She didn't reply. He knew she must have got his letter. Unwilling to entrust it to the post, he had taken it to Tarsus Street himself on his way to work and put it through the letter box. Then he had looked through and seen it lying there, not on the doormat for there was no doormat, but on the dirty red and black tiles. The house had been quite silent, the shutters closed at the basement window and the two windows above it. The phone on the table was hidden behind a pile of leaflets, freebie magazines and junk mail. Once the idea of writing to her had come to him, or, rather, once the idea of what he should write had come, his unhappiness had gone and he had been filled with hope. This euphoria was quite baseless. Simply writing a letter and delivering it wouldn't bring her back. He knew that this was true on one level of consciousness, but on another which seemed most to affect his emotions, he had solved his problems, put an end to misery, won her. At work he was happy, he was almost as he had been before that Sunday when he had said those things to her and she had turned him out. What form her return to him would take he hadn't considered. A phone call, surely. Yet she had never phoned him in the past, not once. He couldn't imagine her writing a letter in return. Should he go to her house as in the old days? It was less than a fortnight ago but just the same it was the old days. Thursday passed without his going back to Tarsus Street. On Friday he phoned her number from work and got Jacopo on his answering machine He left the same message as he had last time, to ask Senta to phone him. But this time he stipulated that it should be that evening and added his phone number. It occurred to him, strange though this seemed, that Senta might not know his phone number. There were unlikely to be phone directories in that house. Christine took Hardy out for his evening walk. Philip wouldn't leave the house. He told her he was expecting the art director to call from head office. Christine believed anything he told her, even that a company like Roseberry Lawn had an art director and that this mythical personage might work late on Friday evenings and need to consult very junior executives like Philip. While she was out with the dog, he experienced one of the worst things that can happen to you on an emotional level: to wait by the telephone for long hours for someone you are desperately in love with to phone, get a call at last and have it turn out to be your sister. Fee wanted to know whether Christine would do her hair if they came round for supper on Sunday. She had a fancy for ash-blonde highlights. Usually Philip wouldn't have known anything about Christine's appointments and engagements but he had overheard her telling her friend on the phone that she was going out at six on Sunday to do a perm for an old lady who was housebound with arthritis. Fee said, OK, she'd call back a bit later when Christine was in and Philip had to say that was all right, though he thought that if Senta hadn't phoned by then he wouldn't be able to help hoping it was she when the phone rang. He wouldn't be able to keep himself from rushing to it and seizing the receiver. And this in fact happened, for Senta didn't phone but Fee did and he suffered the same hope and destruction of hope all over again. She hadn't phoned by midnight when at last he went to bed. On Saturday afternoon he drove to Tarsus Street. The old man in the woman's raincoat had obtained from somewhere a wooden trolley or barrow on which were piled his possessions stowed into plastic carriers. These were arranged like cushions and were in gaudy cushion colours: Tesco red, Marks and Spencer's green, Self-ridge's yellow and the blue and white of Boots the Chemist. The old man reclined on top of them, like an emperor in a chariot, eating a sandwich of something greasy in white bread on which his fingers made black prints. He waved the sandwich at Philip. He had never looked so cheerful. His open-mouthed grin showed greenish carious teeth. 'See what I got meself with your more than generous gift, governor.' He kicked the wooden side of the barrow. 'I've got me own transport now and what's more, it runs on shanks's pony.' After that Philip could hardly avoid giving him a pound coin. He was entitled perhaps to something in return. 'What's your name?' The reply came a little cagily and it was indirect. 'They call me Joley.' 'Are you always about here?' 'Here and Caesarea -' he pronounced it Si-saria '- and over to Ilbert.' 'Do you ever see a girl come out of that house?' 'Kid with grey hair?' Philip thought it a bizarre way to describe Senta but he nodded. The old man stopped eating. 'Not the fuzz, are you?' 'Me? Of course I'm not.' 'I'll tell you one thing, governor, she's in there now. She come home and went in there ten minutes back.' Without shame, he held out his hand. Philip didn't know whether to believe him or not but he gave him another pound coin. A flicker of hope that the front door might have been left open once more was soon dispelled, but when he looked down into the area he saw that the shutters had been folded back a little way. By climbing over the low plaster wall of the steps and squatting down on the concrete it was possible to see into her room. Looking into it after two weeks deprivation - except for dreams, except for those - hastened his heartbeat, he could feel the blood drumming. The room was empty. Over the wicker chair hung her silver dress and a pair of lilac-coloured tights, worn and discarded, for they still held, faintly, the contour of her legs and feet. The bed was still made up with purple cover and pillowcases. This time he didn't knock on the door. The old man was watching him, grinning, though not unsympathetically. Philip said goodbye to him and 'See you' though he now doubted whether he would ever see him again. He drove home, telling himself not to return, to bear it, to contemplate life without her, to soldier on without her. But, although he didn't mean to do this, he made his way up t6 his bedroom on dragging feet and there, having pushed the chair against the door, lifted Flora out from the cupboard. Her face, her neat crimped hair, her remote smile and mesmerised eyes no longer recalled Senta to him. For all that, he had a feeling new and alien to him. He wanted to smash her, break her to pieces with a hammer, and stamp on those pieces, grinding them to dust. For someone who hated violence in all its forms, these were unwelcome shameful desires. He simply put Flora back in her hiding place. Then he lay face-downwards on the bed and, to his own surprise and shame, found himself beginning a dry-eyed painful sobbing. He wept without tears into the pillow, wadding the linen against his mouth in case Christine should come upstairs and hear him. It was half-way through Sunday when he gave up hope. Fee was there, having arranged for Christine to do her highlights in the afternoon. And Cheryl was at home, affording Philip his first sight of her since her return from Cornwall. But she wasn't there for long. Having eaten or picked at the rather better than usual lunch Christine had provided, roast chicken with Paxo stuffing, reconstituted potato and real fresh runner beans, she got up from the table and five minutes later left the house. Philip she had asked, when she was briefly alone with him, to lend her five pounds. He had to say no, he hadn't got five pounds, adding, perhaps pointlessly, that she couldn't want money on Sunday. He sat at the table, with two halves of tinned peaches in a glass dish in front of him, and thought, I will never see Senta again, this is it, all over, the end, it is over. The frightening thing was that he couldn't imagine how he was ever going to get through another week of it. Would next Sunday come and would he be here alive and surviving? Would he actually survive the torture of another week of this? When the dishes were done Christine and Fee took over the kitchen. Christine never charged her daughters for doing their hair but she did allow them to pay for the cost of the preparations she used. Now she and Fee engaged in an argument as to how great a proportion of this cost Fee should be allowed to pay. 'Yes, but, dear, you got us all that nice ham and the strawberries and cream and I've only paid you for the loaf,' Christine was saying. 'The strawberries were a present, Mum, my pleasure, you know that.' 'And doing your highlights is my pleasure, dear.' 'I'll tell you what then, you tell me the price of the ash-blonde tint and I'll want conditioner so you can count that in, and the bit of mousse you use, and take away whatever the ham was, one twenty-two it was, and I'll give you the difference.' Philip was sitting in the living room, looking at the Sunday Express, not reading it but pretending to, with Hardy on his lap. Christine came in with the PG Tips tin she kept small change in. 'Do you know, I could have sworn there was a good seven pounds fifty in here before I went away and now it's down to thirty pee.' 'I haven't been making raids on it,' he said. 'I wish I'd looked in it on Wednesday. I keep wondering if it happened yesterday afternoon while you were out and I popped round the block with Hardy and didn't lock up. I know I should have locked up but I still think of this as a nice neighbourhood. I was only gone ten minutes but you know that's quite long enough for someone to come in and take a quick look round and help themselves to what's going. Some poor person down on their uppers and desperate, I expect. I can sympathise, there but for the grace of God, I always say.' Philip thought he knew very well who the poor person, down on her uppers and desperate would be. The theft had happened just before lunch, not yesterday. Once he would have cared, would have known he must do something, at least would have communicated what he knew to Christine. Now he was concerned for no one but himself. But he emptied his pockets, giving what change he had to his mother. Briefly he wondered where Cheryl was now, what dealing she was involved in with the seven pounds fifty. What could you buy with such a miserable sum? Not smack, not grass, not crack. A bottle of whisky? That, certainly. Some sort of solvent? He couldn't see his sister as hooked on glue sniffing. Fee's hair, when finished, was a helmet of puffed-out glinting honey and cream stripes. Even Philip, who understood very little about these things, knew Christine continued to do hair in styles fashionable in her own early youth. She even referred to them by name sometimes, the Italian and the Beehive, as if these titles were eternal and understood by all subsequent generations, not just those who had been young in 1960. Fee seemed satisfied. If she too suspected Cheryl of stealing the contents of the PG Tips tin she said nothing about it to Philip. After Fee had gone, Christine began packing into her holdall the things she needed for perming the housebound old lady's hair. She kept up a commentary to Philip while she did this, describing her own mother's experience of having a perm in the twenties when you had your hair strung up to an electric machine and baked into curl, how you sat there all day attached to this curious instrument of cookery. He wished she wasn't going out, he didn't want to be left alone with himself and his own thoughts. It was absurd, it was like when he was a little boy and never wanted his mother to leave the house even though there was always someone there to look after him. Yet a month ago he heaved a sigh of relief when she said she was going out. Less than a year ago he was longing for her to marry Arnham. He said, surprising himself, using a phrase she with her curious occasional tact never used to him, 'What time will you be back?' She looked at him in astonishment, as well she might. 'I don't know, Philip. It'll take three hours. I try to make a nice job of it for the old dear.' He said no more. He went upstairs. The doorbell rang as he was entering his own bedroom. Christine opened the door almost immediately. She must have been standing just inside it, preparing to leave. He heard her say, 'Oh, hallo, dear. How are you? Have you come to see Cheryl?' There must have been some reply but it was inaudible. Since he heard nothing, saw nothing, how did he know? How did he know enough to come back to the head of the stairs, hold his breath, clench his hands? His mother said, 'Cheryl's out but she's sure to be back soon. I have to go out myself and, oh dear, I am late. Did you want to come in and wait for Cheryl?' Philip came down the stairs. By then Senta had entered the house and was standing in the hall, looking up. Neither of them spoke and neither had eyes for anything or anyone but each other. If Christine thought this odd she gave no sign of it, she gave no sign of having noticed but went out of the front door, closing it behind her. Still in silence, Philip approached Senta and Senta took a step towards him and they fell into each other's arms. Holding her, smelling her and tasting her soft, curved, moist and salty lips, feeling the pressure of her breasts against his chest, he thought for a moment he would faint with the ecstasy of it. Instead there came to him a surge of strength and power, of sudden enormous wellbeing, and he lifted her off the ground up into his arms. But half-way up the stairs she struggled and jumped down and ran on ahead up to his bedroom. They lay on his bed as they had that first time. Lovemaking had never been so glorious, so infinitely rewarding, not that first time certainly, not even those repeated luxurious indulgent times in her basement bed. Now, as they lay side by side, his arm slack under her shoulders, he felt as if bathed in a warm and deep tenderness for her. To have reproached her for anything would have been unthinkable. Those dreadful visits to Tarsus Street, the hammering on the door, peering through the windows, attempts at phoning, all todk on the character of a dream; the kind of dream which while taking place was very vivid and real, which lingered in a troubling way for a little while on waking, then receded rapidly into oblivion. 'I love you, Senta,' he said. 'I love you, oh, I do love you.' She turned her head towards him and smiled. She drew one small milk-coloured fingernail down the side of his cheek to the corner of his mouth. 'I love you, Philip.' 'It was wonderful of you to come here like that. It was the most wonderful thing you could have done.' 'It was the only thing to do.' 'I met Rita and Mike Jacopo, you know.' She was unperturbed. 'They gave me your letter.' She curled herself into his body in the way she had of making as much of her flesh touch as much of his as possible. It was in itself another kind of sexual act and as if she was using this means to make herself one with him. 'I haven't told them anything. Why should I? They're nothing. They've gone away again anyway.' 'Gone away?' 'They go to these ballroom-dancing contests. That's how they met. They've won silver cups.' Her soft giggle called laughter from him. 'Oh, Senta, oh, Senta. I just want to say your name over and over. Senta, Senta. It's funny, it's as if you've never been away and at the same time it's as if I'm just realising you're back, I've got you back, and I want to laugh and shout and yell with happiness.' When she spoke he felt the movement of her lips against his skin. 'I'm sorry, Philip. Can you forgive me?' 'There's nothing to forgive.' Her head lay nestling into his chest. He looked down on to the crown of her head and saw that the red roots of hair had been bleached silver. For a moment a cold finger touched his happiness and the thought came unbidden and most unwelcome, she was all right without me, she was doing her own thing, she had her hair done. She went to a party... She lifted her head and looked at him. 'We won't talk about what we're going to do for each other tonight. We won't spoil it. We'll talk about all that tomorrow.' Fantasising had no part in Philip's emotional make-up. He had never, while making love to one girl imagined another, more beautiful or more sexy, or lain in bed. at night conjuring up visions of women in fantastic undress lounging in invented pornographic situations. He had never day-dreamed of himself as successful, rich and powerful, the possessor of some lavish home, large fast car, or as a sophisticated world traveller or financier or tycoon. His imagination never even took him as far as the carpet in front of the Roseberry Lawn's managing director's desk, the recipient of congratulations and swift promotion. He had a strong sense of the present and of reality. To create a fantasy for Senta's satisfaction, for that was what it amounted to, would be a daunting task for him. That first week after their reunion, the necessity of this creation rather loomed over him. He felt its dark pressure even when he was most happy, when he was with her in Tarsus Street, for instance, and into the deep peace of the aftermath of love-making, when he should have been most free of care, intruded this silent staring threat. For it did seem to stare at him, it did seem almost a living thing, which entered his consciousness when least welcome and stood there, arms folded, exercising its menace. The act he must perform, albeit only a verbal act, he couldn't put off much longer. It must be confronted and a form found for it, a scenario constructed with actors -or two actors, himself and his victim. More than once Senta reminded him of it. 'We do need proof of each other's love, Philip. It's not enough that we were unhappy when we were apart. That happens to anyone, to ordinary people.' She always insisted that he and she were not ordinary, were more like gods. 'We have to prove that for each other we're prepared to transcend ordinary human laws. More than that, to set them at nothing, show they simply aren't important to us.' She had decided, thinking much about this while they were apart, that he and she were reincarnations of some famous pair of lovers of the past. The precise identity of these historic personages she hadn't yet decided on, or, as she put it herself, this truth hadn't yet been revealed to her. Also while they were separated she had auditioned for and got a part in a fringe theatre production. It was a minor part with less than twenty lines to speak, but not all that minor really, since the woman she played turned out in the end to be the secret agent the entire cast had been seeking through fifteen surrealistic scenes. All this brought Philip an uneasiness that was undesired at this phase in their relationship. He would have liked simply to exult in her renewed love, perhaps make reasonable and sensible plans for the future, thinking ahead to eventual marriage. Whether he actually wanted to get married for quite a long while he was less sure, but he knew there was no other woman he would ever be able to dream of marrying. Instead he was made to feel very awkward by being asked to try to recall whether in a previous life he had been Alexander or Antony or Dante. He had, too, the problem of deciding if the fringe theatre part was a fantasy or actual fact. A fantasy, he was pretty sure. That she had frequently told him the truth about her past didn't mean she was invariably truthful, he had already persuaded himself of that. Her biggest fantasy was what he now had to cope with and he put off his own moves in this rather unpleasant and absurd game from day to day. The more he did so the more he thought about it and the more distasteful it became to him. Killing someone was such a monstrous thing, the worst thing one could do surely -which was why, of course, she talked about their doing it - so that even to have claimed to have done it when you hadn't would be somehow wrong and even corrupting. Philip hardly knew what he meant by this term but of the feeling he was certain. Would a truly sane and normal man tell a woman he had killed someone, lay claim to murder, when he was actually quite innocent? And, come to that, could a person who said that be innocent? He knew he ought to be able to persuade her that this particular fantasy of hers was folly, wasn't even very good for them to think about. If they loved each other as fully as he knew they did they ought to be able to talk about anything to each other, explain everything. The fault, he thought, was as much his as hers. He knew he wasn't a god but when he protested she merely told him he wouldn't know if he was or not but in time the truth of it would be declared to him. 'We are Ares and Aphrodite,' she told him. 'Those old gods didn't die when Christianity came. They just hid themselves and from time to time are reborn in certain specially selected individuals. You and I are two of those individuals, Philip. I had a dream last night in which all that was revealed to me. We stood there on the curve of the earth's globe in blinding light and we were dressed in white robes.' He was by no means sure who Ares and Aphrodite had been, though with a good idea that they had existed only in the minds of men. In the minds perhaps of women like Senta? She told him that this pair of gods (they were called Mars and Venus too which made better sense to him) had had many mortals killed, thought little of striking with death anyone who had offended them or even obstructed them by their very existence. Philip could scarcely think of anyone who had offended him, still less been a nuisance to him by existing. Once, not long ago, Gerard Arnham would have come into this category. Now it was unreal even to consider doing him harm. On the Monday, which was more than a week after Senta had come back to him, he made up his mind that whatever the consequences to his own moral assessment of himself, he could put off this significant move no longer. Once done, it would be the end of his problems. Senta would see his love as proved, would play some similar game to prove her own, and with that behind them they could settle into their joyous relationship which must reach the point of living together, becoming engaged, even marrying. He conforted himself with the notion - a brilliant one that had come to him unsought - that the reality of their love would before long cure her of this need to fantasise. For once, it wasn't a very busy day. He bought several morning papers on his way to work. Returning from an inspection of the refitted flats in Wembley, he bought an evening paper. The first batch hadn't been rewarding. They had reverted, after nearly a year, to the case of the missing Rebecca Neave. Her body had never been found. Now her father and her sister were jointly setting up something called the Rebecca Neave Foundation. They were appealing for donations. These would fund a centre offering classes to women in self-defence and martial arts. A photograph showed Rebecca in the green velvet tracksuit she had worn when she disappeared. They would use a stylised representation of this for the foundation's logo. The Evening Standard had a follow-on story about Rebecca and two other girls who had gone missing in the past year. It also offered Philip a paragraph which seemed the very thing he was looking for. He read it sitting in the car in one of the parking areas at Brent Cross Shopping Centre where he had called to buy wine and strawberries and chocolates for Senta. The body of a man found on a demolition site in Kensal Rise, north-west London, has been identified as that of John Sidney Crucifer, 62, described as a vagrant and of no fixed address. Police are treating the case as murder. Senta herself had suggested to him that someone like that would do, pointing out the elderly bag woman who had sat with her back to the railings. The only difficulty would be if the police found the murderer of John Crucifer and it appeared in the papers. He didn't like to think that Senta might not care if someone else were sent to prison for a crime he, Philip, had committed. But he was being stupid, wasn't he? What did he mean, she wouldn't care? It was all fantasy with her. She might not actually say she knew he hadn't really killed anyone, but she knew he hadn't. She knew already, she must know, that his undertaking to her was one of the moves in the game. Anyway, she never read newspapers, he had never seen her handle or even glance at a newspaper. This John Crucifer would do. He needn't worry about details, he needn't worry even about the unlikely event of the case being blown up into something important, becoming of nationwide interest, because the truth was that Senta didn't want the daylight of reality let in on to it. She wanted dreams and, for once anyway, she should have them. A certain shame afflicted him as he sat there in the shopping centre car park. This was really caused by the idea of the conversation with Senta ahead of him in which he would have to tell her all this and witness her satisfaction. He would be lying and she would be accepting his lie as truth and they would both know it. In the event it was rather worse than he had imagined. He went home first for his evening meal and got to Tarsus Street at about half-past seven. For by no means the first time that day, he found himself on the way carefully rehearsing the story he had prepared for Senta. He also had the piece from the Standard which he had snipped out with Christine's hair-cutting scissors and a pound coin in his pocket for the old man called Joley. His feelings about Joley remained superstitious. It was as if he had been appointed both the guardian of Senta and of their love, and yet it was not that in any real sense but more as if the old man had to be placated with gifts to keep his, Philip's, relationship with Senta secure. Some sort of malevolence would make itself felt if these pound coins were not forthcoming, a malice that might positively harm him and Senta. He had tentatively said something of this to her the night before - he was trying to supply flights of fancy of his own to match hers - and she had talked of fees for a ferryman and sops for a dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld. This was mostly incomprehensible to Philip but he was glad to see Senta pleased. Joley wasn't there this evening. There was no sign of him or his trolley laden with coloured cushions. It seemed somehow a bad omen. A terrible temptation visited Philip to put off for another day the story he had to tell Senta. But when would the opportunity come again? There might not be another chance of this kind for weeks. He would have to do it, to stop thinking of it in this self-examining, excruciatingly analytical way, but just do it. In a cold tone, quite unlike the usual way he spoke to her, he said abruptly that he had done what she wanted. Her face became alive with expectancy. The sea-wave eyes, green and water-white, flashed. She took hold of his wrists. He found it impossible to say the words baldly. He gave her the cutting. 'What's this?' He spoke as if testing his knowledge of a foreign language, listening to each word. 'It will tell you what I did.' 'Aaah!' It was a long satisfied indrawing of breath. She read the paragraph two or three times, gradually smiling. 'When did you do it?' He hadn't supposed too many details would be required. 'Last night.' 'After you left me?' 'Yes.' It reminded him of an amateur production of Macbeth he had seen while still at school. 'You took up my suggestion, I see,' she said. 'What happened? You left here and drove to the Harrow Road, did you? I suppose you had a piece of luck and just found him there hanging about?' He experienced a tremendous feeling of revulsion, not from her but from the subject itself, a physical distaste as strong as the recoil would be from the dog's turds on the step, from a seething mass of maggots. 'Let's just take it that I did it,' he managed to say. His throat was constricted. 'How did you do it?' He would have shunned the idea if he could. He would have escaped from the knowledge, absolute and indisputable, that she was excited, was revelling in a kind of lustful pleasurable prurient interest. She moistened her lips, parted them as if a little breathless. The hands that held his wrists moved up his arms drawing him to her. 'How did you kill him?' 'I don't want to talk about it, Senta, I can't.' And he shuddered as if he had actually committed some terrible act of violence, as if he remembered a knife going in, a gush of blood, a scream of agony, a struggle and a final helpless yielding to death. He hated these things and other people's gloating fascination with them. 'Don't ask me, I can't.' She took his hands and held them out, palm-upwards. 'I know. You strangled him with these!' It was no better than contemplati~ig the knife and the blood. He fancied he could feel his hands tremble in hers. He forced himself to nod, to answer. 'I strangled him, yes. 'It was dark, was it?' 'Of course. It was one in the morning. Don't ask me any more about it.' He could see she didn't understand why he refused to give details. She expected him to furnish her with a description of the night, the empty silent street, the victim's helpless trust - and his own predatory seizing of opportunity. Her face blanked as it sometimes did when she was disappointed. All animation departed, all feeling, and it was as if those eyes turned inwards to contemplate the workings of her mind. With her little girl's hands she took hold of two thick locks of her silver hair and drew them down across her shoulders. Her eyes seemed to turn outwards and fill with light. 'You did it for me?' 'You know it. That's what we agreed.' A long shudder, that might have been real or equally might have been contrived, shook her body from head to foot. He reminded himself that she was an actress. This kind of thing was necessary to her and he would have to live with it. She laid her head against his chest as if to listen to his heartbeat and she whispered, 'Now I shall do the same for you.'

11

To follow Cheryl had been far from his intention when they set out. It was the first time he had actually been out with his sister since the day they had all gone to Arnham's house, and Christine and Fee had been with them then. Not since before his father's death had he and Cheryl gone out alone. It was Saturday evening and he was on his way to Tarsus Street. It was somehow harder to tell a mother who never asked questions that you wouldn't be back till the following evening than if she probed and pried. But he had told her, in a casual way, and she had given him her innocent unsuspecting smile. 'Have a nice time, dear.' Soon it would all be out in the open. Once he was engaged there would be no problem about saying he would be staying overnight at Senta's. He was getting into the car when Cheryl came running out and asked for a lift. 'I'm going down the Edgware Road, that way. 'Go on, make a detour and take me to Golders Green.' It would be a hefty detour but he agreed, he was curious. There was something disquieting in the idea that while she had a secret from him he also had one from her. No sooner had they turned the corner into Lochleven Gardens than she was asking him for a loan. 'Just a flyer, Phil, then you could take me straight down the Edgware Road.' 'I'm not lending you money, Cheryl, not any more. He waited a moment and when she didn't say anything, 'So what's going to happen in Golders Green? What's the big deal there?' 'A friend I can borrow it from.' She said it airily enough. 'Cheryl, what's going on? I've got to ask. I know you're into something. You're never home except at night, you don't have any friends, you're always alone and you re always trying to get money. You're in some kind of bad trouble, aren't you?' 'It's nothing to do with you.' The old brooding sulky note was back in her tone but there was indifference too, a edge of don't-care to it that told him questioning didn't bother her, interference amounted to nothing when she could parry it by admitting nothing. 'It's to do with me if I lend you money, you must see that.' 'Well, you're not going to, are you? You've said you re not, so you might as well shut up.' 'You can at least tell me what you're going to do this evening.' 'OK, you tell me what you're doing first. Only don't bother. I know. You're seeing that Stephanie, aren't you?' Her conviction, quite erroneous, as to what he had been and would be doing made him wonder fleetingly if his own certainty that she was addicted to drugs or drink might be equally mistaken. If she could be wrong, and she was wrong, so could he. He didn't even bother to deny what she had said and he was aware of her triumphant nodding. At Golders Green, by the station where the buses turned round, he dropped her. It was his intention to drive down the Finchley Road, but as he watched Cheryl move off in the direction of the High Road the idea came to him to follow her and watch what she did. It struck him as very odd that she was carrying an Umbrella. It had been raining and looked as if it would rain again. The few people he saw about were carrying umbrellas but for Cheryl to do so seemed to him unprecedented. What could she want to protect from the rain? Not her short spiky hair surely. Not her jeans or the shiny plastic jacket. It was as incongruous seeing her with an umbrella as it would be if Christine were to put on jeans. He parked the car in a side turning. When he emerged into the main street again he thought he had lost her and then he spotted her quite a long way away in the curve of the High Road, walking along the rather wide pavement. When the green figure of the marching pedestrian lit up he ran across the Finchley Road. It was midsummer light and would be for two hours yet but the light was gloomy from rain and a threatening dark overcast. This place would be crowded when the shops were open, cars double parked on the roadway and the passage of buses between them slow. It was a shopping centre only and now, without cinemas or pubs, with scarcely a wine bar, the street was deserted but for Cheryl walking along close to the windows. Not quite deserted. Philip realised rather unhappily that what he meant was it was empty of responsible conventional orderly sort of people. There were three punk boys looking into the window of a motor-cycle accessories store. A man walked alone on the other side, Cheryl's side, a tall thin man in leather and with his hair in a pigtail. For a moment Philip thought Cheryl was going to accost this man. He was walking towards her but much nearer the kerb and as he approached she seemed to veer out from the shelter of the shop windows. By this time Philip had stationed himself in the doorway of a building society's office on the same side as the punk boys. He had wondered from time to time if it were some kind of prostitution Cheryl engaged in. The idea was extraordinarily distressingly distasteful. It would account for her sudden accessions of money but not for her desperate need of small temporary loans. And now he saw that he had been wrong - at least in this instance - for Cheryl walked past the leather-clad man with head averted. She had let him pass by and now she stood, looking warily about her. There was no doubt she was looking to see if the street was as empty as it appeared to be. Him she couldn't detect, he was sure of that. She stared directly at the punk boys who had come away from the window and looked across the street at her, but without interest, without thought of involvement. And Philip realised something. Before Cheryl performed the act that was to overthrow all his guesses as to what she had come here for, he realised that she didn't care if she was observed by the punk boys, for they and she were of a kind, not only heedless of the law but joined in a silent pactiess conspiracy against it. They were the last people who would tell on her. Tell on her for what misdeed? Satisfied that she was unobserved, she slipped into the entry of one of the shops. It was a clothes boutique with a plate glass door. Philip saw her crouch down in front of this door and apparently insert something through the large letterbox of silver-coloured metal. Was she breaking in? A cry of protest sprang up in him and he suppressed it, hand over his mouth. It was impossible for him to see from this distance and in this light what she was doing. He could only see her back and bent head and the action she performed which was that of a person spearing something. The Street remained empty, though a car passed in the direction of the station. Philip was aware of a purring silence, the purr being the distant, eternal, regular throb of traffic. Suddenly Cheryl gave a sharp tug with her right arm, backed, still on her haunches, sprang to her feet and drew something out through the letterbox. Then Philip saw it all, understood it all. The umbrella, used as a hook, had withdrawn a garment from some rack or counter inside the shop. It might have been a sweater or a blouse or a skirt. He couldn't tell. She gave him no chance to see but rolled whatever it was up and thrust it inside her jacket. He was stunned by what he had seen, his feelings temporarily deadened, but he was also fascinated. It wouldn't be true that he wanted her to do it again but he wanted to see it done again. For a moment he thought this would happen, for she approached another boutique a few shops along and stood there with her nose pressed to the glass. But then, shocking him once more with the suddenness of it, she spun round and began to run. She ran, not in the direction he expected, that is back to the Finchley Road, but the opposite way, crossed the road and plunged down a side street near a railway bridge. Philip considered following her but very quickly dismissed this idea and returned to his car. Was that what it was about? Was that all it was about, a kind of crazy addiction to stealing things from shops? He had read somewhere that kleptomania was nonsense, it didn't really happen. What did she do, anyway, with the things she stole? When he first considered telling Senta about it he dismissed the idea almost at once. Second thoughts, surfacing as he drove across North London and down West End Lane, made him confront this propositionagain. Wasn't that what a relationship like theirs ought to be about, confiding in each other, telling each other their doubts and fears? If they were going to be together always, in a life-long partnership, they must unbur. den themselves to each other, they must share their troubles. He drove to Senta's by way of Caesarea Grove, passing the big gloomy church of rough-hewn grey stone in whose west porch Joley sometimes encamped himself for the night. But the porch was empty and the iron gates into the graveyard fastened with chains and a padlock. When he was a child Philip had been afraid to pass places of this sort, churches or houses built to look like some grim edifice of the Middle Ages, and would have made a detour or gone by at a run with eyes averted. He remembered this now, the memory of his fear strongly felt, though not the fear itself. A dozen gravestones, no more, remained under the trees with their black trunks and pointed leathery leaves. He had slowed for some reason to look in there but now he accelerated, turned the corner and parked outside Senta's house. More shutters were closed at the upper windows than he had ever seen before. The only light came from the basement and the sight of that light alone was enough to make his heart beat faster. The breathless feeling was back. He ran up the stairs and let himself in. Music drifted to him but not the kind of music Rita and Jacopo danced to. It was coming up the basement stairs. This was so unusual that he had a momentary fear she might have someone with her and he hesitated outside her door for a moment, listening to the bouzouki music, wondering. She must have heard his feet on the stairs, for she opened the door to him herself and came immediately into his arms. Of course there was no one else there. He was moved with love for her by what she had done, what she seemed so proud of: food and wine set out on the bamboo table, the tape playing, the room somehow cleaner and fresher, the purple sheets on the bed changed for brown ones. She was wearing a dress he had never seen before, black, short, thin and clinging, with a low oval neck that showed her white breasts. He held hei~ in his arms, kissing her softly, slowly. Her little hands, warm with cold rings on them, stroked his hair, his neck. He whispered, 'Are we alone in the house?' 'They've gone away up north somewhere. 'I like it better when we're alone,' he said. She poured glasses of wine for them and he told her about Cheryl. It was a strange treachery in him, he sometimes thought, a mistrust without foundation, that he expected her not to be interested in the things he told her, in his family, his doings. He expected her to be preoccupied, anxious to return to her own concerns. In fact, she was interested, did like to hear, gave him all her attention, sitting there with hands clasped, looking into his eyes. When he got to the bit about Cheryl poking the umbrella through( the letter box a smile dawned on her face, which, if you didn't know it couldn't be, you might have taken for admiration. 'What do you think I ought to do, Senta? I mean, should I tell anyone? Should I even tell her?' 'Do you really want to know what I think, Philip?' 'Of course I do. That's why I'm telling you. I want your opinion.' 'My opinion is that you worry too much about the law and society and things like that. People like you and me, exceptional people, are above the law, don't you think? Or let's say beyond it.' All his life he had been taught to be law-abiding, to respect authority, man-made government. His father, gambler though he had been, was adani~ant about honesty and strict integrity in his dealings. Making one s own rules savoured to Philip of anarchy. 'Cheryl won't be beyond the law if she gets caught,' he said. 'We don't see the world in quite the same way, you and I, Philip. I know you're going to learn to see it as I do but that hasn't happened yet. I mean seeing it as a place of mysticism and magic, as if on a different plane from the dull practical things most people waste their lives on. When you come on to that plane with me you'll find a world of wonderful occult things where everything is possible, nothing is barred. There aren't any policemen there and there aren't any laws. You'll start seeing things you never saw before, shapes and wonders and visions and ghosts. You took one step towards that plane when you killed the old man for my sake. Did you know that?' Philip returned her gaze, but puzzled, not as happy as he had been moments before. He was well aware that she hadn't given him any sort of opinion he might want to hear, hadn't really answered him. Her terms were vague, open to any sort of definition, they bore no relation to concrete things, to rules and restrictions, decency, socially acceptable behaviour, respect for the law. She talked well, he thought, she was beautifully articulate and the things she said, they couldn't be nonsense. That feeling came from his own inability, as yet, to understand. He learned something as she spoke, though not what she had meant him to learn. It was interesting but disquieting at the same time. What he learned was that if you have told a lie about something you have done, as in his case about the murder of the vagrant, you very quickly forget all about it, something inside your memory blots it out. He knew that if, instead of speaking as though she took this act of his for granted, she had asked him artlessly what he had been doing the previous Sunday night, he would have replied that after he left her he had driven home and gone to bed. He would have done the natural thing and told the truth. The sun crept through the splits in the old shutters, making gold bars on the ceiling and laying rods of gold on the brown quilt. That was the first thing Philip saw when he woke up very late on Sunday morning, a string of sunlight drawn across his hand which lay limply outside the covers. He withdrew the hand and, turning over, reached for Senta. She wasn't with him. She was gone. - Again she surprised him. He was sitting up, already full of fears that she had left him, he would never see her again, when he saw the note on her pillow: "Back soon. I had to go out, it was important. Wait for me, Senta." Why hadn't she written "love"? It didn't matter. She had left him the note. Wait for her? He would have waited for ever. His watch told him it was past eleven. Most nights he simply didn't get enough sleep, he never seemed to get more than five or six hours. No wonder he had been tired, had slept on and on. Fully awake now but still relaxed, he lay thinking about Senta, relieved and happy because in the region of his mind which was the place for Senta and himself he had at this moment no worries and no fears. But as if his consciousness didn't want him to be without anxieties, it allowed Cheryl to creep into it. For the first time since he had witnessed that act of hers, the enormity of it struck him. He had been in a state of shock but now the shock had worn off. He knew at once that he couldn't just let it alone, pretend he hadn't seen what he had seen, he was going to have to confront Cheryl. The alternative would inevitably be the phone call from the police to say they had arrested Cheryl on a theft charge. Would it be worse or better to tell Christine first? After that Philip couldn't just lie there, he had to get up. In the nasty corner where the lavatory was and the dripping, bandaged brass tap over the bath, he managed a wash of sorts. Back in her room he folded back the shutters and opened the window. Senta said opening the window let flies in, and as the sash went up a great blowfly sang past his cheek, but the room seemed sometimes to gasp for air. It was a bright shimmering summer's day, the last sort of weather you would have expected to follow the bleak grey week which had preceded it. The short shadows up there on the concrete were black and the sunlight a burning dazzling white. Something happened then which had never happened before and which brought him an enormous exciting pleasure. He saw her come to the house. He saw her legs in jeans and feet in trainers - unprecedented, he had never before seen her in trousers. Would he even have known it was she if she hadn't bent down at the railings and looked at him through the bars? She put her head through the bars, then her arm, stretching it towards him in a yearning kind of way. Her hand was open, palm-upwards, as if she wanted to take his hand in hers. The hand was withdrawn and she came up the steps. Listening intently, he heard every step she took, along the hallway, down the passage, down the stairs. It was a slow entry she made. She closed the door behind her with extravagant care, as if the house were full of sleeping people. He wondered how he could say of someone who was white-skinned, who never had colour in her cheeks, that she was very pale. Her skin had that greenish-silvery look. With the jeans and the trainers she was wearing a kind of loose tunic of dark red cotton with a black leather belt round her waist. Her hair was twisted up or tied up on top of her head under a flat cap of cotton cord like a boy's. She took this cap off, threw it on the bed and shook out her hair. Philip saw her looking at him, the beginnings of a smile on her lips, and saw the back of her in the misty spotted mirror, her hair spread over her shoulders in a great silver fan. She extended her hand and he took it in his. He drew her towards him where he sat on the end of the bed. He smoothed her hair back from her face in both hands, turned her face and brought it to his, kissed the lips which felt cool for so warm a day. 'Where have you been, Senta?' 'You weren't worried, Philip? You had my note?' 'Of course I did, thank you for it. But you didn't say where you were, only that it was important.' 'Oh, it was. It was very important. Can't you guess?' Why did he naturally think of Cheryl? Why did he assume she had been to Cheryl, had said something he would want unsaid? But he didn't answer her, he didn't put this into words. She spoke softly, her lips almost against his skin. 'I went to do for you what you did for me. I went to prove my love for you, Philip.' It was strange how any mention of those reciprocal acts immediately made him uneasy. More than uneasy, causing a recoil, a reflex of shying away. In those few seconds he thought, she may be going to try and teach me her philosophy, but I'll also teach her mine, that fantasising has to stop. But all he could say was, 'Did you? You don't have to prove anything to me.' She never heard what he said when she didn't want to. 'I did what you did. I killed someone. That's why I went out so early. I've trained myself to wake up when I want to, you know. I woke up at six and went out. I had to go so early because it was a long way. Philip will worry, I thought, so I'll leave him a note.' In the midst of his growing exasperation, warmth touched him at her sweetness, her concern for him. He was aware of something wonderful, yet frightening. She loved him more now than before their separation, her love for him was always growing. He took her face gently in his hands to kiss her again but she broke away. 'No, Philip, you have to listen to me. It's very important what I'm telling you. I was going to Chigwell, you see, on the tube and it's a very long way.' 'Chigwell?' 'Well, a place called Grange Hill, it's the next station. It was the nearest one to where Gerard Arnham lived. You haven't guessed, have you? It's Gerard Arnham I killed for you. I killed him at eight o'clock this morning.'

12

For perhaps half a minute he actually believed her. It seemed infinitely longer, it seemed hours. The shock of it made something strange happen on his head, a kind of singing throbbing and a dark redness before his eyes, a sensation as of wheels turning and rolling behind his eyes. Then reason dispelled all that. You fool, he told himself, you fool. Don't you know by now she lives in a world of daydreams? He dampened dry lips with a dry tongue, shook himself a little. His heart was thudding and shaking his ribs. Strangely, she seemed not to notice these earthquakes in him, these overturnings and attempts to grasp at reality, these splits in reassurance through which nightmares came grinning. 'I'd been observing him,' she said. 'I've been over to that house you showed me twice in the past week. I found out he takes his dog for a walk in these woods every morning before he goes to work. I calculated he'd still do it on Sunday but he'd be a bit later - and he was. I waited there, hiding in the trees, and saw him come with his dog.' If any doubts about the falseness of what she said still lingered, thfs would have dispelled them. Gerard Arnham with a dog! Philip remembered how Christine had told him Arnham didn't care for dogs, had cited this as a reason for not taking him with them on that fateful day. It provided him with a question for Senta, a policeman's sort of question aimed at ferreting out the kind of information which the liar may have left unconsidered. 'What kind of dog?' 'Quite a little one, black.' She answered at once. She was prepared with her circumstantial details. 'A Scottie, are they called? If it had been a big fierce Dobermann, Philip, I probably wouldn't have been able to do what I did. I chose Arnham, you know, because he was your enemy. You'd told me he was your enemy, so that's why I picked him.' Philip wanted to ask her what Arnham looked like but he remembered what had happened the last time he seemed to doubt her stories. He tried to think of ways of rephrasing that question. 'It's an interesting thing that a girl will be quite frightened if she meets a man she doesn't know in a wood,' she said, 'but a man's not frightened if a girl comes up to him. I came up to him holding my eye. I said I'd got something in my eye and it was hurting and I couldn't see out of it and I was frightened. That was clever, don't you think?' 'He's a very tall man, isn't he?' Philip was proud of himself. This was the kind of thing he had come across in police procedural serials on television. 'He must have had to bend right over to look at your eye. 'Oh, he did, he did. He bent right down and I held my face up for him to see my eye.' She nodded with a kind of pleased satisfaction. And Philip found himself smiling at this second and surely final confirmation, all that was needed. Arnham was no more than five feet eight, if that. 'He was as near to me as you are now. I knew where to strike. I stabbed him in the heart with a glass dagger.' 'You what?' said Philip, half-amused now by her inventiveness. 'Didn't I ever show you my Venetian dagger? They're made of Murano glass, those daggers, and they're as sharp as razors. When you plunge them in they break off at the handle and they only leave a scratch to show. The victim doesn't even bleed. I used to have two but I used the other one for something else and they're both gone now. I bought them in Venice when I was on my travels. I did feel sorry for the poor little dog, though, Philip. It came running up to its dead master and it started this awful whimpering.' He didn't know much about Venice, he had never been there, and less about Venetian glass. But he wanted to ask her, he had to stop himself from asking her, if she had worn one of those bird face masks and a black cloak. 'It will be in all the papers tomorrow,' she said. 'I don't usually see a paper but I shall buy one tomorrow to read about it. No, I know! I'll g&upstairs later and see it on their TV.' First, she would have a bath in their bathroom. She didn't think there was any blood on her but whether there was or not, she felt less than clean after what she had done. That was why she had worn the dark red tunic, so that blood wouldn't show if it splashed on to her. If there were any splashes they must be tiny ones. She had conducted a thorough search of her clothes while in the train. Philip followed her upstairs, up on to the first, then to the second floor. He had never been into the upper regions of the house before. It was uniformly shabby, dusty and with a kind of dreary squalor. He glanced into a room where an unmade bed was piled with plastic sacks from whose open tops clothes spilt. Cardboard crates that had once contained tins of food were stacked against the walls. There were a lot of flies, buzzing about pendant light bulbs without shades. Senta went into a bathroom where the walls and ceilings were a shiny bright green, the floor composed of patches of variously coloured linoleum. She stripped off her clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor. An unexpected thing had happened. He felt no desire for her. He could look at her naked, undeniably beautiful, and feel nothing. She was less than a picture, far less than a photograph, as unerotic as stone Flora. He closed his eyes, rubbed his closed eyes with his fists, opened them again and watched her step into the water - and felt nothing. From the bath she talked to him about coming back in the train, her initial fear that she was followed, her later obsessive search for a spot of blood somewhere, her examination of fingers and her nails. He felt afraid, out of control. It was the kind of thing he especially hated, crime, the stuff of thrillers, an absorption with hideous violent things. He couldn't stay in the bathroom with her. He wandered aimlessly in and out of rooms. She called after him in that sweet, rather high-pitched tone of hers, as if nothing had happened, as if he were a casual visitor. 'Go and have a look at the top floor. I used to live up there.' He went up. The rooms were smaller and narrower, the ceiling sloping under the roof. There were three rooms, no bathroom, but a lavatory and a small kitchen with a very old oven in one corner and a space where perhaps a refrigerator had once stood. All the windows were closed and on one of the sills stood the green wine bottle he had seen from the street. It felt and smelt as if no window had been opened for ~nonths, years. Outside the sun was shining but it seemed remote, barriers of dirty glass like a fog hanging between here and that distant sunlight. Through the grey encrusted panes the roofs of Queens Park and Kensal were a faded photograph or one over-exposed. Philip had come up here for something to do. He had come to be alone with pain and with fear. But now he was distracted from those emotions. He walked about in a kind of wonderment. The rooms were dirty with the kind of dirt he was growing used to in this house and the smell was thick, like burning rubber in places, in others sweet and fishy, in the lavatory where the pan was dark brown, as sharp and yellow-sour as rotting onions. But these were rooms, this was accommodation. He found himself noting the kind of things it was his job to note, the big cupboards with their panelled doors, the floorboards, the sink of stainless steel, the curtain rails, the few pieces of furniture. She was calling him. He came down to her and said, 'Why did you move down to the basement?' She burst out laughing, a long musical trill. 'Oh, Philip, your face! You look so disapproving.' He tried to smile. 'I didn't like climbing all those stairs.' she said. 'What did I want with all those rooms anyway?' She dried herself and put on the silver dress with the grey flower and they went out to a pub for lunch. He drove her to Hampstead and they sat in a pub garden and ate bread rolls and cheese with salad and drank sparkling ros6 Lambrusco. They went for a walk on the Heath, Philip spinning out the time, delaying their return to Tarsus Street. The way he felt, he thought it unlikely he would be able to make love to her. A terrible desolation had taken hold of him. What he thought of as his great love for her was all gone, vanished. The more she talked - and she talked of everything, of gods and men and magic, of murder, of what society calls crime, of herself and him and their future, of her past and her acting - the worse it became. She held his hand and his cold hand lay inert in her warm one. He suggested they go to the cinema, the Everyman or the Screen on the Hill, but she wanted to go home. She always wanted to go home. She liked indoors, underground. It made him wonder if she had moved down from that top flat because it was too exposed and vulnerable for her, up there. They lay down side by side on the bed and to his relief - a very temporary unhappy relief - she fell asleep. He put his arm round her then and felt the warm aliveness of her, the rise and fall of her breath. Bi~~t there was no more desire than if it were a stone girl that lay there, life-size in marble. She had written him a note and now he would write her one. 'I'll see you tomorrow. Good night.' She hadn't written love but he would. 'All my love, Philip.' He got up carefully without disturbing her, closed the window and folded the shutters. She looked very beautiful lying there, her eyes shut, the long coppery lashes resting moth-like on the white skin. The closed lips were Flora's, sculpted in marble, indented at their corners. He kissed her lips and felt with a shudder that he was kissing a mortally sick woman or even a corpse. Before he left he checked that the keys were safe in his pocket. For all that, there seemed something final about the hollow clang with which the front door closed behind him, though he knew of course it wasn't final, he was still only at the beginning. Arnham wasn't really a short man. You couldn't call five feet eight short. It was only he who saw it this way because he was himself so tall. Arnham had been unfamiliar with dogs but Arnham was married now. Suppose it was his wife's dog? It might be that his wife was fond of dogs, already had a dog, this Scottie, before they were married. If Arnham had married Christine they would have kept Hardy, of course they would. Philip thought about this all the way home. He walked into the living room and found Fee and Darren there with Christine, watching television. The news was just coming on, in shortened form for a Sunday evening. Philip felt a bit sick. He wouldn't have actually put the news on, he didn't want to know, but as it was on, had started, he had to stay and know. His suspense was made worse by Darren's constant interjections, urging the news reader to get on with it and come to the sport. But there was no item about a murder, a murder of any sort, and Philip felt better. He had begun asking himself how he could have been so stupid as even for a moment to think Senta could have killed someone, tiny, slight, child-fingered Senta. 'Cheryl says you've been taking Stephanie about,' said Fee, lighting a cigarette. The smoke brought him another flicker of nausea. 'Is that a fact?' 'That's all in Cheryl's head,' he said, and, 'You've seen Cheryl then?' 'Why shouldn't I have seen her? She lives here.' He was going to have to talk to Fee about Cheryl. Fee would be the best person. But not now, not tonight. He got himself something to eat, a meat sandwich and a cup of instant coffee, and offered to take Hardy round the block. Walking along with Hardy on the lead made him think of Arnham again, of Arnham lying dead and his own little dog whimpering over his body. The trouble was that Senta had described it all too vividly, had gone on and on about it. It was he who was going on and on about it now, his consciousness dominated by it. He was unable to alter the trend of his thoughts and that night he dreamed of glass daggers. He was in Venice, or he was at any rate walking along by a canal in a city, when turning a corner he saw a man set upon by another in cloak and mask, a dagger of perfect and wicked transparency flash in the moonlight. The assassin fled, Philip rushed up to the victim who lay on his back with one pendant hand trailing in the dark water. He searched for the wound but found nothing where the dagger had gone in, only the kind of scratch a cat's claw might make. But the man was dead and the body fast cooling. During the previous week Philip had avoided newspapers. He hadn't wanted to know if the police had found the murderer of the vagrant, John Sidney Crucifer. Blotting out the whole business from his mind, he had avoided everything that might be associated with it, every medium that might reveal more details of it. Television he had scarcely watched anyway since his reunion with Senta. Now he realised he had done nothing about replacing the radio in his car because he didn't want to have to hear its news broadcasts. This ostrich-like behaviour was possible only when it was a minor matter which was at stake. Today he couldn't afford to ignore newspapers. He had to know for sure. On his way to Highgate, where Roseberry Lawn were putting two new bathrooms into an actress's house, he stopped off and bought three morning papers from a newsagent's. The car was parked on a double yellow line but he couldn't wait any longer before knowing. It was just a matter of keeping on the alert for an approaching traffic warden. Two murders had taken place during Sunday, one in Wolverhampton, one in a place called Hainault Forest in Essex. All three newspapers had details, though none was leading on these stories. It would have been different had the victims been women, particularly young women, but both were men. Murdered men are less newsworthy. The Hainault Forest one wasn't named, was described as being in his fifties. A Forest Ranger had found the body. There was nothing in any of the papers about the cause of death or the murder method. Philip drove on to the actress's house. She was a young woman called Olivia Brett who had had a phenomenal success in a television series. Now she was in constant demand. She was very thin, emaciated, and her hair was bleached to the same shade as Senta's but it was shorter than Senta's and much less thick and shiny. She was ten years older than Senta and the heavy pancake make-up she wore made her look older than that. She wanted to know Philip's first name and called him by it, called him darling too, and asked him to call her Ollie, which everyone did, she said. She adored Roseberry Lawn bathrooms, they were better than anything she had seen in Beverley Hills. She adored colour, colour was what made life worthwhile. Would he like a drink? She wouldn't have one, she would only have Perrier, because she was getting so enormously fat that soon the only parts open to her would be those of obese grandmothers. Reeling somewhat under all this, refusing the drink, Philip made his way upstairs to look at the two rooms designated as bathrooms. This was to be simply a preliminary survey, too soon even for measuring up. Philip stood in the first of these rooms, already in use as a bathroom with very old-fashioned shabby fitments, and stared out of the window. London lay below him, spread out at the foot of the northern hills. Chigwell was London, wasn't it, not Essex? He was remembering now that there was a station on the Central Line called Hainault. In 'confessing' to him, she had spoken of woods. Was that what she had meant, Hainault Forest? Was that the open wooded countryside near where Arnham lived? The man was the right sort of age. A man of five feet eight might seem tall to Senta who was so small. Oh, stop it, he said to himself, stop it. It's all fantasy with her, it's all invention. You might as well say that dream you had last night about the man stabbed with the glass dagger was real. Where could a girl like Senta get a glass dagger anyway? They're not the kind of thing that are going to be on open sale. A small voice whispered to him: Ah, but she makes some of it up and some of it is real, you know that. She did go to drama school. It just wasn't RADA she went to. She did travel, only not as far and widely as she said. Olivia Brett had disappeared and a hard-faced housekeeper was waiting downstairs to show him, as she put it, off the premises. Philip said to himself, it's obviously not Arnham, you know it's not, you're becoming neurotic over nothing. The only thing to do now is to put it all out of your head the way you did Crucifer. Don't buy an evening paper, don't watch the news. If you're going to make a go of this, you have to show her fantasising isn't on, fantasising is childish, and you're not going to do that by going along with her fantasies like this. You should never have let any of it get started. But look what happened when he protested, when he resisted. She had refused to see him. But would he really mind now if she refused to see him? The idea turned him cold, the enormity of it. You couldn't love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you? It didn't occur to him not to go to Tarsus Street that evening. He told himself as he drove down Shoot-up Hill that he knew now why lying and fantasising was wrong. Because it brought so much trouble and misery and pain. He bought wine and chocolates for her. They were bribes and he knew it. Entering the street from Caesarea Grove, he was assailed by a sudden anxiety over Joley. This was the longest period since the first time he had seen him that Joley had been absent from his regular beat. Again the church gates had been locked and the church porch empty. This time a week ago nothing would have delayed Philip from rushing to Senta as soon as he could. Things had changed. He was quite prepared, even content, to put off seeing her for half an hour while he went in search of Joley. Ilbert Street was his other haunt, he had told Philip. This long street linked Third Avenue with Kilburn Lane. He drove the length of it between the parked cars. It was a sultry still evening which certainly presaged a warm night, the sort of night on which Joley would conte. ntedly sleep outdoors with no more than benefit of a doorway or patch of waste ground. Philip found it impossible to see much of the pavement because of the nose-to-tail parking. He managed to park his own car and then he set off to walk the street. Joley was nowhere. Philip left the main street and made a foray into the shabby dull little hinterland. By now the sun had set and feathers of red were uncurling all over the smoky grey sky. The feeling came back that his luck depended on Joley and now Joley was gone. His reluctance to see Senta increased as he returned to Tarsus Street. Why had he ever told her he had killed someone? Why had he been such a fool? It was true that he had told her in a very perfunctory way, in such a casual dismissive way that almost anybody would know he was making it all up. Surely she hadn't really believed him. He let himself into the house slowly, almost wearily. He was like an unhappy husband coming home to noisy children and a quarrelsome wife. Her burning joss stick scented the basement stairs. He let himself into the room. The shutters were closed, the bedlamp was on. It felt insufferably stuffy and the heady spicy smell was almost overpowering. She lay face-downwards on the bed, her head in her arms. As he came in she made a convulsive movement. He touched her shoulder, spoke her name. She turned slowly on to her back and looked up at him. Her face was crumpled and runnelled and squeezed with crying, pink and soggy and wet. The pillow into which her head had burrowed was actually wet, with tears or sweat. 'I thought you weren't coming. I thought you were never coming back.' 'Oh, Senta, of course I came back, of course I did.' 'I thought I was never going to see you again.' He took her in his arms then and held her. It was like hugging a frightened weeping child. What has happened to us? he thought. What have we done? We were so happy. Why did we spoil it with all these lies, these games? Philip went into the library and looked Gerard Arnham up in the telephone directory which covered Chigwell. His name wasn't there. The date on the directory was a year ago so naturally he wouldn't be there. It could be no more than six months since he had moved. An alternative would be to ask directory enquiries for the number but at this point Philip wondered what he would say if someone other than Arnhan answered, if for instance his wife answered. He could hardly ask her if her husband was still alive. Three days had passed since Senta had told him she had killed Arnham. In that time she had been different and he had been different. The tables were turned. Now it was he who distanced himself from her and she who clung to him and wept. She said she had killed his enemy for him and instead of being grateful he hated her for what she had done. This was very nearly accurate except that he knew very well she hadn't killed Arnham, had only said she had. Examining his feelings, he discovered his antipathy came from Senta's pride in the idea of killing someone in a particularly brutal way. Or did it? Wasn't it rather that he wasn't sure she hadn't done it, that there still lingered somewhere the germ of a fear that she actually had done it? By now he had seen in a newspa~er that the murdered man in Hainault Forest had been identified as Harold Myerson, aged 58, an engineering consultant from Chigwell. That was coincidence that he came from Chigwell, for there was no possibility Myerson could be Gerard Arnham. He wouldn't haye two names and Arnham wasn't as old as that. The only other murder which had taken place in the British Isles on the previous Sunday was the Wolverhampton one, a boy of twenty stabbed in a fight outside a pub. Philip knew that was true because he had been through three of Monday's morning papers and the evening paper and had bought and scrutinised three more on Tuesday. This meant that Senta had done nothing on that Sunday and Arnham must be alive and Philip was being stupid, imagining crazy things. People one knew didn't kill other people. It was outside one's knowledge, a different world. To account for his attitude towards her he had tried to make her believe it stemmed from his anxiety. He made her tell him in precise detail the whole story over again, hoping to pick holes in it, to find discrepancies between the original account and this later one. 'Which morning did you go over there? You said you went over to Chigwell and watched the house in the mornings.' 'I went on the Tuesday and the Friday, Philip.' He forced himself to say it, though he nearly gagged on the words. 'That Tuesday was only the day after I told you I'd killed John Crucifer. I came here on the Monday night and told you how I killed Crucifer the night before.' 'That's right,' she said. 'That's right. I knew I had to make a start. Once you'd done that for me I knew I had to lay my plans. I got up very early, I didn't get much sleep, and I got the tube out there and watched the house. I saw the woman open the door in her dressing gown and take a bottle of milk in. She's a woman with a big nose and mouth and lot of wild dark hair.' Revelations like this made Philip shiver. He recalled the first time he had seen Arnham's wife through the panes of the window patterned like a shield. Senta, sitting on the bed beside him, her legs tucked under her, her arms loosely round his neck, snuggled up to him. 'I felt good when I saw her. I thought, she's the woman he married when he should have married Philip's mother, and I thought how it would serve her right when he was dead and she was a widow. It's wrong to steal other women's men. If some woman tried to steal you from me I'd kill her, I wouldn't hesitate. I'll tell you a secret about that but not now, later. I'm not going to have any secrets from you, Philip, and you're not going to have any from me - ever. 'It was eight o'clock when Arnham came out with the little dog. He walked him to this bit of green where the trees were and took him in under the trees and then he walked him back. It only took about twenty minutes. I didn't go away, though, I went on watching, and he came out again after a bit and he was dressed up in a suit and carrying a briefcase and she was with him still in her dressing gown. He gave her a kiss and she put her arms round his neck like this.' 'And you went back on the Friday, 'I went back on the Friday, Philip, to check up that he always did it. I thought she might sometimes do it, the thief woman. I got to give them names in my mind. Do you think that's funny? I called him Gerry and her Thiefie and the little dog Ebony because he was black. I thought, suppose it turns out Thiefie takes Ebony out on Sundays. I'll have come all the way out here for nothing, but I'd just have had to come back on Monday, wouldn't I?' Philip found he couldn't bear to hear about the stabbing again. When she reached the point where she had stepped up to Arnham under the trees and told him she had something in her eye, he stopped her by asking why she thought she might have been followed on her return journey to the tube station. 'It was just that there was this old woman on the station platform. I had ever such a long time to wait for a train and she kept looking at me. I thought, have I got blood on me? But I couldn't see any blood. And how could she have seen it when I was wearing the dark red tunic? And then when the train came I was sitting in the train and I took my cap off and my hair came down. The old woman wasn't there, she wasn't in the same bit of the train, but other people were, and since then, Philip, I've been thinking, suppose she thought I was a boy but they could tell I was a girl and all of them sort of made the connection and thought it was suspicious? Don't you think the police would have been here by now? They would, wouldn't they?' 'You needn't be afraid of the police, Senta.' 'Oh, I'm not afraid. I know the police are just agents of a society whose rules mean nothing to people like us. I'm not afraid but I have to be on the watch, I have to have my story ready.' If it had not been so distasteful, there would have been something ludicrous about the police tracking down Senta who was so tiny and so innocent-looking, with her big soulful eyes and her soft unmarked skin, her child's hands and feet. Philip took her in his arms and began kissing her. He shut out the awful thoughts. He asked himself if it was not she but he who was mad, allowing himself to believe for an instant these elaborate inventions. Yet, within moments, opening their second bottle of wine, unwrapping for her a chocolate cherry encased in red silver paper, he was asking her for more details, to tell once again of following Arnham from his house to the open place where the grass and trees were. In the underground room dusk came sooner than up above. It was gloomy and close down here where the smell of dust mingled with the scent of burning patchouli. At this hour, in the dimness, the big hanging mirror seemed like a sheet of greenish water in which their reflections could only vaguely be seen. It had a sheen on it like mother-of-pearl, thick and translucent. The bed, with its rumpled brown sheet and pillows and quilt rather resembled some terrain of folded hills and deep valleys. Philip stopped her when she reached out to put the bedlamp on. He pulled her to him, sliding his hands inside the thin black skirt, the loose top of cheesecloth. Her skin was like warm silk, slippery and yielding. In the dark, with the shutters half-closed and only a little greyish light showing above the pavement level, he could imagine her as she had been before she made these revelations to him, he imagined her as she had been on those two occasions in his own bed. Then and only then, with his eyes closed, was it possible for him to make love to her. He was learning how to fantasise. In the middle of the night he woke up. He had decided long before not to go home that night. Once at least in the week he didn't go home and the previous evening and night he had spent at home with Christine. What had happened was that he had got into the habit of waking up, dressing and silently letting himself out of the room and the house. He still woke up when he didn't need to. She lay asleep beside him. Yellow lamplight from the street fell across her face and turned the silver hair to a brassy gold. The window was open a little at the top and the shutters were ajar. In the past, often at this hour, the music had played overhead and the two pairs of feet danced, but now Rita and Jacopo were away somewhere. The old house with its weight above them of dirty cluttered rooms, a repository of stored rubbish, slowly gradually decaying, was empty but for them. Senta breathed with a silent regular rhythm, her slightly parted lips as pale as a shell. But when he came back from closing the shutters and then fetching himself a drink from the bandaged brass tap, she was awake and sitting up. A white shawl with a fringe was around her shoulders. The light was on now, bright and uncompromising. The holes in the parchment shade made a spotted pattern on the ceiling. She must have put a more powerful bulb in the lamp since it was last on, for the higher wattage revealed the room in every aspect of its squalor, the dus(t on the wooden floor that showed as a clotting of grey fluff round the skirting board, the spiders' webs and dark gritty deposits on the cornices, the chair whose wicker was coming unravelled, the dark old stains and spills on rug and cushions. He thought, I must take her out of this, we can't live like this. Now that the light was on, a blowfly, awakened, zoomed round the sticky neck of one of the wine bottles. Senta said, 'I'm wide awake now. I want to tell you something. Do you remember I said I'd a secret to tell you and I'd tell you it later? It's about women stealing men. He got back into bed beside her, wanting only sleep, aware that he had only five hours before he must get up, before he must get out of this bed and wash somehow, dress and go to work. It was ridiculous now to remember that he had forgotten to bring clean underpants and a clean shirt with him, such unimportant trivial things, doubly ridiculous in the light of what she said to him: 'You know you're not the first with me, don't you, Philip? I wish I'd saved myself for you but I didn't and nothing can change the past. Even God can't change history - did you know that? Even God can't. I was in love with someone else once - well, I thought I was. I know I wasn't really now I know what love really is. 'This man - well, he was a boy, he was just a boy, there was this girl set herself out to steal him away and she did for a bit. Perhaps he would have come back in the end, I wouldn't have wanted him then, not after her. Do you know what I did, Philip? I killed her. She was my first murder. I used the first Murano glass knife on her.' He thought, is she mad? Or is she just mocking me? What went on in her mind that she had to invent these tales? What did she gain by it? He said, 'Put the light out now, Senta. I have to get some sleep.' Christine began to giggle. She looked so pretty when she laughed that Philip couldn't help remembering Arnham and understood why he had been attracted to her. He finished his coffee, said goodbye and left the house. Recalling Arnham had plunged him back once more into the pit of anxiety and doubt. He hardly noticed the sunshine, the scent from a hundred little gardens in bloom, the relief from sulphur stench. He sat in the car, moving off, automatically going through the motions. Head office today for his first call which meant joining the sluggish queue of cars crawling down the hills to London. How could you say people you knew didn't kill other people? Mtirderers were just ordinary, weren't they, till they murdered? They weren't all gangsters or mad. Or if they were their madness or indifference to society's rules was concealed under an exterior of normality. In company they were just like anyone else. How many times had he read in books and newspapers of a murderer's wife or girl friend who said she'd had no idea what he was like, had never dreamed that he did those things while he was away from her? But Senta was so small, so sweet, so childish. Sometimes, when she wasn't lecturing him on power and magic, she talked like a child of seven or eight. Her hand nestled in his like a little girl's. He imagined her going up to a man, whimpering with pain and fear, lifting her face to his, asking him to see what was hurting her eye. It was a sight he saw when he closed his eyes. Opening a newspaper, that vision superimposed itself over the photographs and the print. He remembered her coming into that room in her cap and red tunic and now he thought he could also remember stains on that tunic. Surely there had been a bloodstain high up on the shoulder. The man bent his kindly head, peered into her eye. Perhaps he asked Senta's permission to touch her face, to pull down the lower eyelid. As he came closer, looking for the speck of grit, she drew the dagger of glass from her tunic pocket and thrust it with all her childish force into his heart Had he cried out? Or had he only groaned and crumpled up, sagged at the knees, given her a last look of terrible bewilderment, of agonised enquiry, before he collapsed on to the grass? The blood had spurted on to her, splashing her shoulder. And then the little dog, the small black Scottie dog, had come running up, barking until its barks changed to whimpers. Stop it, stop, Philip said to himself as he said unavailingly each time his imagination turned in this direction. Harold Myerson was his name, Harold Myerson. He was fifty-eight. He happened to live in Chigwell but that was coincidence. Thousands of people lived in Chigwell. Philip thought how it would be possible to go to the police and actually ask about Harold Myerson. Where he lived, for instance, his full address. Newspapers never gave that. It would look very strange going to the police, making an enquiry like that. They would want to know why he asked. They would take his name and they would remember him. And that might in the end lead them to Senta. You do believe she killed him, his inner voice said. You do. You're just unable to face the fact. There is no rule that murderers have to be big and strong and tough. Murderers can be small and delicate, children have done murder. As in certain tactics of martial arts, the perpetrator's own weakness is made use of to take advantage of the victim's strength. Tenderness and pity deflect that victim from his guard when an appeal is made, a wounded place proffered, help asked. There was something else that hadn't occurred to him till now. He got it out and confronted it, the traffic paused and the light red. Suppose Gerard Arnham hadn't been called that at all? Suppose his real name had been Harold Myerson but he had given Christine a false name the better to get away from her when he needed to? Unscrupulous people did that, and Arnham had been unscrupulous, telling Christine lies about the length of time he would be in America and then, on his return, abandoning her. The more Philip considered this the more he believed it. After all, he had never put it to the test. He had never seen Arnham's name in any phone directory, had never heard anyone but Christine call him by it. Philip began to feel sick. He had an urge to jump out of the car, leaving it where it stood half-way down the Edgware Road, and run away. Run where? There was nowhere to go he wouldn't have to come back from. There was nowhere he could hide and dissociate himself from Senta. Arnham might be fifty-eight. Some people looked young for their age and the fact that Arnham had told Christine he was fifty-one meant nothing. It was known that he had lied to her. He had lied when he said he would be in touch with her when he returned from America. A man of five feet eight would seem tall to tiny Senta. He Philip, at six feet and more, towered over her. And the dog? He had been through that one before. It was Mrs Arnham's dog. Mrs Myerson's dog. It was Ebony, the property of Thiefie. Roy was in another of his good moods. This seemed largely brought about by the fact that Olivia Brett had twice phoned and asked for Philip. 'Not by name, mark you,' said Roy. '"The terribly sweet dishy boy with the fair curly hair" was what she said. Oh, chase me, Charlie, I should be so lucky.' 'What did she want?' 'Are you asking me? At your age you ought to know. I expect she'll show you if you pop up to Highgate when the sun's over the yard arm. Philip said patiently, 'What did she say she wanted?' 'In words of a few simple syllables, can she have you to keep an eye on things when the fitters start. Not me or some bloke less easy on the eye is what the little darling means. It was rare for Philip to involve himself in the crush which filled the pubs and cafes of this part of inner London at lunchtime. He usually stopped somewhere in a suburb on his way to a client call. But today, as a result of having had no breakfast, he was very hungry. Before starting on the long drive to Croydon he needed something solid inside him, a couple of hamburgers or a plate of sausages and chips. Two towel rails in cardboard crates, replacements for a damaged pair, were needed in Croydon. He might as well take them with him in the boot of the car. This was an area of office blocks. Passages and alleys led between them into car parks and warehouses. Only one old street remained, much as it had always been, a relic of a Georgian terrace with three little shops tacked on to the end of it. The shops themselves were not old-fashioned but modern tourist traps aimed at those who might conceivably pass along here on their way to Baker Street station. Returning from the car park, making for a cafe where he thought the worst of the rush would now be over, Philip came out of one of the passages under an arch into the old street which seemed to go from nowhere to nowhere. He had often been this way before but had never previously even glanced at the shops. It would have been impossible for him to say what wares were displayed in their windows. But now the gleam of red and blue glass attracted his attention and he paused to look at the glasses and jugs and vases ranged on the shelves. Most of it was Venetian glass. In the very front were pairs of glass earrings and strings of glass beads, behind these glass animals, galloping horses and dancing dogs and long-necked cats. But what made him stare almost incredulously - what had perhaps, unknown to his conscious mind, originally caught his eye? - was a glass dagger. It was displayed on the left-hand side of the window and was contained, for safety's sake or out of prudence or possibly because the law required it, in a case not of glass but of some kind of glass-like plastic. The glass of which it was made was translucent, lightly frosted. Its blade was some ten inches long, the cross-piece of the handle three inches wide. Philip stared at it, incredulously at first, then with a kind of sick recognition. How could it be that he had never even heard of the existence of daggers made of glass until five days before but in the time since he had heard persistent talk of the things and now actually seen one in the shop window? It was like the word you read in the paper that you've never heard before, he thought, and that same day someone speaks it to you and you read it in a book. These things couldn't be rationally accounted for. It couldn't be merely that you actually had seen the word many times before (known about glass daggers subconsciously for ~ years) and that it was only some emotive force which now brought it sharply to your attention. Something ~ occult must be at work, some force as yet beyond human knowledge. Senta would account for it like that and who ~' could say she was wrong? Worse for him than the coincidence was the discovery that glass daggers actually existed. Senta hadn't lied. She hadn't lied about her mother being Icelandic and dying when she was born, or about going to drama school. Had he ever caught her out in a real lie? That was a thought too appalling to linger over - that her lies might exist only in his imagination. He went into the shop. A girl came up to him and with a slight foreign accent, Italian perhaps, asked if she could help him. 'The glass dagger in the window,' he said, 'where does it come from?' 'Murano. It's Venetian glass. All our glass is Venetian made on Murano.' That was the name Senta had told him. He had been trying to remember it. 'Isn't it rather dangerous?' He hadn't meant to sound accusing but she was at once on the defensive. 'You couldn't hurt yourself with it. It is quite - what do you call it? - blunt. The glass is smooth - here, let me show you.' She had dozens of the things in a drawer, all in Perspex cases. It was an effort for him to bring himself to touch it. He felt sweat break out on his upper lip. His finger just touched the edge of the blade. It was quite smooth. The tip ended in a small blob or bubble of glass. 'What's the point,' he said, almost as if she wasn't there, as if he were talking to himself, 'of a knife that won't cut?' Her shoulders lifted. She said nothing, just looked at him in a way which was growing suspicious. He didn't ask the price but handed the box and knife back to her and left the shop. The answer to his question was simple enough - the glass would be ground, a not much harder task then sharpening metal. By now he thought he was beginning to understand Senta's way of mixing truth and fantasy. She might have bought the daggers but not in Venice. She could have bought them here in London. He turned almost blindly out of the old street. No buses ran along here and there were no shops, only the rears of more office blocks. In front of an almost windowless concrete wall, four storeys high, was the area of car parking with a notice at the gate announcing that it was strictly reserved for the use of employees of the company who occupied the block. A car had just turned in. Because it was a black Jaguar it caught Philip's attention, having the effect of just distracting him from these painful and terrifying ideas. Half-bemused, he watched the car move into the one vacant space and park there. The door opened and the driver got out. It was Gerard Arnham.

14

In the past his feelings had alternated between never wanting to see Arnham again, then wanting to see him in order to have the whole thing out, and had finally faded into indifference. Bui he had for a long time been conscious of the fact that he might bump into Arnham on any occasion he went to head office. That, as much as the crowds, had made him avoid having lunch in any of the local eating places. Now he couldn't imagine anyone he would rather have seen. It was nearly as wonderful as being reunited with someone you loved after a separation. Philip could hardly restrain himself from shouting out an excited greeting to Arnham as the man came walking from the car park. Arnham, seeing Philip some few seconds after Philip had seen him, hesitated on the opposite pavement. It was as if he were abashed. But he must almost immediately have sensed Philip's delight, for a smile, slowly dawning on his face, spread and widened as he raised one hand in a salute and, having allowed a couple of cars to pass, hastened across the street. Philip advanced towards him with outstretched hand. 'H ow are you? It's good to see you. Afterwards, when some of the euphoria had passed, he thought how astonished Arnham must have been by this fulsome greeting. After all, he had only met Philip once before, hadn't treated him and his sisters very warmly, and had unmercifully thrown Philip's mother over. Perhaps the truth was he just felt relieved at Philip's ability to let bygones be bygones or else thought him insensitive. Whatever his feelings he didn't show them but shook hands heartily and asked Philip how life was treating him. 'I'd no idea you worked round here.' 'I didn't when we last met,' Philip said. 'I was still doing my training then.' 'It's a wonder we haven't come across each other before.' Philip explained that his visits to head office were not very frequent but said nothing about his own knowledge of precisely where Arnham worked. Rather tentatively Arnham said, 'How's your mother?' 'She's well. Fine.' Why shouldn't he pile it on a bit? Delighted as he might be to see Arnham he needn't lose sight of the fact that this was the man who had jilted Christine, had slept with her - Philip could face this quite equably now - and deserted her. 'She's got quite a profitable business going, as a matter of fact,' he said and proceeded to glib invention, 'and a man who's very keen on her.' Was he imagining it or did Arnham really look a bit upset? 'My sister Fee got married.' As he spoke the words he seemed to see Senta in her bridesmaid's dress, her silver hair spread across the coral satin, and a surge of love for her rose in him and choked the rest of what he meant to say. Arnham didn't seem to notice. 'Have you got time for a quick drink? There's a pub I sometimes go to just round the corner. But for the drive ahead of him Philip might have said yes. Anyway, he didn't specially want to spend any more time with Arnham. The man had served his purpose, had proved his existence, had brought the total glorious peace of mind Philip thought he might never attain again. 'I'm afraid I'm in a bit of a rush.' It was funny how his appetite had entirely gone. Food would have choked him. Alcohol would have made him sick. 'I'm running late as it is.' 'Some other time then.' Arnham seemed disappointed. He hesitated, said almost shyly, 'It would be - would it be all right if I gave your mother a ring sometime? Just for old time's sake?' Philip said, rather coldly now, 'She's still at the same place.' 'Yes, I've got her number. I've moved, of course.' Philip didn't say he already knew that. 'Give her a ring if you want to.' He added, 'She's out a lot but you may catch her.' An urge to run seized him, to dance and shout proclamations of joy to the skies, to the world. He could have grabbed Arnham and danced him down the street, waltzing like Rita and Jacopo waltzed, singing with happiness the tra-la-las of Merry Widows and Vienna Woods. Instead he held out his hand to Arnham and said goodbye. 'Goodbye, Philip, it was good seeing you again.' Keeping himself from running, marching like a soldier with a banner, like a trumpeter, he had a feeling the man still stood there on the pavement behind him, following with a long disappointed gaze the jaunty departing figure. But when at the corner he looked back to wave, Arnham was gone. Philip got into his car and immediately drove to the garage Roseberry Lawn used to ask them about replacing the radio in his car. To make things perfect Joley should have been there in Tarsus Street, seated on his barrow, munching his dustbin retrievings. Philip was sure he would be and even had a five-pound note ready to give him. But when he turned the corner out of Caesarea Grove he saw at once in the clear evening light, as bright as noon, that Joley hadn't returned. In spite of his need to see Senta, a longing which all afternoon he had believed couldn't be postponed for a second longer than was necessary, he parked the car and walked back to look for Joley in the environs of the church. The gates were unlocked and the church door itself stood half open. Philip walked round the back over bleached grass that was permanently deprived of light, between mossy half-buried gravestones, in the deep shade of an ilex and a pair of great ragged cypresses. The smell here was of mould, like stale damp mushrooms. It would have been easy, if you were fanciful, to imagine this was the smell of the dead. He could hear from the interior of the church an organ mournfully playing a hymn tune. There was no sign of Joley anywhere nor even of those remnants he sometimes left behind him as evidence of his sojourn in some sheltered corner, screwed-up bits of paper and a bone or two. Philip came back and went into the church. It was empty but for the organist who was invisible. The windows were of stained glass, darker and heavier glass than that in the Venetian shop, and the only light was from an electric bulb in a kind of censer that hung in the apse. The summer evening was warm but the cold in here was bitter. It was a disproportionate relief to come out once more into the mild hazy sunshine. As he approached the house he saw Rita come down the steps from the front door. She was dressed very showily in a short dress of flowered silk. Her stockings were white lace and her shoes scarlet with high heels. Jacopo followed, slamming the front door behind him. He took her arm and they walked off in the opposite direction. Tonight, in the small hours, Philip thought, they would dance above his head, waltzing to La Vie en Rose and tangoing to Jealousy. He didn't care. He wouldn't have cared if two hundred people had come to a ball up there. He let himself into the house and ran down the basement stairs. As she had done once or twice before, as she had done in the way that delighted him beyond expression, she opened the door to him before his key turned in the lock. She was dressed in something new -or new to him. It was a long dress, nearly ankle-length, of silky semi-transparent pleated stuff, sea-green with silvery-green beads sewn into it. The thin slippery material clung to the voluptuous curves of her breasts, seeming to drip from them like slowly cascading water and trickle over her hips to stroke her thighs in a wave s caress. Her bright silver hair was like needles, like the blades of knives. She put her mouth up to his, her little hands on his neck. Her tongue darted into his mouth, a little warm fish, withdrew itself with delicate slowness. He gasped with pleasure, with happiness. How did she know there was nothing to say? Words were for later. But how did she know of the earthquake which had taken place, of his enormous change of feeling and of heart? She was naked under the green dress. She drew it over her head, pulled him gently on to the bed with her. The shutters were half-closed, the light that came in a distant dazzlement. In a saucer a joss stick of cinnamon and cardamom smouldered. Why had he ever thought he hated this room, found squalor in this house? He loved it, it was his home. 'Then you'll come and live here with me,' she said. 'I've been thinking about that, Senta. You once told me you used to live in the top flat.' She sat on the bed, her arms clasped round her knees. Her face had become very thoughtful. It was as if she was calculating. If it had been anyone else, any other girl, Jenny say, he would have thought she was considering rates and service bills and furniture, but that wasn't Senta's way. 'I know it's a mess,' he said, 'but we could clean it up and paint it. We could get some furniture.' 'Isn't it good enough down here here for you, Philip?' 'Basically, it's too small. Doesn't it seem a bit silly for two of us to try and live here when that top flat's going begging? Or is it that you think Rita wouldn't like it?' She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. 'Rita wouldn't mind.' She seemed to hesitate. 'The thing is I like it down here.' Childishly diffident, her face took on its shy look. She said softly, 'I'm going to tell you something.' Momentarily he felt a tautening, the bracing of nerves that was preparatory now to hearing her tell some new lie or make some grotesque confidence. She moved close up to him, held on to his arm with both her hands, snuggled her face into his shoulder. 'I do have a little bit of an agoraphobia problem, Philip. Do you know what that is?' 'Of course I do.' It rather irritated him, the way she had sometimes of treating him as if he were ignorant. 'Don't be cross. You must never be cross with me. It's why I don't go out very much, you know, and why I like living below ground. Psychiatrists say it goes with schizophrenia. Did you know that?' He tried a light approach. 'I hope we're going to live together all our lives, Senta, and I can tell you I don't intend to spend fifty years in a burrow. I'm not a rabbit.' It wasn't very funny but it made her laugh. She said, 'I'll think about the flat. I'll ask Rita. How will that do?' It did wonderfully. Everything was at once made smooth. He marvelled, but in a calm and simply interested way, that things could have been tragic and terrible yesterday and today, only because he had seen and spoken to a man who was the merest acquaintance, restored to perfection. He took her in his arms and kissed her. 'I want everyone to know about us now.' 'Of course you can tell them, Philip. It's time to tell.' As soon as he got Christine alone he told her about Senta. She said, 'That's nice, dear.' What response had he expected? While Christine pottered about the kitchen, getting their evening meal, he thought about that. The truth was that Senta was so beautiful in his eyes, so wonderful, so utterly different from any other girl he had ever known, that he expected awe first, then amazed congratulations. Christine had received his announcement in a rather preoccupied way or as if he had said he had been going about with some ordinary girl. He would have got more enthusiasm, he thought, if he had said he'd taken up with Jenny again. Doubtful if she had really taken it in, he said, 'You do know who I mean, don't you? Senta who was one of Fee's bridesmaids?' 'Yes, Philip, Tom's girl. I said it was nice. So long as you re fond of each other I think it's very nice.' 'Tom?' he said, surprised she could place Senta in this way as if her parentage were the most remarkable thing about her. 'Tom Pelham, Irene's other brother, the one with an ex-wife that dances and lives with a young boy.' What did she mean, 'other' brother? He didn't ask. 'That's right. Senta's got a flat in their house.' 'Flat' was a bit over the top, he thought, but in a month or two it might be true. Should he also tell Christine about meeting Arnham? No, it would only upset her. Somewhere, treasured among other mementoes, he had no doubt she still kept that postcard with the White House on it. Arnham would never phone, anyway, Arnham would have been put off by what he had told him of another man in Christine s life. Now his euphoria was past Philip wondered if he had spoiled his mother's chances by inventing that other man. Still, Arnham was married himself or at least living with a woman. It was all too late. They sat down to one of Christine's specialities, rounds of toast topped with scrambled egg into which flakes of tuna and a spoonful of curry powder had been stirred. Philip didn't want to have to think about the future, about how she was going to manage on her own and with no one but the ghostly flitting presence of Cheryl. But sooner or later he would have to think about it. 'I'm popping over to Audrey's for a couple of hours,' Christine said, reappearing in a floral cotton dress Philip couldn't remember having seen before but which she had probably resurrected from some summer wardrobe of the past. 'It's such a nice evening.' She beamed at him. She looked happy. It was her innocence and her ignorance that made that sunny temperament, he thought. He would have to support her financially, emotionally, companionably, for the rest of her life. The world out there was no place for her, even its manifestation in the shape of a job in a hairdresser's salon would overwhelm her. It was as if his father had sheltered her under his great sweeping protective wings. A fledgling that never grew up, she peeped about her in amazement. He wondered sometimes how, on her own, she managed such ordinary things as paying her bus fare. Cheryl, coming in, must have passed her on the doorstep. Philip would have been surprised if she had come into the living room. She didn't come in. He heard her feet dragging their way up the stairs. It was more( than a week since he had spoken a word to her. Her reaction to any news he might give about himself and his future would be met, he knew, with blank indifference. Her footsteps sounded above his head. She was in Christine's bedroom, walking about. He heard the creak the wardrobe door made when it was opened. No longer worrying about Cheryl's welfare, he found himself seeing her only as an added burden. As a minder for his mother she would be worse than useless. The bedroom door slammed and, standing just inside the living room, with the door open a crack, he listened to her descent of the stairs. She was indifferent, he realised, to whether he heard her or not, to whether he knew or not. Only a fool would fail to understand that she had been in Christine's bedroom to take whatever money was concealed there, to rob the handbag in whose zip pocket Christine kept her hairdresser's tips or open the china teddy bear with detachable head that usually contained ten and twenty pee pieces. The front door closed. He waited a few moments for her to have disappeared and then he drove to Senta's. 'I don't believe it,' Fee said. 'You're kidding.' It was such a shock that she had to light a cigarette from the stub of the last one. 'He's pulling our legs, Fee,' said Darren. Philip was very taken aback. He had expected his announcement to be greeted with rapturous pleasure. Senta was Darren's cousin and had been Fee's bridesmaid. You would have thought they would be overjoyed to welcome a member of Darren's extended family into their immediate circle. 'You were always teasing me about Senta,' he said. 'You must have realised how I felt about her.' Darren started laughing. He was sitting, as usual, in an armchair in front of the television. Fee snapped at him. 'What's so funny?' 'I'll tell you later.' It was rude and it was also disconcerting. Fee made things no better. 'Do you mean that all the time we were sort of making cracks about you fancying Senta and asking you if you wanted her phone number and all that, all the time you were actually meeting her and going about with her?' 'She didn't want people to know, not then.' 'Well, I must say I do think it's very underhand, Phil. I'm sorry but I do. It makes you feel such a fool when people deceive you like that.' 'I'm sorry, I didn't know you'd take it this way.' 'No good making a fuss now, I suppose. It's too late for that. And now you say she's supposed to be coming here to see us?' He began to regret he had ever arranged it. 'We thought it would be best for me to tell you first and for her to come over after about half an hour. Fee, she is supposed to be a friend of yours, she is Darren 's cousin.~ Darren, who had stopped laughing, put one hand up and snapped his thick fingers. 'Can we have a bit of hush while the snooker's on?' Philip and Fee squeezed themselves into the kitchen which was the size of a moderately spacious cupboard. 'Are you engaged or something?' 'Not exactly but we will be.' He thought, I will propose to her. I will make her a formal proposal, I might even go down on my knees. 'When we are,' he said rather grandly, 'We'll put an announcement in the paper. In The Times.' 'No one ever does that sort of snobby stuff in our family. It's just showing off. Will she want things to eat? Will she want a drink? There isn't any drink in the place.' 'I brought a bottle of champagne.' Fee, who necessarily stood very close to him, gave him a look of half-exasperation, half mischievous conspiracy. 'You're so daft, going on like that. Why didn't you tell us sooner?' 'The champagne's in the car, I'll go and get it.' Having a rare few minutes alone with Fee should have allowed him to confide in her about Cheryl. The moment seemed particularly inappropriate. He imagined her saying in her sharp way that she supposed he was just shifting his problems on to her now he was leaving and getting married. Instead she put her arms round him and gave him a brief hug, laying her cheek against his, whispering, 'Well I'll have to congratulate you, won't I?' Taking the champagne out of the car, he looked up and saw Senta. She too held cradled in her arms a bottle of wine. It was the first time he had ever met her in the open street. There was a special breathless pleasure in going up to her and kissing her in public. Not that anyone was watching but they were there on view, on the pavement embracing, the two hard cold glass bottles pressed between their bodies and keeping them apart like chastity devices. She was in black. It made her skin look shell-white and gave her hair a glassier steelier brightness. She had painted her nails the same colour and put silver on her eyelids. She walked lightly on her stilt heels up the stairs ahead of him. In spite of their height she was still a head's length shorter than he and when she was on the step in front he could look down on to the crown of her head. The red roots of her hair glowed with a curious pinkish luminosity under the silver strands and he was touched with feelings of an intense tenderness for her quirky ways and her harmless vanity. He was aware too of something else: her nervousness when off her own home ground. He noticed it because of what she had told him about her agoraphobia. It was worse in the street, fading to something that seemed like shyness when she was inside the flat and in the presence of Darren and Fee. They both seemed embarrassed but Fee came out with it bluntly. 'I'm not saying it wasn't a surprise but we'll get used to it.' Darren, the snooker concluded and a re-run of some golf tournament showing with the sound turned off, took this as an occasion for catching up on family news. 'What's Auntie Rita up to now then?' In near-silence which was demure and diffident, Senta drank her champagne. She said a soft thank you when Fee proposed a toast to Senta and Philip - 'not engaged yet but soon will be.' This was her first time in the flat but when Fee asked if she would like to see over it - a necessarily brief exercise since there were only the small bedroom and tiny shower room left to see - she shook her head and said thanks, but she wouldn't, not this time. Darren, who worried at his joke like a dog with an old bone, said he hadn't had a bath since he came back from his honeymoon and would she like a shower? In the car going back to Tarsus Street he felt as if he were hursting, choking, with his proposal. But he didn't want her to remember, in the years ahead, perhaps twenty years ahead when they celebrated some wedding anniversary, that he had proposed to her in a car in a north London suburb. 'Where are we going?' she said. 'This isn't the way? Are you kidnapping me, Philip?' 'For the rest of your life,' he said. He drove up on to Hampstead Heath. It wasn't very far. There was a large round moon shining, the colour of her hair. Off the Spaniards Road where the path runs down into the back of the Vale of Health, he led her to the edge of the woodland. It amused him because she so plainly thought he had brought her there to make love in the open air on this mild dry summer night. Docilely, her little hand soft in his, she allowed him to lead her. The moonlight turned the grass white and the bare earth of the paths to chalk, while under the trees the shadows were black. There must have been other people about, it was impossible that they were alone there, but it was as quiet as in the country and as still as indoors. When it came to it kneeling was an impossibility. She would have thought him mad. He held both her hands and drew them up to clasp closely in between their bodies. He looked into her greenish eyes which she had lifted to his and opened very wide. In each of them he could see a moon reflected. Formally, in the manner in which his great-grandfather might have spoken, in a way in which he knew he must have read of in the pages of a book, he said to her, 'Senta, I want to marry you. Will you be my wife?' She smiled faintly. He knew she was thinking that this wasn't quite what she had expected. Her voice when she replied was soft and clear. 'Yes, Philip, I'll marry you. I want to marry you very much.' She put up her lips. He bent and kissed her full on the lips but very chastely. Her skin felt like marble. But she was a marble girl that some god was in the process of changing from a statue to a live woman. Philip could feel the warmth surging through the stone flesh. She said with gravity, drawing a little away, her eyes fixed on his, 'We were destined for each other from the beginning of time.' Then her mouth was more ardently on his, her tongue stroking the inside of his lips. 'Not here,' he said. 'Senta, let's go home.' It wasn't until the middle of the night, the deep dark early hours that he realised why, in the midst of that romantic scene which he had set up, at the moment when he asked her to marry him, unease had seemed to step between them, to mar everything. He understood now. It was because the scene, and even more the setting, seemed to mirror what she had described to him as happening between her and Gerard Arnham in another grassy place and under other trees. Just as he looked into her eyes, bent down and spoke gently to her, she had clutched the glass dagger and thrust it into his heart. The yellow light from street lamps was shed in windowpane shapes across the brown bedcover. Above his head he could hear the Skaters' Waltz and the dancing feet of Rita and Jacopo circling the floor. He thought he must be neurotic, dwelling like this on the foolish past. Hadn't he seen Arnham and spoken to him? Didn't he know beyond a doubt the man was alive and well? Up on the Heath, though he had felt her happiness and known she was glad to be there with him, he had sensed too her unease in the outdoors, the spacious night. How could he seriously have considered it possible for someone like her to perform a violent act while out in the open? The outdoors was her dangerous place. Senta's silver head lay on the pillow beside him. She was deeply asleep. The music and the dancing never disturbed her, safe down here under the ground. Philip heard the feet approach the window and as the waltz ended a thin little shriek of laughter as if Jacopo had taken Rita in his arms and whirled her round and round.

15

He brought Senta home to see Christine. She held out her left hand almost timidly, like a little dog lifting its paw, to display her engagement ring, a Victorian antique of silver with two moonstones. He had given it to her the day before when the announcement of their engagement appeared. In company Senta was very quiet, answering in monosyllables or sitting in a silence she broke only to say please and thank you. He tried to remember back to Fee's wedding, the only time he had seen her in a group of others. She had been talkative then, a different girl, going up to people and introducing herself. He could recall, just before he left to go home, how she had been talking and laughing with two or three men, all friends of Darren's. But he didn't mind this silent manner of hers, knowing as he did that her talk and her sweetness and all her animation were reserved for him when they got back to her room. They stayed in Glenallan Close for about an hour. It was Sunday and Cheryl was also at home. Philip had glanced at the newspaper's colour supplement and seen an article in it on Murano glass daggers. There was a huge photograph of a dagger very like the ones he had seen in the shop and another picture of people at the Venice Carnival in the snow. He closed the magazine as quickly as he might have done if it was hard pornography which was displayed and which the women might have seen. Christine kissed Senta when they left. Philip hardly knew why it was that he was afraid Senta would draw back. She didn't. She pleased him tremendously by presenting her cheek to Christine, her head tilted a little to one side, a small sweet smile on her lips. His suggestion that they should visit her father met with a stubborn refusal. She took the line that Tom Pelham was lucky to get his name in the paper in a respectable way without having to pay a penny for it. Rita had brought her up, not he. Often she hadn't seen him for months on end. It was Rita who gave her a home rent-free. Not that she wanted to impart the news to her stepmother either. Let her find out for herself. Rita had changed since she took up with Jacopo. At the first wine shop which was open that they came to Senta wanted to get out of the car and go in and buy supplies. She had had enough of being out, she said. Philip had wanted to take her for a meal and then to meet Geoff and his girl friend in Jack Straw's Castle. He had it all planned, a further protracted celebration of their engagement with a meal in Hampstead, then the pub where he thought it likely some old college friends of his would be on a Sunday night. 'You're trying to cure me of my phobia by overexposure,' she said to him, smiling. 'Haven't I been good? Haven't I really tried for you?' He had to give in, only stipulating that they got hold of some proper food to take back with them. It worried him sometimes, the way she seemed to live on air and wine with the occasional chocolate. She waited in silence, standing with clasped hands, while he foraged in a Finchley Road supermarket, buying biscuits and bread and cheese and fruit. He had noticed how, out in the open, she mostly looked down at the ground or kept a kind of discreet custody of the eyes. They approached Tarsus Street from the Kilburn end. There were rather a lot of people about, sitting on walls, lounging, standing, gossiping, leaning out of windows to talk to people leaning on windowsills, as there are on fine summer evenings in London streets such as this one. A strong odour of diesel, melted tar and cooking spices filled the air. Philip looked for Joley the way he always did and for a brief moment thought he had spotted him on the corner where the street met Caesarea Grove. But it was a different man, younger, thinner, who wandered aimlessly along the pavement with his possessions contained in carpet bags. She asked him as they got out of the car with their load of food and heavier load of wine bottles, who he was looking for. 'Joley,' he said. 'The old man with the barrow. The tramp, I suppose you'd call him.' She gave him a strange sidelong glance. Her eyelashes were very long and thick and they seemed to sweep the fine white skin under her eyes. The hand with the moonstone ring was lifted to hold back a long lock of silver hair which had fallen to cover her cheek. 'You can't mean the old man who used to sit on our steps? The one who was sometimes in the churchyard round the corner?' 'Why can't I? That's the one I do mean. They were in the house now, going down the basement stairs. She unlocked the door. That room only had to be shut up for a few hours for it to become intolerably close and stuffy. Senta took one of the bottles of wine out of the bag he had put down on the bed and reached for the corkscrew. 'But that was John Crucifer,' she said. For a moment the name meant nothing to him. 'Who?' She laughed. It was a light, rather musical laugh. 'You ought to know, Philip. You killed him.' The room seemed to shift a little. The floor rose up the way it does when you feel faint. Philip put two fingers, which were surprisingly cold, up to touch his forehead. He sat down on the edge of the bed. 'Do you mean that the old man who said he was called Joley and used to have his beat down here was really the man who was murdered in Kensal Green?' 'That's right,' she said. 'I thought you knew.' She poured a large measure of wine into a glass which hadn't been washed since the last Riesling had been drunk from it. 'You must have known it was Crucifer.' 'The man who was murdered...' He was speaking slowly, abstractedly,.... his name was John.' She was impatient in a smiling way. 'John, Johnny, Joley - so what? It was a sort of nickname.' A bead of wine trembled on her lower lip like a diamond drop. 'I mean, didn't you pick on him because it was Crucifer?' His own voice sounded feeble to him, as if he had suddenly become ill. 'Why would I?' 'Have some wine.' She passed him the bottle and another dirty glass. He took it mechanically and sat there holding glass in one hand and bottle in the other, staring at her. 'I thought you picked him because he was my enemy. A terrible thing happened. Her face was the same, white and soft, the pale lips slightly parted, but he saw madness staring out of her eyes. He couldn't have said how he knew,. for he had never seen or known a person even slightly mentally disturbed, b14 this was madness, stark and real and awful. It was as if a demon sat inside there and looked out of her eyes. And at the same time it was Flora's look he saw, remote, pre-dating civilisation, heedless of morality. He had to exercise all the control he could muster. He had to be calm, even maintain a light touch. 'What do you mean, Senta, your enemy?' 'He asked for money. I hadn't any money to give him. He started shouting out after me, making remarks about my clothes and my - my hair. I don't want to say what they were, but they were very insulting.' 'Why did you think I knew?' She said softly, moving nearer to him, 'Because you know my thoughts, Philip, because we are so close now we can read each other's minds, can't we?' He looked away, turned his eyes back reluctantly to look at her. The madness was gone. He had imagined it. That was what it must have been, his imagination. He refilled her glass and filled his own. She started telling him about some audition she was going to in the coming week for a part in a television serial. More fantasy, but of a harmless kind, if any of it was harmless, if it could be. They sat side by side on the bed in the airless room that was full of dusty orange sunlight. For once, he didn't feel like opening the window. A superstitious fear had come to him that not a single word they spoke must be overheard. 'Senta, listen to me. We mustn't ever talk about killing again, not even as a joke or a fantasy. I mean killing isn't a joke, it never can be.' 'I didn't say it was a joke. I never said that.' 'No, but you made up stories about it and pretended about it. I'm just as bad. I did it too. You pretended to have killed someone and I pretended to have killed someone and it doesn't matter now because we didn't really do it or even believe the other one had. But it's bad for us to keep on talking about it as if it was real. Can't you see that? It's sort of bad for our characters.' Just for an instant he saw the demon in there behind her eyes. The demon came and chuckled and vanished. She was silent. He prepared himself for an enraged onslaught such as had been made on him last time he questioned her word. But she was still and silent. She threw back her head and drank the wine down in one swallow, then held out the empty glass to him. 'I'll never mention it again,' she said slowly, and, 'I understand how it is with you, Philip. You're very conventional still. You were glad when you found out it was my mother I lived here with, weren't you? It made things seem respectable. You were pleased when I got a real job that paid. How could you be otherwise with that family? You were brought up to be very straight and rigid and you aren't going to change in a couple of months. But listen to me now. What we had to do for each other to prove our love was a terrible thing, I realise that, I realise it was terrible, and I do understand it makes it easier for you if we just bury it in the past. As long as you also know we can't change the past. We just don't have to talk about it.' He said almost roughly, 'If you're going to drink so much wine we ought to eat something. Come on, let's eat.' 'Are you telling me I drink too much, Philip?' The early warning signs were becoming familiar to him. He was beginning to know them and how to handle them. 'No, of course I'm not. But I think you don't eat enough. I'm trying to look after you, Senta.' 'Yes, look after me, Philip, take care of me.' She turned and clutched at him, holding on to his shouders, her eyes suddenly wild and frightened. 'We don't want to eat yet. Please don't let's. I want you to love me.' 'I do love you,' he said, and he put his glass down and took the glass out of her hand and pulled her down with him in his arms on to the brown quilt. It was another small hours return home for him that night. He had meant to discuss their future with her. Were they going to live together in the upstairs flat? Had she thought about that as she had promised? Were they going to set a wedding date for sometime next year? Could she come up with any ideas as to how the problem of Christine and, come to that Cheryl, could be dealt with? They had scarcely talked at all but made love all the evening. At one point he had got up and eaten something and washed himself under the tap. Coming back to open the window and let some fresh air into the dusty staleness, he had found her sitting up starting on the second bottle of wine, and she had welcomed him back into bed with outstretched yearning arms. He slept soundly. He slept like the dead, exhausted and at peace. His future with Senta looked glorious to him, a series of days of dreaming of her and of nights of love. Their love-making got even better as time went on and she loved it as much as he did. It was hard to imagine that it could get better than it was now but that was something he had said three weeks ago and it had got better. When the alarm went off and he woke up he reached for her, but he was in his own bed and she wasn't there and he felt bereft. On the way to work, a reluctant visit to Olivia Brett, Philip castigated himself for imagining he had seen signs of some kind of neurosis in Senta. It was the shock of course. It was caused by the shock of finding out that John Crucifer was Joley. Poor Senta had told him a simple fact which he might have gathered for himself by this time and he had been so upset by it that he had off-loaded his hysterical feelings on to her. Didn't the psychologists call that projection? It was hardly surprising anyway that she believed he had killed Joley. After all, he had told her he had. He had actually told her, fantastic and unreal though this now seemed, that he had killed the old man. Of course she believed him. For a while, remember, he told himself, he had believed her story of killing Arnham. Well, off and on he had believed it. And all this really illustrated what he had said to her about this kind of talk harming them, damaging their characters. It was certainly damaging his character if it made him believe his Senta wasn't quite sane. But Joley... Philip found he hated to think that it was Joley who had been murdered in Kensal Green, and hated it the more because he had told Senta he was responsible for that death. Now he found it hard to understand why he had ever done that. If she really loved him, and there was no doubt she did, she would have come to realise there was no need for fantasies about proofs of love. It would only have been a matter of sticking it out till she came round, maybe bearing the brunt of a few temper tantrums. Philip had a fleeting qualm at even using the expression in connection with Senta, having a very good idea of how she would react, but how else would you describe it? In saying he had murdered Joley he had somehow involved himself in that death. Worse than that, he had in part made himself responsible for it, becoming a kind of accessory after the fact. He had aligned himself with Joley's killer, put himself into the same category. With these ideas unpleasantly occupying his mind, Philip went up the steps of Olivia Brett's house and was admitted by the actress herself. He couldn't help remembering the complimentary things she was supposed to have said about him and he felt awkward in her company. Stories proliferated in his kind of job about women alone at home who were simply waiting to come across for men like himself, women who invited the surveyor or site manager or fitter into their bedrooms or suddenly appeared in front of them with no clothes on. Nothing like that had ever happened to him but it was early days yet. Olivia Brett wore a dressing gown which was white with a lot of frills on it but not see-through. She smelt like a bowl of tropical fruit that has been left out in the sun. She insisted on walking upstairs behind Philip. He wondered what he would do if he felt her hand caress his neck or a fingertip run down his spine. But she didn't touch him. He didn't want to think about her at all, he wanted her to be an answering machine only or to make her requests in a neutral practical tone. She showed him into the recently gutted bathroom and stood behind him now while he made a draught chart of how he thought the electric wiring should be planned. 'Oh, darling,' she said, 'I don't know if they told you I changed my mind and I'm going to have one of those showers that squirt water out of the walls at you.' 'Yes, I've got a note of it.' 'I showed my friend the picture in your book and do you know what he said? He said it was a jacuzzi standing up to pee.' Philip was a bit shocked. Not by what she said but because she had said it and to him. He didn't say anything, though he knew he ought to have laughed appreciatively. He got out his tape measure and pretended to measure something in the far corner. When he turned round he could see she was looking at him with calculation and he couldn't help contrasting her with Senta, her lined pinched greasy face with Senta's pure velvety skin and the mottled cleavage between the broderie anglaise lapels with Senta's white breasts. It made him smile quite pleasantly at her as he said, 'That seems to be that then. I shan't be troubling you again until the electrician has done his stuff.' 'Have you got a girl friend?' she said. He was astonished. Her tone was harsh and direct. He felt a hot blush redden his face. She took a step nearer. 'What are you afraid of?' It was a stroke of genius. For all the times Philip had thought of things he ought to have said, perfect rejoinders, when it was ten minutes too late to say them, this paid. He didn't know how he thought of it. It came to him on wings of serene appropriateness. 'I'm afraid,' he said, 'I got engaged to be married last week.' With that he passed her, smiling politely, and descended the stairs, not hurrying. She came out on to the landing behind him. He had a momentary qualm. But prostituting oneself for Roseberry Lawn was surely way beyond the call of loyalty. 'Goodbye for now,' he called. 'I'll let myself out, shall I? The interlude made him feel rather jaunty. He had acquitted himself well. It had also served to distract him from the business of John Crucifer alias Joley. The real world, or at least a different one, had intruded. Philip could now see that Joley's death had absolutely nothing to do with him. In fact, his gifts to Joley had probably made the old man's last days brighter. He put the car in the car park when he reached head office. It was ten past one. Just the sort of time when, if he went to find somewhere for lunch, he might bump into Arnham again. Philip told himself that was why he avoided the passage which led into the Street of Georgian houses but he knew it wasn't really. The true reason was that he wanted to avoid passing the Venetian glass shop where he might see in the window the dagger of Murano glass. All his life, probably, the name Murano or even the word dagger would evoke unpleasant memories. That was another good reason why he had to cure Senta of fantasising. There were whole areas of life he now found himself shying away from: the district of Kensal Green, the name Joley and the name John, Scottie dogs, Venice and glass daggers, little grassy glades. Of course time would change it, time would wipe the past clean of all this. He took the other direction and came out intQ a busy thoroughfare where street vendors sold souvenirs to tourists. Philip wouldn't have dreamt of buying anything from one of these stalls, he would have passed them without a glance, but as he came close to one on which tee shirts with the Tower of London printed on them were displayed, and teddy bears in Union Jack aprons and tea towels with pictures of the Prince and Princess of Wales, the press of the crowd slowed his pace. He was forced to stand almost still and for a moment he thought he was going to witness some sort of assault or raid on stall and vendor. A car had pulled into the kerb, on the double yellow line, and two men jumped out. They were young and they looked thuggish, heavy-set with cropped hair and wearing studded leather jackets like Cheryl's. Both of them came up to the stall, one standing at either end. The bigger and older one-said to the vendor, 'Got a licence somewhere about then, have you?' At once Philip knew they were not thieves or thugs but policemen. Never before had he looked at the police with fear. And it wasn't quite fear that he felt now, more a cautious defensiveness. As he watched them standing over the vendor of souvenirs while the man fumbled through the pockets of a coat hanging up on a pole, he thought about Joley and his death. He thought how he had actually said he had killed Joley. Of course he had only said this to Senta, who in this respect didn't count, but he had uttered an admission of murder aloud. It might be that these very police officers, one of whom was now scrutinising the vendor's licence with a deep frown, were part of the team working on the case of Joley's murder. Why had he allowed himself to be drawn into this game of Senta's? Why had he ever played it? Philip had a sandwich and a cup of coffee. While he ate he kept trying to travel those few weeks back in time. He remembered how Senta had withdrawn her love from him and how, to regain it, he had confessed to a murder he hadn't committed, wouldn't even in his wildest nightmares have committed, he who hated these things. It was far worse than what she had done. She had simply invented a killing. He couldn't understand now why he hadn't done a similar thing, why he hadn't appreciated that almost any preposterous tale would have done for her. What had made him think it necessary to claim responsibility for a real murder? He felt soiled by it, he felt that his hands were actually dirtied, and he looked down at them, spread them out in front of him on the yellow formica of the cafe table, as if he might see graveyard earth in their lines and blood under the nails. The way Joley had called him governor came back to him as he went up in the lift to Roy's room. Philip had liked him, had liked the humour Joley still retained in spite of the dreadful life he led. Of course it wasn't so good thinking of him insulting a young girl just because she wouldn't give him money. Philip wondered why Joley had ever gone to Kensal Green. Perhaps there was a soup kitchen up there. Roy was working on his design for the complete remodelling of a flat. It was clear that he was in one of his bad moods. 'What the hell are you doing here?' 'Coming to see you, of course. You said to come in around two.' 'I said to get over to Chigw4l by two and find out just why La Ripple is still dissatisfied with her marble whatsit. No wonder this company's fast going down the plughole when even a little squirt on the bottom rung of the ladder can't get to an appointment on time.' Roy hadn't said anything about going to Mrs Ripple's, Philip was sure of that. But there was no arguing. He wasn't hurt by being called a little squirt. What went sharply home was the bit about the bottom of the ladder. The drive to Chigwell took a long time. It had begun to pour with rain. Heavy rain always slowed up the traffic. The cars and trucks crawled along through Wanstead and by the time he was on the doorstep ringing Mrs Ripple's bell it was five to three. She had a friend with her, a woman she called Pearl. The two of them somehow managed to open the front door together, as if they had simultaneously and ritually put hands to latch. He had the impression they were waiting just inside it, and had been waiting there for some time. 'We'd just about given you up, hadn't we, Pearl?' said Mrs Ripple. 'I suppose we're behind the times. We're naive. We've just got this old-fashioned idea in our heads that when someone says two o'clock he means two o'clock.' 'I'm very sorry, Mrs Ripple. There was a misunderstanding about that, nobody's fault, but I didn't actually know I was supposed to be here until an hour ago.' She said very sourly, 'Now you are here at last you'd better come straight up. You'd better see if you can explain why I have to put up with the shoddy rubbish you've seen fit to instal in my bathroom.' Pearl came up too. She looked enough like Mrs Ripple to be her sister but somehow a more richly furnished, more ornate version. It was as if Mrs Ripple were the standard model and Pearl the de luxe. She had black curly hair like an uncut poodle's and her tight-fitting silk dress was shiny peacock blue. She stopped on the threshold an~l said in a theatrical way, 'How much did you say you had to pay for this job, dear?' Mrs Ripple didn't hesitate. The little scene had probably been rehearsed while they waited for him. 'Six thousand, five hundred and forty-two pounds, ninety-five.' 'Highway robbery,' said Pearl. Mrs Ripple pointed with a quivering finger at the marble top of the vanity unit. She looked like a character in an amateur dramatic production indicating the presence of a ghost offstage. Philip examined the marble, the minute fissure in one of the white veins of the marbling. To his alarm and intense displeasure, Pearl took hold of his wrist and moved his hand so that the tip of his forefinger just touched the fissure. 'But that isn't a fault or damage, Mrs Ripple,' he said, doing his best to disengage his hand without giving offence. 'That's the character of the stone. This is a natural substance~ It isn't as if it's plastic which could be made with a perfectly smooth surface.' 'I should just hope it isn't plastic,' said Mrs Ripple, 'considering what I paid for it.' Philip would have liked to tell her that she had not only chosen the vanity unit from a selection of illustrated brochures but had actually examined samples of the marble they proposed to use. That would only have caused more trouble and in any case have been ineffective. Instead he tried to convince her that any visitor would at once appreciate the quality and taste of her bathroom from the undeniable evidence of that tiny flaw in the marble which would never have occured in a synthetic material. Mrs Ripple wasn't having any of that. She wanted marble, of course she did, she had always known what she wanted and that was marble, but she wanted a piece which had all the veining and the proper look of marble without any flaws. Not daring to promise that they could get it for her, still less instal it free of extra charge, Philip said he had the matter in hand and she would hear from him personally in a day or two. 'Or a week or two,' said Pearl nastily. The rain had stopped. Water lay in pools across the roadway which the sun turned into blazing mirrors. You could see the steam rising. Philip drove down the road and round the corner, heading for where Arnham lived. His wheels made fountains of water splash up, the sun was in his eyes and if he hadn't slowed to pull the visor down, he might have killed the running cat or the little dog which came rushing across the road in pursuit of it. As it was, swerving, braking as hard as he could with his foot slammed on to the floor of the car, skidding on the wet surface, his nearside wing must have struck the dog a glancing blow. It yelped and rolled over. It was a Sealyham, white and fluffy. Philip picked it up. He didn't think it was hurt, for now that he held it, feeling its body for broken bones or painful area, it reacted by a rapturous licking of his face. Arnham's wife or girl friend had come down the steps and was standing at the gate. She looked older than when he had last seen her and thinner, but on previous occasions he had only seen her through glass. Out here in the sunshine she looked thin and ugly and middle-aged. 'He ran straight out in front of me,' Philip said. 'I don't think he's come to any harm.' She said coldly, 'I suppose you were going too fast.' 'I don't think so.' He was getting rather tired of being accused of things of which he wasn't guilty. 'I was driving at about twenty miles an hour because of the wet road. Here, you'd better take him.' 'He's not my dog. What made you think he was mine?' What had? the fact that she and she alone had come out? or because he somehow connected Arnham with a dog? That had been a Scottie, he remembered, that had been Senta's invention. Arnham disliked dogs, had never had a dog. 'I heard your brakes,' she said. 'I came out to see what was going on.' She went back up the steps and into the house and closed the door. Philip, in whose arms the Sealyham was now comfortably snuggled, read the tag on its collar which proclaimed it to be Whisky, the property of H. Spicer, who lived three houses down from Mrs Ripple. He carried the dog home and was offered a five-pound note as a reward, which he refused. But returning to his car, he thought what confusion deception causes, what a muddle in the mind, so that facts are mixed up with truth and truth distorted. Because of what Senta had said he had made certain assumptions based on her story. The story was proved false but the assumptions still held. He got into the car and glanced up at the house again as he switched on the ignition. All you have to hang on to, he told himself, is that Arnham lives there and Arnham is alive. Now forget everything else and be happy.

16

'I just wonder if maybe she's only been getting money together and saving it up. What do you think? I mean she's unemployed and likely to go on being and she's no skills, poor little love, and maybe she thought if she got a nice bit of money behind her...? I don't know. Am I being silly?' Philip had brought himself to tell his mother what had happened on the evening he had followed Cheryl, only to find his story not believed. Christine was aware that Cheryl pilfered from the members of her own family and had learned not to leave sums of money about the house unless she expected to lose them. But that she would steal from a shop was too much for her mother to digest. Philip only thought he had witnessed a theft. What he had really seen was Cheryl's retrieval of her own property that she had somehow left behind there earlier that day. 'It wasn't very nice of you to suspect your own sister of something like that.' This was the nearest she would ever get to a reproach and her tone was gentle rather than reproving. Philip could tell there was no point in arguing. 'All right. Perhaps it wasn't. But if you know she steals from you, why does she?' But Cheryl's purpose in stealing was beyond her. It was as if Christine's mind stopped short at the stealing itself, giving no thought to what Cheryl stole for. Philip's suggestion that it might be for drink or drugs made her stare. Drugs were something that happened to other people's children. Besides, she had seen Cheryl in the bath only two days before and there had been no needle marks on her thighs or upper arms. 'Are you sure you'd have noticed if there had been?' Christine thought she would have. She would have known if Cheryl drank. While they were away on holiday other guests in the small private hotel they had stayed in had missed sums of money. The police had been called in but Cheryl hadn't even been questioned. Christine seemed to think this must imply her innocence. Stealing from one's own mother was different, hardly stealing at all really, one had a sort of half-right to it already. 'The unemployment benefit she gets doesn't amount to much, you know, Phil.' She was pleading for her duaghter with a kind of wide-eyed piteousness, as if Philip were determined on condemning her. 'I'll tell you what,' she said, 'I'll speak to my friend that's the social worker, the one who works with teenagers.' That would be this Audrey. Inwardly Philip reproached himself for finding it hard to believe his mother could know anyone with that sort of job, counted among her friends someone in a responsible caring position. He said firmly. 'That might be a very good idea. And you can explain what I saw. I did see it and it was stealing. It isn't going to help anyone to pretend otherwise.~ That evening he had resolved to stay at home with her but Christine seemed anxious for him to go out. He could tell it wasn't just selflessness. She really wanted the house to herself. It made him wonder if Arnham had fulfilled his promise to phone her, if he had made a reappearance in her life and was due this evening. Philip smiled to himself when he thought of Arnham in this house, talking to Christine, perhaps telling her of his loss of Flora, while all the time the statue was upstairs, no more than a few feet above their heads. Thinking like this made him look at Flora, standing there in the recesses of the cupboard. Senta's face looked out at him from the shadows and the way the soft vague evening sunlight fell on it gave the illusion of a smile. Philip couldn't resist putting out a finger to touch one cool marble cheek and then stroking it lightly with the back of his hand. Had he stolen Flora? Was he then as much a thief as Cheryl? Something, some unlooked-for intuition, brought him to Cheryl's bedroom door. He hadn't been into the room or even seen inside it since the day Fee had found the crumpled bridesmaid's dress lying on the wardrobe floor. Now he opened the door, surprised to find it unlocked, and stepped inside. Three transistor radios, a portable television with a screen the size of a playing card, a tape player, two hairdryers, some kitchen thing, a food processor probably, other electrical equipment - it was all stacked on top of a chest of drawers and Philip knew at once it had been stolen. One of the radios still had a scarlet band of some sort of sticky tape round it. He wondered how she had managed to take these large bulky objects without being detected. Ingenuity born of despair and desperation, he thought. This store of stolen goods was like someone else's savings or investment, waiting to be turned into cash - for what? His sister was a criminal but he couldn't see what there was to be done about it. A fatalistic acceptance was all that was possible now. Appealing to the police or the social services must lead to Cheryl's being charged with theft and because she was his sister, he couldn't give her away to some outside authority. He could only hope for the best, pin his faith to some help or advice coming from the social worker friend of Christine's. He closed the bedroom door behind him, somehow knowing he would never go in there again. As soon as he got to Tarsus Street that evening he tbld Senta what he had seen. She looked at him. Most people, when they say they look into the eyes of another, in fact look into only one eye. Senta actually looked into both his eyes and because this always made her squint, gave her an expression of concentrated intensity. Her lips were parted a little, her clear green-flecked eyes very wide open with the pupils turned towards one another. 'It doesn't matter so long as she's not found out, does it?' He tried laughing at her. 'That's not a very moral way of looking at things.' She was deadly serious. She spoke pedantically. 'But we don't subscribe to conventional morality, Philip. After all, in that sort of morality the very worst thing anyone can do is kill someone. Don't you think you're being a hypocrite condemning poor Cheryl for a very trifling thing when you've done murder yourself?' 'I'm not condemning her,' he said for something to say, something to express because his thoughts were inexpressible: did she really believe he had killed John Crucifer while knowing her own confession was a fantasy? 'I only want to know what to do. What shall I do?' He meant what should he do about Cheryl. Senta was indifferent, he could tell that, absorbed with herself and him. She was smiling. 'Come and live here with me.' It had the effect she must have wanted and brought temporary forgetfulness of Cheryl. 'Do you mean that, Senta? In the top flat? Can we?' 'I thought you'd be pleased.' 'Of course I'm pleased. But you - you don't feel comfortable up there. I don't want you making yourself miserable for me. 'Philip, I have to tell you something.' Again the bracing of his nerves, the tensing of muscles, as he awaited revelations. But quite suddenly he knew it would be all right, what she was going to say. And it was all right, it was more than that. 'I love you so much,' she said. 'I love you far far more than I ever thought I would when we first met. Isn't that funny? I knew I'd been looking for you and I'd found you but I didn't know I was capable of loving anyone the way I love you.' He took her in his arms and held her close against him. 'Senta, you're my love, you're my angel.' 'So you see I couldn't feel uncomfortable anywhere with you. I couldn't be miserable when I'm with you. Wherever I am with you I'd be happy. I'm happy all the time I know you love me.' She put up her face and kissed him. 'I asked Rita about the flat and she said she didn't see why not. She says she wouldn't want rent. Of course that means she could throw us out when she wanted, we wouldn't have a proper tenancy.' He was surprised at Senta's unusual practicality, her actually knowing about things like that. Then he understood what it also meant, that he would be able to go on paying Christine without continuing to live in her house. This might be his release from Christine and Cheryl and Glenallan Close, and an honourable release. It was a long time now since he had even glanced at a newspaper. Newspapers he ha~J avoided along with television and the radio, but had he avoided them because he was afraid of what he might see? He hardly knew what he meant by that himself. Surely not that if he knew a hunt was mounted for Joley's killer it would make him afraid? Sometimes he imagined that his confession to Senta had been overheard, that there were people walking about the streets who had heard him admit to killing John Crucifer. He half-expected Christine to tell him the police had called or that they had been enquiring for him at head office. These things worried him for moments at a time and then he would come to himself and see what folly all this was, the stuff of nightmares and fantasies. But when he went to the warehouse at Uxbridge to search through the marble tops they had in stock in the hope of finding one which had no fissures anywhere in its veining, a motor-cycle policeman was outside. This man was only taking the name and particulars of some traffic offender but for a moment Philip experienced a gut fear that had nothing to do with reason. The first thing he heard when he got in was that Roy was off sick 'with a bug' and that Mr Aldridge wanted to see him 'the minute he arrived if not sooner.' Mr Aldridge was the managing director of Roseberry Lawn. Philip didn't feel nervous about it. He was sure he hadn't stepped out of line. He went up in the lift and Mr Aldridge's secretary, who sat by herself in the outer office, said to go straight in. He expected to be asked to sit down. By now he had some optimistic ideas that he might have been called there to be congratulated or even that promotion was coming. Aldridge was seated but he let Philip stand on the other side of the desk. His glasses had slipped half-way down his nose and he looked rather sour. What he wanted to tell Philip was that Olivia Brett had complained about his behaviour, had described him as insufferably rude and insulting, and would Philip like to explain? 'What does she say I said?' 'You're getting this first hand, I hope you realise that. She phoned and spoke to me personally. Apparently, you made a disgusting remark, something lavatorial, about the shower she's having installed, and when she didn't laugh at this famous joke of yours you told her you were afraid you couldn't waste any more time on her, you had more important things to do.' 'It isn't true,' Philip said hotly. 'I thought, she led me to think - well, it doesn't matter what I thought. But she was the one who made the remark about the shower, not me.' Aldridge said, 'I've always admired her. When I've seen her on TV I've always thought her one of our loveliest actresses, a real English lady. If you imagine I could for a moment credit that a beautiful and refined woman like her would make a cheap joke of that sort - and she brought herself to tell me explicitly exactly what was said, though I needn't repeat it - you're thicker than I take you for. Frankly, I don't think you're thick, I think you're devious and underhand. I don't think you've begun to understand the kind of unwavering courtesy and consideration to our customers which is the highest aim of Roseberry Lawn. Now you can go away and never, repeat never, give any lady or gentleman cause to make a complaint like that again.' It upset him because he hadn't known that people can be as bad as that. He had never supposed that a successful, good-looking, famous and rich woman, with everything going for her, would take such a mean revenge on a man simply because that man had backed out of making love to her. It made him feel sick and sore. But there was no use in giving in to it. He got back into the car and drove to Uxbridge where, searching through twenty marble vanity unit tops encased in flat cardboard cartons, he at last found one that was free of fissures. On his way back to London he bought an evening paper. He hadn't expected there to be anything in it about Joley's death and he was surprised to see a photograph of frogmen searching the Regent's Canal for the weapon police believed might have been used to kill John Crucifer. 'I've got the part, I've got the part,' she sang to him, rushing into his arms. 'I'm so happy, I've got the part!' 'What part is that?' 'I heard this morning. My agent phoned me. It's the part of the mad girl in Impatience.' 'You've got a part in a TV serial, Senta?' 'It's not the lead but it's more interesting than the lead. This is my really big chance. It's going to be in six J episodes and I'm to be in every episode except the first one. The casting director said I'd got a fascinating face. Aren't you pleased for me, Philip, aren't you pleased?' He simply didn't believe her. It was impossible for him to force a smile, simulate pleasure. For a while she didn't seem to notice. Upstairs in Rita's fridge she had a bottle of pink champagne. 'I'll fetch it,' he said. Going up the stairs, making his way into Rita's dirty kitchen that smelt of sour dairy foods, he wondered what to do. Take a stand now, confront her, challenge her with her lies, or else live in her fantasy world, never deceived but playing up to the deceiver, for the rest of his life? He walked back into her room, set the bottle down and began the work of carefully freeing the wires from the cork. She held a glass out to catch the first gush of foam, exclaimed with delight as the cork popped. 'What toast shall we say? I know, we'll say: "To Senta Pelham, a great actor of the future!" He raised his glass. He had no choice but to repeat her words. 'To Senta Pelham, a great actor of the future!' In his own ears his voice rang very coldly. 'I'll be doing the read-through next Wednesday.' 'What's a read-through?' 'All the cast sits round a table and reads through the script. I mean you all read your own parts but without actually acting.' 'What's the name of the company that's making it?' Her hesitation was brief but there was hesitation. 'Wardville Pictures.' She looked down at her hands and the glass of champagne held in both her hands on her lap. Her head fell forward like a flower on a stalk and the silver hair fell across her cheeks. 'The casting director '5 called Tina Wendover and their address is Berwick Street in Soho.' She spoke calmly, coolly, as if replying somewhat defiantly to precise questions. It was as though he had challenged her. He was uncomfortably aware that she was able to read, at least up to a certain point, what went on in his mind. In saying they could read each other's thoughts she had been right in respect of herself. He looked at her and found that her eyes were on his. Once again she was playing that disconcerting trick of looking into both his eyes. Was she inviting him to check up on her? Because she knew he wouldn't? Her fantasising would have been easier to accept, he thought, if she deceived herself, if she believed these tales of hers. The disquieting thing was that she didn't believe them and often didn't expect others to believe them either. She refilled their glasses. She said to him, still fixing him with her eyes, 'The police aren't very clever, are they? It's a dangerous world where a young girl can go up to someone in daylight, in the open, and kill him and no one know.' Was she doing this to him because he so plainly disbelieved her first story? When she talked like this he had a sensation of a kind of internal falling, a dropping of the heart. He could find no words. 'I've wondered sometimes if Thiefie might have noticed me outside their house on those other mornings. I was careful but some people are very observant, aren't they? Suppose I went there again and Ebony knew me? He might smell me and start howling and then everyone would guess. Still he said nothing. She persisted. 'It was very early,' she said, 'but a lot of people did see me, a boy delivering newspapers and a woman with a baby in a buggy. And when I was in the train again I saw someone staring really hard at me. I think it was because the blood stains showed, though I was wearing red. I took my tunic to the launderette and washed it, so I don't know if there were any stains or not.' He turned away from her and contemplated them both in the mirror. The only colour in the picture they made, subdued in the dim subfusc light, their clothes shadowy, their skin pallid and shimmering, was that of the wine, the pale bright rose pink that the green glass turned to blood red. His love for her, in spite of the things she said, in spite of everything, caught at him and seemed to wrench at the inside of his body. He could have groaned aloud for what they might have had if she hadn't persisted in flawing it. 'I'm not afraid of the police. It's not the first time anyway. I know I'm cleverer than they are. I know we're both too clever for them. But I have wondered. We both did those tremendous things and no one even suspected. I thought they might come and ask me about you and I suppose they might yet. You mustn't worry, Philip. You're quite safe with me, they'll never learn anything about your movements from me.' He said, 'Let's not talk about it,' and put his arms round her. The night was gloomy and overcast. To Philip it seemed curiously quiet, the traffic rumble very distant, the street empty. Perhaps that was only because he was later than usual in leaving Senta. It was past one. He looked over the low wall as he came down the steps and saw that her shutters were open a crack. He had meant to close them before he left. But no one in the street could have seen her, sleeping naked on the big mirrored bed. Her self-appointed guardian, he put it to the test and satisfied himself, peering over railings into the gloom. What had she meant, 'not the first time'? He hadn't asked her because what she said had taken a while to sink in. It surfaced starkly now. Had she meant there had been a previous occasion when the police had reason to suspect her of some terrible thing? The lamplight, dim and greenish, and the thin hanging mist created an underwater look as of a drowned town, the houses reef-like, the trees branched seaweed stretching upwards through the cloudy darkness to some invisible light. Philip found himself walking carefully to the car, keeping his footfalls soft, so as not to disturb the heavy unusual silence. It was not until he had started the car - a shockingly loud noise, the engine springing into life with a lion's roar - and turned the corner into Caesarea Grove, that he noticed the leaflet someone had stuck under his windscreen wipers while he was in Senta's house. The wipers, switched on to clear the mist, dragged shreds of paper across the wet screen. Philip pulled in, stopped and got out. He crushed the wet paper into a ball. It had been an advertisement for a carpet sale. A droplet of icy water from one of the churchyard trees fell on to his neck and made him jump. It was dark in there with a kind of cold clammy steaminess. Philip put his hand on the gate. The rusty ironwork was wet to the touch. He felt a colder trickle on the back of his neck than the drop of water had made, a shiver that fingered all the way down his spine. A single candle was burning on one of the steps that led up to the porch on the side of the church. He drew a long breath. The gate opened with a creak that was like a human groan. He took a few steps on the stones, the drenched grass, led by the bluish aureole, the yellow ring, that encircled the flame. There was someone lying on a bed of blankets and rags inside the porch. Joley's face reared up like a ghost's and revealed itself in the candlelight.

17

He hated doing it. Deviousness was alien to his nature. The idea of pretending to be someone else, of telling a false story to gain information, all that was so distasteful as to make him feel an actual physical sickness at the thought of it. He had postponed doing it for four days. Now, alone in Roy's room with Roy out at lunch and the secretary doing Mr Aldridge's Fetters because his secretary was off sick, an opportunity presented itself which he would be cowardly to refuse. Encountering Joley was the event which made this act imperative. For some reason, though now he could hardly imagine what reason, he had utterly believed Senta when she told him Joley and the murdered man John Crucifer were one. He had believed her and been brought to feel terrible things, almost that Joley's death was somehow his fault; if not quite that he had murdered him, that but for his own existence and presence there, Joley would still be alive. Joley was alive. His month-long absence was due to his having been in hospital. Philip had never considered vagrants leading lives which in any way approximated to those led by more conventional humanity, that they might have doctors, for instance, that they might sometimes penetrate when in need the world of the respectable house-dwelling classes. 'I been having me prostrate done,' Joley had said, welcoming him round the hearth the candle made and offering him a cushion of a scarlet Tesco bag stuffed with newspapers. 'In my mode of living, as you might say, it's not desirable having an urgent need to pee every ten minutes. Mind you, I was going bonkers in that hospital.' 'Always washing you, were they?' 'It wasn't that, governor. It wasn't so much that as the doors. It's doors being shut what I can't stomach. We was six in this room like, five others and me, and it's OK by day but come the night they shuts the door. I sweat like a pig when the door's shut. Then I had to go convalescent. I had to, they forced me. You're not going straight out of here back on the streets, they said. Made me sound like a whore, I should be so lucky.' Philip gave him a five-pound note. 'Many thanks, governor. You're a gentleman.' Since then he had seen Joley twice more. He had said nothing about any of this to Senta. What was there to say? All he could have done was reproach her once more for lying to him. Besides, she might genuinely have believed John Crucifer was Joley. Now, in the office, he gave directory enquiries the address of Wardville Pictures and was surprised when they came up with an actual phone number. Bracing himself, taking a deep breath, he dialled. 'May I speak to Tina Wendover?' The voice said, 'She's at a read-through. Who is it speaking?' Philip was very taken aback. Senta had said there would be a read-through of Impatience on Wednesday and today was Wednesday. He gave his own name. 'Would you like to speak to her assistant?' He said he would and when he was put through said, in a reluctant mumble, that he was speaking on behalf of Senta Pelham's agent. He understood that Senta had been offered a part in Impatience. 'Yes, that's right.' She sounded astonished at his enquiry, surprised that he was in doubt, said suspiciously, 'Who exactly is that?' Feeling guilty at once because he had doubted her, he was astonished just the same. This confirmation of what she had told him restored her to him in a new light. Not as a new person, but as a fuller, rarer Senta, cleverer, more sophisticated and accomplished than he had ever supposed. Even at this moment she would be at the read-through. He hardly knew what would be happening at this preliminary gathering of the cast of a television serial, but he imagined actors and actresses, some of them famous faces, sitting round a long table with their scripts in front of them, reading their parts. And Senta was among them, one of them, knowing the correct way to behave, the proper procedures to follow. He imagined her in her long black skirt perhaps and the silvery-grey top, the silver hair spread over her shoulders, with Donald Sinden on one side of her and Miranda Richardson on the other. Philip had no idea if this actor and actress had parts in the serial but theirs were the faces which came into his mind. She was suddenly more real to him, more of an active responsible human being who lived in the world, than she had ever been before. He understood that because of this, he loved her more. His fears receded. They seemed neurotic suspicions, borne of his ignorance of people like her and the world of dreams and imagination they must necessarily inhabit because of their art. So much that made up their lives was unreal, or unreal to ordinary people like himself. Was it any wonder they saw the truth, not as the cut-and-dried thing which was how it presented itself to him, but vague and blurred at the edges, open to numberless imaginative interpretations? When he reached home that evening he heard voices from the living room, Christine's and a man's. He opened the door and saw that the visitor was Gerard Arnham. Arnham, apparently, had phoned Christine on the very day he and Philip had encountered each other. Christine had said nothing about it. His mother could also be secretive, Philip was beginning to discover. She was looking pretty and young and might easily have been taken for Fee's elder sister. Her hair was newly blonded and newly set and Philip had to admit that she wasn't, after all, a bad hairdresser. She had a pale blue dress on with white spots, a dress of the kind, he somehow recognised, that men always like and women often don't, with a full skirt and a tight waist and a low-cut square neck. Arnham jumped up. 'How are you, Philip? We're on our way out to dinner. I just thought I'd like to wait and see you.' Shaking hands, Philip thought immediately about the woman who had come out of their house and accused him of driving too fast. He would have to warn Christine of the existence of this woman and he disliked the prospect. It need not, however, indeed could not, be undertaken at this moment. He thought too of the presence upstairs, inside his wardrobe, of Flora. 'We could all have a glass of sherry, Phil,' Christine said, as if this were a very daring thing to do. Philip fetched the sherry and the glasses and they made conversation rather uneasily, talking of nothing much. Before Philip came in Arnham had apparently been giving Christine some sort of account of his move from his former home and the circumstances in which he had found his present house. He reverted to this, going into close details, while Christine listened avidly. Philip didn't pay this much attention. He found himself speculating once again as to the prospect of Arnham as a husband for Christine. It occurred to him that the woman who had come running out at the sound of his brakes had looked unhappy. Hadn't they been getting on, he and she? Were they on the point of parting? He watched them go down the path, giving Christine a little wave from the window in response to her own. Arnham's car was parked on the other side of the street, which was why he hadn't noticed it when he came in. He handed Christine into it in a courtly old-fashioned way, making Philip feel that if it hadn't been a warm sultry summer evening he would have tucked a rug round her knees. Impossible now to keep from imagining Christine as Mrs Arnham and living in the house in Chigwell with the may tree in the garden. Perhaps the woman he had seen was Arnham's sister or his housekeeper. He would be free to go. There would be no bar to his moving into the top flat in Tarsus Street with Senta. He thought about this as a likelihood, not an impossible dream, as he drove down Shoot-up Hill. Cheryl would naturally go with Christine, it would be the best thing that could happen to Cheryl, to have two parents again, to have a more attractive place to live in. He was aware that he had thought along these lines before, when Christine had first known Arnham, but things had been different then, that had been before Senta. Joley was outside on the pavement, resting on his barrow in the warm sunshine like an old dog. Philip raised his arm to him in a salute and Joley made the thumbs-up sign. A heat wave was coming, you could feel it in the air, in the calmness of the evening, the steady dark gold of the sunset light. And Philip felt, as he let himself into the house and heard from the front room the sound of a waltz, that things had returned to what they once were, had come full circle, been restored to an earlier perfection. No, more than that - a new perfection that was the result of trial and error and subsequent full knowledge. Down there Senta awaited him, his honourable truthful day-dreaming love. Christine had got Arnham back. Joley was at his post. The weather would once more be glorious. The heat was terrible and wonderful. It would have been desirable at the seaside where Philip wished again and again he and Senta might be. In London it brought with it drought and smells and sweat. But Senta's basement room grew cool. In the ordinary warm weather it had been stuffy, in the cold very cold. Now she opened windows he hardly knew existed at the back of the house and let a draught blow through the cluttered subterranean rooms. It was an outdoor time when London briefly became a European city with pavement cafes. Philip wanted to spend their evenings in the open air. As much as anything he liked being seen with her, he liked the envy of other men. To walk about Hampstead or Highgate holding hands with Senta among the crowds of other young people seemed to him the most inviting way to pass their evenings - with of course the prospect of an early return to Tarsus Street. And although perhaps it was true that she preferred to stay in, she consented. On the fourth day of the heat wave, when the weather showed no signs of breaking, he drove to Chigwell in the afternoon. Mrs Ripple's new marble slab had arrived, a perfect one as far as Philip could see, too smooth and flawless to seem like the real thing. He decided to take it to her himself, ask for her approval and give her his personal undertaking that a fitter would come in to instal it that same week. It was Monday. He and Senta had been tremendously happy during the weekend. Without of course telling her he had checked up on her, he congratulated her on her part in Impatience and he could tell how much she loved his praise and how happy she was to answer his rather naive questions. She showed him how she meant to act her part, altering her voice quite subtly and changing her facial expression so that she became, briefly and alarmingly, a different person. She seemed to know most of her lines already. He anticipated the pride he was going to feel when he actually saw her on screen. His emotion was powerful and he felt almost choked by it. They were together from the Friday night until this morning. On Saturday there had been some talk of going up to the top floor and making a start on cleaning the flat, preparing it for their occupancy which now might not be long delayed. But it was too hot. Both agreed there would be time enough for that when the weather got cool again. Their work on the flat could wait until the following Friday. There must have been thousands of other people about in that heat, in those sunlit streets, but he hardly saw them. They were shadows or ghosts, scarcely real. They were there only to make Senta, by contrast, more real, more beautiful, more his own. Any misunderstandings were over, arguments past, quarrels forgotten, talk of death and violence melted away by the sun and the leisurely sensuous pace of life. They ate their meals in pub gardens or on the grass of the Heath, they drank a lot of wine. Hand in hand, they meandered back to the car, back to Tarsus Street, white and dusty and brittle with heat, and to bed in the underground cooi. He had begun to feel he was curing her of her agoraphobia. Very little persuasion had been needed to get her out into the open air, the sunny noons and the sweet warm night-times. 'Just think,' she had said to him, 'in a week's time we may be together all the time.' 'Well, perhaps not a week, but very soon.' 'We won't put it off, we'll get started on Friday. Maybe we could move the bed up, that would be a start. I'll ask Rita to make that horrible Mike help us, shall I? There's just one thing I want you to help me with first but it won't take long and then we'll really begin thinking how we're going to arrange our flat. I'm so happy, Philip, I've never been so happy in all my life!' Throughout that weekend she had never once fantasised. Not a tall story of the past or present had been offered him. A kind of exorcism had taken place, he thought. She was purged of the need to alter truth. How could he avoid the perhaps conceited belief that it was her love for him and his for her that had changed her? Reality had become adequate. Grounded in a traffic jam on the way to Chigwell, he thought tenderly of Senta. He had left her lying in bed, the shutters half-closed, a breeze of early morning that would later die, airing the room, blowing from open window to open window. Sunlight fell across the bedlinen in bands but avoided her face, her eyes. He had seen to that. She had awakened for a little while and put up her arms to him. It had been more of a wrench even than usual to leave her and she knowing it, had held on to him, kissing him, whispering to him not to go yet, not yet. There was such a long tail-back of cars on the approaches to the A12 that Philip briefly thought it might be wiser to turn back when the opportunity of doing so came. Afterwards he was to wonder what sort of a difference to his life it would have made had he done so. Not much probably. Happiness would have endured for a few more days, along with the heat and the sunshine, but it would soon have passed. In the nature of things there could be no escape for him and her, not now. If he had turned back all that would have happened was that the bubble of illusion and self-deception and mysterious false assumptions would have been broken later and not that afternoon. He didn't turn back. His shirt was wet with sweat and sticking to the back of the seat. A car somewhere ahe~id of him, half a mile ahead for all he knew, had overheated and its radiator boiled. It was this breakdown which was causing the delay. He was glad he hadn't given Mrs Ripple a definite time, only said something about the middle of the afternoon, which by its vagueness had raised another of her reprimands. Twenty minutes later he was past the stranded car with steam coming from its raised bonnet that blocked the inside lane. The marble slab fell off the back seat as he turned the corner into Mrs Ripple's road and he had a momentary panic lest it was cracked. Finding it intact when he was finally parked outside the house made a fresh surge of sweat break over him. The tar was melting on the roadway and on the camber, in the hard bright light, mirages of sheets of water danced. Lawns were yellowing, drying up. He hauled the marble slab in its cardboard container out of the hack of the car. Mrs Ripple's front door opened as he came up to the gate and a woman came out with a black Scottie dog on a lead. She paused on the step as people do who spin out their leave-taking. It was Gerard Arnham's woman, wife, sister, housekeeper, whatever she was. Inside the house were Mrs Ripple, and visible behind her, Pearl of the black curly hair and shiny peacock-blue dress. Only today the dress was flame-pink and sleeveless and Mrs Ripple herself wore a flimsy garment with narrow straps which showed sunburnt shoulders and scrawny arms. Philip didn't know why the sight of the woman with the dog caused him such a shock. He was staggered by her. His grasp on the topmost bar of the gate had tightened until the metal dug into his flesh. The weight of the package he carried suddenly reminded him of another marble object he had once lugged about on a warm day, Flora that he had carried to Arnham's house when he lived in Buckhurst Hill. Arnham's woman came down the path towards him, the dog sniffing at his ankles. She didn't seem to recognise him. Her hawk-like face was strained, the eye sockets dark, the forehead deeply lined. She looked as if the heat had dried her out, actually physically depleted her. She passed him, staring trance-like ahead of her. Philip stared at her, he couldn't help it. He looked back and watched her go out of the gate and turn, blindly it seemed, up along the street. Mrs Ripple said, 'Here you are then.' It was the mildest greeting he had ever received from her. Pearl achieved a smile without parting her bright red greasy lips. Mechanically he began opening the cardboard carton and easing out the slab on to the cushions of Mrs Ripple's settee. The dog was what had shocked him, he realised, the presence of the dog, the kind of dog. He wanted to ask Mrs Ripple who the woman was, yet he already knew who she was. He knew who she was and he knew who the dog was. They were Thiefie and Ebony. 'Well, I suppose that's an improvement,' Mrs Ripple was saying. Pearl ran a red-nailed finger over the surface of the marble. 'At least you won't get soap and goodness knows what else trapped in the cracks. Imagine with that other one, the gunge that would have built up. I mean it doesn't bear thinking of.' 'They don't think of it, Pearl. They're men who design them, you see. We'd see some changes if it was women who had a say in it.' Philip would have liked to tell her that in fact this particular series of vanity units had all been designed by woman. Once, that is, he would have liked to tell her. Now his mind had curiously blanked, emptied but for the presence in it of a small black Scottie dog that Senta had named Ebony and heard whimpering as its master died. 'Well, if you're happy with it,' he heard himself saying, 'I'll take it upstairs for you. The fitter will be along before the end of the week.' 'Have you noticed, Pearl, how it's always the same with these people? The beginning of the week is Wednesday morning but "before the end of the week" is late Friday afternoon.' He scarcely heard her. He carried the marble slab up the staircase, very much aware of its weight, aware of it as a man three times his age might be. Inside the new bathroom he crossed to the window, now fussily cluttered with floral Austrian blinds, and gazed at the back of Arnham's house. The may tree, which when he first saw it had been festooned with blossoms, now bore a harvest of berries changing from green to russet colour. Beneath stood the figure of Cupid with his bow and quiver which had replaced Flora. But he noticed something else about that garden which struck him hollowly. No one had tended it for weeks. No one had mown the lawn or pulled out a weed or trimmed off a dead head. Rank grass grew six inches high with yellow and white flowering weeds among it. The little black dog came running into the garden from round the side of the house. It disappeared into the tall grass as a wild animal disappears into the bush. Ebony, he thought, Ebony. Philip turned away and came out on to the landing. Sick though he felt, panic-stricken in some fearful unanalysable way, he had to know the truth. If necessary he would have to ask. In his present state of near-certainty which is still uncertainty, it would be unthinkable to leave here and drive home, to carry with him a doubt that would gnaw like a rat. He could feel in anticipation (through experience) the pain of it. He didn't have to ask. He stood on the landing, holding on to the railing at the head of the stairs, listening to their voices. The door into the living room was open and he heard Mrs Ripple say, 'You know who that was?' 'Who what was?' 'The woman with the dog who came in to ask if I knew anyone who'd help her with the garden.' 'I didn't catch the name.' 'Myerson's her name. Myerson. Mark you, I don't like dogs in the house, I wouldn't have had it if it was anyone else, but I couldn't very well say anything in the circumstances. I'm surprised the name didn't ring a bell with you. It was her husband that was murdered - when would it have been? A month ago? Five weeks?' 'Murdered?' said Pearl. 'What was the name again?' 'Harold. Harold Myerson.' 'You may have mentioned it in your letter. I never read those things in the paper, I avoid those things. I may be a coward but I can't bear things like that.' 'He was murdered in Hainault Forest,' said Mrs Ripple. 'It was on a Sunday morning, a beautiful sunny morning. He was stabbed in the heart while he was out with that dog.'

18

She sat on the bed and he sat in the wicker chair. The window had been open but he had closed it out of fear. There was the room they were in and the looking-glass country, greenish, watery, clouded, a land of swamps, of that room reflected in the tilted mirror. 'I told you I killed him, Philip,' she said. 'I told you over and over I stabbed him with my glass dagger.' He couldn't speak. It had been as much as he could do to articulate the words that demanded the truth from her. She was calmer and more reasonable, even gently amused, than he had ever known her. 'I see now that I must have killed the wrong man. But you did tell me over and over that Gerard Arnham lived there? You showed me the house. We drove past and you pointed to it and you said, that's where Gerard Arnham lives. I think you have to admit, Philip, that it was you who made the mistake, not me.' She spoke as if his contention was only that she had picked the wrong victim. She might have been mildly reproving him for being late for an engagement. Philip had dropped his head into his hands. He sat there feeling the sweat form between his fingertips and the hot pulsing skin of his forehead. Her hand on his arm, the touch of her little child's hand, made him jump and flinch. It was like a lighted match brought close against bare flesh. 'It doesn't really matter, Philip,' he heard her say. He heard her voice soft and sweetly reasonable. 'It doesn't really matter who I killed. The point was to kill someone to prove my love for you. I mean - if you don't mind my saying this- it wasn't the old down-and-out, what's he called, Joley, that you killed, was it? You made a mistake there as well. But we did do it.' The sound she made was a soft rueful giggle. 'Next time,' she said, 'I expect we'd be better at it, we'd be more careful.' He had jumped up and was on her before he realised what was happening. Her shoulders were in his hands, grasped with the nails digging in, and he was crashing her body up and down on the bed, pounding the frailness of her into the mattress, the flimsy ribcage, the bird's bones. She didn't fight him. She yielded to his violence, moaning a little. When he began to strike her she covered her face with her hands. The sight of the ring he had given her, the silver and the milky stone, stopped him. That and her face, so feebly protected, cowering from his flailing hands seemed to paralyse him. in mid-onslaught. He had been the man who hated violence, who couldn't imagine himself performing any brutish act. Even talking about it had offended him. Even thinking of it had seemed a source of corruption. Upstairs the 'Great Waltz' from Rosenkavalier sent its sweet painful strains down through the ceiling. Disgusted with himself, he fell across the bed. He lay in a state of shock, unable to think, wanting to die. Presently he was aware she had sat up. She was wiping her eyes with her fingers. Somehow his blows had cut her face, there was a trace of blood on one cheekbone. It was while she had been protecting her face with her hands that the moonstone ring had been pressed into the skin. Blood got on to her fingertip and she flinched when she saw it. She crouched on all-fours, looking into the mirror at the scratch on her face. 'I'm sorry I hit you,' he said. 'I went mad.' 'That's all right,' she said. 'It doesn't matter.' 'It does. I shouldn't have hit you.' 'You can hit me if you want. You can do what you like with me. I love you.' He was stunned by her. His shock was so immense as to have bludgeoned him into a kind of unconsciousness. He could only look helplessly at her and hear those words, uttered in an impossible context. Her face was soft with love, as if the features had begun to melt. The blood marred a silvery-white perfection, made her human. All too human. 'It was all true then?' he managed to say. She nodded. She seemed surprised, but in a simple childlike way. 'Oh, yes, it was all true. Of course it was.' 'The part about following him and going up to him and saying you had something in your eye - that was true?' He could hardly say the words but he said them: 'And stabbing him - that was true?' 'I told you. Of course it was true. I didn't know you doubted me, Philip, I thought you trusted me.' In a fever of fear and disbelief and panic, he had driven straight to her from Chigwell. He had neither returned to head office nor gone home, so it had been quite early when he arrived. And for once, for the first time perhaps, she had seen him arriving from the basement window. Her smile had died when she saw his face. He had brought no wine, no food. It was the end of his world, or so he had felt when he pounded down the basement stairs. He would never eat or drink again. It was she who said after she had answered all his questions and confirmed it all, when he had no more words. 'Shall we have some wine? I should like to. Would you go out and get some, Philip?' Out in the street he was a hunted person. It was a new feeling. On the way here he had been frightened but afraid only of what she might tell him, of what her looks and her words would confirm. Now he knew for sure, he felt pursued. Before the weekend he had reached a point at which he believed almost nothing she told him until it was confirmed by outside authority, he had nearly come to switch off belief when she began spinning a narrative. That authority had confirmed her part in the television serial and he had been happy, had been relieved. It was strange that now, when she recounted the most incredible things she had ever told him, he believed her utterly. There was no doubting any more. He bought two bottles of cheap white wine. Even before he was back in her room he knew he couldn't face drinking any of it. He must keep his head clear. Oblivion was not for him, still less the sloppy euphoric fuzzy state they sometimes reached, when sex was slipped into like the dreams that come at dawn, as easily found and as dazedly yielded to. As he came back to the room, passing from the dusty heat of upstairs to the cool dimness below, the facts, the truth, slammed back at him once more, the reality that she had murdered in cold blood a defenceless stranger and he whispered to himself in incredulity, 'It can't be, it can't be...' She began drinking the wine greedily. He carried his glassful with him out to the tap, poured it away, refilled the glass with water. In those smoky green glasses you couldn't tell whether the contents were wine or water. She put out her hand to him. 'Stay the night with me. Don't go home tonight.' He looked at her in despair. He spoke his thoughts aloud. 'I don't think I could go home. I feel as if I couldn't leave this room, I couldn't see other people. I can only be with you. You've made it impossible for me to associate with others.' This seemed to please her. He even had the momentary feeling that this had been her whole purpose, to set the two of them apart, to make them unfit for other company. He saw the madness in her face again, in the unfocused gaze, the sublime indifference to all that perplexes and horrifies humanity. It was Flora's face. That look had been on the marble features when he had seen her a lifetime ago lying in the flowerbed in Arnham's garden. This time he didn't try, as he had tried once before, to dispel from his own mind the notion of her madness. If she was mad she couldn't help herself. If she was mad she was helplessly unable to control what she did. He took her in his arms. It was horrible, there was no pleasure in holding her like this. It was like holding some decaying drowned thing or a sack of garbage. He almost retched. And then pity came, for her and for himself, and he began to cry with his face on her shoulder and his lips pressed into her neck. She stroked his hair. She whispered to him, 'Poor Philip, poor Philip, don't be sad, you mustn't be sad...' He was alone in the house. He sat in the window of the living room, watching the light fade in the street. Glen-allan Close, in a sunset like this one, bathed in pale red light, windless and basking, was as beautiful as it could ever be. It had been a night and a day of almost continuous unrelieved suffering, incredible to look back on, beyond belief that two people had been able to bear it. Of course there had been no question of his going to work. After that sleepless night, those long crawling hours in which she had dozed and awakened by turns, had begged him to make love to her, once gone down on her knees to him with infinite pathos, and still he had failed - after all that he had gone up to the phone in the hall at eight in the morning and phoned Rdy at home. He had no need to simulate a hoarse voice, a dry throat, an almost communicable weariness. All that was there already, as a result of those dreadful hours. And with the coming of the sun it had begun again. No doors or windows had been opened the night before and the heat grew like an oven warming. Senta, who had slept till he came back, awoke and began crying. He wanted to hit her again then, to stop that meaningless pointless moaning. To keep himself from striking her he clutched his hands together. Violence that had been alien to him he was learning. He was learning that we are all capable of almost anything. 'You must stop,' he said. 'You must stop crying. We have to talk. We have to decide what to do.' 'What is there to do if you won't love me?' Her face was sodden with weeping as if the skin had blotted up the tears. Wet strands of hair stuck to her face. 'Senta, you must tell me.' A thought struck him. 'Tell me the truth now. You have to tell me only the truth from now on.' She nodded. He felt she was placating him, agreeing in order to avoid more trouble. Her eyes had become wary, greener and sharper, within their swollen lids. 'What did you mean when you said it wasn't the first time? You told me when you were talking about the police that this wasn't the first time. What did you mean?' There was a pause while her eyes shifted, looked into the mirror, back at him. She spoke so innocently, in a way calculated to disarm. 'I mean I killed someone else once. I had this boy friend called Martin, Martin Hunt - I did tell you that. I did tell you there was someone before you. I thought he was the one. It was before I ever saw you. Long before we met. You don't mind, do you, Philip? You don't mind? If I'd known I'd never have gone near him, I'd never have spoken to him if I'd known I was going to meet you.' He shook his head. It was a feeble ineffectual protest at something he didn't understand but which he knew was monstrous. 'What about him?' Instead of replying, she said, creeping close to him but receiving no welcome, no warmth, 'You are going to protect me and save me and go on loving me, aren't you? Aren't you?' It terrified him because he didn't know the answer. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know what he was more afraid of, the law and the power of it out there, or of her. It was important to him, as a man, to be afraid of neither. He forced himself to put his arms round her and hold her. 'I was jealous,' she said, her voice muffled. 'If you ever found another girl I'd kill her, Philip. I wouldn't harm you but I'd kill her.' She had told him nothing but he lacked the heart to persist. He had held her in a mechanical way, his arm becoming a clamp strong enough to support another human being in its hinged angle. It was rather like the way in which he had carried Flora to Arnham's house. She felt as heavy and lifeless as stone. Later he went out and bought food. He had made coffee and got her to drink some. They heard footsteps upstairs and the front door slam and when Philip looked out of the window, up at the pavement, he saw Rita and Jacopo going off towards the tube station with suitcases. In the afternoon Senta went upstairs and when she came back said she had taken two of Rita's sleeping tablets. Philip made sure there wasn't any wine in the room and as soon as she was asleep he left her. She would sleep for hours and he would come back in the night. Someone had scored a deep scratch along the nearside doors of his car. It looked as if done with the rusty nail which the perpetrator had left on the bonnet. Joley wasn't outside nor in Caesarea Grove but bringing up the rear of the queue at the Mother Teresa food centre in Tyre Street. Philip nodded to him but didn't smile or wave. He was finding that deep shock and preoccupation with some huge and terrible event paralyses movement, turns the body in on itself, awfully concentrating the mind. He doubted whether he ought to be driving. He was no more fit to drive than if he had been drinking. The house in Glenallan Close was empty but for Hardy. The little dog made a great fuss of him, jumping up and licking his hands. Philip found sliced bread in the bread bin, coleslaw and ham sausage in the fridge, rejected all of it. Eating might be resumed one day when he no longer felt a blockage in his throat like a jammed trapdoor. He stood inside the living-room window, watching the aftermath of sunset, seeing the serene red-washed pearly sky as unreal, the backdrop of a different world from that in which such things happened. A deep longing filled him that it might not be true, he might have imagined or dreamt it, he might wake up. The car slid into his vision, stopped outside the house. He thought, absurdly: the police. It was Arnham's Jaguar. Arnham and Christine got out of it, she with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a basket of what looked like raspberries in the other. Hardy heard Christine coming and ran out to the door. She had caught the sun. There was a glow on her skin. 'We've been for a picnic,' she said. 'Gerard took the day off and we had this picnic in Epping Forest. It was ever so nice, like real country.' A different world. He wondered if his face expressed the despair he felt. Arnham had a deep tan which made him look even more Italian or Greek. The white shirt he wore was open nearly to the waist, like a young man's, and he had jeans on. 'How are you, Philip? You've been in the wrong place today, I can tell you.' From now on, he would always be in the wrong place. He said, not even trying to frame the words courteously, 'Where do you live now?' 'Still in Buckhurst Hill, but on the other side of the High Road. I didn't move far.' Christine, who had fetched a vase full of water and was arranging her carnations in it, said in that innocent, charming, unthinking way of hers, 'Yes, Philip, I wanted so much to see Gerard's house. We were so near, really. I suppose I'm nosy but I do love to see a new home. Gerard wouldn't take me there, he said it wasn't fit for me to see. He'd have to give it a good clean before I'd be allowed to set foot inside.' Philip hesitated, then said coldly, 'I suppose the truth is you didn't want her to see you'd got rid of Flora.' There was silence. Arnham went very red. The shot had gone accurately home. Philip hadn't actually believed this was the reason for Arnham's unwillingness to take Christine to his house but now he saw he had been right. Holding four or five of the carnations in one hand, holding them out very much in Flora's own attitude, Christine turned to look wonderingly at Arnham. 'Did you, Gerard? You didn't get rid of Flora really, did you?' 'I'm sorry,' Arnham said. 'I'm desperately sorry. I didn't want you to know. He's right when he says that's why I didn't want to take you home. I've got a small garden and you'd have been bound to ask. I'm sorry.' 'If you didn't like her I wish you'd said.' Philip wouldn't have imagined Christine could be so upset. 'I'd much rather you'd said and we could have taken her back again.' 'Christine, believe me, I did want her, I did like her. Please don't look like that.' 'Yes, I know I'm being very silly and very childish, but this has spoilt my day.' 'He sold her to some people in Chigwell.' Philip could never remember having been really vindictive before. It was a new, bitter flavour, sharp and satisfying in his mouth. 'Ask him if he didn't sell her to some people in Chigwell called Myerson.' 'I didn't sell her!' 'Gave her, then.' 'It wasn't like that. It was an accident. I went off to America, as you know, and I was there a month and they had the auction of the house and the contents while I was away. The statue shouldn't have been included, I left instructions it shouldn't be sold, but there was a mix-up and it was sold.' Arnham was looking angrily at Philip. 'I was aghast when I found out. I did my best to get it back and I did trace it to the dealer who had bought it. Only by that time he had sold it to a buyer who paid cash. 'As a matter of fact, that was why I didn't get in touch with you, Christine. I may as well tell you the whole of it. I'd as soon your son wasn't hearing all this but since he's here Once Philip would have left the room but now he didn't see why he should. He stood his ground. 'I wanted to see you,' Arnham said. 'I wanted to see you very much but I couldn't face telling you about Flora. I absolutely funked it. For a while I thought I'd be able to get her back, and when I couldn't and I'd moved into my new house and months had gone by, I thought I can't phone her now, it's too late, it's ridiculous. Apart from the fact that I felt I still couldn't explain about the statue. When I met your son in Baker Street that day I realised how much I'd - I'd missed you.' A look of brooding resentment was levelled at Philip. Arnham's heavy Latin face had taken on a purplish flush. 'I wanted to see you,' he said to Christine, his tone becoming reproachful. 'I wanted to get in touch and I did but I was worried all the time about the statue. I thought I'd have to tell you it had got broken or - or stolen.' Philip gave a low unamused laugh. His mother had got up, lifted the vase of carnations and set it on the windowsill. She pulled at the flowers a bit, trying to make the arrangement symmetrical. She didn't speak. Hardy jumped off the chair he had been sitting on and trotted over to Arnham, his kind cheerful muzzle uplifted and twitching and his tail beginning to wag. Philip noted, as one might observe some fact confirmed beyond a doubt, Arnham's instinctive recoil. Then he put out a hand to touch Hardy's head, a sop, no doubt, to Christine. She turned to face Arnham. Philip expected her to begin uttering reproaches, though this would have been very unlike her. But she only smiled and said, 'Well, that's over. I hope you feel it's cleared the air. Now I'll make us all some tea.' 'You're going to let me take you out to dinner, Christine?' 'I don't think so. It's rather late for that, I'm not used to eating so late and you've a long drive ahead of you. I'm afraid I didn't realise until today,' she said in a bright conversational way, 'what a very long drive it is.' Philip left them and went upstairs. He had to return to Senta, yet there was nothing he wanted to do less. If anyone had told him two days before that there would come a time, and soon, when he wouldn't want to see her, when he would recoil from seeing her, he would have dismissed this with derision. Now he felt as he once had, very long ago, when a little child and his cat had become ill. He had loved the cat, which the Wardmans had acquired as a mature animal, a stray, had named Smoky for its black and grey brindled coat, and had transformed with care and good food into a beautiful sleek creature. Smoky had slept on Philip's bed. He lay in Philip's lap in the evening while Philip did his homework. He was very much Philip's cat, petted and pampered and almost hourly caressed. Then, as he grew old, he became ill. Years and years had passed and Smoky was probably fourteen or fifteen. His teeth were bad and his breath smelt, his fur fell out and bald patches appeared on his coat, he stopped washing. And Philip lost his affection for him. He ceased to love him. He pretended to care still but it was a poor pretence. Awful though his guilt was, he came to avoid poor Smoky and his basket in the corner of the kitchen, and when his parents, fearful of telling him, at last made themselves suggest to him that Smoky should out of kindness be put to sleep, he was relieved, a load was lifted from him. Had he then loved the cat only for his beauty? Had he loved Senta only for her beauty? And what he thought of as the beauty of her mind, her self, her soul if you like? Now he knew that those areas of her being were not beautiful but ill, foul, sick, distorted. They were evil and they stank. Because of this, had he ceased to love her? It wasn't as simple as that. It wasn't simply that he flinched from her madness either, more that the person he had loved was imaginary, not the strange little wild animal with a twisted human brain that awaited him in Tarsus Street. He opened his clothes cupboard and looked at Flora standing in the dimness within, her face framed between a pair of tweed trousers and the raincoat he had bought to replace the stolen one. The curious thing was that she no longer resembled Senta. Perhaps she never had and the likeness lay in his all too willing imagination. Her stone face looked blind and bland, the eyes empty of expression. She wasn't even a she but an it, a thing made of marble, perhaps not even modelled from the life, the work of an indifferent sculptor. He lifted her out, laid her on the bed. The idea came to him to replace her in the garden before he went out. There could be no reason not to do this now that he knew Arnham had parted from her long ago, now that Christine knew it all, now that Myerson who had owned her was dead. He carried her downstairs. Gerard Arnham was leaving. The front door was open and Christine was down at the gate watching as he got into the Jaguar. Philip took Flora into the back garden and set her up in her old position beside the birdbath. Had she always looked so tawdry, so scruffy? The green stain which disfigured her bosom and the folds of her robe, the chip out of her ear, and new hitherto unnoticed damage, a may flower missing from the bouquet, changed her into a fitting ornament for a ruin. He turned away and, looking back, saw that a sparrow had come to perch on her shoulder. In the kitchen Christine was drinking a second cup of tea. 'I called out to see if you wanted some, dear, but you weren't about. Poor Gerard was rather upset, wasn't he?' Philip said, 'You were pretty upset when he didn't come near you for months and months.' 'Was I?' She seemed puzzled, as if the effort of memory yielded nothing. 'I don't think he'll be back and I can't say I'm sorry. Audrey wouldn't have liked it.' At any rate Philip thought she said Audrey. He had always thought she said Audrey, only perhaps he had never listened very closely. 'What has it got to do with her?' 'Not her, dear, Aubrey. My friend, Aubrey. You know who I mean, Tom's brother, Tom Peiham.' The world floated a little, the floor floated. 'You mean, Senta's father?' 'No, Philip. He's Tom. This is his brother Aubrey Peiham, he's Darren's mother's brother and he's never been married, I met him for the first time at Fee's wedding. Philip dear, I'm sure I've never been secretive about this, I've never kept it dark, I always said I was going out with Aubrey, seeing a lot of Aubrey. You can't deny it, now can you?' He couldn't deny it. He had been too occupied with his own affairs to pay it much attention. Audrey was the name he had heard, a woman's name. But it hadn't been for a woman that Christine had bought new clothes, bleached her hair, grown youthful. 'He wants to marry me, as a matter of fact. You -would you - would you mind if I married him?' This was what he had wished for, longed for, a man into whose safe-keeping he could entrust her. How could the world be so full of things that were of paramount importance one day and meant less than nothing the next? 'Me? No, of course I wouldn't mind.' 'I just thought I'd ask. When your children are grown up I think you ought to ask them if they mind you getting married, though you don't expect them to ask you.' 'When is it going to be?' 'Oh, I don't know that, dear. I haven't told him yes yet. I thought it would be good for Cheryl if I married him.' 'Why good for Cheryl?' 'I told you, Philip, he's a social worker, he works with teenagers with problems like her.' Philip thought, she's got it all worked out, she has arranged her life without me. And I always thought she was helpless, I thought she would need to lean on me for life. Suddenly he saw something else: that his mother was the kind of woman men would always want to marry, there would always be men. anxious to marry her. Being married, that was what she was good at in her strange loving scatty way, and they could sense it. It embarrassed him to do it, it wasn't like him, but just the same he put his arm round her and gave her a kiss. She looked up into his face and smiled. 'I may not be back for a while,' he said. 'I'm going to Senta's.' She said vaguely, 'Have a good time, dear.' She was moving towards the phone in the hall, transparently waiting for him to leave so that, in private, she could transmit his permission and his reaction to Aubrey Pelham. He got into the car but didn't immediately start the engine. The unwillingness to rejoin Senta which he had felt while in the house was growing stronger. He was beginning to understand that a violent antipathy could be the reverse of which the obverse was passion. He saw her as evil, he saw her eyes looking at him, very green and glittering. The idea came to him of how it would be never to see her again, the relief, the peace. Somehow he knew that once he went back there he would be lost, but to write - why shouldn't he write and tell her it was all over, it had been a temporary insanity, bad for both of them? He knew he couldn't. But he couldn't go straight back there either. His need was to put it off until long into the night. Darkness would make their reunion easier. There was a strange vision he had of shutting themselves up together, he and she, down in that basement room, admitting no one, never venturing out, keeping themselves safe. But it was a hateful prospect. He drove slowly away from his mother's house. Going in the general direction of Tarsus Street, heading for it as if drawn by a magnet, he nevertheless knew the point must come when he left the destined route and digressed, at least for a little while. He couldn't face her now, immediately. That point came when he would in the usual course of things have left the Edgware Road and turned into the back reaches of Kilburn. Instead he drove on. He was thinking of what Christine had said about Cheryl and he began to feel angry at this facile solution to her unknown trouble. A stepfather who was some sort of probation officer - that was to solve everything. Philip was remembering how once, before he had even met Senta, he had seen Cheryl down here, coming out of a shop in tears. Except that it hadn't been a shop. Slowing to a stop, parking the car where he shouldn't have parked it, on a double yellow line, he got out and stared at the glittering place which, without doors or windows, revealed openly to the street its sparkling, strobe-lit interior, its ranked temptation bathed in flickering red and yellow. He had never been into such a place before, for he had never wanted to. At the seaside, occasionally in a pub, he had had a go and lost and been indifferent. Once, he remembered now, on a Channel crossing from Zeebrugge after a family holiday, his father had played a machine called Demon Dynamo. The name had stuck in his mind, it was so ridiculous. There was a Demon Dynamo in here. There was a Space Stormer and a Hot Hurricane and an Apocalypse and a Gorilla Guerilla. He passed along the aisles, looking at the machines and at the faces of those who stood and played them, their expressions either still and enclosed or ardently concentrated. At a machine called Chariots of Fire a thin pale boy with a felt-head haircut succeeded in aligning a row of Olympic torches and the coins came cascading out. He looked very young but he must be over eighteen. Philip had read somewhere that these places were forbidden to under-eighteens, it was a new law, only recently passed. Did they think you magically became wise and mature with your eighteenth birthday? The boy's face registered nothing. Philip was the son of a gambler so he didn't expect the boy to pocket his winnings and leave. He saw him move on to the Space Stormer. Cheryl wasn't there but he knew now where he would find her.

19

At the cafe table she sat opposite him, bribed to be there by the five pounds he had promised her if she came with him and talked. For a while he was withholding it. He wondered when she had last washed her hair - washed herself, come to that. Her fingernails were dirty. When he looked at her right hand with a cheap silver ring loose on the middle finger, he could only imagine that hand eternally pulling away at the handle on a fruit machine, as mechanically as the hand that pumps equipment in a factory, but without that operator's indifference. Her face was lined, as only a young person's can be, with grooves and furrows that make it look not old but only very very tired. He had found her at last in an amusement arcade in Tottenham Court Road, having searched in similar places the length of Oxford Street. There he watched her lose the last of her money and turn with what must have become an automatic reflex to try borrowing from the man at the next machine. Philip saw her take the refusal. The man didn't so much as look at her. He kept staring at the rows of fruit or whatever it was with the concentration of someone taking an eye test. The repeated shaking of his head he finally accompanied with a wave of his free hand in Cheryl's direction, a pushing away gesture. Scarlet and gold lights, both steady and flickering, the dark depths of the place illuminated with points and spots and glowing furnaces of light, gave to the arcade the look of a stage inferno. p It was difficult getting anything out of her because she was so obviously indifferent, now he had discovered this secret addiction of hers, as to what more he found out or what he thought. She spoke with a kind of bored reluctance. She had tasted her coffee and pushed it away, affectedly shuddering. 'He was dead. Nothing could bring me closer. It made me feel like him. I suppose you could say that. Or maybe it's in the blood, maybe I inherited it.' 'You can't inherit a thing like that.' 'How would you know? Are you a doctor?' 'How long have you been doing it? Ever since he died?' She nodded, making an ugly bored face, but she was restless, picking up the coffee spoon now, tapping the rim of the saucer with it. 'What got you into it in the first place?' 'I was walking by. I was thinking about Dad. Not any of youseemed to care about him dying the way I did. Not even Mum. I was walking by and thinking of him. I was thinking of a night we all came back from a holiday somewhere. We were on the ferry and he played the fruit machine and every time he won he gave me the money and let me have a go. The boat wasn't crowded and you were all somewhere eating and there was just Dad and me alone and it was night and stars were shining. I don't know how I remember that because it can't have been up on deck, can it? It was magic the way Dad kept winning and the money just rolling out. I was thinking of that and I thought, well, I'll go in and have a go -why not?' 'And you got hooked?' said Philip. 'I'm not hooked. It's not a drug.' For the first time there was animation in her face. She looked indignant. 'There was a guy in there just now said to me I was hooked. "You're an addict", he said like I was injecting something. I've never done that. I've never used smack. I've never even smoked. What's with people that they think you're hooked because you like something?' 'You steal for it, don't you? It's a habit you steal to keep on with.' 'I like it, Phil. Can't you understand? I like doing it more than anything in the world. You could call it a hobby. Like Darren is with his sport. You don't call him an addict. It's an interest, like you're supposed to have. People play snooker, don't they, and - and golf and cards and things, you don't say they're hooked.' He said steadily, 'It isn't like those things. You can't stop.' 'I don't want to stop. Why should I? I'd be all right, I wouldn't have a problem, if only I'd got money. It's not having money that's my problem, not the machines.' She laid down the spoon. She pushed her hand across the table, turned it palm-upwards and stretched it out to him. 'You said you'd give me five pounds.' He took the note out of his wallet and gave it to her. It was horrible. He didn't want to make a ceremony out of this, seeming to pass it over quickly as food to the starving, or at the end of a slow calculated cautionary process the way some people tease a dog with a biscuit, offering it and snatching it away. But as he produced the note, as casually as if he were repaying a loan, she grabbed it from him. She drew in her breath and compressed her lips. The note was held tight in her hand, not put away. She wouldn't keep it long enough to make that worth while. When she had gone, was lost in there among the machines with their glittering improbable names, he went back to the car which he had left in a side street. It was a little after ten-thirty and dark. The interview with Cheryl had displaced the area of his anxieties. His mind was full of Cheryl and her desperate defence. He thought, she will be driven to steal again, she probably already is stealing, and she will be caught and she'll go to prison. The selfish self-preserving ego inside him said that might be the best possible thing that could happen to her. In prison they might give her treatment, they might help her. Her brother knew that this way she would be lost. I must do something, he thought, I must. The postponement of his return to Senta he now saw must end. There was no putting it off. She would already be afraid, anxious, wondering what had happened to him. As he drove he began formulating ways of telling her they must part. If the police had discovered anything he would have been obliged to stay with her but, strangely, they knew nothing. It must be that no witness had come to them, no one had spoken to them of a girl with blood on her clothes or a girl in an empty train on a Sunday morning. It was because she was unconnected with Myerson, he thought. This was the murder of a stranger by a stranger, the kind that is the hardest to solve, the kind that has no reason behind it and no motive. Am I then conniving at murder? Am I covering murder up? What good would it do to bring Myerson's killer to justice? Would it bring poor Myerson back? One of the reasons for apprehending a killer was to prevent such a person from killing again. He already knew that she had killed before. She had told him so obliquely enough, but she had told him. That had been the first use of a glass dagger. The house in Tarsus Street lay in darkness. The shutters at the basement window were folded back but there was no light on inside. As he let himself into the hall he remembered the time when she had excluded him and his subsequent passion of unhappiness. How could he have felt like that then, so short a time ago, and feel like this now? If he hadn't told her that lie about killing John Crucifer, perhaps Myerson would still be alive. And he had told the lie solely to get back someone he no longer wanted. He walked down the stairs with a slow heavy tread. He switched off the light and, in the darkness, let himself into the dark room. There was absolute silence but as he came near the bed he heard her sigh in her sleep. The way she was breathing and the depth of her sleep told him she had taken one of Rita's pills. Otherwise, at his approach, she would have woken. He took off his clothes and lay down beside her. It seemed the only thing to be done. For a long while, before sleep came, he lay there looking at the pale curve of her cheek against the brown cotton pillow. Strands of silver hair caught what light there was and gleamed in the dimness. She lay on her side with her little hands curled into fists and held under her chin. He lay apart from her for a while and then, tentatively, like a shy person who fears rejection, he laid his hand on her waist and drew her to him in the curve of his arm. They were in her room and it was morning, early still, only a little after seven but broad daylight. The sun poured with rich abandon on to the shabbiness, the decay, through window panes filmed with dirt. Philip had made coffee. There was some milk left in a bottle but it had turned sour. Senta had wrapped herself in a couple of shawls, one tied round her waist, the other over her shoulders. The roots of her hair were showing red again. She was still in a sleeping pill trance, swimmy-eyed, her movements slow, but he could tell she already sensed the change in him. She was cowed by it and afraid. He sat at the foot of the bed and she at the head of it, leaning on the pillows. But now she crept towards him across the hillocks of the quilt and put out her hand timidly to take his. He felt like snatching his hand away but he didn't. He let it lie in hers, feeling a constriction in his throat. To his own ears he sounded as if he had a bad cold. He tried to clear his throat. 'Senta,' he said, 'did you kill him with the second of the glass daggers?' The question was so bizarre, the words themselves and their conjunction as well as the fact that he had actually seriously uttered them to someone he was supposed to love, to contemplate marrying, that he squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers to his temples. She was nodding her head. He knew what was going on in her mind. To his questions, to the facts and the danger, she was indifferent. She only wanted him to go on loving her. He said, trying to keep his voice steady and to remain cool, 'Then, don't you realise, the police will find you. It's a wonder they haven't by now. The glass daggers link the two deaths. Eventually, they'll find that link. They must have those details somewhere on their computer - why haven't they come to you?' She looked at him and smiled. His hand was tightly enclosed by hers so she could smile. 'I want you to be jealous, Philip. I know it's not kind of me, but I do like it when you're jealous.' Her interpretation of his questions made him see something new - that she was sliding away from normality. What hold she had on reality was loosening. 'I'm not jealous,' he said, trying to keep his patience. 'I know this Martin wasn't important to you. I'm worried for you, Senta, I'm worried about what's going to happen.' 'I love you,' she said and she held his hand in both hers kneading it painfully. 'I love you better than I love me, so why should I care what becomes of me?' Strangely, horrifyingly, he knew it was true. She loved him like that and her face told him so. The words were unnecessary. He held her close to him in the bright dust-filled indifferent sunlight, pressed his hands on her back and his cheek against hers, his nerves unfeeling, his body restless to be gone. She nestled close to him and time passed, long moments that felt like hours until at last he had to say, 'I've got to go, Senta.' She clung more closely. 'I can't take more time off,' he said. 'I've got to go to work now.' He didn't tell her that first of all he was going to see Fee and Darren, to catch them before they left for work. He had to prise her off him, kissing her for comfort. The shawls spread over her, she curled foetus-like into the brown bedclothes. To exclude the harsh yellow light he pulled the shutters nearly closed and left the room quickly without looking back at her. His brother-in-law presented a different and more attractive image at breakfast time than in those afternoon and evening hours when he was to be found sprawled in front of the screen. Newly shaven, he was the handsome bridegroom once again, a frown of concentration aging him as he studied, of all unlikely newspapers, the Financial Times. And Fee who had been bright and brisk, a hairdryer in one hand and plate of toast in the other, was astonished to see her brother, convinced he must have come because of some accident that had happened to their mother. Telling her everything was all right, Philip wondered at the use of this phrase which must always be meaningless. He found himself postponing discussion of the true reason for his visit. Perhaps people often did that, he thought. Speak of the lesser anxiety first, the smaller care. Yet to place Cheryl in this category brought a rush of guilt. Fee was incredulous, then embarrassed. She lit a cigarette as if it was anything but addiction they were discussing. 'Fruit machines?' said Darren. 'Fruit machines? I play fruit machines but no one calls me a junkie.' 'You're not addicted to them. You can control your need to play them and you can make yourself stop. Cheryl can'i.' Philip could tell that he was getting nowhere with these two, who would have perfectly understood the perils, for instance, of alcoholism. It showed him how far Fee had grown away from him and how much nearer to Darren. Perhaps it was necessary and inevitable for the endurance of the marriage. The time had come and could be put off no longer. Darren had already got up from the table and was hunting for his car keys. Philip said, 'Who's Martin Hunt?' 'What?' 'Martin Hunt, Fee. I'm sure it's through you and Darren I've heard the name.' She frowned, screwed up her nose at him in indignation or incredulity. 'You know who it is, you must know. What's wrong with your memory these days?' 'Is he - is he dead?' 'How should I know? I shouldn't think so. He's young. He's only twenty-four or twenty-five. Why would he be dead?' 'Who is he, Fee?' 'I don't know him,' she said. 'It was Rebecca I knew. Rebecca Neave that I was at school with. He was her boy friend. That's all I know, what I saw on telly and in the papers.' It took him a little while to digest this, to understand the meaning of what she had said and to draw inferences. He wondered later if she had noticed how he had turned pale. He felt the blood drawn from his face and a goosepimpling. It was something like faintness too. He held on to the back of one of Fee's dining chairs. Darren came up to Fee and said he was off and kissed her. Fee had gone into the kitchen. She came back drying her hands on a piece of kitchen roll. 'Why did you want to know all that about Martin Hunt?' He lied. Senta had taught him how and he could lie almost without a qualm. 'Someone told me he'd been killed in a car crash.' Fee wasn't interested. 'I don't think so. We'd have heard.' She disappeared again, came back wearing a cotton jacket. 'I've got to go to work, Phil. You coming? Oh, I nearly forgot. Mum phoned and told me Flora was back. I don't really know what she meant. I mean she just said Flora had come back as if she'd walked in of her own accord or something.' They went downstairs, out into the street and the white sunlight. Philip didn't have to lie this time. 'I happened to find her. I thought Mum would like her back so I - I got her back.' 'Why didn't you say? Mum thinks it's a miracle. She thinks Flora just walked in and set herself up on that bit of concrete.' 'I'm sure she doesn't really,' Philip said abstractedly. 'Anyway I'll explain.' Fee looked curiously at him as they parted. 'Did you come all the way over here at this hour just to ask me about a fellow you didn't even know you'd heard of?' He was rehearsing some kind of explanation for Christine. It took his mind off more pressing concerns. It stopped him thinking about what he knew he must at some time confront. He would tell his mother that he had in fact known for a long time that Arnham no longer possessed Flora, that Flora was sold. He, Philip, had been advertising for her, had at last found her and brought her back as a surprise for Christine. The opportunity of giving a real performance of this farrago of inventions was denied him. Cheryl had locked herself in her room. A white-faced Christine came up to Philip before he had even let himself into the house, before he had taken his key from the lock, came up to him and threw her arms round him. He held her shoulders, tried to speak calmly. '~What is it? What's wrong?' 'Oh, Phil, the police have been here. They brought Cheryl back and they searched the house.' 'What do you mean?' He got her to sit down. She was shaking and he held her hand tightly. She spoke in a breathless gasping way. 'She was caught shoplifting. Only a bottle of perfume but she had, she had...' Christine stopped, took a breath, began again,.... she had - other things in her bag. They took her to the police station and charged her or whatever it is they do and then they brought her home. There was a woman detective sergeant and a young man who was the constable.' Hysteria took hold of her and she broke into sobbing laughter. 'I thought it was so strange that way round, it seemed so funny in the midst of all that - that awfulness!' He felt helpless. 'What's going to happen to her?' 'She has to come up in court tomorrow morning.' Christine said it calmly enough, coldly almost, until the sobs caught her again and she gave a cry of misery, clamping her hand over her mouth.

20

She was in her room with the door locked. Philip knocked at the door and rattled the handle. She told him to go away. 'Cheryl, I only want to say Mum and I will come to court with you.' There was silence. He repeated what he had said. 'If you do that I won't go. I'll run away.' 'Aren't you being a bit stupid?' 'It's my business,' she said. 'It's nothing to do with you. I don't want you there hearing what they say.' As he went downstairs he heard her unlock the bedroom door but she didn't come out. He wondered why the police had let her come home. Christine, seeming to read his thoughts, said, 'She can lock herself in, Phil, but we can't lock her in, can we?' He shook his head. Christine had never told them what to do, constrained them, only left them to themselves and loved them. In Cheryl's case at any rate, that apparently hadn't been enough. He stood with Christine in the kitchen, drinking the tea she had made, and they heard Cheryl let herself out of the front door. For once she let herself out quietly. The door closed with a soft click. Christine made a whimpering sound. Philip knew that if he had said that he was going to Senta as usual, that he would be out all the evening and half the night, she wouldn't have protested. Now, letting Senta know he wasn't coming, no longer seemed of importance. Instead he felt how relieved he would be if this evening might be the start of a lifelong separation from her, if all that might become his past. But even as he caught at this hope he recalled her love for him. 'Do you think she'll come back?' Christine asked him. For a moment he didn't know who she meant. 'Cheryl? I don't know. I hope so.' He was out in the garden when the phone rang. It was dusk and he had taken Hardy as far as Lochleven Gardens and back, coming in the back way. Light from the kitchen window fell on the figure of Flora which cast a long black shadow on the grass. A stream of whitish-grey bird excrement had dried on one of her arms. Christine opened the window and called to him that Senta was on the phone. 'Why haven't you come?' 'I can't come tonight, Senta.' He told her about Cheryl, adding that he couldn't leave his mother. 'It's not possible to phone you, you know that,' he said as if he had tried. 'I love you. I don't want to be here without you. Philip, you're going to come and live here with me, aren't you? When are you going to come?' He could hear Rita and Jacopo's music in the background. 'I don't know. We have to talk.' There was terror in her voice. 'Why do we have to talk? Talk about what?' 'Senta, I'll come tomorrow. I'll see you tomorrow.' I'll tell you it's over, he thought, I'm leaving you. I'll never see you again after tomorrow. When he had put the receiver back he began thinking of those people, women mostly, who lived with or loved someone they suspected of being a murderer. He was a man and he knew the woman he loved had done murder, but it came to the same thing. It astonished him that such people could ever consider giving the suspected person up to the police, 'shopping' them, but he was equally surprised that they could want to continue the association. Once, at a party, he had played a game where you had to say what a person would have to do to stop you loving or even liking them, wanting to know them. And he had said something silly, facetious, about being put off someone because they didn't clean their teeth often enoqgh. He knew better now. His love for Senta had melted away when he knew she was responsible for Myerson's death.. Just before midnight Cheryl came back. Philip was sitting up waiting for her, hoping she would come. He had made Christine go to bed. He ran out into the hall when he heard her key in the lock and caught her crossing the hall. 'I only want to say I won't try to come to court with you if that's what you want.' 'The police are coming for me.'~ she said dully. 'They're coming in a car at nine-thirty.' 'You must tell them about the fruit machines.' As he spoke he felt what a stupid term it was, a frivolity in tragedy. 'You will tell them, won't you? They'll do something to help you.' She didn't answer him. With a strange gesture, she pulled out the pocket linings of her jeans to show they were empty. She threw out of her jacket pockets a half-used tube of peppermints, a ten-pence piece. 'That's all I've got in the world. That's my lot. It'll be best if I go to prison, won't it?' He didn't see her in the morning but went off to work before she was up. In the afternoon he phoned Christine to be told Cheryl had received a suspended sentence. If she committed another offence she would go to prison for six months. She was at home with Christine now and Fee had taken the afternoon off and was with them. He began preparing himself for the ordeal before him. Tomorrow it would all be over, he' would have done it, he would have broken with Senta and a new phase of life, empty and cold, would stretch before him. Would he ever be able to forget what she had done and that he had loved her? It might grow faint and vague but it would always be there. A man had lost his life because of her. Before that, someone else had died because of her. She would kill others as time went on. She was made that way, she was mad. For all the rest of his life he would be marked by it, he thought. Even if he never spoke to her again, never saw her, it would scar him. Seeing her was something he was fully resolved on. After all, he had prepared the way. He had told her they had to talk and the fear in her voice showed him she went some way to guessing what he had to say. He would tell her all the truth, that he hated violence and violent death. Even talking or reading about these things was a horror to him. He would tell her how knowing what she had done had destroyed his love for her or, rather, that he now saw her as a different person, she wasn't the girl he had loved, that girl was illusory. But how was he to handle her love for him? Joley was among the men and women in the queue at the Mother Teresa Centre. Philip superstitiously noted his presence there. He had been saying to himself, as he approached Tarsus Street, that if he saw Joley he would go in and speak to Senta, if not, l~e would leave it and drive home. The old man with his barrow and his plastic carrier cushions constituted a sign which Joley reinforced himself by waving to Philip as he passed. Philip parked the car. He sat at the wheel for a long time, thinking about her, remembering how he had used to rush up the steps and into the house, as often as not in too much of a hurry to lock the car behind him. And there had been the time when she took his keys away and he had thought of breaking in, so great was his misery and his longing for her. Why was it impossible to put his mind and his feelings back into that time? She was still the same girl really, she looked and sounded the same. Surely he could go into the house and down the basement stairs and into that room and take her in his arms and forget? He started the car and turned round and drove home. He didn't know whether he was being weak or strong, purposeful or cowardly. Cheryl was out, Christine was out. He later came to know they were out together, had gone to Fee and Darren's with Aubrey Pelham. The phone began ringing at eight and he let it ring. It rang nine times between eight and nine. At nine o'clock he put the little dog on the lead and walked him two or three miles about the streets. Of course he imagined the phone ringing while he was out and he imagined her in the dirty sour-smelling hall at Tarsus Street, dialling, dialling. He thought of how it had been for him when she had expelled him from the house and he had tried to phone her. The phone was ringing as he came in. He picked up the receiver. It was as if he suddenly understood he couldn't avoid answering the phone for the rest of his life. She was incoherent, sobbing into the phone, drawing breath to cry to him: 'I saw you in the street. I saw the car. You turned away and left me.' 'I know. I couldn't come in. 'Why couldn't you? Why?' 'You know why, Senta. It's over. We can't see each other again. It's better never to see each other. You can go back to your life and I'll start mine again.' She said in a small still voice, suddenly calm, 'I haven't any life except with you.' 'Look, we only knew each other for three months. It's nothing out of a lifetime. We'll forget each other.' 'I love you, Philip. You said you loved me. I must see you, you must come here.' 'It won't do any good. It won't make any difference.' He said goodnight to her and put the phone down. It rang again almost immediately and he answered it. He knew he would always answer it now. 'I must see you. I can't live without you.' 'What's the use of it, Senta?' 'Is it Martin Hunt? Is it because of him? Philip, I'm not making this up, this is for real, the uttermost absolute truth. I never slept with him, I only went out with him once. He didn't want me, he wanted that girl. He wanted her more than me.' 'It isn't that, Senta,' he said. 'It's nothing to do with that.' As if he hadn't spoken she went on feverishly, 'That's why the police never came near me. Because they didn't know. They didn't know I even knew him. Isn't that proof? Isn't it?' What sort of a woman was she that she thought a man would mind more about a sexual relationship than an act of murder? 'Senta,' he said, 'I won't end this without seeing you again, I won't do that. I promise. That would be cowardly. I promise I won't do it. I'll see you and we'll end it.' 'Philip, if I said I'd never done it, if I said I'd made it all up?' 'I know it's only the little things you tell lies about, Senta.' She didn't phone again. He lay in bed sleepless for hours. Among other things, he missed her physical presence, but when he thought how he had made love to someone who had killed a man in cold blood, when he relived that, he had to get up and go to the bathroom to be sick. Suppose she killed herself? He suddenly thought how unsurprised he would have been had she suggested a suicide pact. That would have been like her. Dying together, going on hand-in-hand to some glorious afterlife, Ares and Aphrodite, immortals in white robes... The fine weather came back next day. He woke up to early hot sunshine, a bright band of light across his pillow from the window where he had neglected to draw the curtains. A sparrow sat on Flora's outstretched hand. There was dew thick on the grass and the long densely blue shadows. It was a dream, he thought, all of it was a dream. Flora has always stood there, she was never removed to other owners, other gardens. Fee still lives here. I never met Senta. The murders didn't happen, I dreamed them. I dreamed Senta. Downstairs the woman called Moorehead had arrived to have her hair permed. It was the first perm Christine had done for several weeks. The rotten egg smell, seeping everywhere and making breakfast impossible, evoked earlier times, the time before Senta. It helped to keep the illusion going. He made a pot of tea and gave a cup to Mrs Moorehead and Christine said what a treat it was for two old women to have a young man wait on them. Mrs Moorehead bristled up and Philip knew that when the perm was done and she was leaving she would tell Christine it was against her principles to tip the boss. Cheryl came down. It was months since she had been up so early. She sat at the kitchen table drinking tea. Philip sensed that she wanted to catch him alone and borrow money from him. He escaped before she got the chance. The car was going into the garage today to have the new radio put in. He left it there and was given a promise it would be ready by three. On the way back to Head Office he bought a newspaper. The evening paper had just come on to the streets and the front page headline told of a man charged with the murder of John Crucifer. Philip walked along reading the story. There was little to it but the basic facts. The alleged killer was Crucifer's own nephew, an unemployed welder, Trevor Crucifer, aged twenty-five. It was extraordinary the feeling Philip had, as if he had finally and absolutely been exonerated. Someone else had killed the man and it was known. Officialdom and auth ority knew it. It was as if his own stupid ill-considered confession had never been made. It seemed to set him free of guilt as his own knowledge of his innocence never could. Suppose he were to open the paper and on an inside page find that Harold Myerson's true killer had also been found? That Senta's involvement was illusory and everything she had told him the result only of a series of coincidences and circumstantial parallels? Roy sat in his office with the air conditioning turned off and the windows open. A letter had been passed to him from the managing director. It was from Mrs Ripple and listed seven separate faults she had found in her new bathroom. 'I'm without a car till three,' Philip said. 'Then you'd better take mine.' Roy said the keys were in the pocket of his jacket which was hanging up in Lucy's room. As Philip went into the room the phone began to ring. Lucy wasn't there so he answered it. A voice asked if Mr Wardman was expected in that day. 'This is Philip Wardman speaking.' 'Oh, good morning, Mr Wardman. I'm a police officer. Detective Sergeant Gates, CID.' They had offered to come to him at home or at work but Philip said, quite truthfully, that he had to go to Chigwell anyway. Gates had given him some idea of what it was about. He thought about it, turning it over and over in his mind, as he drove Roy's car through the lumbering congestion of London's eastern suburbs. 'We're making enquiries about a missing statue, Mr Wardman. Well, a stolen statue.' Briefly he had been aghast, stricken silent. But Gates hadn't been hectoring or accusatory. He had spoken to Philip as to a potentially helpful witness, one of those who genuinely help the police in their enquiries. Philip had several times been in the area - wasn't that a fact? The district of Chigwell Row, that is, from which the statue had disappeared. If they could come and talk to him or alternatively he could spare the time to come in and answer a few questions.... At the wheel of Roy's car, the windows wide open, the sun shining, Philip told himself that was literally all they wanted, him to tell them if he had seen any suspicious persons in the neighbourhood. It occurred to him quite suddenly that Flora must be valuable, really valuable. That brought him a sense of chill. He thought of his job. But they didn't know, they couldn't know. Gates had someone with him who introduced himself as a detective inspector. Philip thought this was rather a high-ranking officer to be deployed on an enquiry into the theft of a garden ornament. The inspector's name was Morris. He said, 'We've asked you to come here as the result of a rather interesting coincidence. I understand your young sister has been in a spot of trouble?' Philip nodded. He was mystified. Why didn't they talk about Chigwell and Mrs Ripple's neighbourhood? 'I'm being very frank with you, Mr Wardman, perhaps franker than you've been led to believe we usually are. I don't personally care for secrets. A woman officer searched your home and saw a certain statue in the garden. She very intelligently made the connection between that statue and the one which was missing from Mrs Myerson's garden, having acquainted herself with the description of the missing one from the Metropolitan Police computer link.' 'Is she worth a lot then?' Philip managed to say. 'She?' 'Sorry. I meant the statue. Is it valuable?' Gates said, 'Mrs Myerson's late husband paid �18 for it at auction. I don't know if you call that valuable. Depends on your standards, I suppose.' Philip had been going to say he didn't understand but he did now. It wasn't a question of Flora's value. They knew he had stolen her. The woman police sergeant had seen her when they brought Cheryl home, had identified her by that chip Out of her ear and the green stain. The two officers were looking at him and he returned their gaze steadily. There was nothing for it. If he denied it they might accuse poor Cheryl. He couldn't understand why they hadn't accused Cheryl, come to that, in the circumstances, she seemed a natural choice. 'All right,' he said, 'I did take the statue. I stole it, if you like. But I did think, mistakenly as it happens, that I had some sort of right to it. Are you...' His strength wavered and he cleared his throat.... are you going to charge me with stealing it?' 'Is that your chief concern, Mr Wardman?' said Gates. The question was incomprehensible. Philip rephrased what he had said. 'Am I going to be prosecuted?' Receiving no reply, he asked if they wanted him to make a statement. It was strange the way they seemed to latch on to this as if they would never have thought of it for themselves, as if Philip had had a brilliant and original idea. A girl~ with a typewriter who might or might not have been a police officer herself took a statement from him. He told the truth which sounded untrue when expressed aloud. ~ When he had finished he sat and looked at them, the two policeman and the girl who might or might not have been ~ a policewoman, and waited for those words to be uttered which he had read in detective stories and heard on television: you are not obliged to say anything in answer to the charge... Morris got up. He said, 'All right, Mr Wardman. Thank you very much. We needn't keep you any longer ~ 288 'Is that all then?' Philip made himself say it in a firm calm voice. 'All for now, yes.' 'Are you going to prosecute me for taking the statue?' There was some hesitation. Morris was gathering up papers from the desk. He looked up and said in a slow deliberate way, 'No, I don'. t think so. I don't think that will be necessary. That would be rather a waste of time and the public's money, don't you think?' Philip didn't answer. It wasn't a question to which an answer was expected. He suddenly felt embarrassed, he felt foolish. Once he was outside relief came surging in to dispel the embarrassment. He would restore Flora to Mrs Myerson, he thought, it was the least he could do. If the police didn't come and collect her, he would bring her to Chigwell himself. He drove to Mrs Ripple's and was conducted up to the bathroom where all the flaws in the list were pointed out to him to the accompaniment of a great deal of vituperative abuse and reiteration of what it had all cost. Pearl was nowhere to be seen, had perhaps gone home. He drove back past Mrs Myerson's house. There was an estate agent's 'For Sale' board in the front garden. The Scottie dog Senta had named Ebony was asleep on the path in the shade. Philip had a sandwich in a pub in Chigwell and drove back to London when the traffic was at its lightest. He parked Roy's car and walked down to the garage to fetch his own. Lucy said to him as he came into the office, 'A Mr Morris has been on the phone for you.' For a moment Philip couldn't think who that was. Then he knew. The policeman was being discreet in not naming his function or his rank at Philip's place of work. But why had he phoned at all? Had they changed their minds? 'Did he leave a number?' 'He'll call back. I said you wouldn't be long.' It was a lengthy fifteen minutes. Philip relived his earlier fears. If they were going to charge him he made up his mind to go and tell Roy immediately, get it over, face the worst. Then he knew he couldn't go on waiting like this. He looked up the police number in the phone directory and phoned Morris himself. It took a little while to locate him. Philip's mouth had grown dry and his heartbeat unpleasantly palpable. When Philip told him who this was, Morris said, 'Have you got (a girl friend, Mr Wardman?' It was the last thing Philip expected. 'Why do you ask?' he said. 'Perhaps you know a girl with very long blonde hair - well, silver-blonde? A rather small girl, no more than five feet tall?' 'I haven't got a girl friend,' Philip said, unsure whether he spoke the truth.

21

His mind presented the explanation to him. It was like one of those puzzles in a newspaper. You look up the answer on the back page and when you read it, it is so clear and so obvious, you wonder how you could have failed to see it in the first place. The police must have taken note of every event in Harold Myerson's recent past, spoken to every acquaintance he had, all his neighbours, noted every visitor to his house. Their interest would have been aroused by the theft of Flora and the description of the thief given to them by Myerson's next-door neighbour. One, or perhaps more than one, witness had described to them the small young girl with the long silver hair seen in the neighbourhood of Myerson's murder that Sunday morning, and later seen in a tube train. Might there be a connection between that girl and the thief of the statue? It was a long shot but the police did not neglect long shots. Philip understood that if they had never seen Flora in his own garden, they would never have found him. They would never, except through him, have found Senta. It was he who had led them to Senta. He had led them to Senta by means of the statue she resembled. All this passed through his mind while he was on his way to Tarsus Street. He hadn't waited, had said nothing to Roy. It was strange how the old longing for Senta had come back to him when he heard Morris describe her. He had no idea what he would say or do when he got there but he knew he had to go there and tell her and somehow help her. He couldn't deceive himself that the police wouldn't find her now. The overcast sky had begun spilling out rain. First it came in separate isolated drops like large flat coins, then in a downpour such as falls in the tropics. But it. didn't simply fall, it tore out of the sky and lashed in a splintered wall of water, a steel shutter of water dropped with a harsh clang. Instead of lightening as the rain was shed, the sky seemed to grow darker and all along his route lights were coming on in houses and office blocks. Cars had their lights on. The beams of his headlights made misty paths in the torrent. Joley and an old woman with a dog in a basket on wheels were sitting together in the shelter of the church porch. The dog looked like one of those you sometimes see on sentimental birthday cards, peeping over the rim of the basket with its face between its paws. Joley waved. Philip thought suddenly, remembering it for some reason, that this was the day he and Senta had been due to start work on the upstairs flat. Last weekend they had decided, that sunny lovely happy weekend that seemed a thousand years away. On Friday evening they would go up to the flat and see what there was to do and he would help her with things she wanted done. He had put the receiver down rather than answer any more of Detective Sergeant Morris's questions. He had replaced the receiver and cut off the policeman~ s voice. Morris would certainly have rung back immediately. When Lucy or Roy told him Philip had gone out he would know the phone call hadn't been accidentally cut off but deliberately terminated by Philip. He would know Philip was guilty or guilty by association or desperately anxious he shouldn't find out the identity of his girl friend. And that would make him waste no time in findingit out - her identity and her address. It would be easy. He had only to ask Christine. He had only to ask (Fee. In their innocence they would give it to him at once. Philip parked the car outside the house as near to the steps as he could get it. The nearside wheels were in a lake of water on which the rain drummed. The rain was a great grey roaring lashing curtain between him and the house. He remembered the rain that first night they had made love, the evening of Fee's wedding day, but it hadn't been like this, it had been mild compared to this. The house was only half-visible, for the rain made an obscuring wall, fog-like yet savage. He threw open the car door, jumped out and slammed it behind him. Those seconds on the pavement and the steps before he was in the shelter of the porch were enough to soak him. He shook himself and stripped off his jacket. As soon as he was inside the hail he knew Rita and Jacopo were away. He could always tell, though he never really knew how. The house was rather dark. All houses would be dark due to the storm-induced twilight outside. He couldn't have said why he didn't switch the light on but he didn't. There was no smell of joss stick coming up the basement stairs. There was no smell except the ingrained one you got used to when you habitually came to this house. He had rushed to get here but now he was here he hesitated outside her door. He had to brace himself for the sight of her. A long breath inhaled and expelled, his eyes squeezed closed and opened again, he let himself into the room. It was empty, she wasn't there. But she had been there very recently. A candle was burning in a saucer on the low table in front of the mirror. it was a new candle, its tapering top burnt down only a little way. The shutters were closed, the room dark as night. She couldn't have gone out, not in this rain. He folded back the shutters. The rain streamed down the glass in a shaking sobbing waterfall. Her green dress, a dress that might have been made of rain, water transmuted into silk, hung over the wicker chair. The high-heeled silver shoes stood side by side underneath. There were some sheets of paper with typing on them, clipped together and lying on the bed, that he thought might be her television script. He left the room and went up the stairs and hesitated at the top. She often went upstairs. It was a sort of parental home to her. He went up the next flight, came to the rooms he had glanced at that day she had had the bath in Rita's bathroom, the day on which she had come home in the morning and told him she had killed Arnham. The rooms were just the same, the one which was full of bags of clothes and newspapers, the bedroom where Rita and Jacopo slept with its window covered by a pinned-up bedspread and foam underlay doing duty for a carpet on its floor. He opened the bathroom door. There was no one in there but as he came back on to the landing he heard a board creaking above his head. He thought, this was the day we were to begin up there. She has started without me, she has decided to make a start befote I come. All that happened between us since then, all I said, all my horror and hatred have gone for nothing. He understood quite suddenly that all this time, since he began his drive here, since he parked the car and entered the house, he had been afraid of what she might have done, that she might have killed herself and he might find her dead. He went to the foot of the stairs, the last flight. There he gradually became aware of the smell. It was a very strong appalling reek which leaked down those stairs. As he smelt it and felt it grow more powerful, as he was aware that it had been creeping down to him since first he set foot on this floor, he also knew that it was of something he had never smelt before. It was a new smell and one that, perhaps, few human beings are obliged to smell in the present day. The board above him creaked again. He went up the stairs, trying to breathe only through his mouth, shutting off his nose from sense. The doors were all shut. He thought of nothing, he had ceased to think of how, once, they had planned to live up here. His movements were instinctive. He no longer heard the roar of the rain. He opened the door into the main room. The light was dim but it wasn't dark, for there were neither curtains nor shutters at the two dormer windows. This was the back of the house and through the streaming glass could be seen above rooftops a sky as grey and rough as granite. There was nothing in the room but an old armchair and on the floor between the half-open cupboard door and the left-hand window, something that looked like a stretcher or pallet, but which was in fact a door with a grey blanket laid on it. Senta was standing beside it. She was wearing the clothes she had worn for her visit to Chigwell; the red cord top on which she said she had searched for bloodstains, the jeans, the running shoes. Her hair was tied up with a piece of red striped cloth. The smile she gave him transformed her. Her whole face became a smile, her whole body. She came to him with her arms out. 'I knew you'd come. I felt it. I thought, Philip will come to me, he didn't mean what he said, he couldn't mean it. Isn't it funny? I wasn't even afraid for more than a moment. I knew my love would be too strong for yours to stop.' And it was, he thought, it was. it had returned in a cascade, like the rain. The pity and the tenderness he felt burned him, affecting the inside of his body with a painful burning sensation. There were tears at the back of his eyes. He put his arms round her and held her and she crushed herself against him as if she were trying to push her body inside his. This time she was the first to move out of their embrace. She stepped back and looked at him very sweetly, her head a little on one side. He was aware, incongruously, that while holding her, while renewing his love for her, he had ceased to smell the smell. It returned now on a thick hot wave. The smell was one he associated with flies. She put out her hand and took his and said, 'Philip, my darling, you said you'd help me with something I have to do. Well, we have to do. It's something that has to be done before we can contemplate living up here actually.' She smiled. It was as mad a smile as he could ever imagine seeing on a woman's face, demonic and empty and split off from real things. 'I would have done it before, I know I ought to have done it before, but I'm not really physically strong enough to do things like that on my own.' He had no thoughts. He could only stare and feel pain and feel her hand, small and hot, in his. There were all sorts of things he had to say, terrible things to tell her. All he could do was begin stupidly, 'You said Jacopo...' 'They're away till tomorrow. Anyway, it wouldn't do to let them know. We have to get this done before they come back, Philip.' A butcher's shop left open and unattended for several long hot days, he thought. A shop full of rotting meat after everyone had died of the bomb or radiation sickness. She opened the cupboard door. He saw a kind of face. Like Flora's gleaming without life in the recesses of his own cupboard, but not like that, not like that at all. Something that had once been a girl and young, propped against the bare wall and still clothed in green velvet. He made a sound of horror. He put both hands over his mouth. It seemed as if the whole inside of him rose 4 up into his mouth and swelled there. The floor moved. He wasn't going to faint but he wasn't going to remain standing up either. His hands out like someone seeking water to swim in, he lowered himself till he crouched on the grey blanket pallet. She hadn't noticed, it hadn't touched her. She was ~' looking into the cupboard now as if what it contained was no more than a cumbersome or awkwardly shaped ~ piece of furniture that somehow must be moved and ~ disposed of. Apart from sight perhaps, her senses were shut off. He saw her reach into the cupboard and pick ~ 296 up from the floor a kitchen knife, its blade and handle blackened with old blood. She lied only about the little things, the minor details... 'You've got your car, haven't you, Philip? I thought we could carry it down on that thing you're sitting on and put it in my room till it gets dark and then we could...' He screamed at her, 'Shut up, for Christ's sake, stop!' She turned slowly, she turned mad pale watery eyes on him. 'What's the matter?' They were the biggest things he had ever done, getting up off the floor, standing up, kicking that cupboard door shut. He put his arms round Senta and manhandled her out of that room. This was the next door to be shut. His nostrils, the entire inside of his head it seemed, his brain, were painted with that smell. There weren't enough doors in the world to shut it out. He dragged her to the top of the stairs, pulled her with him half-way down the stairs until they sprawled together on the treads. He held her shoulders, made a cage for her face with his hands. Her face was forced up against his, their mouths inches apart. 'Listen to me, Senta. I've given you away to the police. I didn't mean to but I have. They'll come here, they'll be here soon.' Her lips parted, her eyes opened very wide. He was prepared for her to attack him with fists and teeth but she was still and limp, as if suspended from his hands. 'I'll get you away,' he said. 'I'll try to.' He hadn't meant to say this. 'That's what we'll use the car for. I'll get you away somewhere.' 'I don't want to go away,' she said. 'Where would I go? I don't want to be anywhere without you.' She got up and he got up and they went downstairs. There was a new smell here, the old smell of sourness and mould. He thought, it is hours and hours since I spoke to'Morris. She pushed open the door to the basement room. The candle had burnt itself out in a pool of wax. He folded back the shutters and saw that the rain had stopped. Water was running down the area wall and splashing against the kerb as cars passed. He turned back to her. At once he could see that only one thing concerned her, one thing was important to her. 'You do still love me, Philip?' It might be a lie. He no longer knew. 'Yes,' he said. 'You won't leave me?' 'I won't leave you, Senta.' He crouched on the bed beside her and turned his face away from its reflection in the mirror, its crumpled, frightened, damaged image. She crept across the mattress to him and he took her in his arms. She nestled up close to him and put her lips against his skin and he held her tight. He could hear cars going through the water up there and he heard one stop outside. The things we think of, he thought, the things we remember at terrible times. When he stole the statue he had thought, they wouldn't send a police car out for something like that. But they would for this. They would for this.

The End