone away. That looks awful, that eye. Was it in a pub it happened?' His mother didn't question and check up on him, so he didn't see why he should put up with it from a sister. She went out to the car, came back rather shrilly, 'How long's that poor dog been on his own?' He didn't answer. 'Shall I give you a hand with that stuff?' 'All right. I mean, thanks. I thought you'd be here, Phil.' She preceded him up the stairs. In the room that was now Cheryl's alone the doors of a clothes cupboard were open, one of the twin beds piled with dresses and coats and skirts. But the first thing he saw, the first thing he really took in, was the garment that lay in a heap on the floor of the cupboard. It was the bridesmaid's dress which Senta had stripped off that day they first made love. 'She must really have liked that dress, mustn't she?' said Fee. 'She must really have appreciated it. You can see she just took it off and dumped it there. By the look of it, it somehow got soaking wet first.' He said nothing. He was remembering. Fee picked up the ruined dress, the satin stained with water spots, the net creased and the skirt torn at the hem. 'I mean, I can understand if she didn't like it. It was my taste, not hers. But you'd think she'd think of my feelings, wouldn't you? I mean, finding it there sort of just discarded. And poor old Stephanie. She sat up nights to finish making that.' 'I suppose she just didn't think.' Fee pulled a suitcase down from the top of the cupboard. She began folding things up and putting them in the case. 'Mind you, she's very peculiar. I only asked her to be my bridesmaid because Darren's mother specially asked me to. She said Senta would feel left out. I'm sure she wouldn't have. They've really split off from the rest of the family, that lot. I mean, we asked Senta's father and her mother but they didn't come, they didn't even answer the invitations.' With seeming indifference, he said, 'Someone said Senta had a foreign mother but that she was dead. I suppose they'd got hold of the wrong end of the stick.' It gave him an odd little thrill to speak her name so casually. He waited for Fee's denial, watched her, expecting her to turn round to him, her upper lip raised, her nose wrinkled up, the face she made when something she found incredible was said to her. She folded the bridesmaid's dress up, said, 'I may as well take it with me. I supposeA can have it cleaned, someone might want it. It's miles too small for me.' She closed the lid of the case, fastened it. 'Yes, there was something like that,' she said. 'Her mother died when she was born. She came from some funny place. Greenland? No, Iceland. Darren's uncle was in the Merchant Navy and they put in there or whatever the expression is, and he met her but her family were funny about it because he wasn't an officer or anything. Anyway they did get married and he had to go back to sea and she had this baby - I mean, Senta -and died of some awful complications or whatever.' It was all true then. He felt both aghast and terribly pleased, relieved and appalled. There were more questions to be asked but before he could ask them, Fee said, 'Uncle Tom - I mean I'm supposed to call him uncle now - he went back and fetched the baby. Her people were mad, Darren's mother says, because they thought they'd get to keep her. Uncle Tom brought her home and very soon after he married Auntie Rita. She's the one that lives with the young guy. Would you carry the case, Phil? And I'll bring my winter coat and the two dolls.' They loaded up the car. Philip made a cup of tea. It was so warm and sunny that they sat in the garden and drank it. Fee said, 'I wish Mum hadn't given Flora away. I expect it sounds silly to you but I thought she gave the place a touch of class.' 'That's something it needs,' said Philip. He toyed with the idea of setting Flora up out here somewhere. Why shouldn't he build a rockery for her? No one had done anything to the garden except mow the grass since they moved here. And that was all it was, grass with fences round it on three sides and bang in the middle the concrete birdbath. He tried to imagine Flora standing on rocks with flowers at her feet and a couple of little cypress trees behind her, but how could he explain to Christine? 'Come over and have a meal with us one night,' said Fee. 'I mean, I won't say you must miss Mum's home cooking but at least you don't normally have to get it for yourself.' He said he would and fixed on Thursday. By that time he would have seen Senta three times, so it would be reasonable to have an evening away from her the way he did when Christine was at home. After Fee had gone he took Hardy for a long walk up to Brent Reservoir, leaving by the back door and with the back door key in his pocket. Senta's telling him to get out, he had ruined her life, he took rather less than seriously. Certainly, he now saw, he had been at fault. She had naturally been furious at being disbelieved when she told the truth. For it was the truth, that was the amazing thing. All that must be true, for if the account of her mother's nationality and her own birth was not fantasy neither would her travels be nor her drama school training nor her meetings with the famous. Of course she was hurt and upset when he doubted her, when he told her so in that blatant way. It was rather an awkward situation. He couldn't exactly tell her he now believed her because he had questioned his sister about her. It needed some thinking out. In the light of what Fee had said, Senta's rage was easy to understand. He had behaved like a narrow-minded clod, living up to her estimate of people as ordinary and bent on living in an ordinary world. Was it perhaps hysteria, a kind of uncontrollable angry misery at her word being disbelieved, that had led her to all that talk about proving his love for her? The difficulty was he couldn't now remember what had come first, his declaration or disbelief or her demand that he kill someone for her. He would set it right, waste no more time. Take Hardy home and go straight back to Tarsus Street. Falling asleep and staying asleep quite a long way into the night was something he wouldn't have expected to happen to him. But he had had almost no sleep the night before and no more than two or three hours on Friday night. Returned from their walk, he had fed the dog, eaten a hunk of bread and some cheese, gone upstairs to change and there lain down on the bed for what was to be a ten-minute nap. It was dark when he awoke, long dark. The illuminated green numerals on his digital clock told him it was twelve thirty-one. Their confrontation, his deep apology and request for forgiveness must wait until tomorrow. Well, tonight really, he thought as he drifted off once more into sleep. Hardy, for once not shut up in the kitchen for the night, lay curled up on the end of the bed by his feet. It was the little dog coming close up to his face, licking his ear, which awoke him. He had forgotten to set the alarm but it was only seven. Soft hazy sunshine filled the room. Already, at this hour, you could feel in the air the promise of a hot and perfect day, that kind of expectant smiling serenity that breathes from a sky that is cloudless but veiled in a fine mist. It was what the older people called 'settled'. Rain and cold seemed something that happened in another country. He had a bath, shaved, put Hardy out into the garden which was going to have to suffice for him this morning. Yesterday's miles ought to last him a day or two. Philip put on a clean shirt and the suit which Roseberry Lawn expected its personnel to wear when visiting customers. He had a kitchen conversion to keep an eye on in Wembley and a projected bathroom installation to estimate in Croydon. Wembley wasn't far away but the fitters would start work at eight-thirty. He felt for his keys in the pocket of the jeans he had worn yesterday. There were two sets, the keys to the Opel Kadett and a second ring on which he kept the key to this house, the key to the outer door of head office and, for the past month, the keys to the house in Tarsus Street. These last, he saw to his extreme dismay, were missing. His own house key was there and the one to the office. The ring was a plain one without a fob. It was impossible for the keys to have slipped off. Could Senta have taken them off? He sat down on the bed. He felt rather cold in spite of the warmth of the day but his hands, which held the ring with two keys on it only, were damp. It was easy to see, when he thought about it, what had happened. She had asked him to fetch her a drink of water and while he was away she had abstracted her own keys from the ring. At midday, while he was taking his lunch break, he tried to phone her from a call box. Never yet had he succeeded in getting a reply from that phone in the hall in Tarsus Street and he didn't now. He did something strictly against Roseberry Lawn rules and asked Mrs Finnegan, the Croydon householder, if he might use her phone. Someone of Mrs Ripple's sort would have made a thing out of it, refused and lectured him, but Mrs Finnegan only stipulated that he make his call through the exchange and pay the cost of it. It made no difference, anyway, for no one answered. He had measured up the tiny area of bedroom she wanted transformed into a bathroom with full-size bath, lavatory, vanity unit and bidet, told her he doubted it would be a possibility, listened to her protests, argued very politely, smiled and agreed when she said he was very young, wasn't he, and would he get a second opinion? She kept staring speculatively at his eye. By then it was a quarter-past five. There was hardly a worse time for driving across London. The time was twenty to seven when he got to the Harrow Road and turned off into the hinterland. In Cairo Street he stopped outside an off-licence and bought -wine and crisps and after-dinner mints, the only chocolates they had. Now he was nearly there he was aware of a kind of sick excitement building up inside him. The old man in the woman s raincoat was sitting on the pavement with his back to the railings above Senta's area. He was still wearing the raincoat, though it was very hot, the pavements white in the sun and the tar melting on the roadway. The old man whose face was 120 covered with a yellowish-white stubble had fallen asleep, his head lolling against a heap of rags he had used to cushion the railings. In his lap lay an assortment of food scraps, a piece of burnt toast, a croissant in cellophane, a jam jar with about an inch of marmalade in the bottom of it. Philip thought that if he woke up he would give him another pound coin. He didn't know why this old vagrant, wretched and destitute, moved him so much. After all, you saw plenty like him, men and women, he wasn't unique. They congregated here and in the neighbouring streets because of the proximity of the Mother Teresa Centre. The front doors of houses like this one where there were many tenants were often left open. But he had never found this one open and he didn't now. There was no bell. This place was a far cry from the kind of house where there was a row of bells by the front door with the tenant's name on a neat card above each one. The door knocker was of brass long turned quite black. Something sticky came off it on to his fingers. He banged and banged. She had taken the keys off the ring because she didn't want to see him. She didn't want him to come back. That must be the truth but it was something he didn't want to face. He bent down and looked through the letter box. All he could see was the phone on the table and the shadowy passage leading away to the basement stairs. He went back down the steps and looked over into the area. The shutters were folded across her window, and this in spite of the heat. It made him feel she must be out. Those auditions she went to, those famous people she knew, that was all true. He stepped back across the pavement and looked up at the house. There were three floors above the basement. It was the first time he had ever looked up at it like this. In the past he had always been in too much of a hurry to pause, too eager to get into the house and find her. The roof was shallow, of grey slates with a kind of little railing round. This was the only ornamental thing on the forbidding facade, liver-coloured bricks punctured by three rows of windows, each on a plain flat oblong, deeply recessed. On one of the windowsills on the middle floor was a broken window box that had once been gilded and flakes of gilt still adhered to it. In it were some dead plants tied up to sticks. Philip was aware that the old man had woken up and was watching him. He had a strange superstitious feeling about the old man. If he ignored him, repudiated him, he would never see Senta again. But if he gave him something substantial it would count in his favour in that mystical hand-out centre, where people received benefits according to the measure of their charity. Someone, whose opinion he had privately derided at the time, had once said to him that what we give to the poor, that is what we take with us when we die. Although he could ill afford it, he took a five-pound note out of his wallet and put it into the hand that was aijeady stretched out to receive it. 'Get yourself a good meal,' he said, by now embarrassed. 'You're a nobleman, governor. God bless you and your loved ones.' It was a strange one, that term 'governor', Philip thought, getting back into his car. Where did it come from? Did it originate with the governor of a prison -or a workhouse? He shuddered a little, though the car was hot and stuffy. The old man was still sitting on the pavement, contemplating the flyer with great complacency and satisfaction. Philip drove home, made himself coffee, baked beans on toast, ate an apple, took Hardy round the block. Much later, at about nine-thirty, he tried that phone number again but there was no reply. A postcard came from Christine next morning. It showed St Michael's Mount off the southern coast of Cornwall. Christine wrote: 'We haven't been to this place and don't suppose we shall as the coach trip doesn't go there. But it was the prettiest card in the shop. Wish you were here enjoying this heatwave with us. Much love Mum and Cheryl.' Cheryl hadn't signed it though. It was all in Christine's writing. Philip suddenly remembered who it was that had said that about the money we give to the poor being all we take with us when we die. It was Gerard Arnham. The only time Philip had met him Arnham had said that. When they went down to the steakhouse perhaps it had been and Christine had talked of Stephen, quoted him as saying, 'Oh, well, you can't take it with you...' When she stopped hearing from Arnham had Christine felt the way he did now? But that was nonsense. Senta was only peeved, sulking, punishing him. She would keep it up for a few days maybe, he must be prepared for a few days. It might be the best thing not to attempt to get into the house again, to leave it for today. But when he was driving home that evening from a call he had made in Uxbridge, he found the pull of Tarsus Street impossible to resist. The heat was greater than on the previous evening and more humid, sultrier. He left the car windows open. He left them open, thinking sod's law will operate, if I close the windows and lock up the car she won't let me in but if I leave the windows open she will let me in and I shall have to come back to close them. The old man was gone, all that remained of him a rag tied round one of the railings at ground level. Philip went up to the front door, banged on the knocker, banged a dozen times. As he retreated he looked down into the area and fancied he saw the shutters move. He thought for a moment that the shutters had been open and she, or someone in there, had closed them at the sound of his feet on the stone steps. He had probably imagined it, he was probably deluding himself. At any rate, they were closed now. On Wednesday he kept away. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He had begun to long for her. The longing wasn't only sexual but it was sexual. The continuing heat made it worse. He lay on his bed naked with the sheet half over him and thought of that first time when she had come to him here in this bed. He rolled over on to his face and clutched the pillow and groaned. When he went to sleep he had the first wet dream he had for years. He was making love to her in the basement bed in Tarsus Street, and unlike most dreams of this kind, he was really making love to her, was deep inside her, moving towards one of their triumphant shared climaxes, experiencing it and shouting out with happiness and pleasure. He woke up at once, making noises, whimpering, turning over to feel sticky wetness against his thigh. That wasn't the worst thing. The worst was having had the joy of it and knowing it wasn't real, it hadn't happened. He got up very early and changed the sheets. He thought, I've got to see her, I can't go on like this, I can't imagine another day of this. She has punished me enough, I know I was wrong, I know it was unkind of me and insensitive and cruel even, but she can't want to go on punishing me, she has to give me the chance to explain, to apologise. It was a joke, wasn't it, an ordinary house in an ordinary slummy London Street, that no one could get into? The place wasn't boarded up, it had ordinary doors and windows. Driving across London to another encounter with Mrs Finnegan in Croydon, he had the strangely unwelcome idea no one else lived there but Senta. That whole great barrack of a place was empty but for Senta living in one room in the basement. I could get in, he thought, I could break the basement window. Tentative plans for Mrs Finnegan, sketched by Roy, were for a shower room the area of a medium-size cupboard. 'I want a bath,' Mrs Finnegan said. 'Then you'll have to sacrifice half the bedroom area, not a quarter.' 'I have to have a bedroom big enough to get twin beds in or at least a double bed.' 'Have you considered bunks?' said Philip. 'That's all very well at your age. Most of my friends are over sixty.' Philip asked if he could use her phone. She agreed if he would reverse the charges. He phoned Roy for advice. Roy, who was being unusually happy and expansive these days, said to tell the silly old fart to move to a bigger house. 'No, better not do that. Suggest a hip bath. Actually, they're good, a great way to have a bath, especially if you've got one foot in the grave and another - ' he laughed a lot at his own joke '- on a bar of soap.' Through the exchange Philip tried to put a call through to the house in Tarsus Street. She must answer sometimes, she had to. What if her agent wanted her? What if one of those auditions was successful? She didn't answer. He suggested the hip bath to Mrs Finnegan who said she would have to think it over. There must be ways of getting into a house. Didn't she ever answer the door? What about the gasman, the man who read the electricity meter, the postman with a parcel? Or was she only failing to answer because she knew it was the time he was likely to come? He got off early. It was too late to go back to the office but too early really to stop work. He stopped work. What about all the times he had worked Saturdays without overtime? It was twenty to five and he was in West Hampstead, ten minutes drive away even at a bad time for traffic. She wouldn't expect him at ten to five. Thunder was rumbling from over the Hampstead Heath direction. Mrs Finnegan had said to him there would have to be a storm soon to clear the air. A bright tree of lightning grew out of the roof of the Tricycle Theatre and threw branches across the purple sky. Raindrops as big as old pennies he could just remember lay black on the white pavements in Tarsus Street. The old man was back but busy in a dustbin from which red Tesco bags bulged, stuffed with rubbish. Philip stood and looked up at the house. He noticed this time that there were no curtains at any of the windows but at the window behind the box of dead plants a pair of shutters like Senta's had been folded across. It was possible that they had been like that last time he looked. He didn't think so but he couldn't really remember. Did she really live alone there? Was she perhaps a squatter? He wasn't going to bang on that knocker today. He leaned over into the area and tapped on the glass of her window. The shutters, of course, were closed. He banged harder and shook the sash bar. A man and a woman walked by along the pavement. They took no notice of him. He might have been a real burglar, breaking in to steal or do damage, but they were indifferent, they ignored him. Philip mounted the steps and, forgetting his resolve, knocked at the front door. He stood there, knocking and knocking. A tremendous clap of thunder seemed to shake the whole terrace of which this house was a part. Someone in the house next door closed a downstairs window. The rain came down in a sudden cascade of straight glittering silver rods of water. He stood well back under the porch, little splashes of rain hitting him with sharp cold stings. Mechanically, he went on knocking, but by now he was sure no one was in there. Because he couldn't have done so himself he was sure no one could have stood being in there and hearing this racket on the door knocker without doing something about it. When the rain let up a little, he made a run for it to the car. He could see the old man sitting at the top of an even longer flight of steps than Senta's and, sheltered by a porch with pitched roof and wooden pillars, begin gnawing on chicken bones. Senta was never out for long. He thought he would wait there till she came back. It amazed him that only last week he had asked himself if he was in love with her. Had he been totally blind, totally out of touch with his own deepest feelings? In love with her! If she came along the street now he wondered how he would keep from casting himself at her feet. How would he keep from lying at her feet and embracing her legs and kissing her feet, from weeping with joy at just seeing her, at being with her again, even if she refused to speak to him? After two hours had passed and he had just sat there thinking of her, imagining her appearing, picturing her appearing in the far distance and gradually approaching, after two hours of that he got out of the car and went back up the steps and knocked on the door again. While at Mrs Finnegan's he had considered breaking her window. There was a loose brick lying on the concrete ridge between railings and the dip down into the area. Philip climbed over on to this concrete and picked up the brick. He happened to look back along the street at that point, he was looking to see if the old bag man was watching, and that was how he saw the policeman in uniform strolling along. He dropped the brick down into the area, went back to the car and drove up to Kilburn High Road. There he had a hamburger in McDonald's and afterwards two pints of bitter in Biddy Mulligan's. It was getting on for half-past eight but still broad daylight. The rain had stopped, though the thunder still rolled. Mrs Finnegan had been wrong and it hadn't cleared the air. Back in Tarsus Street he knocked on the front door again and hammered on the basement window. Looking up at the house, this time from the opposite pavement, he saw that the shutters at the window on the middle floor were still closed. Perhaps they always had been and it was an illusion of his that they had been open until that afternoon. He had begun to feel a little mad, that maybe it was all illusion, that she lived here, that anyone lived here, that he had ever met her and made love to her and loved her. Perhaps he was mad and it was all part of his delusion. It could be schizophrenia. After all, who knew what it was like to have schizophrenia until you had it yourself? At home he found the poor dog hiding from the storm under the dining table, shivering and whimpering. His water bowl was empty. Philip filled the bowl and put out Kennomeat and when Hardy didn't want to eat it, took him on his lap and tried to comfort him. It was plain that Hardy only wanted Christine. When the thunder growled in the distance he trembled till his skin shook. Philip thought, I can't go on like this. I can't face life without her. What shall I do if I never see her again, if I never touch her, hear her voice? Carrying the dog under one arm, he went out to the phone and dialled her number. The line was engaged. That had never happened before. The phone was answered, then. Someone answered it. At worst, someone took the receiver off so that when people tried to get through they heard the engaged signal. He felt a great absurd surge of hope. The last thunder clap had been at least ten minutes ago. In the darkening sky, clear areas were opening between the rolling hills of cloud. He carried Hardy into the kitchen and set him down in front of his food dish. As the little dog began cautiously to eat, the phone rang. Philip went to the phone, closed his eyes, held his fists clenched, prayed, let it be her, let it be her. He picked up the phone, said hallo, heard Fee~s voice. Immediately, before she had said two words he remembered. 'Oh, God, I was supposed to be coming to have a meal with you and Darren.' 'What happened to you?' 'We've been run off our feet at work. I was late home.' How well lately he had learned to lie! 'I forgot. I'm sorry, Fee.' 'So you bloody should be. I have to work too, you know. I went shopping in my lunch hour for you and I made a pie.' 'Let me come tomorrow. I can eat it tomorrow.' 'Darren and I are going to his mum tomorrow. Where were you anyway? What's happening to you? You were funny on Sunday, and that eye and everything. What have you been doing the minute Mum goes away? I've nearly gone mad sitting here waiting.' You and me both, Fee. 'I said I'm sorry. I really am. Can I come on Saturday?' 'I suppose so.' It was his first experience of expecting, when the phone rang, to hear one special loved longed-for voice, and hearing another. He found it very bitter. To his shame, though there was no one there but Hardy, he felt his eyes fill with tears. Suppose she wasn't holding out on him, though, suppose something had happened to her. Unwillingly, he remembered Rebecca Neave who had disappeared, who had not been there to answer phone calls when needed. Tarsus Street was a slum compared to where Rebecca had lived. He thought of the street by night and of the big empty house. But the line had been engaged. He would try again and if the signal he had heard before still obtained, would ask the exchange if the line wars engaged speaking. The idea that in a moment or two he might actually hear her voice was almost too much for him. He sat down crouched over the phone and expelled his breath in a long sigh. Suppose he spoke to her and in five minutes, less than five minutes, he were to be back in the car, driving down to Cricklewood, down Shoot-up Hill, bound for Tarsus Street. He dialled the number. It was no longer engaged. He heard the familiar ringing tone as he had heard it at Mrs Finnegan's, as he had heard it thirty, forty times in the past days. It rang four times, stopped. A man's voice spoke. 'Hallo. This is Mike Jacopo. We are not available to speak to you right now but if you would like to leave a message and your name and phone number, we will get back to you as soon as possible. Please speak after the bleep.' Philip had known from almost the first word, from the stilted manner and enunciation, that these sentences were recorded for an answering machine. The tone sounded on a single shrill beep. He replaced the receiver and wondered as he did so if the long indrawn gasp he had made was recorded for Jacopo to hear.

9

Fee and Darren were buying their flat on an enormous mortgage extending over forty years. They had been granted it only because they were so young. Philip, sitting in their small bright living room with its view of the entrance to a new shopping mall, wondered how they could bear it, any of it, the prospect of those forty years, like forty links in an iron chain. The flat was in West Hendon where there was a large Indian community and most of the grocer's shops sold poppadoms and Indian spices and gram flour. Most of the building was newish but it was also mean. If it had been anywhere else they wouldn't have been able to afford it, even paying back the loan over more than half a lifetime. For the first few years, Darren said, they wouldn't exactly be paying it back anyway, they would just be paying interest. There was this room and a bedroom and the kitchen where Fee ran around like a real housewife cooking potatoes and inspecting her pie through the glass door of the new oven, and a shower room about the size of the one he had suggested Mrs Finnegan should have. Darren said he hadn't had a bath for a month. He laughed when he said this and Philip could imagine him repeating it over and over to people at work, delighted by his joke. 'No, seriously, I'm hooked on showers. I wouldn't give you a thank-you for a bath now. Indians never have them, did you know that? What was it that chap in the shop told you, Fee, what's-his-name, one of those funny Indian names?' 'Jalal. His name's Jalal. He said his people laugh at us slurping around in our own dirty water.' 'When you come to think of it,' said Darren, 'that's just what we do. Those of us with baths, that is.' He reeled off statistics about the number of households in Britain with baths, the number with two and the number without any. 'You want a shower while you're here, Phil?' Philip hadn't been back to Tarsus Street since he heard the voice on the answering machine. Thursday night had been sleepless. Mike Jacopo, he was convinced, must be Senta's lover. He and she lived there together, that was what that 'we' on the recording meant. Jacopo had gone away or they had quarrelled and to spite him or show she didn't care or something, she had turned to Philip and led him to that secret room down there in the basement. For three weeks. Then Jacopo came back and she staged a quarrel with Philip to be rid of him. There were holes in this theory but he held on to it with variations all through Friday and Saturday until, late on Saturday afternoon, it came to him that there was no reason why J acopo shouldn't simply be another tenant, the tenant perhaps of the ground floor. 'We' didn't necessarily mean him and Senta. It could be him and anyone. Now, at Darren and Fee's flat, he knew he could probably get answers to this by simply asking straight out. But if he asked any more questions about Senta, if he asked one more, they would guess. He thought, the truth is I don't want to know about Jacopo, I only want her back, I only want to see her and speak to her. Darren talked about the new Rover and football and football hooligans in Germany. They ate the pie and a very rich sweet trifle and then Darren got out his colour slides, at least a hundred of them, which Philip felt obliged to look at. The wedding photographs had come, the ones taken by the elderly photogr'apher who smelt of tobacco, and Philip found himself looking at Senta in her bridesmaid's dress. Was that the nearest he would ever get to her, a portrait she shared with four others and which he had to share with two? Darren sat beside him and Fee looked over his shoulder. He was aware of the thudding of his heart and wondered if they could hear it too. 'You can see she's done acting,' Darren said. Philip's heart seemed to beat louder and faster. 'Has she?' he managed and his voice sounded hoarse. 'You can see that. When she left school she went to this acting college. She's a bit of a show-off, isn't she? Look at the way she's standing.' Fee asked him to come back and have Sunday lunch with them, she was doing roast lamb. Philip didn't think he could face it. He said he had things to do at home, work to catch up on. In the morning he regretted his refusal, for the empty day stretched in loneliness before him, but he didn't phone Fee. He took Hardy up on the Heath and walked about trying to think of some way of getting into that house, short of breaking in. Later, during the long light evening, he phoned her number and once more heard Jacopo's recorded message. Philip replaced the receiver without saying anything and tried desperately to think. After a few moments he picked it up again, redialled and when the tone had sounded said, 'This is Philip Wardman. Will you please ask Senta to phone me? It's Senta Pelham who lives in the basement. Will you please ask her to phone me as a matter of urgency?' Christine and Cheryl would be home on Wednesday. He couldn't face the thought of being with other people, having to talk to them, to hear about yet another holiday. Lying awake in the dark, listening to soft rain stroking the windowpanes, he thought of Senta's truthfulness and honesty and how he had ascribed her accounts of her experiences to fantasising. The rain fell more and more heavily throughout the night and in the morning it was still pouring. He drove along partly flooded roads to Chigwell to see if the fitters were having any problems with Mrs Ripple's bathroom. This time he didn't even glance out of the window towards Arnham's garden. He had lost interest in Arnham. He had lost interest in everything and everybody but Senta. She occupied his mind, she had moved into his mind and lain down on the bed from where she stared into his inner eyes. He moved dully, he was like a zombie. Mrs Ripple's hard snapping voice uttering complaints was just a noise, a nuisance. She was complaining about the marble top of her vanity unit, there was a flaw in the veining, a tiny flaw, no more than a scratch and on the underside, but she wanted the whole slab of marble renewed. He shrugged, said he would see what he could do. The fitter winked at him and he managed a wink in return. Last time he was here Senta had been with him. She had kissed him in the car outside Mrs Ripple's house and later, out in the country, they had made love on the grass, hidden by a ring of trees. He had to have her back, he was desperate. He thought once more of breaking that window, forcing those shutters apart, sawing through them if necessary. His imagination showed him himself thus breaking and entering and her waiting there for him, crouched on the end of the bed, reflected in the great mirror. And it showed him a similar entry to the room, through smashed glass and shattered wood, to find it empty. Tarsus Street was bad enough in sunshine, horrible in the rain. One of the ever-present rubbish bags had burst and its contents, mostly paper, exploded across pavement and roadway, scraps alighting in surreal ways. The rain had pasted a biscuit-packet wrapper round the trunk of a lamp standard in the manner of some council notice. The railing spikes speared the separated leaves of a paperback book. Wet newspaper squelched in corners with matchboxes and juice cartons in its lap. Philip got out of the car and stepped across a puddle in which a yoghurt pot floated. The fa~ade of the house was unchanged except that the window box had filled with water which overflowed in a stream down the dark wet bricks. The shutters upstairs and her shutters remained closed. He stood in the rain staring up at the house. There was nothing else to do. He had begun to notice all kinds of things about it that at first he had missed. There was a Greenpeace sticker in the left corner of the top left-hand window. On the painted framework of the middle floor shutters something had been written in pencil beside a little pencil drawing. He was too far away to see what was written or drawn. Inside the middle window on the top floor a green glass wine bottle stood on the sill, a little way right of centre. The rain continued to fall steadily from a sky which was precisely the same shade as the grey slates on the roof. He noticed that from the pitched roof of the porch one tile was missing. He went up the stairs and banged on the front door, avoiding the coiled pile of dog turd on the second step. After a while he looked through the letterbox. This time he saw the phone and the passage leading away to the basement stairs and something new. Two envelopes lay on the table beside the phone. At home he changed out of his suit and hung it up to dry, dried his hair on a towel, remembering how, that first day, she had asked for a towel to dry her own. He cooked egg and bacon but when it was served up on a plate with a hunk of bread and butter, couldn't eat it. The phone rang and his heart hit his ribs. No voice would come when he lifted the receiver, he was sure of that. It was a kind of croak he gave. 'Are you OK?' Fee said. 'You sound peculiar.' 'I'm fine.' 'I rang to know if you wanted me to get anything in for Mum on Wednesday. You know, a loaf and some ham or something.' The question he longed to ask, was dying to ask, was displaced by another, seemingly less significant. 'Was it RADA Senta was at? Was it the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art?' 'What?' He repeated the question. He was starting to feel sick. 'I wouldn't know,' she said. 'How should I know?' 'Would you ask Darren, please?' 'Why do you want to know?' 'Just ask him, please, Fee.' He heard his question relayed to Darren in a tone stiff with sarcasm. They seemed to be arguing. Had it taken marriage to show Fee her childhood sweetheart was somewhat slow on the uptake? She came back to the phone. 'He says he went there once with his brother to see something she was in. It wasn't like a building, you know what I mean, it was just a big house. Out west somewhere, Ealing, Acton.' 'RADA is near the British Museum, it's in Bloomsbury. Is he sure it wasn't there?' 'He says Ealing definitely. What is all this, Phil? What's going on? You're always asking questions about Senta.' 'I'm sure I'm not.' 'Darren says do you want her phone number?' The irony! He knew that phone number better than his own, better than his own birth date, his address. He said, 'No to that and yes to the first question. If you could get a loaf in and something for their supper, Fee.' She was laughing as she said goodbye. He sat there, pondering. It was new to him, this revelation that someone could both tell the truth and fantasise, for that was what it amounted to. She had told him true things and she had embroidered the truth. Where the truth was adequate she had offered it to him and where it fell short of glamour or drama, she had invented. Did he do that? Do we all? And where in this scheme of things did her request that he prove his love for her find its place? Was it a fantasy or a real demand for a real act? Presently he dialled her number. This time the answering machine wasn't on and the phone rang and rang unanswered. It was late at night. The sky was dull and without visible stars, moonless, faintly misty, a smoky red where a horizon of roofs could be seen. Dampness was palpable in the cool still air. On the corner where Tarsus Street met Caesarea Road stood three men about Philip's own age, one of them a Rastafarian, the others white, nondescript, one wearing several rings in the lobe of his right ear. Philip noticed the rings because they glinted in his car lights. The men turned to stare at him, watched the car, watched him get out of it. They did nothing. The old bag man was nowhere to be seen. Philip hadn't seen him since the weather changed. The street was still littered with rags of paper, cardboard boxes, cuboid juice cartons with straws still sticking out of them. A greenish lamplight glazed the moist sticky pavements, the railings, the gleaming humpbacks of parked cars. A dog came along the pitted concrete from Samaria Street, busy in pursuit of some unknown goal, perhaps the same dog which had deposited the heap of turds on the step. It disappeared down into the area next door. An occasional drop of water trickled and fell from the leaves on the plane trees. Philip, momentarily, had a strange feeling that came quite unbidden. It was as if a voice within him asked him what he was doing seeking love, passion, perhaps a life's partner, in this awful place. For what woman who had any choice about it, any alternative, would choose to live in this filthy sink of north-west London, this rancid hole? This unwelcome reflection fled as fast as it had come for, looking up wearily by now at the house he saw the shutters had been closed at the middle window on the ground floor and between their boards, where the wood had warped, light showed in bright lines. He ran up the steps. The front door was open. That is, it was unlocked, on the latch. He could hardly believe it. From somewhere inside came the sound of music in waltz time, the same kind of music as he had sometimes heard late at night lying in bed beside Senta. The Blue Danube. As he stood there it stopped and he heard laughter and hands clapping. He pushed the door open and went in. The music, which was coming from inside the room on the left where the light showed through the shutters, began again, this time a tango, Jealousy. On all his visits to this house he had scarcely noticed that there were doors opening off this hallway, had never conjectured that there must be rooms behind. He had thought of nothing but going to Senta. This room, of course, would be directly above hers. He must have made a sound, though he was unaware of it. Perhaps he had drawn in his breath sharply or his footsteps had made a floorboard creak, for the door was sdddenly flung open and a man shouted, 'What the fuck do you think you're doing?' Philip was silenced and in fact stricken statue-like as much by the sight of the two people who stood just inside the room as by the man's violent and abusive tone. The pair of them were in evening dress. They reminded him of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in one of those thirties films you sometimes saw on television, and then he saw that they were not really like that at all. The woman was in her fifties, with a mane of long grey hair and a coarse, lined, though lively face and a sleek sinuous figure to which her shabby red silk dress clung. A bunch of bruised artificial flowers on the bodice, red and pink, trembled as she drew breath. Her partner was smart enough, though unshaven and with ragged hair. His face was white and thin, his hair yellow, and he was no more than four or five years older than Philip himself. Finding a voice, Philip said, 'I'm sorry. I was looking for Senta - Senta Pelham, she lives downstairs. The front door was open.' 'Christ, she must have left it open again,' the woman said. 'She's always doing that, it's bloody careless.' Her partner went over to the tape player and turned the sound down. 'She's gone to a party,' he said. 'Who are you anyway?' 'Philip Wardman. I'm a friend of hers.' For some reason the woman laughed. 'You're the one who left a message on our answerphone.' So this was Mike Jacopo. Philip said, stammering a bit. 'Are you - do you - do you live here?' The woman said, 'I'm Rita Pelham and this is my house. We've been away a bit lately with the competitions up north.' He had no idea what she meant but he understood this was Senta's mother, or the woman she called mother, and Jacopo the young lover Fee had talked about. Confusion robbed him of words. All that mattered anyway was that she wasn't here, she was out, she had gone to a party. J acopo had turned the sound up again. The tango played. They moved into each other's arms, hands stiff, heads erect. Rita swayed backwards, in the loop of Jacopo's arms, her grey hair sweeping the floorboards. Jacopo moved into the stylised steps of the dance. As they passed the door he kicked it shut. They had forgotten Philip. He went out through the front door, pushed up the latch, closed the door behind him. Tarsus Street was empty. The Rastafarian and the two white men had gone. So had the radio from his car which he had left unlocked and the raincoat from the back seat. It was only when he was home and in bed that he thought how he should have stayed there. He should have sat in the car until she came back, all night if necessary. He hadn't thought of it because the theft of his radio and the raincoat, which was a Burberry, which he had bought with his Visa card and still hadn't finished paying for, had shaken him rather a lot. Perhaps he could have persuaded Rita Pelham or Jacopo to let him into Senta's room and stay the night there. Of course they wouldn't have agreed to that, of course not. That Rita owned the house and lived there somehow changed the aspect of things. It meant that Senta, like him, lived at home with her mother. It wasn't quite like that, he could see it wasn't, but it was a similar state of affairs. Things somehow became less sordid when seen in that light. Senta lived with her mother, she wasn't responsible for the decay of the place and the dirt and the smell. He slept and dreamed of her. In the dream he was in her room, or rather, he was inside the mirror, watching the room through the glass, the bed that was piled with purple pillows and quilt, the wicker chair with her discarded clothes on it, the shutters folded across the window, the door that led to those corridors and caverns of rubbish, closed and with a chair set against it. He sat inside the mirror and it was like sitting in a tank of greenish water in which tiny speck-like organisms swam, in which thin green fronds faintly swayed and a crawling snail left its silver trail on the other side of the glass. She came into the room, forcing the door open and knocking the chair over. She came close up to the glass and looked into the green speckled translucence without seeing him, she didn't even see him when their faces were pressed together with the wet glass between. Out with Hardy in the morning, along Glenallan Close, round Kintail Way, and back by way of Lochleven Gardens, he met the postman who handed him his own mail. There was another postcard from Christine, though she was coming home today, and a letter for her from one of her sisters. The postcard was of a street in Newquay this time and said: 'I may be home before you get this so won't give you any news. The X is supposed to mark our room but Cheryl says it is wrong because we are on the third floor. Much love, Mum.' Philip put Christine's letter on the mantelpiece. They seldom got letters, any of them. The people they knew and their relatives phoned if they wanted to communicate. But why shouldn't he write to Senta? He could type the envelope at work so that she wouldn't know who it was from. Yesterday morning he wouldn't even have considered this but things had changed. Rita and Jacopo were there and they got letters. He had seen two envelopes lying by the phone when he looked through the letter box. If a letter came for Senta one of them would probably take it down to her and she would at least open it. When she saw it was from him, would she throw it away? Bereft of his radio, he was driven back to his own thoughts as he drove down to the West End to head office. The difficulty would be in knowing what to say to her that would stop her throwing it away. Philip hardly ever wrote personal letters. He couldn't remember the last time he had and he had never written a love letter, which this must be. Normally, when he put pen to paper, or more often, dictated something to Lucy the typist he shared with Roy and two others, the result was on the lines of: 'Dear Mrs Finnegan, This is to confirm receipt of your cheque for a deposit on the agreed work in the sum of �1, 000. If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact me at the above showroom at any time...' Still, he could write a love letter, he knew he could, phrases from the fullness of his heart and his longing were already coming to him, and he could apologise and beg forgiveness. He wouldn't mind that, he wouldn't find it humiliating. But she had asked him to prove his love for her... Roy, still in a good mood, caught him doing the envelope on Lucy's typewriter. 'Writing your love letters in the company's time now, I see.' It was uncanny how near the bone people could get and all unwittingly. Philip pulled the envelope off the roller. No doubt Roy really thought it was to Mrs Ripple, for he said, 'The order for that new bit of marble's come through. Can you give the old bag a ring and tell her it'll be with her by midday?' He tried to do so on Lucy's phone. The line was engaged for the first couple of attempts. While he waited he had a look at Lucy's Daily Mail, read a story about the IRA, one about a dog rescuing its owner from drowning in the Grand Union Canal, another which was an account of the murder of an old woman in Southall. He picked up the phone again and dialled Mrs Ripple's number. 'Hallo, who is it?' Her voice came out of the receiver in a sharp blast, the sentence as if one polysyllabic word, not four. He told her who it was and passed on Roy's message. 'About time too,' she said, then, 'I shan't be here. I'm going out.' He said he would get back to her. An idea had come to him out of the air, out of nothing, an idea of stupendous magnitude, a total solution. It felled him so that he spoke to her in a tone of vagueness, hesitantly, unable to find the ordinary simple words. 'What did you say?' He pulled himself together, said, 'I have to talk to my colleague, Mrs Ripple. With your permission, I'll come back to you within five minutes.' As if an observer or listener could read his thoughts, he shut the door. He picked up the newspaper again and looked once more at the account of the murder of the Southall woman. Why hadn't he thought of this way out before? It was so simple, it was only another move in the game. For that was all it was to Senta, a game, but one that he also had to play. He even liked the idea of that, of a private secret game they both played, even when neither quite knew the truth of the other's strategy. That only made it more exciting. She was a fantasist who also told the truth about her own history. He still found that hard to get used to, but he knew it was an accurate analysis of her. Another aspect of her character was now revealed to him. She would want a lover - a husband? - to have an equally fantastic dream life. Even in the short time they had known each other he might already have disappointed her by his failure to relate adventures and exploits of his own past. The point was that she would know he was inventing and expect him to do this. She did it herself, it was a way of life with her. He saw himself suddenly as stupid and insensitive. Because he had been too thick to respond to her invitation, a simple and innocent invitation to a shared fantasy, he had caused them all this misery, the worst ten days of his life. The door opened and Lucy came in. It was she who picked up the receiver when the phone rang and held it at arm's length to defend herself from Mrs Ripple's ear-shattering blast. The letter he composed sitting at the table in the living room, where he was subject to a series of interruptions. First Hardy wanted a walk. Philip took him as far as the end of Kintail Way and began again: 'Dear Senta. It looked cold. He wrote 'Darling Senta,' and though he had never in his life called anyone darling, liked it better. 'Darling Senta, I have missed you so terribly, I didn't know what it was to miss anyone before. Please don't let us ever be apart again like that.' He would have liked to write about the sex they had, about making love to her, and the terrible deprivation not making love to her had been, but some deep inner shyness held him back. The act was lovely and open and free but the words embarrassed him. The sound of a key in the lock made him think it must be Christine, though it was early for her. He had forgotten Fee was coming round with the loaf and the ham. She had also bought Danish pastries, a basket of strawberries, a carton of double cream. 'Who are you writing to?' He had quickly covered the letter with the TV Times on which he had been resting the paper, but a corner showed. The truth would never be believed, so he told her the truth in an airy tone. 'Senta Pelham, of course.' 'You should co-co. Chance'd be a fine thing. That reminds me, I had that bridesmaid's dress cleaned, the one she kindly dumped on the floor, and it's come up looking super. Will you tell Mum I picked up her winter coat at the same time and I've put it up in her wardrobe?' He waited until the front door had closed behind her. 'Darling Senta, I have tried to see you, I don't know how many times I have been to your house. Of course I can understand now why you wouldn't let me in and didn't want to see me. But please don't ever do that again, it hurts too much. 'I have thought a lot about what you asked me. All this time I have been thinking of you, I don't think I have had a thought for anything or anyone else, and of course I have naturally thought about what you said I should do to prove I love you. Personally, I think the proof is in what I've been through since I left you that day and you took the keys to your house away from me....' Perhaps he shouldn't put that bit in. It sounded too much like a reproach, it sounded like whining. The throbbing of a diesel engine outside told him Christine had arrived. He put the TV Times over his letter again and went to the door. She was alone, without Cheryl. Her skin was tanned, her face golden with pink cheeks, her hair bleached by the sun. She looked young and pretty and he hadn't seen the dress she had on before, a natural-coloured linen coat-dress that was plainer and more sophisticated than what she usually wore. Hardy rushed past him and hurled himself at Christine, yelping with joy. She came up the step with the dog in her arms and kissed Philip. 'You said to have a taxi so I did, and it was ever so nice, but he charged me over five pounds. I said to him I didn't think it was fair that clock or meter or whatever it is still ticking the price up even when you're stuck in a traffic jam. It ought to stop when the taxi isn't moving, I said, but he just laughed.' 'What happened to Cheryl?' 'It's funny you should ask that because she was with me right up until we'd been in the taxi for ten minutes. We were going along this street with lots of quite nice shops and she suddenly said to the driver to stop and let her out and he did and she said, "Good-bye, see you later", and got out, and I must say I did think it was funny because all the shops were closed.' The Edgware Road, he thought. 'Did you have a good time in Cornwall?' 'Quiet,' she said. 'It was very quiet.' This was what she said when people asked her if she had enjoyed Christmas. 'I was on my own a lot.' She wasn't complaining, just stating a fact. 'Cheryl wanted to be off by herself. Well, a young girl, you know, she doesn't want an old bat flapping after her. Isn't Hardy pleased to see me? He does look well, dear, you've been taking good care of him.' She peered into the dog's adoring face and then into Philip's in her gentle rather apprehensive way. 'I can't say the same for you, Phil, you're looking quite peaky.' 'I'm OK.' Thanks to Cheryl's defection, he would have to stay with her now instead of finishing the letter. He couldn't go upstairs and desert her on her first evening at home. Looking back over those terrible ten days he thought, what a waste, what a waste! We could have been together every night, all night, if I hadn't been such a fool... It was gone ten-thirty when he got back to his letter. Christine wanted an early night. A quick scan of her appointments book had shown her she was doing a shampoo, trim and blow-dry at nine next morning. Philip sat on his bed, rested letter paper on the TV Times and the TV Times on his old school atlas on his knees. 'Darling Senta, I have missed you so terribly...' He read over what he had written, felt fairly satisfied. At any rate he knew he couldn't do better. 'I don't know why I made such a fuss when you suggested what we should do to prove our love for each other. You know I would do anything for you. Of course I will do it. I would do fifty times that for you, just to see you again I would do it. I love you. You must know that by now but I will tell you again because this is what I want you to know and what I will prove to you. I love you. With all my love for ever and ever, Philip.'

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