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The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell

First published in 1994

THE world began to fall apart at nine in the evening. not at five when it happened, nor at half past six when the policemen came and Eve said to go into the little castle and not show herself, but at nine when all was quiet again and it was dark outside. Lira hoped it was all over. She watched the car go down the lane toward the bridge and then she went back to the gatehouse and upstairs to watch it from her bedroom window, the red lights on its tail as it went over the bridge and its white lights when it faced her again as the road climbed and twisted among the hills. Only when she could see its lights no longer, could see no lights anywhere but a red moon and a handful of stars, did she feel they were saved. Downstairs she found Eve, calmly waiting for her. They would talk now, but of course about other things, or read or listen to music. Eve smiled a very little, then composed her face. There was no book in her lap or piece of sewing in her hands. Lira saw that her hands were shaking and this frightened her. The first real fear she felt came from the sight of those small, normally steady hands, faintly trembling. Eve said, "I have something very serious to say to you." Lira knew what it was. It was Sean. Eve had found out about Sean and didn't like it. With a sense of shock she thought about what Eve did to men she didn't like or who interfered in her plans. An attempt would be made to separate her from Sean and if that failed, what would Eve do? She herself was safe, she always was, she was the bird who pecked at the jaws of death, but Sean was vulnerable and Sean, she saw quite clearly, might be the next candidate. She waited, tense. It was about something quite different. "I know it'll be hard for you, Lira, but you're going to have to go away from here." Again Lira got it wrong. She thought Eve meant both of them. After all, that particular threat had been hanging over them for days. This was a battle Eve hadn't been able to win, a conquest she couldn't make. "When will we have to leave?" "not we. You. I've told the police you don't live here. They think you just come sometimes to visit me. I've given them your address." She stared hard at Lira. "Your address in London." The falling apart of things started then, and the real fear. Lira understood that she had never really known what fear was until that moment, a minute or two after nine on an evening in late August. She saw that Eve's hands had stopped shaking. They lay limp in her lap. She clenched her own. "I haven't got an address in London." "You have now." Lira said in a jerky voice, "I don't understand." "If they think you live here they'll ask you about what you saw and what you heard and perhaps--perhaps about the past. It's not only that I can't trust you"--Eve offered a grim little smile "to tell lies as well as I can. It's for your own protection." If Lira hadn't been so afraid she would have laughed. Hadn't Eve told her that saying things were for people's own protection was one way totalitarians justified secret police and lying propaganda? But she was too frightened, so frightened that she forgot she had been calling Eve by her first name for years and reverted to the childhood usage. "I can't go away alone, Mother." Eve noticed. She noticed everything. She winced as if that name had brought her a twinge of pain. "Yes, you can. You must. You'll be all right with Heather." So that's whose address it was. "I can stay here. I can hide if they come back." Like a child, not someone of nearly seventeen. And then, "They won't come back." A sharp indrawing of breath, the voice not hers but a baby's. "Will they?" "I think so. No, I know so. This time they will. In the morning probably." Lira knew Eve wasn't going to explain anything, and she didn't want an explanation. She preferred her own knowledge to the horror of naked confession, admission, perhaps excuse. She said again, "I can't go." "You must. And tonight, preferably." Eve looked at the dark out there. "Tomorrow morning, first thing." She closed her eyes for a moment, screwed them up, and made a face of agony. "I know I haven't brought you up for this, Lizzie. Perhaps I've been wrong. I can only say I had the best intentions." Don't let her say that about my own protection again, Lira prayed. She whispered, "I'm scared to go." "I know--oh, I know." A voice caressing yet wretched, a voice that somehow yearned, Eve's large dark eyes full of compassion. "But, listen, it won't be too hard if you do exactly what I say, and then you'll be with Heather. You always do what I say, don't you, Lizzie." I don't. I used to once. Her fear held her rigid and silent. "Heather lives in London. I've written the address down, this is the address. You must walk to where the bus stops. You know where that is, on the way to the village, between the bridge and the village, and when the bus comes--the first one comes at seven-thirty--you must get on it and tell the driver where you want to go. It's written down here. You must hold out your money and say, The station, please." The bus will take you to the station, it stops outside the station, and you must go to the place where it says tickets' and buy a single ticket to London. A single to London," is what you say. It's written down here, Paddington, London. "I can't get in touch with Heather to say you're coming. If I go to the house to use the phone, Matt will see. Anyway, the police may be there. But Heather works at home, she'll be at home. At Paddington Station you must go to where it says taxis' and take a taxi to her house. You can show the taxi driver the piece of paper with her address. You can do all that, Lizzie, can't you?" "Why can't you come with me?" Eve was silent for a moment. She wasn't looking at Lira but at Bruno's painting on the wall, Shrove at sunset, purple and gold and dark bluish-green. "They told me not to go anywhere. You aren't planning on going anywhere, I hope, is what they said." She lifted her shoulders in that characteristic way, a tiny shrug "You have to go alone, Lira. I'm going to give you some money." Lira knew she would get it from the little castle. When Eve had gone she thought of the ordeal before her. It would be impossible. She saw herself lost as she sometimes was in dreams. Those were the kind of dreams she had, of wandering abandoned in a strange place, and weren't all places strange to her? She would be alone in some grey desolation of concrete and buildings, of empty tunnels and high windowless walls. Her imagination created it out of well-remembered Victorian fiction and half-forgotten monochrome television scenes, a rats' alley from Dickens or a film studio. But it was impossible. She would die first. The money was a hundred pounds in notes and some more in coins. Eve put it into her hands, closing her fingers around it, thinking no doubt that Lira had never touched money before, not knowing that she had done so once when she found the iron box. The coins were for the bus, the exact fare. What would she say to the driver? How would she ask? Eve began explaining. She sat beside Lira and went through the instructions she had written down. Lira said, "What's going to happen to you?" "Perhaps nothing, and then you can come back and everything will be like it used to be. But we must face it. The chances are they'll arrest me and I'll have to appear in the magistrates' court and then--and then a bigger court. Even then, it may not be too bad, it may only be a year or two. They aren't like they used to be about these things, not like" even now she could be reassuring, joky--"in the history books. No torture, Lizzie, no dungeons, no shutting up in a cell forever. But we have to face it, it may be for a while." "You haven't taught me to face anything," Lira said. It was as if she had slapped Eve's face. Eve winced, though Lira had spoken gently, had spoken despairingly. "I know. I did it for the best. I never thought it would come to this." "What did you think?" Lira asked, but she didn't wait for an answer. She went upstairs to her room. Eve came in to say good night. She was cheerful, as if nothing had happened. She was smiling and at ease. These mood swings made Lira more frightened than ever. She thought it likely Eve would fall asleep at once and sleep soundly. Eve kissed her good night and said to be off in the morning early, to take a few things with her, but not to bother with too much, Heather had cupboards full of clothes. Smiling radiantly, she said it sounded terrible to say it, but in a strange way she felt free at last. "The worst has happened, you see, Lizzie, it's rather liberating." The last thing Lira noticed before her mother left the room was that she was wearing Bruno's gold earrings. She had meant not to sleep at all, but she was young and sleep came. The sound of a train woke her. She sat up in the dark, understanding at once it had been a dream. No train had run along the valley for years, not since she was a child. Without the trains the silence had been deeper than ever. Fear came back before the memory of what there was to be afraid of. A vague unformulated terror loomed, a great black cloud, that split into the constituents of her dread, the initial departure, the bus--suppose it didn't come?--the terrible train, in her mind a hundred times the size of the valley train with its toy engine, and Heather, whom she recalled as tall, strange, remote, and full of secrets to be whispered to Eve behind a guarding hand. In all of it Lira had forgotten Sean. How could she let Sean know? The load of bewilderment and despair cast her down among the bedclothes again and she lay there with her face buried and her ears covered. But the birds' singing wouldn't let her lie quiet. The birds were sometimes the only things down here to make a sound from morning till night. The dawn chorus broke with a whistling call, then came a single trill and soon a hundred birds were singing in as many trees. She sat up fully this time. The gatehouse was silent. Outside all but the birds seemed quiet, for the wind had dropped. The curtains at the window were wide apart as they always were, since the only lights ever to be seen were those of Shrove. She knelt up on the bed in front of the window. Some demarcation was visible between the brow of the high wooded hills and the dark but clear and glowing sky. There, in the east, a line of red would appear, a gleaming red sash of light unravelled. Meanwhile, something could be seen, the outline of the house, a single light in the stable block, a dense black shapelessness of woodland. Knowledge of what was out there began to give the prospect form, or else the cold glow that comes just before dawn had started to lift the countryside out of darkness into morning twilight. The water meadows showed themselves pale as clouds and the double line of alders on either side of the river seemed to step out of the surrounding dark. now Lira could see the shape of the high hills beyond, though not yet their greenness, nor the road that banded them halfway up like a white belt. She got off the bed, opened the door very quietly, and listened. Eve, who never rested by day, who was always alert, attentive, watchful, uncannily observant, slept by night like the dead. She was going to be arrested today but still she slept. The uneasy feeling came to Lira, as it had come before, that her mother was strange, was odd inside her head, but how would she really know? She had no standard of comparison. If she didn't think about what she was going to do but kept her mind on practical things, if she didn't think, it wasn't so bad. These moments had to be lived through, not the future. She went downstairs to the bathroom, came back and dressed. She wasn't hungry, she thought she would never eat again. The thought of food, of eating a piece of bread, of drinking milk, made her feel sick. She put on the cotton trousers Eve had made, a T-shirt from the reject shop, her trainers, Eve's old brown parka, the hundred pounds divided between its two pockets. Did Eve mean her to say good-bye? Opening her mother's door, she thought how this was the first time she had done so without knocking while Eve was inside since Bruno came, or earlier even, since the first Jonathan days. Eve lay asleep on her back. She wore a decorous white nightdress, high at the neck, and her thick dark brown hair was spread all over the pillows. In her deep sleep she was smiling as if she dreamed of lovely pleasurable things. That smile made Lira shiver and she shut the door quickly. It was no longer dark. Clouds were lifting away from the thin red girdle that lay along the tops of trees, dark blue feathers of cloud being drawn away up into a brightening sky. Birdsong filled up past silence with its loud yet strangely remote music. Lira was thinking again, she couldn't help it. Opening the front door and going outside and closing it behind her was the hardest thing she had ever done. It exhausted her and she leaned on the gate for a moment. Perhaps nothing would seem so hard again. She had taken her key with her, why she couldn't tell. The chill of daybreak touched her face like a cool damp hand. It brought back the feeling of sickness and she breathed deeply. Where would she be this time tomorrow? Better not think of it. She began to walk along the lane, slowly at first, then faster, trying to calculate the time. neither she nor Eve had ever possessed a watch. It must be somewhere between six-thirty and seven. Too light for cars to have their lights on, yet these had, the two of them that she could see in the far distance coming along the winding road toward the bridge. She sensed that they were together because both had lights, one following the other, aiming for a certain goal. By now she was in that part of the lane that was the approach to the bridge and where no tall trees grew. She could see the flash the morning light made on the river and see too the tunnel mouth on the other side where once the train had plunged into the hillside. Suddenly the car lights were switched off, both sets. Lira couldn't even see the cars anymore, but she knew they were coming this way. There was nowhere else for them to go. If she got onto the bridge they would have to pass her, only they wouldn't pass her, they would stop. She climbed up the bank and hid herself among the late-summer tangle of hawthorn and bramble and wayfarer's tree. The cars glided up silently. One of them had a blue lamp on its roof, but the lamp wasn't lit. Lira had been holding her breath all the time and now she expelled it in a long sigh. They would come back--they would bring Eve back--and in doing so pass the bus stop. She scrambled down the bank and ran onto the bridge. The river was wide and deep and glassy, not gulping at boulders and rippling between them until much farther up. On the bridge Lira did what it was unwise to do, she stopped and turned and looked back. It might be that she would never see it again, any of it. She would never return, so she stopped and looked back like the woman in the picture at Shrove had done, the tall sad woman in white draperies who Eve told her was Lot's wife and her forsaken home the Cities of the Plain. But instead of those desolate and wicked places, she saw between the trees that rose out of the misty water meadows, the alders and the balsams and the lombardy poplars, the gracious outlines of Shrove House. The sun that had risen in a golden dazzlement shed a pale amber light on its stone facade, the central pediment that held a coat of arms of unknown provenance, its broad terrace approached by flights of steps on both sides, its narrow door below and wide, noble door above. This was the garden front, identical to the front that faced the gates in all but that aspect's gracious portico. All its windows were blanked by this light that lay on them like a skin. The house looked as immovable as the landscape in which it rested, as natural and as serene. From nowhere else could you see Shrove as from here. Trees hid it from spectators on the high hills. They knew how to conceal their homes from view, those old builders of great houses, Eve had said. Lira said a silent good-bye to it, ran across the bridge and out onto the road. The place where the bus stopped was a couple of hundred yards up on the left. Whatever Eve might think, she knew it well, she had often walked this way, had seen the bus, a green bus that she had never once been tempted to board. What time was it now? A quarter past seven? When would the next bus come if she missed this one? In an hour? Two hours? Insurmountable difficulties once more built themselves up before her. Ramparts of difficulties reared up in her path, impossible to scale. She couldn't wait for that bus out in the open and risk the police cars passing her. For all that, she kept on walking toward the bus stop, shifting the bag onto her other shoulder, now wondering about the train. There might not be another train to London for a long time. The train that had once run along the valley had passed quite seldom, only four times a day in each direction. How would she know if the train she got into was the one for London? The sound of a car made her turn, but it wasn't one of their cars. It was red with a top made of cloth and it rattled. As it passed it left behind a smell she wasn't used to, metallic, acrid, smoky. One other person waited at the stop. An old woman. Lira had no idea who she was or where she came from. There were no houses until the village was reached. She felt vulnerable, exposed, the focus of invisible watching eyes as she came up to the stop. The woman looked at her and quickly looked away as if angry or disgusted. It took only one more car to pass for Lira to know she couldn't wait there, she couldn't stand on the verge and wait for the bus. What was she to do there? Stand and stare? Think of what? She couldn't bear her thoughts and her fear was like a mouthful of something too hot to swallow. If she waited here by the old woman with the downcast eyes, she would fall down or scream or cast herself onto the grassy bank and weep. An impulse to run came to her and she obeyed it. Without looking to see if anything was coming, she ran across the road and plunged in among the trees on the other side. The old woman stared after her. Lira hung on to the trunk of a tree. She hugged it, laying her face against the cool smooth bark. Why hadn't she thought of this before? It had come to her suddenly what she must do. If she had thought of this last evening, how happy the night would have been! Except that if she had, she would have left last night, gone when Eve first told her to go, fled in the darkness across the fields. A footpath ran close by here and through the pass. You couldn't really call it a pass, a pass was for mountains, but she had read the word and liked it. First of all she had to scramble up a hundred yards of hillside. The rumble of the bus, whose engine made a different noise from a car's, made her look down. Somehow she guessed it had arrived exactly on time. The old woman got on it and the bus moved off. Lira went on climbing. She didn't want to be there still when the cars came by. The footpath signpost found, she climbed the stile and took the path that ran close under the hedge. The sun was up now and feeling warm. It was a relief to be far from the road, to know that when they came back they would be down there below her. When the path came to an end she would find herself in a web of lanes, buried in banks, sheltered by hedges, far from thoroughfares that went anywhere. The nearest town was seven miles off. It ought not to take her more than half an hour from here and she would be with him soon after eight. She wouldn't let herself think he might have gone, he might have moved on, that, angry with her, he had abandoned her and fled. The birds had stopped singing. All was still and silent, her own footfalls soundless on the sandy track. The white and gold faces of chamomile flowers had appeared everywhere amid the grass and the old man's beard that had been clematis clung to the hedges in cascades of curly grey hair. She encountered her first animals, half a dozen red cows and two grey donkeys cropping the lush grass. A ginger cat, going home from a night's hunting, gave her a suspicious look. She had seen few cats, most of them in pictures, and the sight of this one was as pleasing as that of some exotic wild creature might be. With the bright morning and her marvellous decision, fear was fast ebbing away. She had only one isolated fear left, that he wouldn't be there. The path came to an end with another stile and she was out in a lane so narrow that if she had lain down and stretched her arms beyond her head, her hands might have touched one side and her feet the other. A small car could have got along it, tunnelling between the steep, almost vertical banks, green ramparts hung with the long leaves of plants whose flowers had bloomed and faded. The tree branches met and closed overhead. It was flat, even a little downhill, and she began to run. She ran from youth and an increasing sense of freedom but from hope and anxiety too. If he had gone, meaning to let her know tomorrow or the next day... Her hands in her pockets closed over and crushed the notes, two thin fistfuls--a lot or a little? She ran on through the green tunnel and a rabbit ran across ahead of her. A cock pheasant squawked and flapped, teetered across the lane, a poor walker and a worse flier, its two hens following it, scrabbling for the shelter of the bank. She knew about things like that, knew far better she suspected than most people, but would it suffice? Would it do until she could learn about the other things? The lane met another and another at a fork with a tiny triangle of green in the midst of it. She took the right-hand branch where the land began to fall still farther, but she had to go past one bend and then another before she saw the caravan below her. Her heart leapt. It was all right. He was there. It was parked, as it had been for the past few weeks, since midsummer, on a sandy space from which a bridlepath opened and followed the boundary between field and wood. Horses were supposed to use it, but Lira had never seen a horse or a rider on that path. She had never seen anyone there but Sean. His old Triumph Dolomite, like a car from a sixties film, was parked where it always was. The curtains were drawn at the caravan windows. He only got up early for work. She had been running, but she walked this last bit, she walked quite slowly up to the caravan, mounted the two steps, and taking her right hand from her pocket and the notes it had still been enclosing, brought it to the smooth surface of the door. Her hand poised, she hesitated. She drew in her breath. Knowing nothing but natural history and scraps of information from Victorian books, she nevertheless knew that love is unreliable, love is chancy, love lets you down. It came to her, this knowledge, from romantic dramas and love poetry, the sighs of the forsaken, the bitterness of the rejected, but from instinct too. Innocence is never ignorant of this, except in those nineteenthcentury novels, and then only sometimes. She thought of how he could kill her with the wrong word or the abstracted look, and then she expelled her breath and knocked on the door. His voice came from in there. "Yes? Who is it?" "Sean, it's me." "Lira?" Only amazed, only incredulous. He had the door open very quickly. He was naked, a blanket from the bed tied around him. Blinking at the light, he stared at her. If she saw a sign of dismay in his eyes, if he asked her what she was doing there, she would die, it would kill her. He said nothing. He took hold of her and pulled her inside, into the stuffy warm interior that smelled of man, and put his arms around her. It wasn't an ordinary hug but an all-enveloping embrace. He folded himself around her and held her inside himself as a hand might enfold a fruit or a cone, softly but intensely, sensuously appreciating. She had been going to explain everything and had foreseen herself telling her long tale, culminating in what had happened yesterday. It was a justification she had had in mind and a defence. But he gave her no chance to speak. Somehow, without words, he had made plain to her his great happiness at her untoward unexpected arrival and that he wanted her without explanation. As his arms relaxed their hold she lifted up her face to him, to look at his beautiful face, the eyes that changed his whole appearance when they grew soft with desire. But she was deprived of that too by his kiss, by his bringing his mouth to hers, so sweet-tasting and warm, blinding and silencing her. When the bed was pulled down out of the wall the caravan was all bed. Her face still joined to his, she wriggled out of her clothes, dropped them garment by garment onto the floor, stepped out of the tracksuit pants, kicked off her trainers. She put her arms up again to hold him as he had held her. He let her pull him down onto the bed. It was warm where he had left it. They lay side by side, her breasts soft and full against his chest, hip to hip, their legs entwined. He began to kiss her with the tip of his tongue, lightly, quickly. She laughed, turned her face. "I've run away! I've come to you for good." "You're a marvel," he said. "You're the greatest," and then, "What about her?" "I don't know. The police came, they came in two cars, they'll have taken her away." She appreciated his look of amazement, his interest. "I'd gone by then. Are you pleased?" "Am I pleased? I'm over the moon. But what d'you mean, the police? What police?" "I don't know. The police from the town." "What's she done?" She put her lips close to his ear. "Shall I tell you about it?" "Tell me the lot, but not now." He ran his hands down her body, down her back in a long slow sweep, and drew it close to him in a delicate arch. Without looking, she sensed him viewing her, appreciating her smoothness, her whiteness, her warmth. His hip touched hers, his thigh pressed against hers, warmth to warmth and skin to skin. "Don't talk now, sweetheart," he said. "Let's have this now."

SHE slept for a long time. She was very tired. Relief had come too and a reprieve. When she woke up, Sean was sitting on the bed, looking down at her. She put out her hand and took hold of his, clutching it tightly. Sean was wonderful to look at. She hadn't much to judge by, the painted man at Shrove, grainy monochrome images of actors in old movies, the postman, the oilman, Jonathan and Bruno, Matt, and a few others. His face was pale, the shape of the features sharply cut, his nose straight, his mouth red and full for a man's, dark eyes where she fancied she saw dreams and hopes, and eyebrows like the strokes of a Chinese painter's brush. She had seen a painting in the drawing room at Shrove with willow leaves and pink-breasted birds, a strange flower Eve said was a lotus, and letters made up of black curves like Sean's eyebrows. His hair was black as coal. Lira had read that, for as far as she knew she had never seen coal. "You've been asleep for six hours." He said it admiringly, as one acclaiming another for some particular prowess. "For a minute, when I woke up, I didn't know where I was. I've never been to sleep anywhere but in the gatehouse." "You're kidding," he said. "No, why would I? I've never slept away from home." She marvelled at it. "This is my home now." "You're the greatest," he said. "I'm lucky to have you, don't think I don't know it. I never thought you'd come, I thought, she'll never come and stay and be with me, she'll go and I'll lose her. Don't laugh, I know I'm a fool." "I wouldn't laugh, Sean. I love you. Do you love me?" "You know I do." "Say it, then." "I love you. There, is that okay? Haven't I proved I love you? I'd like to prove it all the time. Let me come in there with you, love, let's do it again, shall we? D'you know what I'd like best? To do it to you all the time, we wouldn't eat or sleep or watch TV or any of those things, we'd just do it. or ever and ever till we died. Wouldn't that be a lovely death?" For answer she jumped up, eluding his grasp, and shifted to the far corner of the bed. He had laid her clothes there, the garments shaken and carefully placed side by side, like Eve might. Quickly she pushed her legs into the tracksuit, pulled the top over her head. She said gravely, "I don't want to die. not that way or any other." A thought came that she had never considered before. "You wouldn't ever do it to me without me wanting it, would you, Sean?" He was angry for a moment. "Why d'you say things like that? Why did you ask me that? I don't understand you sometimes." "never mind. It was just an idea. Don't you ever have nasty ideas?" He shrugged, the light and the desire gone out of his face. "I'm going to make us a cup of tea. Or d'you fancy a Coke? I've got Coke and that's about all I have got. I haven't got nothing to eat, we shall have to go down to the shop." Anything she thought. I haven'tgot anything to eat. She wouldn't tell him this time. "Sean," she said, up in the corner, her back to the wall. "Sean, we'll have to go. I mean, leave here. We ought to put a good many miles between us and her." "Your mum?" "Why do you think the police came? I told you they came." As she spoke she knew he hadn't thought, he hadn't listened. Probably he hadn't heard her say that about the police. He had been consumed by desire, mad for her, closed to everything else. She knew how that felt, to be nothing but a deaf, blind, senseless thing swollen and thick with it, breathless and faint. "I told you the police came." "Did you? I don't know. What did they come for?" "Can I have that Coke?" She hesitated and made the hesitation long. "I'm supposed to have gone to her friend Heather. That's where she thought she'd sent me. But I came to you." "Tell me what she's done." His expression was a bit incredulous and a bit--well, indulgent, she thought the word was. He was going to get a surprise. It wasn't going to be what he thought--she searched her imagination--stealing something or doing things against the law with money. He sat down where he had sat before and became intent on her. That pleased her, his total absorption. "She killed someone," she said. "The day before yesterday. That's why they came and took her away and I'm afraid they'll want me, they'll want me to be a witness or something. They'll want to ask me questions and then maybe they'll try to put me somewhere to have people look after me. I've heard about that. I'm so young, I won't be seventeen till January." She had been wrong about his absorption. He hadn't been listening. Again he hadn't heard her, but for a different reason. He was staring at her with his mouth slightly open. As she noted this he curled his upper lip as people do when confronted by a horror. "What did you say?" "About what? My age? Being a witness?" He hesitated, seemed to swallow. "About her killing someone." "It was yesterday, after I came back from meeting you in the wood. Or I think so. I mean I didn't actually see it, but I know she killed him." "Come on, love." An awkward grin. "I don't believe you." It left her helpless, she had no idea how to respond to this. She drank a few mouthfuls out of the open triangle in the top of the can. Eve had once told her that when a cat is in doubt how to act, it waves the tip of its tail. She felt like a cat but with no tail to wave. He must make the next move, for she couldn't. He got up and took a few steps away. The caravan was too small for more than a few steps to be taken. She drank some more of her Coke, watching him. "Why did you say that," he said, "about her killing somebody? Was you kidding? Was you trying to be funny?" "It's true." "It can't be." "Look, Sean, I didn't make it up. It's why I came away. I didn't want them to take me and shut me up, make me live somewhere. I knew they'd come this time. This time they'd find out and it wouldn't take long. I was expecting them all night." His naturally pale face had gone whiter. She noticed and wondered why. "You mean she killed someone by accident, don't you?" "I don't understand what that means." It was a sentence she was often obliged to utter since she had been with him. "She was shooting birds and she shot someone by mistake, is that it? You told me she wouldn't never kill birds or rabbits, you told me that when we first met." Only the last four words really registered with her. They made her smile, remembering. She slithered down the bed, jumped off, and put her arms around him. "Wasn't it lovely that I met you and you met me? It was the best thing that ever happened to me." This time it was he who pulled away from the embrace. "Yes, love, okay, it was great. But you've got to tell me. About this killing, this is serious, right? What happened? Was it some guy poaching?" "No," she said, "no, you don't understand." "Too bloody right I don't and I won't if you don't tell me." "I'll try." She sat down and he sat down and she held his hand. "She murdered him, Sean. People do do that, you know." It seemed a wild and curious statement for her to be making. "She murdered him because she wanted to be rid of him. She wanted him out of the way, it doesn't matter why, it's not important now." This time he didn't say he disbelieved her but, "I can't credit it." What had Eve said? "Then you must just accept." "Who did she murder?" She could tell from his tone that he still thought she was lying. That made her impatient. "It doesn't matter. A man. No one you know. Sean, it's the truth, you have to believe me." She was learning truths of her own. "I can't be with someone who thinks I'm telling him lies." From delighted laughter, she was near to tears. She sought for a way out. "I can't prove it. What can I do to make you believe it?" He said in a low voice, "I sort of do believe you--now." "I'll tell you all about it." She was eager. She took hold of his shoulders and brought her face close up to his. "I'll tell you everything, if you like, from when I was small, from when I can first remember." He kissed her. When her face was as close to his as that, he couldn't resist kissing her. His tongue tasted of the caramel sweetness of Coke as she supposed hers must. They were on the bed, that was where you sat in the caravan, and her body grew soft, sliding backward, sinking into the mattress, she was wanting him as much as she had when she first arrived that morning. He pulled her up, grasping her hands. "I want you to tell me, Lira. I want to know everything about you. But not now. now tell me what your mum did." Being frustrated made her sulky. "What's the good? You won't believe it." "I will, I've said so." "I think we ought to leave, we ought to be on our way, not sitting here talking." "Don't you worry yourself about that, I'll see to all that. You tell me about your mum and this man." She saw it in his eyes as the idea came to him. "Did he try raping her, was that it?" "He was teaching her to shoot pigeons with a shotgun. He was out there shooting and she said, show me how." "You've got to be joking." "It's the truth. If you're going to say that, I won't tell you." "Right, then. Go on." "I hate shooting birds. I hate people shooting anything, rabbits, squirrels, anything, it's wrong. And I thought Eve my mother--I thought she did too. She said so, she taught me to think like that. But she told him the pigeons were eating her vegetables and she asked him to show her how and he said he would. You see, I think he'd have done anything she asked, Sean." "She's an attractive woman." "More attractive than I am?" "Don't be bloody ridiculous. Was you watching all this?" "I'd been in the wood with you," Lira said. "They didn't see me. I came up through the garden and they were on the grass where the new trees are. Sound carries terrific distances there, you know. Even when people are speaking softly you can hear them. I saw the two of them with just the one gun and I thought she must be telling him not to shoot the pigeons. He was allowed to, you know, because though pheasant shooting doesn't start till October you can shoot pigeons when you like. Poor things! What did it matter to him, he wasn't a farmer, they weren't his cabbages they were eating, and even if they were, the pigeons have got to live, haven't they? "I thought, good for her, she's going to stop him, but she didn't. She was out there with him for a shooting lesson. I'd heard her talking about it with him, but I didn't think she was serious. When I saw them I asked myself, what on earth is she doing? He started showing her things about the gun and she was looking and then he handed it to her. "I didn't want to see the birds killed. I started to go back toward the gatehouse. Then the shot came and immediately afterward this screaming choking noise. So I turned around and ran across the lawn and there she was looking at him where he lay. She wasn't holding the gun, she'd dropped it, she was looking down at him and all the blood on him." Sean had put up his hand to cover his mouth. His eyes had grown very big. He took his hand away, pushing at his cheek in a curious wiping movement. "What did you do?" he said in a small voice. "I didn't do anything. I went home. She didn't tell the police and I didn't, so I think Matt must have. You know Matt?" "Of course I do." "He was there, up by the house. Only I don't think he saw any more than I did. He guessed." "But you said the police had only just come, they were coming when you left--when? A couple of hours ago?" "They came last evening. They didn't see me. You see, they didn't come to the gatehouse, not then. First of all, cars came and a black van to take away the body. I watched it all from my bedroom window. Eve told me to stay there and not come out, not to let anyone see me. I didn't want them to see me. She went up to Shrove and I think the policemen talked to her there. They talked to her and they talked to Matt and Matt's wife. "She knew they'd come back, so she said I must go. For my own protection, she said. I ran away to you. That's it." "That's all of it?" "not all, Sean. It'll take me a long time to tell you all of it." "I'll get the van fixed up to the tow bar," he said. She went outside with him. The day was warm and sultry, two in the afternoon, and the sun a puddle of light in a white sky. Watching him, she picked blackberries off the hedge and ate them by the handful. She was enormously hungry. The battered Dolomite shifted the caravan with the slow weary competence of an old cart-horse. It groaned a bit and expelled a lot of black exhaust. Lira got into the passenger seat and banged the door. Car and caravan lurched off the grass verge onto the harder surface of the lane. "Where shall we go?" "We have to go where they'll let me park the van. Before you come I was thinking of trying Vanner's. They're wanting pickers for the Coxes. We could both of us do that." "Coxes won't be ready till the third week of September," she said, always glad to show off something she knew and he might not. "Anyway, how far is it?" "Twenty-five miles, thirty. Far enough for you?" "I don't know. What else can you do?" He laughed. "Electrical work, sort of, put washers on taps, grind knives, I'm halfway to a motor mechanic, wash your car, do your garden--as you should know--clean windows, most things, you name it." "Why apples, then?" "Apples make a change. I reckon I always do pick apples in September and cherries in July." "I'm hungry," she said, "I'm so bloody hungry." "Don't swear, Lira." "You do. Who d'you think I got it from?" "It's different for me. You're a woman. I don't like to hear a woman swear." She lifted her shoulders, the way Eve did. "I'm tremendously hungry. Can we buy some food?" "Yeah, we can get take away." He looked at her, remembered and explained, "Stuffthey've cooked for you in a shop, right? Or we'll find a cafe, maybe a Little Chef if there's one on the A road." She was no longer afraid. Fear might not be cancelled, but it was postponed. The prospect of going into a cafe excited her. And she'd be with Sean. Shops she had been in, one or two over the years, but a real restaurant, if that was the word, that was very different. She remembered what she had taken with her when she left the gatehouse. "I've got money. I've got a hundred pounds." "For Christ's sake," he said. "It's in the van, in my coat." "Did you nick it?" His tone was stern. "Of course not. Eve gave it to me." He said nothing. She looked out of the window at the passing countryside, all of it new, all uncharted for her. They drove through a village as the church clock struck three, and ten minutes later they were in a sizable town with parking in the marketplace. On either side of the carpark the roads that enclosed it were lined with shops. She had seen something like this before, though not here, the dry cleaner's, the building society, the estate agent, the Chinese restaurant, the Oxfam shop, the sandwich bar, the building society, the insurance company, the Tandoori House, the bank, the pub, the card shop, the estate agent. An arch, in pink glass and gold metal, led into a deserted hall of shops. Perhaps all towns were like this, all the same inside, perhaps it was a rule. Sean's practised eye quickly summed up the situation. "The cafes are closed, it's too late. Pubs are meant to stay open till all hours, but they don't never seem to. I can go get us pie and chips or whatever." Her hunger was greater than her disappointment. "Whatever you like. Do you want some money?" She said it cheerfully, trying to strike the right note, having never said it before. Yet for some reason he was offended. "I hope I'll never see the day when I've got to live off my girlfriend." Once he had gone she got out of the car. She stretched her arms above her head, tasting freedom. It was heady stuff, for something was making her shiver and it couldn't be the day, which was as warm as high summer. She had never felt like this before, dizzy, faint was perhaps the word, as if she might fall. She opened the door of the caravan and clambered up inside. Five minutes' sitting down and a few deep breaths and she felt better. The bed was stowed away in the wall, the sheets and blankets folded, and the table down, ready for a meal by the time Sean came back. The packages he was carrying had grease seeping through the wrapping paper and gave off a pungent smell of deep frying. She had been so hungry and the smell from the chips and Cornish pasties he unwrapped was so enticing, but she couldn't help herself. Without warning to herself or him she burst into violent tears. He held her in his arms close to him, stroking her hair while she sobbed. Her body shook and her heart was pounding. "It's all right, it's all right, sweetheart. You've had a shock, it's delayed shock, you'll be okay. I'll look after you." He soothed her. He stroked her hair and when she was just crying, not sobbing and shrieking anymore, wiped her eyes with his fingers, as gently as a woman, as gently as Eve when she was being gentle. As she quietened he did something she loved him to do, began combing her hair with his own comb, which had thick blunt teeth. The comb ran smoothly through the length of her long dark hair, from crown to tip, and as he paused she felt his fingers just touch and then linger on her neck and the lobe of her ear. She shivered, not this time from shock or strangeness. "Give us a kiss," he said. It was more enthusiastic than he had bargained for, a deep sensuous kiss full of controlled energy now released. He laughed at her. "Let's eat. I thought you was hungry." "Oh, I am. I'm starving." "You could've fooled me." This was her first Cornish pasty. She had no means of knowing whether it was a good one or passable or bad, but she liked it. In the past she had never been allowed to eat with her fingers. There had been many gently enforced rules and much benevolent constraint. "When we get wherever we're going," she said, "I'll tell you the story of my life." "Right." "I don't know, but I don't think there've been many lives like mine." "You've got a long way to go with it yet, like maybe seventy years." "Can I have the last chip? I'll tell you from back as far as I can remember. That's when I was four and that's when she killed the first one." She pulled a length from the toilet roll he kept by the bed to use as tissues and wiped her mouth. When she turned back to him to say she was ready, they could be off as soon as he liked, she saw that he was staring at her and the look on his face was aghast. One of the first things she could remember was the train. It was summer and she and Mother had gone for a walk in the fields when they heard the train whistle. The single track ran down there in the valley between the river and lower slopes of the high hills. It was a small branch line and later on, when she was older, Mother told her it was the most beautiful train journey in the British Isles. Her eyes shone when she said it. But on that afternoon when Lira was four there were not many passengers and those there were couldn't have been looking out to appreciate the view, or else they were all looking out the other side at the high hills, for when Mother waved and she waved no one waved back. The train jogged along not very fast and disappeared into the round black tunnel that pierced the hillside. Lira suspected that she and Mother hadn't been there very long the day she saw her first train. If they had been, she would have seen a train before. It was possible they had been at the gatehouse for only a few days. Where they had come from before that she had had no idea then nor for a long time to come. She could remember nothing from before that day, not a face nor a place, a voice nor a touch. There was only Mother. There was only the gatehouse where they lived and the arched gateway with the tiny one-roomed house on the other side and Shrove House in the distance. It was half-concealed by tall and beautiful trees, its walls glimpsed mysteriously and enticingly between their trunks. When Mother read stories to her and there was a palace in them, as there often was, she would say, "Like Shrove, that's what a palace is, a house like Shrove." But all Lira had seen of the real Shrove until she was nearly five and the leaves had turned brown and blown off the trees, were a dreamy greyness, a sheet of glittering glass, a gleam of suntouched slate. Later on she saw it in its entirety, the stone baluster that crowned it, broken by a crest-filled pediment, the many windows, the soaring steps, and the statues that stood in its alcoves. She was aware even then of the way it seemed to bask, to sit and smile as if pleased with itself, to recline smiling in the sun. nearly every day Mother went up to the house that was like a palace in a fairy tale, sometimes for several hours, sometimes for no more than ten minutes, and when she went she locked Lira up in her bedroom. The gatehouse was the lodge of Shrove House. Later on, when Lira was older, Mother told her it was built in the Gothic style and not nearly so old as the house itself. It was supposed to look as if it dated from the Middle Ages and had a turret with crenellations around its top and a tall peaked gable. Out of the side of the gable came the arch, which went over the top of a pair of gates and came down on the other side to join up with the little house that looked like a miniature castle with its slit windows and studded door. The gates were of iron, were always kept open, and had SHROVE HOUSE written on them in curly letters. The gatehouse and the arch and the little castle were made of small red bricks, the dark russet colour of rosehips. Lira and Mother had two bedrooms upstairs, a living room and a kitchen downstairs, and an outside lavatory. That was all. Lira's was the bedroom in the turret with a view over their garden and the wood and Shrove park and everything beyond. She disliked being locked in her bedroom, but she wasn't frightened, and as far as she could remember she didn't protest. Mother gave her things to do. She had started teaching Lira to read, so she gave her rag books with big letters printed on the cloth pages. She also gave her paper and two pencils and a book to rest on. Lira had a baby bottle with orange juice in it because if she had had a glass or a cup she would have spilled the juice on the floor. Sometimes she had two biscuits, just two, or an apple. Lira didn't know then what Mother did in Shrove House, but later on she found out because Mother began taking her too and she was no longer locked in her bedroom--or only when Mother went shopping. But that was more than six months later, after it had all happened and the winter had come, when snow covered the hillsides and the only trees to keep their leaves were the huge blue cedars and the tall black firs. Before that, in the summertime, the dogs came. Except in pictures Lira had never seen a dog or a cat or a horse or any animals but wild ones. She thought these two came the day after she and Mother had walked in the fields and seen the first train, but it may have been some other day, a week or even a month later. It wasn't easy to remember time spans from so far back. The dogs belonged to Mr. Tobias. It wasn't he who brought them but another man. Lira had never seen Mr. Tobias but only heard about him, and she wasn't to see him for a long, long time. The man who brought the dogs came in a kind of small truck with a barrier like a white wire fence across the back inside to keep the dogs off the front seats. His name was Matt. He was a short, squarish man with big shoulders who looked very strong and his hair grew up from his broad red forehead like the bristles on a brush. "They are Doberman pinschers," Mother said. She always explained everything slowly and carefully. "In Germany, which is another country a long way away, they used to be trained as police dogs. But these are pets." She said to Matt, who was staring at her in a strange way, "What are their names?" "This one's Heidi and he's Ruth." "Are they nice, friendly dogs?" "They'll be okay with you and the kiddy. They'll never attack women, they've been trained that way. I'd be up the nearest tree myself if someone called out Kill!" when they're around." "Really? Mr. Tobias didn't say." "Thought you might say no to looking after them, I daresay." He gazed around him, stared at the high hills beyond the valley as if they were the Himalayas. "Bit isolated down here, aren't you? not what you'd call much life going on." "It's what I like." "It takes all sorts, I suppose, though I'd have thought a smashing-looking girl like yourself'd want something a bit more lively. Bright lights, eh, bit of dancing and the movies? You wouldn't have such a thing as a cup of tea going, I daresay?" "No, I wouldn't," said Mother and she took the dog leashes in one hand and Lira's hand in the other, went into the gatehouse, and shut the door. The man outside on the step said something Lira couldn't catch but which Mother said was a dirty word and never to say it. They heard his van start up with a roar as if it was angry. The dogs started licking Lira, they licked her hands, and when she stroked them, they licked her face. Their coats felt like nothing she had ever touched before, shiny as leather, soft as fur, smooth as the crown of her own head when Mother had just washed her hair. She said to Mother, "Heidi and Ruth are black lined with brown," and Mother had laughed and said that was right, that was just how they looked. "You can't remember all those things your mum and him said word for word, can you?" said Sean. "not really. But it was like that. I know all the kinds of things she says and ever could say. I know her so well, you see, it's as if I know her perfectly because I don't know anyone else." "How about me? You know me." She could tell she had hurt him and tried to make amends. "I know you now. I didn't then." "Go on, then. What happened with the dogs?" "Eve was looking after them for Mr. Tobias. He had to go away, he went to see his mother in France, and he couldn't take the dogs for some reason." "Quarantine." "What?" "When he come back in he'd have to put the pair of them in quarantine for six months. That means they'd be in like kennels. It's the law." "I expect that was it." "Why couldn't this Matt look after them wherever it was he lived?" "In the Lake District. He had a job, he was working all day. He couldn't take them out for exercise or wouldn't. Anyway, Eve wanted to do this for Mr. Tobias, she wanted to please him. "We were supposed to have them for two or three weeks, I can't exactly remember. I loved them, I wanted us to have a dog after they'd gone back, but Eve wouldn't. She said Mr. Tobias wouldn't like it." "So it wasn't them she killed?" "I told you, it was a person, a man." Lira never knew who he was or what it was he had tried to do. now that twelve years had passed and she was grown up, doing the thing that grown-ups did herself, she could guess. It was she who saw him first. Mother was down at Shrove and she was locked up in her bedroom. Where the dogs were she didn't know. Probably in the little castle where they slept at night or even at Shrove, for in a sort of way it was their house. It belonged to Mr. Tobias, who owned them. Mother had been gone a long time. Who could say now how long those long times actually were? It's different when you're four. Half an hour? An hour? Or only ten minutes? She had read the letters in the rag book and made them into words, "dog," "cat," "bed," "cot." The baby bottle had been sucked dry and the pencil had scribbled over every single sheet of paper. She climbed upon the bed and crawled on all fours over to the window. The room had six sides and three windows but was too small for the bed to be anywhere but pushed against the wall with the window that had the best view. The sun was shining, sparkling on the river, and the wind was blowing the clouds and making their shadows run across the slopes of the high hills. A train whistled from somewhere out of sight and came into her view from out of the tunnel. She climbed onto a chair to look out of the window that overlooked the gateway and the little castle. There was never anyone there. There was never anyone to be seen but Mother, the milkman and the postman in the morning, and Mr. Frost on his tractor on certain afternoons. Sometimes a car came down on its way to the bridge. Mostly the lane was empty and all that showed its face in the barn on the other side was the white owl, so seeing the man made her jump. He was holding on to one of the gates and looking toward Shrove, a tall man in blue jeans and a pullover and brown leather jacket and with a canvas bag on his back. Suddenly he looked up in the direction of her window and saw her there between the curtains. She knew he saw her and it frightened her. She couldn't have said why it did, but it was something to do with his face, not a nice face, not the kind she had ever seen before. It was masked in yellow-brown hair all over it, great bushes of curly hair from which eyes stared and the nose poked out. Later she wondered if she had thought the face not nice because of the beard, which was new to her. She never saw another until the day Bruno and Mother took her shopping in the town. She was afraid he was coming to the gatehouse and would get in and come to get her. Ducking down from the window and wriggling across the floor and hiding under the bed couldn't stop that and she knew it. She knew it even then. Under the bed she didn't feel safe, only a bit safer, and she thought it might be a little while before he found her. Mother had locked the door of her room and the front door of the gatehouse, but that didn't make Lira think the man wouldn't be able to find her. A long time went by and Mother came back. She pulled Lira out and hugged her and said she hadn't seen any man and if there was one he was probably harmless. If he wasn't she'd set Heidi and Ruth on him. "How will you know?" Lira said. "I know everything." Lira believed that was true. Late that afternoon there was a knock at the front door and when Mother went to answer it the man with the beard was on the step, asking for a glass of water. Lira thought Mother would say no, she hung on to Mother's skirt, peering around her until Mother said to let go, not to be so stupid. The man said he hoped he wasn't a nuisance. "Go and fetch some water, please, Lira," Mother said. "not a glass, a mug. You know how to do it." Lira knew. In some ways Mother had brought her up to be independent. Only in some, of course. For a long while she had fetched her own water when she wanted a drink, climbing up onto the chair by the sink, taking a mug from the shelf, turning on the tap, and filling the mug and then being very careful to turn the tap off again. She did this now, filling the mug that had a picture on it of a lady in a crown, and carrying it back to the front door. Some of it spilled on the way, but she couldn't help that. The man drank the water. She saw so few people she noticed everything about the ones she did see. He held the mug in his left hand, not his right like Lira and Mother did, and on the third finger of that hand was a wide gold ring. That was the first time she had ever seen a ring on anyone's hand, for Mother wore none. He said to Lira, "Thank you, darling," and gave her back the mug. "Is there anywhere around here doing B and B?" he said to Mother. "Doing what?" "B and B. Bed and breakfast." "There's nowhere around here doing anything," Mother said, sounding glad to say it. She took a step outside, making him step backward, and spread out her arms. "What you see is what you get." "Best press on, then." Mother made no answer. She did what Lira didn't like her doing to her. It was a way she had of lifting her shoulders and dropping them again while looking hard into the other person's eyes, but not smiling or showing anything. Until then Lira hadn't seen Eve do it to anyone but herself. From an upstairs window, the one in Mother's room in the gable which overlooked the lane this time, they watched the man go. It was only from here that you could see where the lane ran along past the wood on its way to the bridge in one direction, and in the other to peter out into first a track and then a footpath. The man walked slowly, as if his pack felt heavier with each step he took. At the point where the lane wound and narrowed he paused and looked back in the direction of Shrove or perhaps just at the high hills. They lost him among the trees, but they went on watching and after a little while saw him again, by now a small figure plodding along the footpath under the maple hedge. After that it became a game between the two of them, each claiming to be able to see him still. But when Lira got excited, Mother lifted her down from the window and they went downstairs to get on with Lira's reading lesson. An hour every afternoon was spent on teaching her to read and an hour every morning teaching her writing. The lessons were soon to get much longer, with sums as well and drawing, but at the time the man with the beard came they lasted just two hours each day. Every morning very early, long before the writing lesson, they took the dogs out. Heidi and Ruth had been used to living indoors, so couldn't have kennels outside, which Mother would have thought best, but slept in the little castle. Lira had never been in there before the dogs came, but Mother had a key and took her in with her and she saw a room shaped like her bedroom with six sides and narrow windows with arched tops, only these had no glass in them. The floor was of stone with straw on it and two old blankets and two old cushions for the dogs. Ruth and Heidi bounded about and nuzzled her and licked her face, making noises of relief and bliss at being released. Lira had thought how horrible it would be if they met the man with the beard while they were out in the water meadows. But they met no one, they hardly ever did, only a vixen going home with a rabbit in her mouth. Mother ordered the dogs to sit, to be still, and they obeyed her. She told Lira about foxes, how they lived and raised their young in earths, how people hunted them, and that this was wrong. That might have been the morning she saw her first kingfisher. It was about that time, she couldn't be sure. Mother said kingfishers were not common and when you saw one you should phone up and tell the County Kingfisher Trust. So it must have been that morning, for after they got home and the dogs were back in the house next door, Mother locked her in her bedroom and went over to Shrove to phone. Lira read the words in the rag book and drew a picture of Mother on one of the sheets of paper. It might have been another day she did that, but she thought it was the Day of the Kingfisher. From about that time she got it into her head that all men had fair hair and all women dark. The man who delivered the oil was fair and so were the postman and Matt and the man with the beard, but Mother and she were dark. She drew a picture of Mother with her long dark hair down her back and her long coloured skirt and her sandals. It was just finished when Mother unlocked the door and let her out. There was something different in the living room, Lira spotted it at once. It was hanging up on the wall over the fireplace, a long dark brown tube with a wooden handle. She had never seen anything like it before, but she knew Mother must have brought it back from Shrove. "It was a gun," said Sean. "A shotgun. There were a lot of guns at Shrove. I began thinking about it later--I mean years later--and I think that man had really frightened her. Frightened is probably not the word, she doesn't get frightened. Let's say, alerted her to danger." "Yeah, maybe she reckoned she should never have said that about what you see is what you get. I mean, like, you know, not being no one else around for miles." "I expect so." "But he'd gone, hadn't he?" "He came back." It stayed light in the evenings until nearly ten, but Lira was put to bed at seven. She had her tea, always wholemeal bread with an egg or a piece of cheese. Cake and sweets were not allowed, and years passed before she found out what they were. After the bread she had fruit, as much as she wanted, and a glass of milk. The milkman came three times a week, another man with fair hair. Mother read her a story when tea was over, Hans Andersen or Charles Kingsley, books borrowed from the library at Shrove. Then came her bath. They had a bath in the kitchen with a wooden lid on it. She wasn't locked in her bedroom at night, she was never locked in except when Mother went to Shrove or shopping in the town. When Lira couldn't get to sleep she knew it was useless calling out or crying, for Mother took no notice, and if she came downstairs Mother would shrug at her and give her one of those wordless looks before taking her back up again. So all she could do was wander about upstairs, looking out of the windows, hoping to see something, though she hardly ever did. If Mother knew Lira went into her room and played with her things, she gave no sign of it. Mother read books in the evenings, Lira knew that, or listened to music coming into her ears through wires from a little square black box. In Mother's room she opened the cupboard door and examined all the long bright-coloured skirts that Mother wore and the other things she never wore, long scarves, a couple of big straw hats, a yellow gown with a flounce around the hem. She looked in her jewel case, which was kept in the dressing table drawer, and could have told anyone precisely what the case held, a long string of green beads, two pairs of earrings, a hair comb made of brown mottled stuffwith brilliant shiny bits set in it, a brooch of carved wood and another of mother-of-pearl. Mother had told her that was what it was when she wore the brooch just as she told her the beads were jade and the two pairs of earrings made of gold. That evening the green beads and one pair of earrings were missing because Mother was wearing them. Lira closed the box, went back to her own room, and knelt upon the bed, looking out of the window. The gatehouse garden, in which Mother later on grew peas and beans and lettuces, soft fruit on bushes and strawberries under nets, was mostly bare earth at that time. Mother had been working on it that day, digging it over with a fork. There was just one tree, a single cherry tree, growing out of the soft red-brown soil, and two long grass paths. Lira shifted her gaze upward, waiting for the last southbound train, which would go through a bit after eight-thirty. She hadn't known about north and south and eight-thirty then, though Mother was teaching her to tell the time and to understand a map, but she knew the last train would come out from the tunnel while it was still light but after sunset. The sky was red all over, though you couldn't see where the sun went down from her room. Once it had set, the high hills went grey and the woods changed from green to a soft dark blue. The train whistled at the tunnel mouth and came chugging down. Lights were on inside, though there was a lot of light outside still. It would stop at the station, at Ring Valley Halt, but you couldn't see the station from here. In the distance, the train grew very small, long and wriggling like one of the millipedes that lived near the back door. After it was gone there would be nothing more to be seen from this window. Lira scrambled off the bed and went on tiptoe back across the landing to Mother's room. From here, you could see the bats that lived in the barn roof on the other side of the lane and swooped after moths and gnats. Sometimes she saw the great cream-coloured owl with a face like a cat's in a book. She had never seen a real cat. It was a little too early for owls this evening. Down below her, in the little patch of front garden, as twilight came, the colour began to fade from the red and pink geraniums and the tobacco flowers began to gleam more whitely. If the window had been open she could have smelled them, for their scent came out at dusk. Just as Lira was thinking nothing would happen, it would get dark without anything happening, the front door opened and Mother came out in her green and purple and blue skirt and purple top, her green beads and gold earrings, with a black shawl wrapped around her. She opened the gate in the wall that ran around the garden, unlocked the door of the little castle, and the dogs came rushing out. Mother said, "Quiet. Sit," and they sat, though trembling and quivering, Lira could see, hating this enforced stillness. Mother said, "Off you go," and the pair of them began gambolling about, jumping up and trying to lick her, leaving offwhen she didn't respond. She walked around the side of the gatehouse out of sight, the dogs following, but Lira knew she wouldn't go far because she never did in the evenings. Lira ran back into her own bedroom, climbed onto the bed, and pressed her face against the window. Outside a bat swooped, so close that she jerked her face back, though she knew the glass was there. Ruth and Heidi were in the back garden playing, grappling with each other and making mock growling noises and rolling over and over. Mother wasn't with them, Mother must have come back into the house. Back on the landing, Lira listened, but she couldn't hear Mother down there. She ran into Mother's room and up to the window. Mother was sitting on the wall, listening to the music coming out of the band around her head and holding the little black box in her hands. Where were the dogs? No longer in the back garden, she discovered as she bounced back onto her own bed. They must have gone out through the opening in the fence and into the wood, as they sometimes did. But they were well-trained, they always came back at a call. It would get dull now if nothing more happened than Mother sitting on the wall, waiting for the dogs to finish their play. Lira never considered getting back into bed and trying to sleep as an alternative to this roving from room to room. Either she fell asleep when she happened to be on her own bed or Mother found her asleep on the landing floor or in the chair by the front bedroom window. She always woke in her own bed in the mornings. But she didn't want to be there now, she wasn't tired. Perhaps Mother had decided to do something different. Lira ran back to check. Mother was still there, still listening. It was nearly dark but not too dark to see the man with the beard come along the lane from the bridge direction. The man looked just the same except that this time he hadn't got his backpack with him. His footsteps made no sound on the sandy floor. Mother wouldn't have heard them if they had with that thing on her head and the music that was called Wagner flowing into her ears. Lira began to be frightened. Mother had said the dogs would protect them but the dogs weren't there, the dogs were a long way away in the wood. Lira couldn't look. Why hadn't she banged on the window to warn Mother? She hadn't thought of that till afterward. The first time the man came she had got under the bed, the second time she had fetched him a drink of water. This time she put her hands over her eyes. They were talking, she could hear their voices but not what they said. Very cautiously she parted her fingers and peeped through them, but they had gone, Mother and the man, they had come too near the gatehouse for her to see or else they had walked around the back. She ran to the back and as she jumped on her bed, Mother screamed. "What was he doing to her?" Sean said. "She never told me, she never said a word about it, not then and not later. I know now, of course I do. When she screamed I was so frightened I covered up my ears, but I could still hear, the window was open. I thought the man would catch her and--oh, make her his prisoner or something--and then come and get me." "You were only a little kid." "And there was no one else for miles and miles. You know that. There never was. If there had been it couldn't have happened, none of it could." It wasn't dark but the beginning of the long midsummer twilight. When Mother's scream died away she heard the man laugh but she couldn't hear what it was he whispered. She looked out of the window, she had to look, and Mother was on the grass path and the man was on top of her. He was trying to hold her there with one hand and with the other he was undoing his jeans. Lira was so frightened she couldn't make a sound or do anything. But Mother could. Mother twisted her head around under the man's arm that pinned her neck and bit his hand. He jumped and pulled up his hand, shouting that word Matt had used on the doorstep, and Mother screamed out, "Heidi, Ruth! Kill! Kill!" The dogs came out of the wood. They came running as if they had been waiting for the summons, as if they had been sitting among the trees listening for just that command. In the half-dark they no longer looked like nice friendly dogs that licked your face but hounds of hell, though that was before Lira had ever heard of hounds of hell. They didn't jump at the man, they flew at him. All eight powerful black legs took off and they were airborne. Their mouths gaped open and Lira could see their white shining teeth. The man had started to get to his feet, but he fell over on his back when the dogs came at him. He covered his face with his hands and rolled this way and that. Heidi had half his great yellow beard in her jaws and Ruth was on him biting his neck. The dogs made a noise, a rough, grumbling, snorting sound. Mother jumped up lightly as if nothing had happened and dusted down her skirt with her hands. She stood in that way she had, with her hands on her hips, the shawl hanging loose from her shoulders, and she watched them calmly, the dogs savaging the man and the man screaming and cursing. Then, after a little while, she said, "All right, dogs, that'll do. Quiet now. Still." They obeyed her at once. It was clever the way they stopped the moment she spoke. Ruth had some of the man's blood on his face and Heidi a mouthful of beard. The man rolled over again, his head on his arms, but he had stopped screaming, he didn't make a sound. Mother bent over him, looking closely, she didn't touch him with her hands but prodded him with one small, delicate foot. Lira made a little sound to herself up in her bedroom, a whimper like a dog whining behind a closed door. Sean said hoarsely, "Was he dead?" "Oh, no, he wasn't dead." "What did she do?" "nothing. She just looked at him." "Didn't she get help? There was a phone in Shrove House, you said." "Of course she didn't get help," Lira said impatiently. Mother took hold of the dogs by their collars and put them in the little castle for the night. Lira saw her do that from the other window and heard her come into their own house and shut the front door after her. She went out onto the landing and listened. In the sitting room Mother was moving a chair about and it sounded as if she had climbed on the chair and jumped off it. Lira scrambled across the bed to have another look at the man on the grass. He was still there but not lying face-downward anymore. It was really dark now, too dark to see much but the shape of the man sitting there with his head on his knees and his arms up around his head. Soon he would get up and go away and leave them and they'd be safe. She peered out through the dark, hoping for that to happen. Suddenly she could see the man very clearly in a big oblong of light. The back door was open and light was coming from the kitchen. She wrinkled up her nose and made a face because the man's face and beard were a mass of blood. Her knees had looked like that when she fell over and hurt herself on the gravel. Mother walked out into the light and pointed something she had in her arms and there was a tremendous explosion. The man tumbled over backward and jerked a bit and shuddered and lay still. In the little castle the dogs set up a wild barking. Mother came back into the house and shut the door and the light went out. In the late afternoon, going by the lanes instead of the A road, Sean and Lira reached Vanner's fruit farm. This was orchard country, acre after acre of close-pruned stubby apple trees in long lines and then acre after acre of Cornice pears and Louise Bonnes. The big wooden crates that would take the apples were stacked on top of one another in the corners of orchards. Lira saw women mounted on steps picking the big green Cornice. Very few of the pears had been left to fall, but the apple crop, Discovery and Jonagold, had been a heavy one, and under the trees the ground was scarlet with abandoned fruit. Sean took the left-hand turn into Vanner's land. He had been there before and knew where to go. The long straight macadamized roadway was bounded on either side by lines of alders, neat quick-growing trees to make high hedges. He had to pull in to let a car with its soft top down go past in the other direction, coming from the farm shop. A woman was driving. She had shiny blond hair and red lipstick on, gold earrings and red varnish on her nails, and Lira stared at her, fascinated. "You're not still thinking women are all dark and men are all fair, are you, love?" "Of course I'm not. I was only four." "Because there's other ways of telling the difference." He put his hand in her lap and moved the fingers into her crotch. "Bet you can't talk while I'm doing that. Go on, try. I bet you can't." "I can do that too," said Lira, reaching for him. "It'll be worse for you, you won't be able to drive." He laughed and gasped and grabbed her hand. "Better leave off till we get there or I'll have to stop the van and we'll cause an obstruction." The parking place for caravans was in a remote spot where the orchards ended and the strawberry fields began. The strawberries were long over, the people who came to pick their own departed, and the fields a desolate waste of brown tendrils and dying leaves. A line of extremely tall Lombardy poplars on a high bank divided these fields from the Discovery orchard, and under the shadow of the poplars, on a rutted area of dried mud and scrubby grass, stood a sign that said, PICKERS' Varus PARK HERE. Beside the sign was a water tap, and an arrow spraypainted on cardboard pointed to the waste disposal. Other pickers there might be, but there was only one caravan. It was parked at the far end up against the bank and looked as if no one was living in it or had lived in it for a long time. Its door and windows were shut and its blinds down. Just the same, Sean parked his car and van as far away from it as he could. He didn't uncouple the van from the car or get the generator going or fill the water tanks. He and Lira, without a word, with scarcely an exchanged glance, got out of the car, went into the van, and made love. They delayed for just the time it took to pull the bed down. "I tell you what," said Sean, when it was finished and she was lying in his arms, warm and damp and sighing with pleasure. "now we're here and got a base, you can get yourself to the family planning or whatever and go on the Pill. Then I won't have to keep on using these things, I hate them." She looked up at him, uncomprehending. When he had explained she said, "You'll have to come with me, then. I won't know what to do." "Haven't you never been to the doctor's?" He would be hurt if she said, "Haven't you ever been," so she didn't say it. "Eve took me a couple of times. It's lucky I'm healthy. She said I had my injections when I was a baby." "Yeah, okay, but injections won't stop you getting yourself pregnant." "You getting me pregnant," she said. He laughed. He liked her being a bit sharp with him. Hugging her tight, he said, "D'you mind talking about it or is this the wrong time? I mean, you know, what happened after your mum shot the guy with the beard." "Why would I mind?" She couldn't see why she would. Eve said people liked talking about themselves better than anything and now, savouring the pleasure of it for the first time, she understood this was right. Thinking about it, going over it all, picking the bits to tell him and the bits not to, she enjoyed very much. It was her life and she was beginning to see what an extraordinary one it had so far been. "I started crying, I couldn't help it. I lay on the bed sobbing and screaming." "I'm not surprised." "No, well, Eve came up and hugged me. She got me a drink of water and told me not to cry, not to worry, everything was going to be all right. The man had gone away, she'd blown him away." "Christ." "She didn't mean me to think she'd killed him. She didn't know I'd been watching. I didn't tell her. I was only four but somehow I knew not to tell her. All she knew was that I'd seen the man come and heard the shot. She got into bed with me and I liked that. I was always wanting to sleep in the same bed with her but she'd never let me. She was so nice and warm and young. D'you know how old she is now?" "About thirty-five?" "She's thirty-eight. But that's young, isn't it? I mean, it's not young to us but people would call it young, wouldn't they?" "I reckon," said Sean, who was twenty-one. "How did she come to have a funny name like Eve?" "It's Eva, really. It's German. Her father was German. I didn't know what her name was till I heard Mr. Tobias call her Eve. She was just Mother. And then when Bruno was always calling her Eve I started doing it too and she didn't mind." "Who's Bruno?" "Just a man. He doesn't come into it for years and years. I'll tell you about him when we get there. We'd got this other man lying dead on our grass, or Eve had, it wasn't really much to do with me. The thing was no one ever came near us then, no one at all but the milkman and the oilman and the man who read the electric meter at the cottage and at Shrove. And they didn't go in the back garden or ask any questions. "The milkman was strange. I noticed more when I was older. I never knew any children so I don't know if he talked like a child but Eve said he had a mental age of eight. He used to say things about the weather and the trains and that was all he ever said. Here comes the train," he'd say and, We're in for a cloudburst." He never noticed things. That man's dead body could have been lying on our doorstep and he'd have just stepped over it." "What about it, then?" said Sean. "The dead body." She didn't know exactly. Real events got mixed up with dreams at this point. She'd had awful dreams that night, had woken screaming and found Eve gone, back to her own bed. But she had come and comforted her and stayed, as far as Lira knew, for the rest of the night. But she couldn't have, Lira realised that later, for in the morning when she looked out of the window, the man was gone. What does death mean to a child of four? It hadn't really registered with her the night before, that the man wouldn't ever get up again, wouldn't ever speak again or laugh or walk about. She had just been terribly frightened. When he was gone she thought he had gone of his own volition. He had mended and got well and walked away. It was years afterward when she was much older, piecing memories together and comparing them with similar contemporary events, that she understood he was dead and Eve had killed him with Mr. Tobias's shotgun. not only had Eve killed him but had taken his body away. Eve was a small woman with a tiny waist and slender elegant legs. She had small hands with long tapering fingers. Her face was wide at the cheekbones and narrow at the chin, her forehead high, her upper lip short, and her mouth full and lovely. Slightly tilted, her pretty nose was a little too small for her face. She had large hazel-green eyes and black eyebrows like Chinese brushstrokes, not unlike Sean's, and her thick, shiny dark hair reached to the middle of her back. But she was very small, no more than five feet or five feet one at best. Lira didn't know her weight, they had no scales, but when she was sixteen Eve estimated seven and a half stone for herself and eight stone and a bit for Lira and that was probably right. Yet this tiny woman had somehow moved a man one and a half times her weight and nearly six feet tall. And put him where? Somewhere in the wood, Lira decided when she thought about it around that sixteenth birthday. She put the body in the wheelbarrow and took it through the gap in the fence and buried it in the wood. During the night while Lira slept and before she woke up screaming. Or after she had held her and soothed her and she had slept again, Mother had gone down and worked silently in the dark. The first thing she saw from the window that morning even before she saw the man was gone was Matt opening the door of the little castle and letting the dogs out. He wasn't due till mid-morning, Mother said, running into the room. She sounded cross and upset. Lira went to the other window. The dogs had made straight for the place where the man had lain and ran about sniffing the grass in a frenzied way and pushing their noses into the earth. "There's something fascinating them," Matt said when Lira and Mother went outside. "They been burying bones?" "Do you know what time it is?" Mother said. "It's six-thirty in the morning." "So it is. Dear, oh, dear. I'd some business down this way yesterday, so I stopped the night and come over here first thing. not got you girls out of bed, I hope." Mother ignored this. "Has Mr. Tobias come back from France?" "Coming back tonight. He wants his dogs there when he gets home. They're all the company he's got, I reckon. It wouldn't suit me, I like a bit of action myself, but it takes all sorts to make a world." "It certainly does," said Mother, not very pleasantly. "You'd think he'd get himself a girl--well, he does, but nothing permanent." Matt spoke as if Mother didn't know it all already. "Of course he's loaded, got his own place and this here and the London one and there's girls falling over themselves to get him, but to be perfectly honest with you he's just not interested." He winked incomprehensibly at Lira. "not in settling down, I mean." In spite of what had happened, Lira wasn't afraid to put her arms around each dog's neck and place a tender kiss on each glossy black skull. She cried a bit when they had gone. She asked Mother if they could have a dog of their own. "No, absolutely not. Don't ask me." "Why couldn't we, Mother, why couldn't we? I do want a dog, I love Heidi and Ruth, I do want one of my own." "Then you must want." Mother smiled when she said it, she wasn't angry, and she called Lira Lizzie, which she sometimes did when she was pleased with her or not too disappointed in her. "Listen, Lizzie, suppose Mr. Tobias came to live at Shrove? He might, it's his house--one of his houses. Then Heidi and Ruth would come with him and what would happen to our dog? They don't like other dogs, they'd attack it. They'd hurt it." Like they hurt the man, Lira felt like saying but she didn't say it. Instead, she said, "Is he going to come? I'd like him to come because then we'd have his dogs and we wouldn't have to have our own. Is he going to come?" Mother said nothing for a moment. Then she put her arm around Lira and pulled her close against her skirts and said, "I hope so, Lizzie, I hope he will," but she wasn't smiling and she gave a heavy sigh. next day was Mother's day for going shopping. She went once a fortnight to get the things the milkman wouldn't bring. He brought butter and eggs and porridge oats and orange juice and bread and yoghurt as well as milk, but he never brought meat or fish. Until they grew their own, Mother had to buy vegetables. She had to buy fruit and cheese. The bus that went to the shops-to town, that is--ran four times a day and Mother had to walk down the lane and go over the river bridge and a hundred yards along the road to the bus stop. When Mother went to town she never took Lira with her. Lira was locked up in her bedroom. She was used to it and she accepted, but not this time. At first she gave in, sat on the bed with the rag book and the pencils, sucked at her orange juice bottle. Mother had given her an apple as well for a treat, a Golden Delicious because there were no English ones "July. She knelt on the bed and watched Mother go along the lane toward the main road. Then she shifted her gaze from the distance to the foreground and saw where the man had been and the dogs and the explosion had happened. She began to scream. Probably she couldn't have screamed for the whole hour and a half Mother was away. Halfway through she may have fallen asleep. But she was screaming when Mother came back. Mother said, "I won't leave you again," and she didn't for a long while but of course she did again one day. It might have been that evening or an evening days or weeks later, at any rate it was after the dogs had gone, that Lira was playing her roving-between-the-bedrooms game after bedtime. She tried on Mother's straw hats, the golden one with the white band and the brown one with the cream scarf tied around it, and she stroked Mother's suede shoes, that had things inexplicably called trees thrust into them. When she was tired of that she looked inside the jewel case. Mother was wearing one set of earrings and the mother-ofpearl brooch, so of course those things weren't in there. Lira hung the jade beads around her own neck, put the comb with the shiny bits on it into her hair, and admired the result in the mirror. She picked up the wooden brooch and found lying underneath it a gold ring. Whose could it be? She had never seen it before, she had never seen any ring on Mother's hand. Examining it with great interest, she saw that there was some writing on the inside of the ring, but she was only four then and she couldn't read very well. nor did she at that time connect the ring with the man with the beard. "It was his ring?" said Sean. "It must have been. I looked at it again later, when I could read. The writing said, TMH AnD EHH, MARCH 3, 1974. I didn't know what it meant then, but now I think it was his wedding ring. Victoria had a wedding ring. Do men have them?" "I reckon there's some as do." "Those were his initials and his wife's and that was the date they got married, don't you think?" "She must have took it off him, off his hand," said Sean, making a face. "I don't know why she did unless she thought she might sell it one day. Or maybe she thought if she buried it with him someone might dig it up." "Why did she do it?" "Do what? Shoot that man?" "Why didn't she get an ambulance, have him taken to the hospital? You said he could sit up, he'd have got all right. It wasn't her fault, no one'd have put the blame on her, not if she said he'd been going to rape her." "I never knew quite why," Lira said, "but it might have been something like this. Later on someone told me a story about a child being attacked by dogs and I put two and two together. It was Bruno, as a matter of fact, he told me. You see, the man would have told them at the hospital and they'd have told the police. About the dogs, I mean. And the dogs would have been killed." "Destroyed." "Yes, I expect that's the word. The dogs would have been destroyed like the ones in Bruno's story. Mr. Tobias loved his dogs and he'd have blamed Eve and given her the sack and turned us out of the gatehouse. Or that's what she thought. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't, but she thought he would and that was the important thing. She couldn't leave Shrove, you see, she couldn't, that was the most important thing in the world to her, Shrove, more important even than me. Well, Mr. Tobias was important to her too but only in a special sort of way." Sean was looking bewildered. "You've lost me." "never mind. That's really all there was to it. If the dogs had killed the man she wouldn't have had to kill him. I expect that's the way she thought. But they hadn't killed him, so she had to, or else he'd have told the police. She shut the dogs up and went into the house and got the gun and shot him." "Just for that? Just so Tobias wouldn't get mad at her?" Lira looked at him doubtfully. "I don't know. now you put it like that, I really don't know. Perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps she had some other reason, something to make her hate him, but we're never going to know that, are we?" She watched Sean as he got up and washed at the sink. He put his jeans back on again and found himself a clean T-shirt. It occurred to her that she hadn't any clothes except the ones lying in a heap on the floor. She'd have to wear his, or those of his that would fit her, and when she'd made some money picking apples... The hundred pounds, she had forgotten the hundred pounds. "I want to drive into town, wherever that is," she said, "and go and eat in a real restaurant. Can we?" " Course we can. Why not? We can go and have a Chinese." Lira washed her knickers and her socks at the sink. She had to put her jeans on over nothing but that didn't much matter. Her jeans were a cause of great pride, not least because it had been such a struggle getting Eve to let her have them. She'd managed to get two pairs, these and a pair she'd left behind. Eve hated trousers and had never worn jeans in all her life. Lira borrowed a long-sleeved check shirt with a collar from Sean and thought a little about Eve, wondering where she was now and what was happening to her. Sean had been thinking the same thing. "We ought to get a paper tomorrow. You haven't never seen a paper, I suppose? A newspaper, I mean." "Oh, yes, I have." She was a bit hurry. Once, in a magazine rack at Shrove, she had found a newspaper called The Timer and the date on it was the year before she was born. Eve had taken it away before she could read much of it. "What we ought to get is television." "now there's something you've never seen, telly, I bet." She answered him in quite a lofty way. "I used to watch it at Shrove every single day. Eve never knew, she'd have stopped it but I didn't tell her. It was a secret thing I did." "Like me," said Sean. "not really like you. You're much better. But I didn't know you then. I watched it for yearr till the set broke and Jonathan wouldn't have it mended." The expression on his face made her laugh. "Could we have one in here? Would your generator work it?" "Hopefully," he said. " "Course it would." "Then I'm going to buy one." A thought struck her. "Only, I don't know--is a hundred pounds a lot of money, Sean?" He said rather bitterly, "It's a lot for us, love," and then, "Hopefully it'd buy a little portable telly but I don't know about colour." Her eyes grew wide. "Does it come in colour? Does it really?" When they went outside to the car they saw that the other van, the camper, wasn't unoccupied as they had at first thought. A light was on inside it and the blind was raised in the window nearest to the roadway. They had to pass it to get out. Inside, a fiercer, bluer glow than the overhead lamp indicated the presence of a television screen, and as they passed within a few feet Lira saw the little rectangle filled with dazzling colour, emerald green grass, yellow-spotted leaves, and an orange-and-black tiger prowling. "What a lot I've got to catch up with," she said. Life at the gatehouse had been of the simplest. Much of it would seem dull to Sean, incredible. There was a good deal she wouldn't tell him but keep locked in her memory. For instance, how, because Eve wouldn't leave her alone in the cottage anymore even ith the doors locked, couldn't bring herself to do that when she screamed so piteously, she had been obliged to take Lira with her. And that was how she came to enter Shrove House for the first time. The palace, the house of pictures and secrets, dolls and keys, books and shadows. Sean would never see it quite like that, no one would but herself and Eve. Most of all Eve.

THEY walked up the drive between the trees, the hornbeams that were nearly round in shape and the larches that were pointed, the silver birches whose leaves trembled in the breeze and the swamp cypresses that came from Louisiana but grew happily here because it was damp by the river. There were giant cedars and even taller Douglas firs and Wellingtonias taller than that, black trees you saw as dark green only when you were close up underneath them. The trees parted and she saw the house for the first time and to her then it was no more than a big house with an enormous lot of windows. A man was mowing the grass, sitting up in a high chair on wheels. She had seen him once or twice before and was often to see him again. His name was Mr. Frost, he wasn't a young man, but had wrinkles and white hair, and he came on his bicycle from the village on the other side of the river. White hair was only another kind of fair hair and his confirmed Lira's belief. He raised one hand to Mother and Mother nodded but they didn't speak. Steps went up one side to the front door of Shrove and then there was a kind of platform before the stairs ran down the other side. The stairs had railings like theirs at the gatehouse but the rails here were made of stone with a broad stone shelf running along the tops of them. On the shelf were stone vases from which ivy hung and between the vases stone people stood looking toward the trees. Lira and Mother went up the flight on the left and Lira held on to the stone railings. Everything was very large and this made her feel smaller than usual. She looked up, as Mother told her, to see the coat of arms, the sword, the shield, the lions. The house towered, its windows shiny sheets, its roof lost in the sky. Mother unlocked the front door and they went in. "You will not rush about, Lira," Mother said, "and you will not climb on the furniture. Do you understand? Let me see your hands." Lira held them out. They were very clean because Mother had made her wash them before they came out and she had held Mother's hand all the way. "All right. You can't get them dirty in here. now, remember, walk, don't run." The carpets were soft and thick underfoot and the ceilings were very high. none of the ceilings was white but done in gold and black squares or painted like a blue sky with white clouds and people with wings flying across it, trailing scarves and ribbons and bunches of flowers. The lamps were like raindrops when it is raining very hard and some of the walls had things like thin carpets hanging on them. A huge painting covered one entire wall. Mother called it The Birthday of Achilles and it showed a lot of men in helmets and women in white robes all rushing to pick up a golden apple while a woman in green with flowers stood by holding a fat naked baby. Mother took her through the drawing room and showed her the fireplace with the lady's face on it, the screen painted with flowers, and the tables that were of shiny wood with shiny metal bits on it and some with mother-of-pearl like mother's brooch. The tall glass doors were framed in mahogany, Mother said, and they were more than two hundred years old but as good as new. Lira and Mother went through the doorway out onto the terrace at the back, and when Lira ran down the steps and stood on the lawn and looked up at Mother, she was frightened for a moment because the back of the house was the same as the front, the same coat of arms, sword, shield, and lion, the same railing around the roof and up the stairs, the same windows and the same statues standing in the alcoves. Mother called out to her that it was all right, it was supposed to be that way, but that if she looked closely she would see it wasn't quite the same. The statues were women, not men, there was no front door, and instead of ivy, small dark pointed trees grew in the stone urns on the terrace. So Lira ran up again and she and Mother made their way to the kitchen. Mother unhooked an apron from behind a cupboard door, a big ugly brown apron, and wrapped it around herself, covering up her white cotton blouse and and long, full greenand-blue skirt. She took a clean yellow duster from a pile and tied her head up so that you couldn't see her hair, she trundled out a vacuum cleaner and found a large, deep tin of mauve polish that smelled of lavender. For the next three hours they remained in Shrove House while Mother cleaned the carpets with the vacuum cleaner, dusted the surfaces and the ornaments, and polished the tables. She couldn't get it all done today, she said, and she explained to Lira how she did a bit one day and another bit two days later and so on, but she hadn't been in there for two weeks because, as she put it, of one thing and another. She had been afraid of Lira being a nuisance or of breaking something, but Lira had been as good as gold. Remembering not to run, she had walked through all the rooms, looking at everything, at a table with a glass top and little oval pictures in frames inside, at a small green statue of a man on a horse, at a green jar with black birds and pink flowers on it that was taller than she was. One room was full of books, they were all over the walls where other rooms had paint or panelling. Another, instead of books, had those things hanging up like the one Mother had that made the explosion. She didn't stay in there for long. A cabinet in one room was full of dolls in different dresses and she would have loved to touch, to get them out, she longed to, but she did what Mother told her, or if she didn't she made sure Mother couldn't find out. But mostly she did as she was told because as well as loving Mother so much, she was afraid of her. The door to a room opening out of that one was shut. Lira tried the handle and it turned, but the door wouldn't open. It was locked, as her bedroom door used to be locked when Mother went out, and the key gone. Of course she very much wanted to get into that room, as much as anything because the door was locked. She rattled the handle, which did no good. There were three staircases. By this time she had learned to count up to three well, to six, in fact. She went up the biggest staircase and down the smallest, having been in every bedroom, and climbed onto one of the window seats--Mother wouldn't find out, the vacuum cleaner could be heard howling downstairs--and looked across the flat green valley floor to watch a train go by. If not, then, conscious of beauty, she was aware of light, of how radiantly light the house was everywhere inside. There wasn't a dark corner or a dim passage. Even when the sun wasn't shining, as it wasn't that day, a clear pearly light lit every room and the things inside the rooms gleamed, the glass and the porcelain, the silver and brass and the gilt on the mouldings and cornices. The biggest staircase had flowers and fruit carved on the wood on each side of it and the carving gleamed with a deep rich glow, but all she could think of then was how much she would like to slide down the polished bannister. They left at four o'clock, in time to get home for Lira's reading lesson. "Doesn't Mr. Tobias ever live there?" she asked, taking Mother's hand. "He never has. His mother did for a while and his grandfather lived there all the time, it was his only home." She gave Lira a thoughtful glance, as if she was pondering whether the time had come to tell her. "My mother, who was your grandmother, was his housekeeper. And then his nurse. We lived in the gatehouse ourselves, my mother, my father, and I." Mother squeezed Lira's hand. "You're too young for this, Lizzie. Look up in the ash tree, see the green woodpecker? On the trunk, picking insects out with his beak?" So if the day the man with the beard came was called the Day of the Kingfisher, this was the Day of the Woodpecker, the day of the first visit to Shrove. After that Lira always went with Mother to Shrove and now, when Mother went to town on the bus, instead of locking Lira in her bedroom in the cottage, she put her in one of the Shrove bedrooms. Mostly it was the one called the Venetian Room because the four-poster bed had its posts made out of the poles used by gondoliers in Venice, Mother said. Lira could read quite well by the time she was five and had a real book in the room with her. She wasn't in the least frightened of being shut up in the Venetian Room at Shrove, she wouldn't have been frightened of being in her own room anymore, but she did ask Mother why Shrove and not at home. "Because Shrove has central heating and we don't. I can be sure you're warm enough. They have to keep the heating on all winter because of the damp, even though no one lives there. If it was allowed to get damp the furniture might be spoiled." "Why is the little room next to the morning room always locked up?" "Is it?" said Mother. "I seem to have mislaid the key." Shrove was to become her library and her picture gallery. More than that, for the paintings were a guide to her and a catalogue of people's faces. To them she ran when she needed to identify a new person or when confirmation was required. They were her standard of comparison and her secondhand portrait of the outside world. This was how other people looked, this what they wore, these the chairs they sat on, the other countries they lived in, the things their eyes saw. In the cold depths of winter, a very cold one when the river froze over and the water meadows disappeared under snow for a whole month, a black car with chains on its tires slid slowly down the lane and parked in the deep snow outside the gatehouse. There were two men inside. One stayed in the car and the other one came to the front door and rang the bell. He was a fat man with no hair at all but for a fairish fringe surrounding the great shiny pale egg that was his head. By chance, Lira and Mother had been sitting side by side at Mother's bedroom window, watching the birds feeding from the nut feeders they had hung on the branches of the balsam tree. They saw the car come and the man come to the door. "If he talks to you you are not to say anything but I don't know," " said Mother, "and you can cry a bit if you like. You might like that, it might amuse you." Lira never found out who the man was. Of course she guessed later on. He said he was looking for a missing person, a man called Hugh something. She had forgotten his other name but Hugh she remembered. Hugh came from Swansea, was around these parts last July on a walking holiday, but left the B and B he was stopping at without paying for his two nights. The fat man talked a lot more about Hugh and why they were looking for him and what was making them look six months later, but Lira didn't understand any of it. He described Hugh, which she did understand, she remembered his fair beard, she remembered tufts of it in Ruth's mouth. "We are very quiet down here, Inspector," Mother said. "We see hardly anyone." "A lonely life." "It depends what suits you." "And you never saw this man?" He showed Mother something in the palm of his hand and Mother looked at it, shaking her head. "You didn't see him in the lane or walking the footpath?" "I'm afraid not." Mother lifted her face and looked deep into the fat man's eyes when she said this. Although it meant nothing at the time, when she was older, thinking back and comparing her own personal experience, Lira understood how Mother's look must have affected him. Her full red lips were slightly parted, her eyes large and lustrous, her skin creamy and her expression oh so winsome and trusting. About her shoulders her glorious hair, a rich, dark shining brown, hung like a silk cape. She had one small white finger pressed against her lower lip. "It was just a possibility," the fat man said, unable to take his eyes off her, but having to, having to drag his eyes away and speak to Lira. "I don't suppose this young lady saw him." She was shown the photograph. Apart from prints on the fronts of Mother's books, it was the first she had ever seen, but she didn't say so. She looked at the face which had frightened her and which Heidi and Ruth had ruined with their teeth, looked at it and said, "I don't know." This made him eager. "So you might have?" "I don't know." "Have another look, my love, look closely and try to remember." Lira was growing frightened. She was letting Mother down, she was obeying Mother but letting her down just the same. The man's face was horrible, the bearded man called Hugh, cruel and sneering, and who knew what he would have done if Mother hadn't... She didn't have to pretend to cry. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know," she screamed and burst into tears. The fat man went away, apologising to Mother, shaking hands with her and holding her hand a long time, and when he had gone Mother roared with laughter. She said Lira had been excellent, quite excellent, and she hugged her, laughing into her hair. For all that she loved Lira and cared for her, she hadn't understood that she had been really frightened, really shy of people, really bewildered. It took the driver a long time to get the car started and an even longer time to pull it out of the snow without its wheels spinning. Lira calmed down and began to enjoy herself. She and Mother watched the driver's struggles from the bedroom window with great interest. The snow went away and the spring came. Most of the trees that were coniferous looked just the same, always the same greenish black or light smoky blue, but the larches and the swamp cypresses grew new leaves like clumps of fur of an exquisite pale and delicate green. Mother explained that larches too were deciduous conifers and the only ones native to the British Isles. Primroses with sunny round faces appeared under the hedges and clusters of velvety purple violets close by the boles of trees. Wood anemones, that were also called windflowers and had petals like tissue paper, grew in the clearings of the wood. Mother told Lira to be careful never to pronounce them an-enomies, as so many people did who ought to know better. Lira hardly talked to anyone but Mother, so was unlikely to hear the wrong pronunciation. Except the postman, though they didn't discuss botany. And the milkman, who noticed nothing but the trains and the signs of changes in the weather, and the oilman who came to fill Shrove's heating tank in March, and Mr. Frost, the gardener who mowed the grass and trimmed the hedges and sometimes pulled out the weeds. Mr. Frost went on never speaking. They saw him ride past the gatehouse on his bicycle and if he saw them he waved. He waved from his mowing machine if he happened to be there when they walked up the drive to Shrove. The oilman only came twice a year, in September and again in March. Lira had never talked to him, though Mother did for about five minutes, or listened rather, and listened impatiently, while he told her about his flat in Spain and how he had found a cut-rate flight to Malaga that was so reasonable you wouldn't believe. Lira didn't know what that meant, so Mother explained how he went across the sea in one of those things that flew overhead sometimes and made a buzzing noise about it, unlike birds. The milkman said, "It feels like spring," which was silly because it was spring, and "Here comes the train," that he needn't have bothered to say because anyone could see and hear it. They got very few letters. Lira never got any. Letters came for Mother sometimes, from someone called her aunt, though she never explained what an aunt was, from her friend Heather in London, and one regularly once a month from Mr. Tobias. This one had a piece of pink paper in it, which Mother said was a check. When next she went to the shops she took the pink paper with her and took it to a bank and they turned it into money. Like a good fairy waving a wand, suggested Lira, who was much into fairy tales at that time, but Mother said, no, not like that, and explained that this was money which she had earned for cleaning Mr. Tobias's house and looking after it and seeing it came to no harm. In April the dogs came again to stay. Matt brought them and told Mother that Mr. Tobias had gone to somewhere called the Caribbean this time, not France. Lira hugged Heidi and Ruth, who knew her at once and were overjoyed to see her. Had they forgotten the man with the beard called Hugh? Had they forgotten how they attacked him? Lira wondered if they would attack Matt if she called out, "Kill!" "Why doesn't Mr. Tobias ever come himself?" Lira asked Mother while they were out in the meadows with the dogs. "I don't know, Lizzie," Mother said and she sighed. "Doesn't he like it here?" "He seems to like it better in the Dordogne and Mo, cambique and Montagu Square and the horrible old Lake District," said Mother incomprehensibly. "But perhaps he will come one day. Of course he'll come one day, you'll see." Instead of coming himself, he sent a postcard. It had a picture on it of silver sand and palm trees and a blue, blue sea. On the back Mr. Tobias had written, This is a wonderful place. Its good to get away from cold, grey England in the cruellest month, though I hardly suppose you would agree. Say hallo to Heidi and Ruth for me and to your daughter, of course. Ever,. T. Lira couldn't read joined-up writing, even the beautiful curvy large kind like Mr. Tobias's, so Mother read it to her. Mother made a face and said she didn't like him putting his dogs before her daughter but Lira didn't mind. "I know what T's for," she said, "but what's his name that starts with J?" "Jonathan," said Mother. By the time the summer came, Lira could read Beatrix Potter and the Andrew Lang fairy books if the print was large enough. She could write her name and address and simple sentences, printing of course, and she could tell the time and count to twenty and add up easy sums. Mother took her into the library at Shrove and said that when she was older she would be welcome to read all the books in there she wanted. Mr. Tobias had told her to help herself to any books she fancied reading, he knew she loved reading, and of course that invitation extended to her daughter. "Jonathan," said Lira. "Yes, Jonathan, but you must call him Mr. Tobias." There were history books and geography books and books about languages and philosophy and religion. Lira noted the words without understanding their meaning. Mother said there were also a great many books that were stories, which meant made-up things, not things that had really happened, they were novels. Most of them had been written a long time ago, more than a hundred years ago, which wasn't surprising since they had belonged to Mr. Tobias's grandfather's father, who had bought the house when he got rich in 1862. The books were rather oldfashioned now, Mother said, but perhaps that was no bad thing, and she looked at Lira with her head to one side. It grew hot that summer and one day Lira went with Mother to a part of the river that was very deep, a pool below the rapids that came rushing over the stones, and Mother began teaching her to swim. Mother was a good strong swimmer and Lira felt safe with her, even where the water was so deep that even Mother's feet couldn't touch the bottom. The second or third time they had been down there they were coming back up the lane Mother said afterward she wished they'd come through the Shrove grounds as they usually did--when they had to flatten themselves against the hedge to let a car go by. It didn't go by, it stopped, and a lady put her head out of the window. That was when Lira had to revise her ideas on her haircolor-sex-linkage theory, for the lady's hair was blond. It was not otherwise much like hair at all but seemed to be carved out of some pale yellow translucent substance, a kind of lemon jelly perhaps, and then varnished. The lady had a face like the monkey in the illustrations to Lira's jungle Book and hands with ropes under the skin on the backs of them and a brown paper dress Mother said afterward was called linen and made from a plant with blue flowers that grew in the fields like grass. The lady said, "Oh, my dear, I haven't seen you for an age. Don't you ever come down to the village anymore? I must say I've expected to see you in church. Your mother was such a regular at St. Philip's." "I am not my mother," said Mother, very coldly. "No, of course not. And this is your little girl?" "This is Eliza, yes." "She will be going to school soon, I suppose. I don't know how you're going to get her there with no car, but I suppose the school bus will come. At least it will come to where the lane joins the main road." Mother said in the voice that frightened Lira when it was used to her, which was seldom, "Eliza will be educated privately," and she walked away without waiting for the lady to put her head in and her window up. That was the first time Lira heard school mentioned. She didn't know what it was. At that time no school or schoolchildren figured in the books she read. But she didn't ask Mother, only what the name of the lady was and Mother said Mrs. Hayden, Diana Hayden, whom Lira would probably never have to see again. They had the dogs back for a fortnight in October and again six months later. When the time came for Matt to come with the van to collect them he didn't turn up. Something must have gone wrong, Mother said. There was no means of letting her know, as they had no phone and it was impossible to send telegrams anymore. But when he didn't come on the following day she got it into her head this was because Mr. Tobias would come himself. He had told the man to leave it to him this time, he would collect the dogs when he got back. But he wasn't due back till today. After he had had a good night's sleep and got over his jet lag he would get in his car, or more likely the estate car, and drive down here from Ullswater, where he lived but had no one willing to look after his dogs. Mother was sure he would come. She and Lira went over to Shrove early in the morning and Mother gave it a special clean. At home she had a bath in their kitchen bath and washed her hair. That was the next day, in the morning. She put on one of her long bright-coloured skirts and her tight black top, the green beads around her neck and the gold hoops in her ears. It took her half an hour to plait her hair in the special way she had and pin it to the back of her head. And she did all this because Mr. Tobias was coming. He didn't come. Matt did. He drove up in the afternoon and pushed past Mother into the gatehouse before she could stop him. "I've been down with one of them viruses that's going about," he said, "or I'd have been here before." "Where is Mr. Tobias?" "He rung up from Moram-whatsit, said he'd be home today. Didn't he never let you know? Dear, oh, dear. never mind, there's no harm done, is there?" No harm done! Mother went up to her bedroom after Matt had gone and lay on her bed and cried. Lira heard her crying and went up and got into bed with her and hugged her and said to stop, not to cry, it was going to be all right. And so it was. In the month of June, when all the wild roses were out and flowers were on the elder trees and the nightingales sang in the wood, Mr. Tobias came to Shrove in his dark green shiny Range Rover and, with the dogs at his heels, ran up the cottage garden path and banged on their door, calling, "Eve, Eve, where are you?" That was how Lira learned what Mother's first name was. She called the day gone by the Day of the nightingale because the nightingales had sung from morning till night and beyond. People who didn't know, Mother said, believed nightingales only sang by night but that was false, for they sang all around the clock. 1Y real name's Eliza. I've sometimes thought she called me after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion." "Come again?" said Sean. "Because she intended to do the same thing with me as Pygmalion did with Galatea and as Professor Higgins did with Eliza Doolittle, he remade her to be the way he wanted her, or let's say he had an ideal and he tried to turn her into that." Sean frowned while he concentrated. "Sounds like My Fair Lady to me." "She said she didn't, anyway, when I asked her. She just liked the name." Lira finished her strawberry milkshake and wiped her mouth. "Sean, can I have a burger? D'you know I've never had one." "Course you can. We'll both have a burger and chips." "Isn't it funny? I was so afraid to leave the gatehouse and her, I thought I'd die of fright." "You're always dying of something, you are." "Only I never do really, do I? I was so frightened and now I'm out in the world--that's how I see it, out in the world--I really like it. Or perhaps it's just you I like. I wouldn't have liked Heather." "You might've. You don't know her." "Oh, yes, I do. I did. She came to stay. But not then, not till after Mr. Tobias had been." They were in the town, Lira wary of the crowded pavements but liking the shops and the big green with a few old people sitting on wooden seats and children feeding ducks on a pond. Sean wouldn't take her money, he had a bit saved up, and when they had had lunch he bought two bottles of wine and sixty cigarettes, something else she had never tried before. Sean lit a cigarette as soon as he was in the car. "Eve said they kill you." "She's not the only one says that. But I reckon it's just the same old thing, them trying to stop you having a bit of pleasure. I mean, look at it this way, my grandad, he's eighty-seven, he's smoked forty a day since he went out to work at fourteen and there's not a thing wrong with him, spry as a cricket he is." "What's a cricket, Sean?" "There's the game cricket, you know, test matches and whatever, there's that, but it's not that, is it? I reckon I don't know what it is, to tell you the honest truth." "You shouldn't use words if you don't know what they mean." Sean laughed. "Sorry, teacher." He wanted her to try a cigarette, so she did. It made her cough and then it made her feel sick, but Sean said it was always like that the first time and you had to persist. They called in at the farm shop on the way back to the caravan and saw Mr. Vanner in the office. He was short of pickers for the Emile pears and took them both on to start next day. On the way out Lira helped herself to a James Grieve from the basket with the notice that said, Help yourself and enjoy a great taste. She'd taken a big bite out of it when Mrs. Vanner behind the counter said in a nasty tone, "Those apples are intended for our paying customers, if you don't mind." No one had ever spoken to her in that rude way before. Sean squeezed her arm to stop her answering back, though she wouldn't have done that, she was too shocked. "What a horrible woman," she said the moment the door closed behind them. "Mean old bitch," said Sean. Another camper had arrived at the caravan park. Whoever owned it had already put up a washing line with washing on it and tied a black terrier up to the steps. Lira glanced at the other camper, the one who was there before they came, and saw the blue glow of the screen under the raised blind. "D'you know what we forgot, Sean? We forgot to buy the television set." "I can think of better things to do than watch telly," said Sean, putting his arm on her shoulders and stroking her neck with his fingertips. "And something to read," she said as if he hadn't spoken. "I'll need books to read. How can I get books?" "I don't know." He wasn't interested. "I can't exist without books." But she went into his arms very willingly when they were inside the caravan and the door was shut. She was soon pulling off her clothes and climbing across the bed to where he waited for her. They hadn't bothered to put the bed back in the wall that morning, knowing they would be sure to need it again soon. Mother said, "This is Mr. Tobias, Lizzie, that you've heard so much about," and to Mr. Tobias she said, "I'd like you to meet my daughter Eliza, Jonathan." It was a new experience for Lira to shake hands with someone. Mr. Tobias's hand was warm and dry and his handshake very firm. He got down on his haunches so that their eyes were on a level. His were dark brown and his hair light brown, lighter than his skin, which was very deeply tanned. Of all the men that Lira had ever seen--the milkman, the postman, and the oilman, Mr. Frost, Mr. Tobias's man who brought the dogs, and that other one who had a beard--of all of them, Mr. Tobias had the nicest hands. They were thin and brown with long fingers and square nails. And he had a lovely voice. Instead of sounding like Matt or the oilman or the man with the beard or the milkman, who all sounded different from each other, his voice was more like Mother's but deeper of course and somehow softer. It was the sort of voice you'd like to read you a story before you went to sleep. "She's very like you, Eve," he said. "She is you in little. A clone, perhaps?" "I'm afraid not," Mother said. "But I'm glad she looks like me." Lira was very surprised to see a bottle produced and two glasses, a bottle with brown liquid in it, and orange juice for her. Mr. Tobias was very tall and had to bend his head to get under the doorway into their living room. He wasn't wearing jeans like most of the other men she had seen or the bottom part of a suit like Mr. Frost, but trousers in pale fawn stuff like the ribbing on a sweater and a white shirt with an open neck and a brown velvet jacket. Eve told her afterward that it was velvet. It looked, and she imagined felt, like the mole she had seen come out of an earth mountain on the Shrove lawn. She was very shy of him. While he talked to her in his bedtime-story voice, she could only stare at him with her eyes very wide open. He asked her what she did all day long and if she could read and would she draw something for him. While she was drawing a picture of Shrove with the river behind and the high hills and Heidi and Ruth running about on the grass, he said he expected she would be going to school soon. Mother said briskly that there was time enough for that and changed the subject. She wished he had let her know he was coming, she would have got some food in and given the house a special clean. "You would? You're supposed to get a woman in from the village to do that." "I know, but they aren't reliable and they'd have to have a car. It's easier to do it myself. I prefer to do it myself, Jonathan." "I thought it was odd when I went through the accounts with Matt and there was no provision made for a daily." Mother said again, "I prefer to do it myself." She looked down in rather a meek way, her long eyelashes brushing her cheek. "You pay me so generously that, really, I feel it's my duty." "My idea when you came here was that you would be a kind of estate manager. You had the cottage and a--well, a salary, to run the place." "Dear Jonathan, there's nothing to run but Mr. Frost and the oilman," said Mother and they both laughed. Lira finished her drawing and showed it to Mr. Tobias, who pronounced it very good and said she must sign it. So she wrote Eliza Beck in the bottom right-hand corner and wondered why Mr. Tobias gave her signature such a strange long look before turning to Mother with one eyebrow up and a funny little crooked smile. The dogs were not to sleep in the little castle this time but over at Shrove with Mr. Tobias. Lira played with them until it was her suppertime, and then she and Mother took them halfway up the Shrove drive and released them. She stood under the tallest Wellingtonia and called to them to run home, to run and find the master. Mr. Tobias came to the front door of Shrove and down the steps and waved to them. He had something hanging around his neck on a strap. Lira couldn't see very well from that distance, but as they came closer she thought it looked rather like the thing Mother had that made music. He beckoned and put the thing up to his face, holding it in both hands. Mother went on walking toward him, telling her not to be shy, Mr. Tobias was only taking a photograph of them. But Lira was shy, she hid behind a tree, so Mother got into the picture by herself. By this time she had almost grown out of that baby game she used to play after she was put to bed, running from one room and one window to the other, but that night, for some reason, she felt like playing it again. Perhaps the reason was that Mother had come upstairs to check that she was asleep. Lira dived under the covers and lay with her eyes shut, breathing steadily. She half opened an eye as Mother tiptoed out and saw that she had changed into her best skirt, the one she made herself from a piece of blue and purple and red material she had bought when she went to town. Mother wore the new skirt, which was very full and long, nearly to her ankles, a tight black top, and a shiny black belt around her little waist. Her hair was done in the way Lira loved and which took half an hour to do, drawn back from her face and done in a fat plait that started at the crown of her head and was tucked under at the nape of her neck. Lira thought she heard the front door close. She jumped out of bed and ran across to Mother's room and the window. Mother was letting herself out by the front gate. It was a warm evening, still daylight, but the sun was low in the faded blue sky. Mother hadn't a coat or a shawl. She was going toward the gateway. Lira ran back into her own room, the turret room, stood on the chair, and watched Mother passing through the open gateway and starting up the drive to Shrove. Lira had never been left alone before, unless she was locked in and safe. Mother was walking under the trees, through the park and up to the house, she had never gone so far before. Fear sprang within her and, as it does when one is a small child, touched off immediate tears. In a moment she would have screamed and sobbed but in that moment, while her breath was held, Mr. Tobias came strolling out from the back of Shrove House. He stopped and held out both hands and he and Mother looked at each other. Somehow, Mr. Tobias being there, knowing that all Mother was doing was meeting him, made everything all right. Mother took both his hands in her hands and said something and laughed. He walked around her, looking her up and down, nodded, touched the beautiful shiny plait with one finger. Then he took her hand and hooked it over his arm and they went on toward the house, walking very closely side by side. Lira no longer much minded Mother going because they were together and would only be at Shrove. She minded a very little bit because she wasn't there with them, she felt left out. But not afraid anymore. She ran back into Mother's room to see if anything was going on at the front, even if it was only rabbits feeding on the grass verges. There were always rabbits in the evening, that wasn't exciting. They couldn't get at Mother's vegetables because most things were covered in nets, the lettuces, the cabbages, the peas, and the carrots, but not the beans and the strawberries because rabbits never ate them. The sun was setting behind the woods, turning the trees black and the sky almost too dazzling a gold to look at. She watched it dip and sink until all the gold was drained away and the sky turned from yellow to pink to red. Once the sun went the bats came out. Mother had explained how they can hunt for insects in the dark, by their squeaks, which humans can't hear, bouncing off flying objects and echoing back at them. A moth flew up to the window and Lira identified it as a privet hawk, though its body was yellow and brown instead of pink and brown and its lower wings were yellowish. Perhaps it was just a common yellow underwing. Mother had brought her a moth book from the library at Shrove as well as Complete British Butterflies. She ran downstairs and fetched the book. Perhaps she would have an apple too, but there were no apples at this time of the year. Instead she ate some of the strawberries she and Mother had picked before Mr. Tobias came. She couldn't find the moth, or a picture she could be sure was of the one outside the window, and she must have fallen asleep when she got back into bed, for she remembered nothing else from that night and it was the following evening or the next that she looked out of Mother's room much later, in the dusk, and saw them at the gateway of Shrove, standing close up against the wall of the little castle. Mr. Tobias had his arms around Mother and he was kissing her in a way Lira had never seen anyone kiss anyone before, on the mouth. The truth was that she had never seen anyone kiss anyone ever except Mother kissing her, which wasn't the same thing. Mr. Tobias let Mother go and Mother came into the house. Lira crept very quietly across the landing on her way back to her own room and as she passed the top of the stairs she heard Mother singing down there. not very loudly but as if she was enjoying singing. And Lira knew the song and that it was something called Mozart, for she had often heard Mother play the record where the lady sang how she would make her lover better with the medicine she kept in her heart. When the weekend came, so did a lot of visitors to Shrove. They were all friends of Mr. Tobias, Mother said, two men and three ladies, and they came along the lane and past the gatehouse and right in through the gates of Shrove up to the house. Lira said, could they go up there, she and Mother, and see the people, but Mother said, no, she wouldn't be going there again till Monday and Lira certainly would not. "Why?" said Lira. "Because I said no," said Mother. "Mr. Tobias invited us but I said no, not this time." "Why?" "I think it best, Lira." On the Saturday evening she saw all the people coming back from a walk. She was at Mother's window and she saw them all very clearly, passing the gatehouse garden. One of the ladies had stopped to admire Mother's big stone tub that was full of geraniums and fuchsias and abutilon in full bloom. The men were just men, nothing special, though one of them had bare skin instead of hair on top of his head, and the ladies were nice-looking but not one of them as pretty as Mother. Perhaps Mr. Tobias thought so too, for he turned his head as they passed and gave the gatehouse a long look. Lira didn't think he was looking at the flowers. But still, there was something special about the ladies, they looked different from anyone Lira had ever seen before, smoother somehow and cleaner, their hair cut as trimly and evenly as Mr. Frost cut the edge of the lawn where the flower border began. All three wore jeans like the milkman and Hugh, but one had a jacket like Mother's best shoes, the suede ones with the trees in them that Lira liked to stroke, and a silk scarf with a rope and shield pattern, one a wondrous sweater with flowers knitted into the pattern and her face painted like Diana Hayden's and the third a shirt like a man's but long and made of bright green silk. Half an hour later one of their cars came down the drive from Shrove House--well, from the stable block, really, where cars were kept--with Mr. Tobias's Range Rover ahead of it to show the way, and in the morning Mother told her they had all gone out to dinner in a hotel somewhere. By Monday they had gone away and she and Mother went up to Shrove to change the beds and clear up the mess. Or Mother did. Lira talked to Mr. Tobias and he showed her his holiday pictures. He took her into the library and said she must have any book from it she wanted to read. They took the dogs down to the river and waved to the train and when they got back Mother had finished. "I'm not at all happy about you doing this, Eve," Mr. Tobias said and he didn't look happy. "Perhaps I will try to get someone," Mother said. Lira thought she seemed quite weary and no wonder, the house had been an awful mess, Mother had said nothing when they first arrived, but Lira had stared wide-eyed at the sticky glasses, the cups and plates standing about everywhere, the powdery grey stuff mixed up with burned paper tubes in the little glass trays, and the big brown stain on the drawing room carpet. "I should have cleared up myself," said Mr. Tobias, which, for some reason, made Mother laugh. "Come out with me tonight? We'll go somewhere for dinner." "I can't do that, Jonathan. I have Eliza, remember?" "Bring her too." Mother just laughed again, but in a way that somehow made it clear they weren't going out for dinner and that it was an absurd suggestion. "Then you can cook my dinner. At the gatehouse. It's a poky little place and I'm going to have it done up for you from top to bottom, but if we haven't a choice, the gatehouse it must be. needs must when the devil drives. You're a bit of a devil, you know, Eve, and you know how to drive a man, but you shall cook my dinner. If you're not too tired, that is?" "I'm not too tired," said Mother. Lira didn't expect to be allowed to stay up with them. It was a nice surprise when Mother said she could, though she must go to bed straight after. Mr. Tobias came at seven with a bottle of something that looked like fizzy lemonade but had its top wired on and a bottle of something the colour of Mother's homemade raspberry vinegar. The top came out of the lemonade bottle with a loud pop and a lot of foam. They had a salad and a roast chicken and strawberries, and when Lira had eaten up the last strawberry she had to go to bed. Oddly enough, she went straight to sleep. next morning she did what she always did in the mornings, ran into Mother's room for her cuddle. Mother had always been alone in her big bed but she wasn't alone this time. Mr. Tobias was in the bed with her, lying on the side nearest to the window. Lira stood and stared. "Go outside a moment, please, Lira," Mother said. A moment always meant counting to twenty. Lira counted to twenty and went back into the room. Mr. Tobias had got up and done his best to get his broad shoulders and long body inside Mother's brown wool dressing gown. He muttered something, grabbed his clothes from the chair, and went downstairs to the kitchen. Lira got into bed with Mother and hugged her, she hugged her so tight that Mother had to say to let go, she was hurting. The bed smelled different than usual, it didn't smell of clean sheets and Mother and her soap, but a bit like the river in a season of drought, a bit like the dead fishes washed up on the sand, and like water with a lot of salt in it for cooking. Mr. Tobias came back, washed and dressed, saying it was terrible they hadn't got a bathroom, he would have a bathroom put in as a priority. And why on earth didn't Eve have a phone? Everyone had a phone. He went away after breakfast but came back in the afternoon with a present for Lira. It was a doll. Lira had very few toys and what she had had been Eve's--a rag doll, a celluloid one, a dog on wheels you pulled along with a piece of string, a box of wooden bricks. The doll that Mr. Tobias had bought her wasn't a baby but a little girl with dark hair like her own that you could wash and legs and arms and face that felt like real skin and a wardrobe of clothes for her to put on when the dress she was wearing had to be washed. Unable to speak, Lira stared mutely. "Say thank you to Mr. Tobias, Lizzie," said Mother, but she didn't seem very pleased and she said, "You really shouldn't, Jonathan. She will get all sorts of ideas." "Why not? Harmless ideas, I'm sure." "Well, I'm not. I don't wish her to have those ideas. But you are very kind, you are very generous." "What shall you call her, Lira?" Mr. Tobias said in his softest sweetest voice. "Jonathan," said Lira. That made them both laugh. "Jonathan is a man's name, Lizzie, and she's a girl. Think again." "I don't know any girls' names. What were the ladies called who stayed with you?" "Last weekend? They were called Annabel and Victoria and Claire." "I shall call her Annabel," said Lira. After that Mr. Tobias slept in Mother's bed most nights. Lira slept with Annabel and brought her into Mother's bed in the morning, knocking on the door first as instructed to give Mr. Tobias a chance to get up. He stayed at Shrove for three weeks, then four, and the dogs with him, but no more people were invited for the weekends. Mother was very happy. She was quite different and she sang a lot. She washed her hair every day and made herself another new skirt. Every day they were either up at Shrove or Mr. Tobias was with them at the gatehouse, and if anything was wrong it was only that when Mr. Tobias wanted to take them out in the Range Rover, Mother always said no. Lira very much wanted to go to the seaside and the suggestion was made, but Mother said no. All right, said Mr. Tobias, come to London with me for the weekend, come to Montagu Place, but Mother said that would be worse than the seaside. "You like it here, Jonathan, don't you? It's the most wonderful place in the world, nowhere is more beautiful." "I like a change sometimes." "Have a change, then. That's probably the best thing. Have a change and then come back here to us. I can't believe the Ullswater house is more beautiful than this." "Come and see. We'll all go up for the weekend and you shall judge." "I don't want to go from here ever and Lira doesn't. I thought"-Mother turned her face away and spoke quietly--"I thought it might be attractive to you now because I am here." "It is. You know it is, Eve. But I'm young and, frankly, I'm rich. You know my father left me very well-off. I don't want to settle down in one place for the rest of my life and see nothing of the world. That doesn't mean I don't want you to see the world with me." Mother said she didn't want to see the world. She had seen enough of it for a lifetime, enough forever, it was all horrible. nor did she want the gatehouse done up and a bathroom put in. She didn't want him wasting his money on her. Luxuries of that kind meant nothing to her and Lira. If he must go away and she could tell he wanted to, he must leave the dogs with her and that way he would come back. "I don't need a reason to come back. Matt can look after the dogs." "Leave them with me and then I'll know you have to come. You must always leave them with me." He slept in Mother's bed that last night and went back to Shrove in the morning. Later on he came to the cottage in the Range Rover and said good-bye. He hugged Mother and kissed her and kissed Lira, and Lira said Annabel would miss him. They waved after the Range Rover as it went down the lane and Lira ran upstairs to watch it go over the bridge. When it was out of sight she and Mother put the dogs in the little castle and Mother said they might as well go up to Shrove to tidy up and put things to rights. Mr. Tobias had left a lot of mess, though for the past three weeks he hadn't been there much. While Mother was running the vacuum cleaner over the bedroom carpets, Lira went into the morning room and looked at the door that was always locked. She tried the handle just in case it was, for once, unlocked. It wasn't. Squatting down because she was quite tall by then, she put one eye to the keyhole and closed the other. She was surprised to find she could see quite a lot, a piece of the red upholstery of a chair and the braid on its arm, the corner of a kind of table with drawers in it, the bright-coloured spines, blue and green and orange, of books on a shelf. What could there be in there she wasn't allowed to see? Lira now wished she had told Mr. Tobias about the locked room on the several occasions he and she had been together in the house while Mother was cleaning upstairs or in the kitchen. But of course they had never been in the morning room, it wasn't much used and there was no reason why it should be when there were a drawing room, a dining room, and a library as well. Lira was convinced that if she had asked Mr. Tobias he would have fetched the key and opened the door at once. next time he came she would ask him. When he came back to fetch the dogs. But the weeks went by and he didn't come. He didn't write, not even a postcard, and after nearly a month Matt came in the Range Rover and took the dogs away. Mother happened to see the Range Rover coming across the bridge. It was the right colour, though she couldn't see the number, she was sure it was Mr. Tobias himself coming and even more sure when she saw it in the lane. Mr. Tobias had never before sent Matt in the Range Rover but he had this time, and when Matt had gone and Heidi and Ruth with him, Mother went into her bedroom and cried. Lira had never told anyone about that. Well, she had had no one to tell until now, but she didn't tell Sean, she kept it locked up and secret inside her head. And when Sean said, this guy Tobias, the one that Shrove House belongs to, did he ever come, she said only, yes, he did, but he didn't stay long. "And didn't you never go to school?" "No, I never did. Mother taught me herself at home." "It's against the law, that." "I expect it is. But you know where Shrove is, the back of beyond, far away from just about everywhere. Who would know? Eve told lies about it. She was very open with me. She said it was important not to tell lies unless you had to, but if you had to the important thing was to know they were lies. She told some of the people that asked that I went to the village school and the other people that I went to a private school. We met Diana Hayden in the lane and Eve told her we were in a hurry because she was taking me to catch the bus for school. You have to remember there weren't many people. I mean, basically, there were just the milkman, the postman, the man who read the meter, Mr. Frost, and the oilman, and they weren't going to ask. none of them was there for more than five minutes except for Mr. Frost and he never spoke." "Didn't you want to go to school? I mean, you know, kids want friends." "I had Eve," Lira said simply, and then, "I didn't want anyone else. Well, I had Annabel, my doll. She was my imaginary friend and I used to talk to her and discuss things with her. I used to ask her advice and I don't think I minded when she didn't answer. I didn't know, you see. I didn't know life could be different. "When I could read, I mean really read, Eve started teaching me French. I think I speak quite good French. We did history and geography on Mondays and Wednesdays and arithmetic on Tuesdays. She started me on Latin when I was nine and that was on Fridays, but before that we did poetry reading on Thursdays and Fridays and music appreciation." Sean was staring at her aghast. "What a life!" "I really didn't need to go to school. We talked all day long, Eve and me. We walked all over the countryside. In the evenings we played cards or did jigsaws or read." "You poor kid. Bloody awful childhood you had." Lira wasn't having that. She said hotly, "I had a wonderful childhood. You mustn't think anything else. I collected things, the gatehouse was full of my pressed flowers and pine cones and bowls with tadpoles in and caddises and water beetles. I never had to dress up. I never ate food that was bad for me. I never quarrelled with other children or fought or got hurt." He interrupted her and said perspicaciously, "But you know about those things." "Yes, I know about them. I'll tell you how, but not now, not this minute. now I just want you to know my childhood was all right, it was fine. She's not to blame for anything that happened to me, she was a wonderful mother to me." Again his face wore that incredulous expression and he shook his head faintly. She was silent and gently she took his hand. She wasn't going to tell him--or not yet--that things had changed, that the happiness was not perpetual. Eve told her the myth of Adam and Eve, insisting as she did so that it was only that, a myth. They read the passage on the creation in Genesis, and then the expulsion from the Garden in Milton, so she knew about the serpent in paradise and later i imagined it was Eve and herself who hand in hand through Eden took their solitary way. But all she told Sean of the months before her seventh birthday was that Mr. Tobias came back once, for a day and a night, a night he didn't spend at the gatehouse with Eve but in his own bed at Shrove. Then he went away, if not forever, for a very long time.

AT first Sean was better at picking pears than she was. He knew how to lift each fruit from the twig on which it grew and bend it gently backward until it came away in his hand. Lira just pulled. The pears got bruised and sometimes her fingernail went through the mottled green skin, wounding the white flesh beneath. Mr. Vanner would dock her pay, Sean said, if she damaged his fruit, so she tried to be more careful. She was used to being told, it wasn't something she had learned to resent. They picked the pears before they were ripe, before the outside turned yellow with a red blush and while the inside was still firm and waxy. Since they came to Vanner's, the sun was always shining. Each morning they woke to a pale blue sky, a stillness and a white mist lying on the fields. Over the farm buildings the Russian vine spread snowy clouds of blossom and Mrs. Vanner's garden was overgrown with yellow and orange nasturtiums. They began picking before it grew hot and took a couple of hours off from noon till two. At that time they had lunch, packets of crisps and a pork pie, cans of Coke and Mars bars, sticky from being kept in a hot pocket. The pear fields were a long way from the caravan, so mostly they didn't bother to go back but ate their food sitting on the bank under the quickthorn hedge. At first they were nervous about being seen by the other pickers, but no one was interested in them, no one came their way, and on the second day they slipped into the little sheltered place where the elders made a tent of branches and made love on the warm dry grass. Both knew they would make love that evening and when they went to bed but it seemed too long to wait. Afterward Sean fell asleep, stretched out full-length, his head buried in his arms. Lira lay awake beside him, her cheek resting on his shoulder and her arm around his waist. She liked looking at the way his dark hair grew on the nape of his neck, in two points like the legs of an M, and she thought for the first time that it was also the way Mr. Tobias's hair grew. Mother hadn't told her the history of her mother and the Tobiases until she was older. She must have been about ten when she learned about her grandmother Gracie Beck and old Mr. Tobias, also called Jonathan, and the will, old Mr. Tobias's daughter, Caroline, who was Mr. Tobias's (that is, Jonathan's) mother, and her enormously rich husband, who left her because she was so awful. When she was seven all Lira knew was that Mother and Mr. Tobias had known each other since he was a big child and she a small one and that somehow or other Shrove House ought to have belonged to Mother and not been Mr. Tobias's at all. Oh, and that Mother loved Mr. Tobias and he loved her. Mother told her that one evening in the winter when they were sitting by the big log fire and Lira had the doll called Annabel on her lap. Lira had noticed that Annabel often brought Mr. Tobias into Mother's mind. "The difficulty is," Mother said, "that Mr. Tobias is a restless man and wants to see the world, while I intend to remain here for the whole of my life and nevergo away." She said that last bit quite fiercely, looking into Lira's eyes. "Because there is nowhere in the world like this place. This place is the nearest thing to heaven there is. If you have found heaven, why should you want to see anywhere else?" "Have you seen everywhere in the world?" Lira asked, carefully combing Annabel's hair. "near enough," Mother said mysteriously. "I have seen more than enough of people. Most people are bad. The world would be a better place if half the population were to perish in a huge earthquake. I have seen more than enough places. Most places are horrible, I can tell you. You have no idea how horrible and I'm glad you haven't. That is the way I want it to be. One day, when you have grown up the way I want you to, you can go out and have a peep at the world. I guarantee you'll come running back here, thankful to be restored to heaven." Lira was uninterested in any of that, she didn't know what it meant. "Mr. Tobias doesn't think other places are horrible." "He'll learn. It's only a matter of time, you'll see. When he has travelled about for long enough and seen enough, he'll come back here. It just takes him longer than it took me." "Why does it?" "Perhaps because I have seen more dreadful things than he has or just that I'm wiser." In the spring of that year Heather came to stay. Mother said nothing about it until the day before she arrived, and then all she said was, "You'll be sleeping in my room with me for the next week, Lira. Miss Sawyer is coming and will have your room." Lira knew who Miss Sawyer was from the letters Mother got. She was the same person as Heather. "For heaven's sake don't call me that, child," said Heather five minutes after she got there. "My name is Heather. Miss Sawyer' sounds like a headmistress. What's your headmistress called?" Lira, who had understood almost nothing of what was said, simply gazed at her, her extreme thinness. her heiht. her small head and sleek red hair. "Head teacher, then? I can't keep pace with all these new terms." Mother changed the subject. She explained to Lira that she and Heather had met while they were at college and Heather knew Mr. Tobias. "Is he still around?" "Shrove is his house, Heather. Surely you remember that?" That was when Heather first began whispering to Mother behind her hand. She gave Lira a glance, then quickly turned, put up her hand, and began the whispering. "Wishy, wishy, wishy," was how it sounded to Lira. After she had been upstairs and seen her room, Heather said she had never before stayed in a house without a bathroom. She didn't know houses without bathrooms existed anymore. But no, of course she wasn't going to allow Mother to carry hot water upstairs for her, which Mother had offered to do. She would use the bath in the kitchen like they did, only it was going to be very awkward. Another awkwardness was what she called "lack of TV." Lira didn't understand that either and wasn't very interested. The weather was fine, so they went out for many long walks and Heather went for a ride in the train from Ring Valley Halt. She had to go alone. Mother said she had been too many times to want to go again, so Lira couldn't go either. There was no car to go out in--Heather had come by taxi from some distant station--no record player, hardly any books published later than 1890, no phone, and no restaurants nearer than eight miles away. The village where Mr. Frost came from had something called a pub, Mother said, but they couldn't go there because pubs didn't like children and wouldn't let them in. "Wishy, wishy, wishy," whispered Heather behind her hand. "Oh, do speak out, Heather," said Mother. "You are creating mysteries where none need exist." So Heather stopped whispering and said boldly, the night before she was due to go, "You'll go mad here, Eve." "No, I shall go sane," said Mother. "Oh, dear, how epigrammatic!" "All right. I mean I shall become normal again. I might even be happy. I shall recapture the old-fashioned values and bring up a daughter who has been kept clean of the hideous pressures of our world." "It all sounds very high-flown and unnatural to me. Anyway, you won't be able to. Her contemporaries will see to that. When you get tired of being a noble savage, remember I've always got a couple of spare rooms." Eve must have remembered those words when she was find somewhere for Lira to seek sanctuary. Or else Heather wrote it in a letter, for she never came back and that was the only time Lira ever saw her. Mother left Lira to her own devices while she swept the bedroom carpets at Shrove with the vacuum cleaner ("You must never say hoovered," Lizzie") and at those times Lira explored the library. One of the books she found was of fairy stories and the tale of Bluebeard was in it. After she had read it she began to associate the locked room with Bluebeard and wondered fearfully if it might contain dead brides. She thought perhaps old Mr. Tobias had married several women, killed them all, and left them to moulder behind that locked door. Even when Mother showed her old Mr. Tobias's portrait, a big painting that hung in the upstairs hall of a man with a proud expression and grey hair but no beard, blue or otherwise, she still wondered. She wanted to know what that thing was sticking out of his mouth, a stick with a little pot on the end of it. Mother said it was called a pipe, something you put ground-up leaves in and lit with a match, but Lira, remembering that Mother claimed to be a good liar, for the first time disbelieved her. In a much more prideful place, where the light was bright and no eye could fail to be drawn to it, hung a portrait of the lady called Caroline. She wore the kind of dress Lira had never seen on an actual woman, ankle-length, flowing, low-cut, and of silk the same red as her mouth. Her hair was chestnut-colored, her skin like the petals of the magnolia even now blooming in the Shrove gardens, and her eyes fierce. Lira spent a long time looking at all the pictures in the house that were of real people, alive or long dead. There was no portrait of Mr. Tobias and I none of the rich man who had run away from Caroline. Heather wrote Mother a thank-you letter and after that weeks went by without the postman ever coming to their door. The milkman came and said, "The ten-thirty is late" and "This sunshine is a real treat," but they never saw the postman until one day he brought an envelope with a little paper book in it. Lira managed to get a fascinated look at this book, which was full of pictures of irons and hair dryers and towels and sheets and dresses and shoes, before Mother came and took it away from her. A log fire was burning in the grate and Mother got rid of the book by tearing it into pieces and putting the pieces on the fire. After that there was no post for weeks, nothing from Mr. Tobias until a postcard came, a plain one, not even a picture, with just a few lines on the back asking them to have the dogs. "not if it's a nuisance," he wrote. "Matt will willingly have them. It is only for two weeks while I go to France to see my mother." "Caroline," Lira said. Mother said nothing. "Does she live in the house in the place called Dordogne?" Lira had spent a long time studying the large maps of France in the library atlas. "Does she live there by herself? Is she called Mrs. Tobias?" She remembered the fierce eyes and the red, mouth-coloured dress. "She is now. She is called Caroline Tobias. When she was married she was called Lady Ellison, but our Mr. Tobias was always called Jonathan Tobias because that was his grandfather's wish. She lives in a house in the Dordogne her husband gave her when they were divorced." Mother gave Lira a speculative look as if she was considering explaining something, but she must have thought better of it. "Mostly, she lives by herself. Mr. Tobias goes to see her." "We can have the dogs, can't we?" said Lira. "Even if Matt really wants them, we can have them, can't we?" "Of course we shall have the dogs." So that Mr. Tobias would be sure to come. Lira knew that only in retrospect, not at the time. It was the day of her first French lesson ("Voici la table, les livres, la plume, le cahier' that Matt came with the dogs. She was pursing her lips, trying to make that funny sound which is halfway between an E and a U, when they heard the van coming and then the knock at the door. It was rather a cold day even for April, she remembered, and the old electric heater was switched on. The dogs were pleased to see her, as they always were, jumping up and licking her face and wagging the bit at the end of their backs where their tails had been chopped off. But Ruth was less violent in his affections than in the past, his breath smelled, and his muzzle was going grey. Dogs had seven years to every year of ours, Matt said, and that made Ruth over seventy. Heidi, of course, was only six, or forty-two. "Will he die?" Lira said. Matt's hair was much longer than last time, hanging down in greasy hanks. "Don't you worry yourself about that," he said. "That's a long way off." But Mother said, "Yes, he'll die this year or next. Dobermans don't live much past eleven." Lira knew her tables. "Or seventy-seven." It had the effect of making Matt ask her why she wasn't at school. Before she could reply Mother said coldly, "It's Easter. The schools have broken up for Easter." Some years went by before Lira realised a vital fact about that statement, though she knew there was something odd about it at the time. Mother hadn't told a lie, it? as the Easter holidays, but just the same the impression she had given Matt was a false one. Later on she observed other instances of Mother doing this and learned how to do it herself. Mother asked Matt how long they were to have the dogs this time and he said two or three weeks, he couldn't be more precise. But they'd let her know. "Still haven't got no phone, I see." "And never shall have." "It'll have to be a postcard, then." "I think we can leave that to Mr. Tobias," Mother said in the very cold way she sometimes had, and then, less coldly, almost as if she was asking for something she didn't want to have to ask for, "Will he come for them himself?" Lira didn't like the look Matt gave Mother. He wasn't smiling but it was as if he was laughing inside. "Like you said, we'll have to leave that to him." With one of his winks, he added, "It'll depend on what Miss Fastley has to say." Lira had never heard of Miss Fastley, but Mother looked as if she had, though she said nothing. "When him and her get back from France," Matt said. As soon as he had gone, Lira thought they would return to the French lesson but Mother said that was enough for today and to take the dogs down to the river. They wrapped up warmly and went down through the Shrove garden. A couple of trains had very likely passed by, Lira couldn't remember details like that, but it was probable at that hour. Likely too that she had waved to the train and one or two passengers waved back. There were never more than a few to wave back. Mother stood looking across the valley and up to the high hills where the white road ran around among the greening trees. The woods were white with cherry blossom and primroses grew under the hedges. "It's so beautiful, it's so beautiful!" she cried, spreading out her arms. "Isn't it beautiful, Lizzie?" Lira nodded, she never knew what to say. There was something about the way Mother looked and the breathy edge to her voice that made her feel awkward. "I don't mind the trains, I think in a way the trains make it better, it's something to do with all the people being able to sit inside and see how beautiful it is." And she told Lira a story about a man called George Borrow who sold Bibles, wrote books, and lived in norfolk, and who moved away and lived away for years because he couldn't bear it when they built a railway through the countryside he loved. "Who's Miss Fastley?" Lira said on the way back. Mother can't have heard her that first time because she had to say it again. "She is one of the ladies who came to stay at Shrove for the weekend last year. She is the one called Victoria." "Annabel had the sweater with flowers on," said Lira, "and Claire had the jacket like your shoes, so Victoria must have been the one in the green silk shirt." "Yes, I believe she was." They didn't put the dogs straight into the little castle but had them in with them for the evening. Ruth lay in front of the electric heater and slept. He was tired after his walk, Mother said they had taken him too far. Lira sat on one side of the fireplace and Mother on the other side. Lira was reading Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne and Mother was reading Eothen by A. W. Kinglake. They sometimes read bits aloud to each other and Winnie the Pooh was so funny there were a lot of bits Lira would have liked to read aloud but when she looked up she saw that Mother wasn't reading but gazing sadly at the hearth rug and she had tears on her face. Lira didn't offer to read aloud but went silently back to her book. She thought Mother was crying because Ruth was old and would soon die. The money they earned Lira wanted to save up. Eve had set her an example of thrift. There had been the bank account and the tin in the kitchen. And, of course, the secret box in the little castle. Strict accounts had been kept of what Eve earned and what they spent and these were consulted and referred back to before a length of material was bought to make a dress for Lira or a new skirt for Eve. The biggest expenditure Lira remembered was on the tape player Eve bought so that Lira could learn about music and get used to hearing the works of the great composers. She was nearly eight when that happened. Sean appreciated her economies. He said that being sensible about money was one thing she could teach him. They might have Cornish pasties or pork pies and crisps for lunch with chocolate bars afterward, but it would be wiser not to go into town so much in the evenings for a meal at the Burger King or even Mr. Gupta's Tandoori. One evening Sean saw a notice in the window of the new supermarket that they wanted assistants. It would be only for sticking labels on packets and putting cans on shelves, but he said he was going to apply for it. The money would be at least twice what he earned at Vanner's, maybe three times as much. "I will too, then." "I don't reckon you can, love. They'll want your insurance number and you haven't got none." "Can't I get one?" "not without giving your name you can't." They found the family planning clinic too--Lira gave Sean's name and called herself Elizabeth Holford--and a notice board in a newsagent's window on which five people were advertising for domestic help. Lira studied it thoughtfully. Housework was something she could do. When they got back, the man with the black dog put his head around the door of his camper, said hi and how about a cup of tea? Lira could see Sean didn't want to, but it was rude to say no, so they went into the man's camper, the kitchen part, where the black dog was sitting on a counter, watching television. Instead of tea the man, who said his name was Kevin, produced a bottle of whiskey and three glasses, which Lira could see made Sean feel a lot better about going in there. The little glowing screen fascinated her, the picture was so clear and the colours so bright. But at first she was half-afraid to look in case a policeman appeared describing her own appearance or even Eve herself. There was no need to worry. This was a program about small mammals in some distant part of the world, rathke creatures and squirrellike creatures, which perhaps accounted for the dog's absorption. He was much smaller than Ruth and Heidi, less sleek and with a real tail, which thumped on the counter when the squirrels jumped about, but just the same he reminded her of Mr. Tobias's dogs, now long dead. She and Mother had looked after them for three weeks, not two, on that occasion and at the end of that time, without warning, Matt appeared to take them away. When Mother saw his van stop outside and saw him get out of it, his hair longer than ever and tied back now, all the colour went out of her face and she grew very white. Lira thought she would be bound to ask him where Mr. Tobias was but she didn't, she hardly spoke to him. The dogs were handed over, Lira having hugged them both and kissed the tops of their heads, and somehow she knew as she watched the van depart that they would never come again, or not both of them, or not in the way they had before. She didn't know how she knew this, for Mother said not a word about it, didn't even look out of the window but set the French book in front of Lira and told her quite sharply to begin reading. That evening Mother said they must go over to Shrove House, which surprised Lira because they never did. They never went there after about three in the afternoon. It was just after six when they walked across the parkland between the tall trees. There were cowslips in the grass and against the hedges cow parsley and yellow Alexanders. But this time Mother said nothing about how beautiful it was. They walked in silence, hand in hand. Mother took her into the library and set her a task, to find the French books, to count them and then to see if she could find one called Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It took Lira no time at all. There weren't many French books, she could count only twenty-two, kmile among them. She took it down from the shelf, a very old book bound in blue with gilt letters, and went to look for Mother. She was in the drawing room, talking into the telephone. Lira had never before seen anyone do that. Of course she had seen the telephone and more or less knew what it was, Mr. Tobias had told her, and on that occasion she remembered, while he was explaining, Mother had frowned and shaken her head. It was Mother using it now. Lira kept very still, listening. She heard Mother say, "I've said I'm sorry, Jonathan. I've never phoned you before." Her voice went very low so that Lira could hardly hear. "I had to phone. I had to know." Somehow Lira had expected to hear Mr. Tobias's voice coming out of the other end of the receiver, but there was silence, though she could tell Mother could hear him. "Why do you say there's nothing to know? If there was nothing, you would have come." Lira had never heard Mother speak like that, in a ragged, pleading, almost frightened voice, and she didn't like it. Mother was always in control of things, all knowing, all powerful, but that wasn't how she sounded now. "Then, will you come? Will you come, Jonathan, please? If I ask you, please to come." Even Lira could tell he wasn't going to come, that he was saying, no, I can't, or, no, I won't. She saw Mother's shoulders hunch and her head dip down and heard her say in her cold voice, not unlike the one she used to Matt, "I'm sorry to have troubled you. I do hope I haven't interrupted anything. Goodbye." Lira went up to her then and put out her hand. She showed her the blue book called kmile but Mother seemed to have forgotten what she had asked her to do and everything about it. Mother's face was as pale as a wax candle and as stiff.... "You lost in a dream, love?" Sean said. "I offered you a penny for them and you never heard a word I said. Kevin wants to know if you'd like a glass of his Riseling?" Lira said, yes, thanks, she'd love some, and when she saw the wine box and read the name she somehow managed to stop herself telling them it was pronounced "reesling," she thought their feelings might be hurt. Kevin was a small man with a nut-brown face and black hair, though not much of that was left. He might be thirty or he might be forty-five. Lira couldn't tell, she wasn't much good at guessing ages, and no wonder. The men talked about football and then about the dog that Kevin said was a good little ratter. It had started to rain, Lira could hear it drumming on the roof of the camper. What would become of them if it rained? Mr. Vanner wouldn't pay them if they couldn't pick. She suddenly thought, with a fierce hunger, not altogether unlike the desire she often had for Sean, that if she didn't soon have a book in her hands, if she couldn't soon read a book, she'd die. She asked Kevin how much his TV cost and could tell at once from Sean's expression that she shouldn't have. But Kevin didn't seem to mind. He said he didn't know, he hadn't a clue, because it was one of the things he'd brought with him from their household when he and his wife split up and he reckoned it was she who bought it in the first place. "not thinking of getting married, are you?" he said when she and Sean were going. "Only you want to think twice. Hang on to your freedom while you can." "Of course we're not thinking of getting married," said Lira, and she laughed at the very idea, but Sean didn't laugh. She hadn't said much to Sean at all about Eve and Mr. Tobias, it had all been in her head, all memories. It was he who brought the subject up next day, he must have been thinking about it, she didn't know why. They were still in bed, though it was quite late in the morning, but there was no point in trying to go out and pick with the rain pouring down. When she first woke she had been quite disorientated, not knowing where she was but imagining she must be in the gatehouse. The rain made it unnaturally dark. Half-asleep still, she had looked for the book that should have been open and face downward on the bedside cabinet. But there was no bedside cabinet and no book, and when she turned over she rolled into the warm eager arms of Sean. Instead of reading she cajoled and kissed him into making love to hen-never a hard task--which he would have said was better any day, and often she would agree. Suddenly he said, "This guy Tobias, he slept with your mum? I mean, they was in the same bed?" "They were lovers, they were like us." "That wasn't right," Sean said very seriously, "not with you in the house, not with a little kid." "Why not?" She didn't know what he meant and she could tell he found it hard to explain. "Well, it's just not. Everyone knows that. They wasn't married. Your mum should have known better, an educated woman like her. It's one thing just the two of them, but not with a little kid in the house. You got to have principles, you know, love." She said, no, she didn't know, but he took no notice. "D'you reckon she thought he'd marry her?" "She hoped he would." "Yeah, she must have been lonely. It wasn't right, him taking advantage of her like that." Lira told him about the phone call and how Eve had been afterward, quiet and preoccupied and sometimes as if she was frightened. "Well, she was in love, wasn't she?" Romantic Sean pressed his lips into her neck. He stroked her hair. "She loved him and she thought she'd lost him, you got to pity her." "I don't know about being in love," Lira said. "Maybe a bit. She wanted Shrove House, that was what all that was about. She wanted Shrove House for herself, to make sure she'd never be parted from it. That was the only way. If she married Mr. Tobias it'd have been hers." He was shocked. "That's not right." "I can't help it. It's the way it was. It was always like that. She wanted that place, to be there all the time and to be sure she could be, more than anything in the world. It was all she wanted." "It sounds crazy to me." She could feel him shaking his head as it lay on the pillow beside hers. "Whatever happened, then?" "He married someone else," said Lira. "He married Victoria."

LIZA was eight years old and for as long as she could remember she had never been away from Shrove. Once a week Mother went on the bus into town to do the shopping, but Lira had never asked if she could come. now, when she thought about it, she couldn't imagine why she had never said, "Can I come?" Locked up in her bedroom or else locked up in one of the rooms at Shrove, she had been content or she had accepted. "That was wrong." Sean was in censorious mood. "Suppose something had happened to you." "It didn't." "Maybe not. Just as well for her. You might have hurt yourself or the place caught on fire." She thought but didn't say that the place burning down would have been a bigger tragedy for Eve. Shrove on fire would be worse than Lira dying in it. "If they'd found out what was going on they could have took you away and put you in care." "They didn't know, whoever they are." "Wasn't you scared?" "No, I don't think I was, not ever. Well, for a bit after the man with the beard, but I saw what she did about that, you see. It showed me she'd always look after me. I liked being locked up in the library at Shrove best, there or in the morning room. It was so warm." "What d'you mean, warm? The place was empty, wasn't it?" "The heating was always on from October to May." "He must be rolling in it," Sean said disapprovingly. "Central heating blasting away when no one lived there and there's poor buggers sleeping rough on the streets." She wasn't interested, she hardly knew what he meant. "I used to read the books. Of course there were lots I didn't begin to understand, they were years and years too old for me. Eve said to me once, I just wonder what people would say, the ones who think you ought to have gone to school, if they could have seen you trying to read Ruskin and Matthew Arnold at seven-and-half." Sean had no comment to make on that. "Anyway, I was never left for more than two hours. Then Eve would come for me and she'd always have something nice, some treat, coloured pencils to draw with or a new pair of socks or a painted egg. I remember once she came home with a pineapple, I'd never seen one before. Then one day she brought a picture." It was a painting of Shrove House. Mother had to tell her what it was or she might not have known, the painting was so strange, the colours so strong and the house not looking the way she had ever seen it. But when Mother explained that this was just one man's, the painter's, view of it, that he had chosen to paint it at sunset and after a storm, that he saw it as a symbol of wealth and power and had therefore accentuated all the yellows to express gold and the dark purples to reveal strength, then she began to understand. Mother had seen the painting in the window of a place she called a gallery and had bought it "on an impulse." It was cheap, she said, for what it was. "Besides, we've got quite a lot of money," Mother said, and proudly, "We don't fritter money away." She hung the painting on the wall in their living room where the gun had once been. When Lira climbed up on a stool to look more closely at it she saw that the words Bruno Drummond were written in red in the bottom right-hand corner with the date 198. It was the next morning, or perhaps the morning after next, that the postman came and brought with him the letter from Mr. Tobias. Mother tore open the envelope and read it. She threw the envelope into the rubbish bin, read the letter a second time, and folded it up. She said a strange thing, she said it in an intense concentrated way while she stared at the folded letter in her hand. "In ancient times they used to kill a messenger who was a bearer of bad news. It's fortunate for that postman that things have changed." Lira could hear his van going back up the lane. She waited for Mother to tell her what Mr. Tobias had written, but Mother didn't tell her and there was something in her face that stopped her asking. There were more lessons than usual that week and sometimes they went on into the evening. That was one of the signs that something had happened to upset Mother, an increase in lessons. On the Saturday morning, while Lira was eating her breakfast, Mother said, "Mr. Tobias is getting married today. This is his wedding day." "What's wedding?" said Lira. So Mother explained about getting married. She turned it into a lesson. She talked about marriage customs in different parts of the world, how in some countries, for instance, a man could have several wives, but not here, here people could be married only one at a time. It was called monogamy. She told Lira about Islam and about the Mormons, about Christian brides in white dresses being married in churches and Jewish people under canopies stamping on glass. Then she read out something from the Book of Common Prayer about marriage being forever until the two people were parted by death. Mr. Tobias wouldn't be married like that, however, but in an office by a registrar. "Were you ever married?" Lira asked. "No, I never was," said Mother. At a quarter past twelve she said it must all be over now and they were man and wife. Lira said, wasn't he a man before, and Mother said she was quite right, it was just an expression and not a very good one. They were hurband and wife. "Will they come and live here?" said Lira. Mother didn't answer and Lira was going to repeat the question, but she didn't because Mother had gone a dark red colour and clenched her fists. Lira thought it best to say no more about it. She married Annabel to the rag doll in a ceremony of her own invention but she did it upstairs in the privacy of her bedroom. And of course Mr. and Mrs. Tobias never did come to live at Shrove, though they stayed there from time to time, the first time being a fortnight after the wedding. Another letter came first. Mother read it, screwed it up, and looked cross. "What does he mean, get a woman in to get the place ready? He knows I'll never do that. He knows I clean it and that I'll clean it ready for his wife." And she said those final two words again. "His wife." She and Lira spent the afternoon at Shrove. Mr. Tobias would no longer be sleeping in his old bedroom but in the one that had been Caroline Ellison's in the four-poster with yellow silk curtains. With Victoria, Lira thought, though Mother hadn't said so. The four-poster was quite different from the Venetian one and made of dark brown carved wood with a carved wood roof Mother called a tester. She said that in olden times before there was glass in windows and when ceilings were very high, birds used to fly in and roost in the rafters on cold nights. You needed a roof on your bed to protect you from owl and hawk droppings. While Mother put clean white sheets on the four-poster and mats of yellow silk and white lace out on the dressing table, Lira tried the handle of the door to the locked room on the off-chance of its not being locked for once. But it was, it always was. Mother had said she must start writing compositions--well, stories really--and asked her to do one about getting married. Lira was already working it out in her head. She was going to have a girl called Annabel get married to a man called Bruno who brought her home to his big house in the country by a river. Annabel found the locked room while Bruno was out riding on his horse and then she found the key to the door in the pocket of his dressing gown. next time he went out she unlocked the door and inside she found the dead bodies of three women that he'd killed before he married her because only Moslems could have more than one wife. Lira didn't know what would happen next but she'd think of something. She expected Mr. Tobias to come running to their door as he had in the past, the dogs at his heels. Mother was busy sewing, her back to the window, her feet working the treadle on the machine faster than usual and her hands guiding the cloth, but Lira sat on the step outside, waiting for him. It was October but warm and sunny, the leaves on the balsam tree still green, the blackberries and the elderberries over and the holly berries turning from green to gold. The morning had been misty but now the air was clear, the sky blue, and everything very still. They were late. Lira was almost at the point of giving up and going indoors when at last the car came, not the Range Rover but the Mercedes. Later on Lira was to learn to identify many makes of cars, but at that time she only knew a Range Rover, a Ford Transit van, a Mercedes, and whatever kind it was the police used. The Mercedes was going quite fast, it was going to sweep straight in through the open gates, but Mr. Tobias did see Lira, and he stuck his arm out of the window and waved. Of course he was on the near side of the car, the side nearest to her. On the other side sat the lady who had worn the green shirt. Victoria. Mrs. Tobias. It was a pity because Lira couldn't see her very well. She wasn't wearing a green shirt this time but a fawn sweater with a neck that came right up to her chin and then folded over. Her hair was fair, a pale blond, it was exactly the same colour as the jumper but silky instead of woolly and rough. Her face wasn't visible. Lira supposed the dogs must be in the back, though she couldn't see them. She waved and waved until they were out of sight and then she went in to give Mother all the details. That evening she expected them to come or him to come, best of all she would have liked him to come alone, and she sat in the window with Annabel, as if Annabel would draw him in some magic way. "It must have been like turning a knife in the wound," she said to Sean, "the way I went on and on about him. When was he coming? Could we go up there? Poor Eve! But I didn't know any better. I was only a child." "I shouldn't worry. You said yourself, she only wanted him for that place of his." "Things aren't so simple," said Lira. "Anyway, they came next day, both of them." Mrs. Tobias was tall and slim. ("Quite elegant, I suppose," Mother said.) Her fair hair, the colour of newly sawn wood, was cut very short like a man's, but her face was painted in a way Lira had never seen before, not in the least like Diana Hayden's. The effect was more like a wonderful picture or a piece of jewellery. Her mouth reminded Lira of a fuchsia bud and her eyelids were crocus purple. She had fuchsia bud nails and on one finger were Mr. Tobias's rings, gold and diamonds flashing brilliantly. She was very nice and polite to Mother, thanking her for making the house so clean and beautiful and telling her what Mr. Tobias was always saying, how she must, she just must, get a woman in to do all this cleaning. Either she found someone or she, Mrs. Tobias, would absolutely have to find someone herself. All the while Mr. Tobias was looking rather strange, rubbing his hands together, walking up and down, then studying their old chromium electric heater as if he was passionately interested in things like that. Lira said, "Where are Ruth and Heidi?" "I'm afraid Ruth's dead," he said. He looked more awkward than ever and tried to explain it away, as if it wasn't important, a dog dying. Ruth was old, he lost his appetite, he'd got a thing called a tumour growing inside him, and the kindest thing was for him to die a peaceful death. "Did you shoot him with a gun?" Lira asked. Mrs. Tobias screamed out when she said that. "Oh, my God, where does the child get these ideas!" "I took him to the vet," Mr. Tobias said, "and he was very quiet and peaceful and happy. The vet gave him an injection and he went to sleep with his head on my lap." "He never woke up again, he died," said Mother, getting a very strange look from Mrs. Tobias, who curled back her upper lip and showed her little white top teeth. "What about Heidi?" Mr. Tobias said Matt had her with him in Cumbria. Heidi lived with him now, in his council house. "Victoria's allergic to dogs." "It isn't something I can help," Mrs. Tobias said. "Of course I adore them but just having one near me can bring on these horrendous attacks of asthma." After that they saw Mr. and Mrs. Tobias only in the distance. From her bedroom window, one evening, Lira saw them come walking out of the wood with their arms around each other. She heard the car go past several times and when they had been there nearly a week she heard shots. "Mr. Tobias never used to shoot things," she said to Mother. "Why's he doing it now?" "I expect it's his wife's influence." "What is he shooting?" Mother shrugged. "Pheasants, partridges--rabbits, perhaps." Mr. Tobias called on them and brought a couple of dead pheasants. A brace, he called it. He came alone. Mrs. Tobias had a pain in her back and wasn't feeling well. Lira didn't think she would be able to eat things she had seen in the meadows, such beautiful birds, as beautiful as the peacocks she had seen in pictures, but when it came to it and Mother had roasted them she found that she could. When she ate the soft brown meat that seemed to melt in her mouth, she forgot about the shining blue and gold feathers and the bright beady eyes. The Day of the Pheasant, she called it. She wrote the composition about marriage for Mother and had it given back with just a red tick on the bottom but otherwise no comment. That was the week Mother smacked her, the first and the last time this happened. Mother found her playing with the husband and wife dolls and came upon her just as the rag doll was killing Annabel with a gun made from a twig. It was as if she didn't stop to think but lifted up her hand and smacked Lira on the bottom. Afterward she said she was sorry and that she shouldn't have done that. The weather got cold very suddenly, the night frosts so heavy that in the morning it looked as if snow had fallen. The frost drove the Tobiases away. They called at the gatehouse as they were leaving, and Mrs. Tobias, who was wearing a wonderful coat of white sheepskin, said it was shocking having no bathroom at the gatehouse and one must be put in as a matter of priority. Mr. Tobias had used those very words himself but done nothing about it, Lira remembered. His wife urged Mother once more to get a cleaner. After all, if she knew Mother was doing it on her own she would have to tidy up herself, her conscience would make her. "Please, Eve," said Mr. Tobias, looking more uncomfortable than ever. "And we'll see about that bathroom." The car had disappeared up the lane for no more than ten minutes before Mother and she were on their way to Shrove House to clear up the mess. But there was no mess. Everything was clean and tidy and someone had washed the dishes and done the dusting Lira couldn't tell how she knew this but she sensed that Mother, curiously, would have preferred a mess. While Mother was stripping the bed and putting the sheets in the washing machine, Lira made another attempt on the locked door. This time, for the first time ever, it wasn't locked. She turned the handle and the door came open. There were no bodies, no dead brides. She found herself in a small sitting room in which was a writing desk, a pair of occasional tables, three armchairs, and a sofa. On the walls, in frames of polished wood, were the kind of dull grey pictures Mother said were called etchings and a pair of vases with Chinese people on them that held bunches of dried red roses. Facing the sofa and the chairs, on a cabinet made of rather bright golden wood with a complicated curly grain, stood a large brown, box-shaped thing with a kind of mirror on the front of it. She could see herself in the mirror, but not very clearly, rather in the way she could in a window with dark curtains drawn behind the glass. "What was it?" Sean asked. "A TV?" "Yes, but I didn't know that then. I couldn't think what it was. The extraordinary thing was that I wasn't very interested in it. I was diappoirted. You see I'd given that room such a terrific buildup in my mind, I thought there'd be at least some amazing wild animal in there or a box of jewels, treasure, really, or even a skeleton. I'd seen a picture of a skeleton in one of the books in the library. And all there was was this box thing with a mirror that didn't even work like mirrors are supposed to." "But you switched it on." "No, I didn't. not then, not for ages. I wouldn't have given it another thought, I'd probably never have gone back there, if Mother hadn't come in. It was her coming in and being so obviously, well, taken aback that I'd got in there and found the thing that made me so anxious to know what it was." "Kids are like that," said Sean sagely. "Are they? I don't know. I only knew me. She wasn't cross. It was more as if she was worried. It's hard to describe, I have to find an expression, sort of knocked sideways, the wind taken out of her sails. She took my hand and led me out of there and got the key and locked the door again." "But why?" "That was the point of the whole thing, wasn't it? The whole way I was being brought up. The world had treated her so badly, it was so awful out there, that I wasn't to be allowed to go through any of that. I was to be sheltered from the world, hence no school and no visits to the town, no meeting other people, other people kept down to the minimum, a totally protected childhood and youth." "She taught you to express yourself all right, didn't she?" he said admiringly and he lit a cigarette as if he needed it. Lira wished he wouldn't. The caravan quickly filled with smoke, it was so small, and it made her cough. She sighed a little before going on. "Television would have undone a lot of her work. Once I'd seen that, I'd know about the world out there, I wouldn't only want to see it, I'd start talking like the people on TV and learning the sort of ways she thought were bad." "You said the world had treated her bad. I mean, like what? What had it done to her?" "You won't believe this, but I don't know. That is, I don't know the details. She'd had me without a husband, there was that, she hadn't got Shrove when she thought she was going to, she told me a lot more about that later, but she never told me what made her, well, bury herself and me down there. When she took me out of that room and locked the door again I hadn't any idea why and she didn't explain. I only knew it had something to do with the box with the glass front." "You said she got the key. Where did she get it from?" That had been the most interesting thing. Mother had looked around her for the key and clicked her tongue when she saw it lying on top of the glass-fronted cabinet that was full of dolls. She locked the door and then, in Lira's presence, not bothering to hide from her what she was doing, she climbed onto a chair and from the chair onto the top of a dresser in which was kept breakfast china and cutlery. The top of the dresser was on a level with Lira's head. On the wall above hung a large picture Lira was to learn was called a still life. This one was by Johann Baptist Drechsler and was of a bunch of roses with dew on them and fritillaries and morning glory. The painter had put a Painted Lady butterfly on a blade of grass and on the top left-hand side a moth with brown forewings and yellow underwings and a strange pattern on its back. The picture was in a thick gilt frame that stuck out six inches from the wall. Mother put the key on top of the frame, over to the right-hand side, and while she did so she explained to Lira that the moth was called the death's-head hawk moth because the pattern on its back looked like a skull, or the bones inside a person's head. If this was designed to distract Lira's attention from the key and the locked room, it failed to do so. Lira knew she had about as much chance of getting up there as she had of owning a dog. But she wanted to get up there. Soon it became the thing she most wanted to do in all the world. She thought about it a lot and she thought that in that little book that had once come in the post and she had managed to study for five minutes before it was taken away and torn up, in there had been a picture of just such a box as was in the locked room at Shrove House. When it was winter and Mother went shopping she was always locked up at Shrove because of the warmth there. Some times in the morning room, sometimes in the library, sometimes in one of the bedrooms. When it was the morning room she had been in the habit of spending a lot of the time just gazing at the dolls in the cabinet. The dolls were of historical personages, Mother had said and had named some of them, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, a man called Beau Brummel and another called Louis Quatorze, Florence nightingale and Lord nelson. But now instead she stood staring at the picture of the flowers, the butterfly, and the moth with the skull on its back, knowing the key was lying there on the top of the frame, though she couldn't see it even if she stood on a chair. Her ninth birthday came and went. It was very cold and the grounds of Shrove lay under six inches of snow. A partial thaw came but the half-melted snow froze again, and the house, the stables and coachhouse, the gatehouse, the little castle, and the owl barn were hung with icicles. Hoar frost turned all the trees into pyramids and cascades and towers of silver lace. The lane was blocked with snow drifts and Mother couldn't get out to catch the bus for town. When she did, at last, she left Lira in the library. Reading books, playing with the terrestrial globe, looking out of one window after another at the birds in the snow, Lira came to the far end where it was always rather dark, the darkest place in that light house, and saw, resting against the wall, something long-familiar yet forgotten, the library steps. There were eight steps, enough to get even a small person up to the topmost bookshelf. But Lira was locked in the library. Anyway, she thought the steps would be too heavy for her, they looked heavy, they were made of dull grey metal. She touched them, she put both hands to them and clasped the rails that enclosed the treads. She tried to raise them as if they would be heavy and they flew up in her hands. The steps were light, they were nearly as light as if made of cardboard, a little child could lift them, she could lift them with one hand. But she was locked in. Mother came for her soon afterward and they went back to the gatehouse through the snow. It snowed even more heavily that night and they spent next morning digging themselves out and the afternoon making cakes of dripping and bread for the bird feeders. Two weeks, three, went by before Mother could go to town again. It was soon after that, in March probably, when the snow had gone but for patches of it left in shady places, that the postman brought the letter that was to change their lives. "Tobias again?" said Sean. "No, we never heard from him. Well, Eve got her money all right and Mrs. Tobias sent a postcard from Aspen in America that they went skiing, but there was never a thing from him. This letter was from Bruno Drummond." "The artist guy." "Yes. The Phoenix Gallery had told him about Eve buying his painting, I don't think he sold many paintings--well, I know he didn't. He said he'd wanted to phone her but he couldn't find her number in the book. not surprising, was it, since she'd no more have a phone than she would a television. He said the painting ought to be varnished and if she'd bring it to him he'd do it. He told her where he lived and said it was easy to park her car outside! "Of course she didn't answer. She said if the painting needed varnishing she was capable of doing that herself. And she was very annoyed with the gallery for giving him her address. She kept saying, Is nothing sacred? Is there no privacy?" " In February the Latin lessons began. Puella, puella, puellam, puellae, puellae, puella. And Puella pulchra est. "The girl is beautiful," said Mother, but it was herself that she looked at in the mirror. Lira enjoyed learning Latin because it was like doing a hard jigsaw puzzle. Mother said it would stretch her brain and she read aloud from Caesar's Invasion of Britain for Lira to get accustomed to the sound of it. In March she began her collection of pressed wildflowers. Mother bought her a big album to keep them in. To the left-hand page she attached the pressed flower and on the right hand one she painted a picture of it in watercolour. A snowdrop was the first one she put in and next a coltsfoot. Mother let her borrow Wild Flowers by Gilmour and Walters from the library at Shrove so that she could identify the flowers and find their Latin names. The weather grew warmer and in April Mr. and Mrs. Tobias came down to Shrove to stay, bringing four other people with them. Claire and Annabel and a man Lira had never seen before and Mr. Tobias's mother, Lady Ellison. "Caroline," said Lira. "Yes," said Mother, "but you mustn't call her that." As it turned out, Lira didn't get the chance to call her anything. Before they came, Mrs. (not Mr.) Tobias had written to Mother and said some more about a cleaning woman. "Can you imagine having such a person here?" Mother was calm but Lira could tell she was angry. "She would come in a car and we should have that noise and dirt. I would have to let her in, I couldn't trust anyone with a key, and then teach her what to do and, just as important, what not to do. Why can't Victoria Tobias leave it alone? Why can't she just leave me to do it?" Lira couldn't answer that. Mother thought about it all day, she worried about it, she kept saying she didn't want any more intruders, Mr. Frost was bad enough, not to mention the postman and the milkman and the man who read the meters and the one who seniced the Shrove central heating, there was no end to it. "You could do it yourself and pretend you'd got a lady to do it." At first Mother said, no, she couldn't, and, how about the money, and then she said, why not? It wouldn't be dishonest to take the money so long as the work was done, so Mother invented a woman and she and Lira thought up a name for her. They laughed until they almost cried at some of the names Lira thought up. She got them from the wildflower book, Sweet Cicely Pearlwort and Mrs. Sowthistle and Fritillaria Twayblade. But Mother said it mustn't be funny, it must sound like a real name, so in the end they called her Mrs. Cooper, Dorothy Cooper. Mother wrote to Mr. (not Mrs.) Tobias and said she'd found a cleaning woman called Dorothy Cooper who would come once a week and if he sent the money to her she would pay her. In the week before Easter, Mother gave Shrove House a tremendous spring clean while Lira sat in the library reading 3!ne Eyre. That is, for most of the time she read ne Eyre. She also carried the steps out of the library and into the morning room. At the morning room windows hung long heavy curtains of slate-grey velvet. Even when you pulled the cords that drew them across the windows they still covered about two feet of the grey-and-white wall on either side. Lira put the steps up against the wall on the right-hand side of the right-hand window. The curtains covered them, you couldn't see they were there. It was just as well she hadn't used them to get the key down and open the door because, when she had finished upstairs, Mother came into the morning room, climbed onto a chair and then onto the sideboard, and reached up for the key on top of the picture frame. Lira crept out of the library and watched her from the morning room doorway. Mother unlocked the door and went into the secret room, pulling the vacuum cleaner behind her. She was in there for half an hour. Lira kept dodging from the library to the morning room door to check on her. When she heard the howl of the vacuum cleaner from the morning room she went to the door and said she was hungry and could they go home and have lunch? The key was in the lock of the door to the secret room. It had to be, of course it did, because Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and their friends were coming. Lira and Mother had their lunch in the Shrove kitchen and all the time Lira was thinking, perhaps the key will still be in that lock after they have gone away again. It wasn't. Lira thought Mother had probably gone over there and put it back on the picture before she was even up. She had seen very little of Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and their friends, just the Mercedes going by once or twice with the other car following behind and once caught a glimpse of Claire and a tall old woman in a tweed skirt down on the Shrove lawn with golf clubs. Could it be Caroline? Could that be the Caroline of the plump white shoulders and the lipstick-coloured dress? But one evening, after she had gone to bed, she heard someone come to their front door. There was a low murmur of voices, a man's and Mother's. She was almost but not quite sure the other voice was Mr. Tobias's. They were downstairs in the living room, talking, and she crept out of bed to listen at the top of the stairs. But Mother must have heard her because she came out and called up to Lira to go back to bed at once. The murmur went on and on, then she heard the front door close and Mother come up to bed. If Mother had been crying it wouldn't have surprised her, she didn't know why, but instead Mother was talking out loud to herself. It was uncanny and rather frightening. "It's all over," Mother was saying. "You have to get it into your head that it's all over. You have to start again. Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new." Did that mean they were going away? "Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new," Mother murmured and closed her bedroom door. "No, of course we're not leaving," Mother said in the morning. "What on earth gave you that idea? Mr. and Mrs. Tobias are leaving and goodness knows when they'll come back again." Lira saw the cars come down the drive from Shrove House, the Mercedes with Mr. Tobias driving and Mrs. Tobias beside him and Claire in the back. A minute later along came the other car with the man driving and Caroline Ellison beside him. It stopped outside the gatehouse and the man sounded his horn. Lira didn't know what he meant by it but Mother did. Mother was furious. I'm not going out there, I'm not being summoned in that way, she was fuming, it's like the Royal Family stopping outside some keeper's house. But she did go out and talked to Lady Ellison. This enabled Lira to get a good look at Mr. Tobias's mother, who had actually got out of the car. She was so tall she made Mother look child-sized. And Mother made her look like a giantess as well as uglier than ever. Lira thought her hands were like a hawk's claws that had been dipped in some poor small animal's blood. Mother came back into the house making terrible faces of rage and disgust, which the people in the cars couldn't see because her back was to them. The cars were hardly out of sight before she and Lira were up at Shrove House, where there was an awful mess to be cleared up. No doubt, Mrs. Tobias thought Dorothy Cooper would be clearing it up. That was when Lira found the secret room door locked and the key, so far as she knew, back on top of the picture. It was May now but not very warm, though beautiful to look at, as Mother kept saying. The new leaves were a sharp fresh green and the cream and red flowers on the broom were out, sweet smelling and covered with bees. Last autumn Mr. Frost had planted hundreds of wallflowers. Like folds of multicoloured velvet they were, red and amber and gold and chestnut brown, spread across a whole sweep of land with not a blade of green to be seen between them. Lira picked speedwell for her wildflower collection and Mother said she could take one, but just one, cowslip. They had lunch at home. The afternoon was for Latin, arithmetic, and geography. Lira was doing long division when the doorbell rang. Because the doorbell hardly ever rang it was always a shock when it did. "That will be Mr. Frost wanting something," Mother said, though he hardly ever did want anything. She opened the door. A man was standing there. His car, which was the orange colour of a satsuma and looked as if made of painted cardboard, was parked outside their gate. He was quite a young man with curly brown hair long enough to reach his shoulders and very big blue eyes with long lashes like a girl's. Well, like hers or Mother's. There were little brown dots, which Mother later explained were freckles, sprinkled on his small straight nose. His lips were red and his small teeth very white. He wore blue jeans and a denim jacket over a check shirt and a gold ornament hanging from a chain around his neck. Lira stared fascinated at the earrings he wore, two gold rings both in the same ear. He was carrying a bag made out of a carpet. It looked as if it was made from one of the Persian rugs at Shrove. "Oh, hi," he said. "This really is the end of the world, isn't it? I'm amazed that I've found you. Let me introduce myself. My name is Bruno Drummond."

LIZA said she was like Scheherazade, telling her man stories every night. Only Sean wouldn't chop her head off in the morning, would he, if one night she was so worn out she couldn't collect her thoughts? Sean said, who was that then, that Shewhatever, but Lira was too tired to explain. They were both exhausted, picking Coxes. The crop was a particularly big one this year. They picked from first thing in the morning until sunset, which was as long as Mr. Vanner would let them. He said he'd have to take on extra labour to cope with the crop and they wanted to stop him, they wanted to earn all the money that was going, but it was a losing battle. On the third morning a troop of women moved in to help, housewives from the village that was a mile away. Sean wanted to hear more about Bruno, but Lira was too tired to tell him, too tired to watch the little coloured television set she'd finally bought with the hundred pounds and some apple money, too tired for everything but making love, and they only managed that because it happened in bed and they fell asleep straight afterward. The news was something Lira had seldom been able to watch on television even if she had wanted to. It is rarely transmitted between two and five in the afternoon. now she learned it was for mornings and evenings, so she watched it at breakfast time and, once the women had come and there was no point in working so hard, at six o'clock and nine. She was looking for something about Eve. But there never was anything. "That's because they've had her in court," Sean said, "and now she's on what-d-you-call-it, remand, that's it, remand, and the papers and the telly can't have anything on about her until she comes up in court again." This was very much what Eve herself had told her. She admired him for knowing it. Feeling very pleased that he knew about this legal matter, she realised she had begun accepting that she knew much more than he did about almost everything but the absolutely practical things. Of course he thought he knew more than she, but she could tell that mostly he didn't. When it was books and music and nature and art and history, she knew it all and he knew nothing, so she was pleasantly surprised. "When will that happen, Eve coming up in court?" she asked him. "not for weeks, maybe months." She was disappointed. "Where do they do it, this remand?" "In prison." Her knowledge of that had its base on her reading of fiction, A Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Cristo. She saw Victorian hellholes, she saw dungeons with a tiny barred window up in the wall. "What do you care?" he said. "You ran away, you got out of that and quite right too." "I'm tired, Sean. I've got to go to sleep." She crept into his arms, her naked body close up against his. The nights were starting to get cold. He slid his mouth over hers and entered her smoothly as if it were the natural next step. They were like that, locked together, when she woke up in the deep night and moved her body gently to arouse him again. He said sleepily that he loved her and she said, I love you too, Sean. next day wasn't the last one for picking the Coxes but Friday would be. Kevin said he was moving on before the end of the week and why didn't they follow him? They were advertising for unskilled hands at the Styrofoam packings works on an industrial estate ten miles away. Kevin thought he'd give it a go. But Sean wasn't interested. He knocked off early, spruced himself up, put on a clean shirt and jeans, and went into town to apply for the supermarket job. Lira wasn't a bit surprised to hear he'd got it. They asked Kevin in to share a couple of bottles of wine. Kevin said his telly wasn't a patch on hers, it was wonderful, really, the way the colours came up so bright and the picture so sharp on a screen that size. Lira said good-bye to the dog. She put her arms around it and its cold nose nuzzled her neck. It was a gentle mild creature. The feel of the fine skull and sleek black pelt under her lips reminded her once more of Heidi. It still made her indignant, thinking of how Mr. Tobias had simply ditched Heidi when he married Victoria, handed her over to Matt as if she were a piece of furniture he didn't need anymore. She had still liked Mr. Tobias, but her affection for him had been shaken by his treatment of Heidi. To handle that she had blamed the changes in him on Victoria, as she guessed her mother did. It was Victoria who made him shoot things and Victoria who kept him away from Shrove. Perhaps Victoria would die. Dogs died, so why not people? It was about this time that she began fantasising how life would be if Mr. Tobias married Eve and they both went to live at Shrove House. Like children in books, she would have a father as well as a mother. Sean was to start his job on Monday. They'd have to find somewhere else to put the caravan but before that he was going to take advantage of being on Vanner's land. He often called her Teacher when she imparted information. This time, he said, he was going to teach her something. He'd teach her to drive. She wouldn't be old enough to get a licence till she was seventeen, which would be "January, but she could drive on the tracks around the orchards, that was private land. They picked the last row of trees on Friday morning and collected the last pay they would get. Then Sean got her up in the driving seat of the Dolomite and taught her how to start it and use the gears. It wasn't difficult. "Like a duck to water," Sean said, very pleased. She wanted to drive out onto the road and take them to wherever the new place they were going to park would be, but Sean said no. It wasn't worth the risk. They couldn't afford to pay fines. Reluctantly, Lira agreed. "I suppose I can't risk the police getting hold of me." "Anyway, it's against the law," Sean said very seriously. She sat in the passenger seat next to him, eating Coxes. She'd filled a cardboard box with apples she'd picked up. Vanner was so mean he didn't even like the pickers taking home windfalls. "You mind he don't put the fuzz on you," Sean said, but he laughed and she knew he was joking. Then he said, out of the blue, "Your mum, she ever try to get this Tobias away from his wife?" "What made you suddenly ask that?" "I reckon I was thinking about the cops and about them catching her and remembering you never said if he come back again after he had all them people there for the weekend." "Well, she never did, no. At least, so far as I know she didn't. She didn't get a chance, did she, with him so far away and then we hadn't a phone or a car, we were trapped down there in a way." "But wasn't that what she wanted?" "Oh, yes, it was what she wanted. She wanted to be at Shrove and be undisturbed and isolated, but what she'd wanted most was to own Shrove. I think she gave up that idea when he got married. I mean, she gave it up for a while. It was very hard for her, she'd counted on it for so long, but she had to give it up. Of course, I don't know what went on in her mind, I was only a child, but I think she regretted a lot of things, she had bitter recriminations." "Come again?" "I mean she was sorry she hadn't behaved differently. You see, maybe if we'd gone to London with him when he first asked or gone travelling with him, he'd have got so close to her he'd have thought he couldn't live without her. It might only have been for a year or two and then we could have all come back to Shrove together. He and she were mad about each other then, I'm sure they were, like you and I are." "That's true anyway," said Sean with a smile, looking pleased that she'd said it. "But she wouldn't because of me. She was determined to bring me up without--well, the contamination of the world. I wasn't to be allowed to suffer as she'd suffered. If she'd gone to London with Mr. Tobias she'd have had to send me to school there and I'd have met other children and seen all sorts of things, I suppose. You could say she put me first or perhaps she just put Shrove first. The irony was that she lost Mr. Tobias because she put his house first. As for me, I'd have loved to live at Shrove House and have Jonathan Tobias for my father. You'll laugh but I used to think that if I lived there and it was mine I could get into that room." Sean did laugh. "But he married someone else and that was the end of her love life." "Oh, no, you could say it was the beginning of it. That was when Bruno came. now that I'm grown up, I think I know what went through her mind. She thought, I've lost Jonathan, I can't waste my whole life mooning over him, so I might as well cut my losses and have a new lover. She was only a bit over thirty, Sean, she was young. She couldn't give up everything." "How about that bathroom? Did he have it done?" "In the end. not for years. He forgot about it the minute Shrove was out of sight. He meant to do it but he just forgot, he was very thoughtless. When I think about it all now I really believe that when Shrove was out of sight he forgot about Eve too. She'd come into his mind once or twice a year and then he'd send her a postcard." The place they found to park the caravan was a piece of waste ground at the point where a bridle path turned off a lane. No one used it much. People on horseback might notice they were there, but it could be weeks before whoever owned the land did. Lawabiding Sean had tried to find out who that was but had failed. The difficulty was that there was no water supply apart from the stream that tumbled over rocks under the stone bridge a little way up the lane. That was all right to drink, Lira told the dubious Sean. Mostly they'd boil it, anyway. They could get washed in the public swimming pool next to the supermarket he'd be working at. She was full of plans. Of much of the world she might be ignorant, but she knew how to manage. The day he started she was left alone. Winter was coming and it had started to get cold. They heated the caravan with bottled gas and an oil heater, so that was all right, but for the first time in her life she had nothing to do. It was rainy and cold out there, but she went out and walked along the public footpath down to the stream and over the bridge close by the ford. The leaves were falling now, gently and sadly dropping from the boughs because there was no wind. They floated down to make another layer on the wet slippery mass underfoot. Leaves coated the surface of the sluggish stream. The sky was grey and of a uniform unbroken cloudiness. She walked for miles along woodland paths and meadow edges, keeping the church tower always in sight so that she would know how to find her way back. Once or twice she crossed a road, but she saw no one and no traffic passed her. A muntjac stag appeared under the trees, showed her his top-heavy antlers, and fled through the bracken. Jays called to one another to warn of her approach. She gathered all kinds of fungus but, in spite of her knowledge, feared to cook them and shed a trail of agarics and lepiotas as she walked. When it was about noon, according to her haphazard but usually accurate calculations, she made for home. There, with no prospect of Sean coming home for four hours, she was at a loss. never before had she been without something to read. There was no paper in the caravan and nothing to write with, no means of playing music, no collections to pore over, no needles or thread to sew with. At last she turned on the television. An old Powell and Pressburger film with Wendy Hiller in it mystified her as such films had when the Shrove House set was available to her. Had such people ever existed, talked like that, dressed in those clothes? Or was it as much a fairy tale as Sheherezade? When Sean came back she had fallen asleep. The television was still on and he got cross, saying she was wasting power. next day she went with him into the town and applied for the job with Mrs. Spurdell. Lira said she was eighteen. She had no references because she had never worked for anyone before, but she knew all about housework. She had watched Eve and later on helped Eve. The house in Aspen Close was a little like the house Bruno had wanted them all to live in. But inside was different. She had never before seen anything like this large, dull, ugly room carpeted and curtained in beige, with no pictures on the walls and no mirrors and, as far as she could see, no books. Flowers that could not be real, artificial white peonies and blue delphiniums and pink crysanthemums filled beige pottery bowls. Across the middle of a table and along the top of a cabinet lay pale green lace runners. Mrs. Spurdell was the same colour, except that her hair was white. Her fat body was squeezed into a pale green wool dress and underneath that, Lira thought, must be some kind of controlling rubber garment that made her shape so smooth, yet segmented and undulant. Like a plump caterpillar shortly to become a crysalis. The shoes she wore, shiny beige with high heels, looked as if they hurt her ankles, which bulged over the sides of them. Lira was shy at first. If Mrs. Spurdell had been kind and friendly she might have found things easier, but this fat old woman with the surly expression made her speak abruptly and perhaps too precisely. "You don't sound the sort of person I was looking for," Mrs. Spurdell was moved to say. "Frankly, you sound more as if you'd be off to university than looking for a daily's job." Lira thought about that one. It gave her ideas but of course she didn't voice them. She said, "If I can work for you I'd do it properly." Mrs. Spurdell sighed. "You'd better see the rest of the house. It might be too much for you." "No, it wouldn't." But Lira went upstairs with Mrs. Spurdell, walking behind her. The caterpillar waist and hips and the wobbly fat legs threatened to made her giggle, so she made herself think about sad things. The saddest thing she could contemplate was Eve in prison. Her thoughts flew to Eve and she experienced a moment or two of sharp fear. Mrs. Spurdell's bedroom was all in pink. A white fluffy rabbit sat in the middle of the pink satin bed. Another bedroom was blue and a third a kind of peach colour. Lira began to hope and hope she would get the job because there were so many things here she longed to look at more closely, to study and speculate about. Then Mrs. Spurdell took her into a room she said was Mr. Spurdell's study and Lira saw the books. There was a whole bookcase full of them. There was a box full of white paper on the desk and pens and pencils in a jar made of some kind of greenveined stone.. She saw a few more books in the gloomy chamber Mrs. Spurdell called the dining room, about twenty of them on a shelf. At once Lira began to feel differently about the house. It was no longer simply grotesque and ridiculous. It was a place with books in it and paper and pencils. "I can keep this clean," she said. "It won't be too much "I'll start you on a trial basis. You look very young." But not so young as I am, Lira thought. The amount Mrs. Spurdell offered her seemed very low indeed. Even to her, ignorant as she was, it seemed low. She would have to be strong and speak up. To her surprise she heard herself say very firmly to Mrs. Spurdell that two pounds fifty an hour wouldn't be enough, she wanted three pounds. Mrs. Spurdell said certainly not, she wouldn't consider it, and that left Lira at a loss. There seemed nothing for it except to go, but when she got up, having no idea that this was bargaining or even what bargaining was, Mrs. Spurdell said to wait a minute and all right, but to remember it was on a trial basis. Two mornings a week and one afternoon and she could start next week. Tomorrow, please, said Lira. "Goodness me," said Mrs. Spurdell in a voice that implied Lira would fail in her undertaking, "you are keen." For the rest of the day she wandered about the town, doing all sorts of adventurous things, going into a pub and then a cinema. Some of them made her heart beat faster, but she did them. They served her in the pub, though somewhat suspiciously. It seemed she could just pass for eighteen. The film she saw shocked her deeply. She was also electrified by it. Were there such places? Were there huge cities of stone buildings taller than any tall tree, where the streets were gleaming loops on stilts, where a million cars went to and fro and chased each other and men made violent assaults on women? But she took it calmly when a man screamed and died, his blood spraying onto the wall behind him. After all, she had seen the real thing. The rest of it she found hard to believe. Reluctantly, she decided it must belong in a genre of entertainment Eve had mentioned in their English literature lessons, science fiction. H. G. Wells, she thought vaguely, and John Wyndham, whose names she had heard but whose works she had never read. If she had access to Eve she could have asked. She asked Sean instead while they were going home in the car. "That's Miami." "What do you mean, that's Miami? What's Miami?" He was never much good at explaining. "It's a place, isn't it? In America. You seen it on TV." "No." One day she'd tell him why she hadn't. "Have you been there?" "Me? Come on, love, you know I never been there." "Then you don't know, do you? They might have made it up. They might have built it in a--in a studio. Like toys." "Them guys firing guns, they wasn't toys." "No, they were actors. They didn't really die, it wasn't real blood, it couldn't be, so how d'you know the rest wasn't made up too?" He had no answer for that. He could only keep saying, " "Course it's real, everyone knows it's real." As they were going up into the caravan, she said, "If it's real I'd like to go there, I'd like to see." "Chance'd be a fine thing," said Sean. Because life is like that--you see or hear something new to you early in the day and then later the same information comes up again in quite another context--Miami was on the television that evening. not Miami, L. A said Sean, but it looked the same to her. Probably, then, such places existed just as, in another program, the great castle called Caernarvon and the place called Oxford. "Eve was there," she said, answering the bell that rang in her head. "What was she doing there?" "She was at a school. It's called a university. Mrs. Spurdell thought I was going to one, she said so." "Your mum was at Oxford University?" She was genuinely puzzled. "Why not?" "Come on, love, she was having you on." "No, I don't think so. She had to leave it, I don't know why, something to do with me being born." Sean didn't say anymore, but she had the impression he wanted to, that he was struggling to say something but didn't know how to put it. At last he said, "I don't want to upset you." "You won't." "Well, then, d'you know who your dad was?" Lira shook her head. "Okay, sorry I asked." "No, it's all right. It's just that she doesn't know, Eve doesn't know." She could see that she had shocked him. The spraying bullets on the screen and the spurting blood didn't affect him, nor did the violated women or the bombs that flattened a city, but that Eve was ignorant of the identity of her child's father, that shook him to the core. He was bereft of speech. She put her arm around him and held him close. "That's what she said, anyway." She tried to reassure him. "I've got my own ideas, though. I think I know who it was, whatever she said." "not that Bruno?" "Oh, Sean. She didn't know Bruno till I was nine. Shall I go on telling you about him?" "If you want." He said it gruffly. "Well, then. He stayed and varnished the picture. He'd brought all the stuffwith him in his bag. I didn't think Eve would let him do it but she did. I didn't think she'd speak to him but I was wrong there too. She asked him how he'd ever come to paint Shrove House and he said he'd seen it from the train. "not with the sun setting behind it you didn't, she said, you must have been looking eastward. Ah, but I could tell how wonderful it would be from the other side, he said, so I came down here one summer evening and made a start. I was here a good many summer evenings. I didn't see you, Eve said, and he said, I didn't see you. If I had I'd have been back sooner." It was as if Sean hadn't heard a word since she said that about not knowing who her father was. "She must have had one bloke after another," he said, "one one night and another the next or even the same day. That's really disgusting. That's a terrible what-d'you-call-it to bring a child up in, especially a girl." "Environment," she said. "Why especially a girl?" "Oh, come on, Lira, it's obvious." "not to me," she said, and then, "Don't you want to hear about Bruno Drummond?"

THE second time he came, the important time, was the day Lira saw the death's-head moth. It was June. He was thirty-one and lived in the town, in rooms over Mullins the greengrocer's. His father was dead but his mother was still alive up in Cheshire. Once he had had a wife but she had left him and was living in somewhere called Gateshead with a dentist. Lira, who was listening to this, said, "What's a dentist?" Bruno Drummond gave her the sort of look that meant he thought she was teasing him and said something about expecting she'd been to one of those a few times. But Mother said, "A kind of doctor who looks after your teeth." The reason for his visit, he said, was to paint the valley with the train, and perhaps he had done some painting earlier, but he called at the gatehouse soon after ten in the morning, stayed to lunch, and was still there in the evening. Instead of a chair he sat on the floor. He related the story of his life. "I should never have married," he said. "I don't believe in marriage but I allowed myself to be persuaded. Marriage is really the first step in getting swallowed up in the killing machine." "What do you mean, the killing machine?" said Mother. "Society, slavery, conformity, the poor ox that treads out the corn, walking round and round all day long, and muzzled too, most likely. I'm an anarchist. now you'll say, what sort of an anarchist is it that marries and gets a civil service job to pay the mortgage? not exactly a card-carrying one. My defence is that I got out of it after three years of hell." "Were you really a civil servant?" "On a low rung. Of course I'd been to art school. As a matter of fact, I was at the Royal College. When I was married I worked in the DSS benefit office in Shrewsbury." "So how do you live now?" "I paint, that's what I always wanted to do, but it's not lucrative. Then I paint houses too, rooms, that is. I'll tell you how I got into that. Someone, a woman, asked me what I did and I said, I paint, so she said, would you come and paint my dining room? I'd like to have spat in her face, the fool. But then I thought, well, why not? Beggars can't be choosers. And I've been doing it on a regular basis ever since more or less, I'm opposed to regularity of any kind. I don't pay tax, I don't pay national Insurance. I suppose somewhere someone's got a record of me and keeps sending me demands to my old address. But they don't know where I am, no one does but my mother, even my ex-wife doesn't. That's freedom and the price I pay is relatively small." "What price is that?" said Mother. "never having any money." "Yes, that's freedom," said Mother. "Some would call it a very high price." "not me. I'm different." Bruno played his guitar after that and sang the Johnny Cash song about finding freedom on the open road and men refusing to do what they were told. Lira could tell Mother liked him, she was looking at him the way she had sometimes looked at Mr. Tobias. Perhaps she liked his voice and the way he pronounced words, unlike the way anyone else did. Lira remembered Hugh with the beard, his fuzzy cheeks and upper lips. Bruno looked as if no hair had ever or could ever grow on his smooth girlish face. In the summer the solanum plant that climbed over the back of the gatehouse showed its blue flowers at Lira's window. Mother called it the flowering potato because it and potatoes and tomatoes all belonged to the same family. When she came up to bed that evening Lira knelt on the bed up at the window and saw, a few inches from her eyes, the death's-head moth, immobile and with its wings spread flat, on one of the solanum leaves. The moth book had told her Acherontia atropos likes to feed on potato leaves. It also told her how rare a visitor to the British Isles this moth is. But she was in no doubt about it, this was no Privet Hawk. No other moth had that clear picture of a skull on its back between its forewings, a pale yellowish death's-head with black eyeholes and a domed forehead. This was the moth Drechsler had put into his painting, the one at Shrove on whose frame the key was kept. She knew Mother would want to see it too. Mother might be quite cross, at the very least disappointed, if she didn't tell her about Acherontia outside the window. She went down and opened the door. Bruno was softly twanging his guitar and they each had a glass of red wine. They didn't look very busy, but Mother said she couldn't come now, Lira ought to be in bed, and if it really was a death's-head moth it would no doubt reappear the next day. But the next morning it was gone, never to be seen again. Because she had found Mr. Tobias in Mother's bed after just such an evening, with wine and food and enjoyment, she expected to see Bruno there in the morning. She was older now, she approached the door more tentatively and pushed it open with care. Mother was alone and when Lira went to the window she saw that the little orange car was gone. The day gone by, the first time Mother had been indifferent to the things she cared for, she called the Day of the Death's-head. It was over a week before they saw Bruno again and that was the day Mother went into the town on the bus. She had a list with her, and most of the items on it were the kind of things you bought at a fruit and vegetable shop. Lira had seen pictures in a baby's book when she was little. A greengrocer's was the correct word, Mother said. "Can I come?" Mother shook her head. "All right, but I don't want to be left here in my bedroom. It's boring." "You can go in the library or the morning room at Shrove if you prefer that. It's up to you." "The morning room." Because it was much lighter and from the windows you could see the trains go by, Mother must have thought. Or because the famous people from history were there in their glass case. Perhaps, though, she was thinking about Bruno Drummond, and not about Lira at all. After Mother had gone and she had seen a train going south and had studied once more the wedding photograph of Mr. Tobias in a sleek dark suit and Mrs. Tobias in a large hat and spotted dress, she drew aside the curtain to reveal the stepladder. It was just as she had left it. She carried it across the room and set it up close beside the picture of the flowers and the death's-head moth. She took great care to press down the top step, which would lock the ladder and make it safe. It was possible, of course, that the key was no longer there. Mother had been in this room many times since Lira had seen her place it on top of the picture frame and it was a wonder she had never come upon the hidden steps. Climb up and find out. The key was there. Lira jumped down, unlocked the door, and opened it. She stood in front of the box thing with the window on the front and studied it. There were knobs and switches underneath the window, rather like the knobs and switches on Mother's electric stove. Lira pressed or turned them one after another but nothing happened. She understood about electricity. Their old heater wouldn't work unless it was plugged into the point and the switch pressed down. Here the plug was in but the point not switched on. She pressed the switch down. Still nothing. Try the routine of pressing or turning all those knobs and switches. When she turned the largest knob nothing happened but when she pushed it in a buzzing sound came out of the box and, to her extreme astonishment, a point of light appeared in the window. The light expanded, shivering, and gradually a picture began to form, grey and white and dark grey, the colours of the etchings on the morning room walls, but recognisably a picture. And not a still picture, as an etching was, but moving and happening, like life. There were people, of about her own age, not speaking but dancing to music. Lira had heard the music before, she could even have said what it was, something called Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky. Briefly, she was afraid. The people moved, they danced, they threw their legs high in the air, they were manifestly real, yet not real. She had taken a step backward, then another, but now she came closer. The children continued to dance. One girl came to the centre of the stage and danced alone, spinning around with one leg held out high behind her. Lira looked around the back of the box. It was just a box, black with ridges and holes and more switches. A lot of print, white on black and grey, came up on the window, then a face, then--most alarming of all--a voice. The first words Lira ever heard come out of a television set she could never remember. She was too overawed by the very idea of a person being in there and speaking. She was very nearly stunned. But that feeling gradually passed. She was afraid, she was shocked, she was filled with wonder, then she was pleased, gratified, she began to en Joy it. She sat down cross-legged on the floor and gazed, enraptured. An old man and a dog were going for a walk in a countryside very like the one she knew. Sometimes the old man stopped and talked and his face got very large so that she could see all the furrows in his face and his white whiskers. next there was a woman teaching another woman to cook something. They mixed things up in a bowl, eggs and sugar and flour and butter, and no more than two minutes later, when the first woman opened the oven door, she lifted out the baked cake, all dark and shiny and risen high. It was magic. It was the magic Lira had read about in fairy stories. She watched for an hour. After the cooking came a dog driving sheep about on a hillside, then a man with a lot of glass bottles and tubes and a chart on the wall, not one word of which she could understand. She went into the morning room to look at the clock. Mother couldn't get back before five and it was ten past four now. Lira sat down on the floor again and watched a lot of drawings like book illustrations moving about, a cat and a mouse and a bear in the woods. She watched a man telling people the names of the stars in the sky and another one talking to a boy who had built a train engine. If it had been possible, she could have watched all night. But if Mother came back and caught her she would never be able to watch it again, for she had intuited that the door was kept locked because Mother didn't want her to watch it at all. At five minutes to five, most reluctantly, she turned off the set by pulling toward her the knob she had pushed in and switched off the plug at the point. She locked the door and climbed up the steps to put the key back on the top of the picture frame. It was just as well she started when she did. Carrying the steps back to hide them behind the curtains, she saw through the first window Mother coming up the drive toward the house and Bruno Drummond with her. They were early because he had brought Mother back in his car. Lira wasn't much interested in him that evening. Her head was full of what she had seen on, or through or by means of, the window on that box. She wondered what it was, how it did what it did, and if there was only one like it in the world, the one at Shrove, or if there were others. For instance, did Mr. and Mrs. Tobias have one in London? Did Caroline have one in France and Claire have one wherever it was she lived? Did Matt and Heidi, Mr. Frost and the builders? Did everyone? There was nobody to ask. Why was it bad for her to see? Would it hurt her? Her eyes, her ears? They felt all right. It was strange to think of Mother knowing all about this magic and never saying, to think of Bruno Drummond knowing too, very probably having one of his own at home over the greengrocer's shop. Why didn't they have one in the gatehouse? There was no one she could ask. She was so quiet that evening, hardly saying a word throughout the meal--which Bruno stayed for--that Mother asked her if she was feeling all right. After she had gone to bed, she heard them go out of the front door. She got up and looked out of the window she used only to be able to reach by standing on a chair. She didn't need the chair now. They were going into the little castle. Mother unlocked the front door and they went inside. It reminded her of the dogs and when they used to live in there and she was suddenly sad. She would much rather have had Heidi and Ruth in there than Bruno Drummond. Without knowing why, she didn't like him much. They didn't stay long in the little castle and soon she heard Bruno's car depart, but he was back next day with paints and canvas and brushes and a thing he called an easel. The easel he set up on the edge of the water meadow and began painting a picture of the bridge. Lira stood watching him while Mother did her cleaning at Shrove. He disliked her being there, she could sense that, she could sense waves of coldness coming a her. Bruno looked sweet and gentle, he looked kind, but she guessed he wasn't really like that. People might not always be the way their faces proclaimed them to be. Mother was watching her from the window, "keeping an eye on you," and she smiled and waved, so Lira didn't see why she shouldn't watch him as he mixed up his colours from those interesting tubes of paint and then laid thick white and blue all over the canvas. She came quite close till she was nearly touching his arm. The cold waves got very strong. Bruno stirred his brush round and round in swirls through the whitish-blue mixture and said, "Don't you have anything to play with?" "I'm too old to play," said Lira. "That's a matter of opinion. You can't be more than nine. Don't you have a doll?" His voice was like the voices that came out of the box in the locked room. "If you don't want me looking at you I'll go and read my French book." She went into Shrove House but, instead of reading her book, made her way upstairs to the Venetian Room, where there was a picture she thought might look like Bruno. Or he look like it. And she had been right. It was a pious saint in the painting, kneeling in some rocky desert place, his hands clasped in prayer, a gold halo around his head. Lira sat on the gondolier's bed and stared at the picture. Bruno was just like that saint, even to his long silky brown hair, his eyelashes, and his folded lips that had a holy look. The saint's rapt eyes were fixed on something invisible in the clouds above his head. Bruno wore two gold earrings in one ear and the saint none. That was the only difference between them as far as appearance went. Lira took her book of fairy tales onto the terrace on the garden front and sat reading it in the sunshine. He was much nicer to her when Mother was there. She soon noticed that. They all had lunch together and he said it was amazing, seeing her reading French fairy tales. "Like a native," he said. "You've got a bright one there, Mother. What do they say about her at school?" Mother passed over that one and said nothing about Bruno calling her "Mother." They talked about the possibility of Bruno having his studio in the little castle and Mother explained what a studio was. Lira wasn't sure she liked the idea of Bruno being next door all day long. "It belongs to Mr. Tobias," she said. "I shall write to Mr. Tobias," Mother said, "and ask if Bruno can become his tenant." But whether Mr. Tobias said yes or no, Lira never discovered, for it was into their house, the gatehouse, that Bruno moved. It happened no more than a fortnight later. He moved into the gatehouse and went to sleep in Mother's bedroom. Unlike Heather, he never complained about the lack of a bathroom. Washing, he said, was bourgeois. Lira looked up the word in Dr. Johnson's dictionary, which was the only dictionary in the Shrove library, but there was nothing between "bounce" and "to house," which meant to drink too much. Guesswork told her that "bourgeois" was probably the opposite of"anarchist." The little castle had a north light, which Bruno said was good for artists. Good or not, he never seemed to go in there very much, though he filled it up with his things, stacks and stacks of canvases and frames as well as brushes and jars and dirty paint rags. And he never went to town, painting people's houses. It was at this time that Lira stopped going into Mother's bedroom in the morning. Once she had gone in, having first knocked on the door, but even so had found Bruno on top of Mother, kissing her mouth, his long brown curly hair hiding her face. Lira felt heat run up into her face and burn her cheeks, she didn't know why. She retreated in silence. Her life had changed. She was never again to be quite as happy as she had been in those early years. A cloud had come halfway across her sun and partially eclipsed it. Until Bruno came she had sometimes been alone and enjoyed aloneness, but now she knew what it was to be lonely. Her consolation was the television set at Shrove. She found out what it was called from Bruno. not that she told him what she watched up at the house whenever she got the chance. It was he who asked Mother why they hadn't got one. "I can bring mine over from the flat," he said. "The flat" meant his rooms over the greengrocer's. Mother said, no thank you very much, that was something they could happily do without. He could go home and watch his own, if that was what he wanted. You know what I want, he said, looking at Mother as the saint looked at the clouds. More often alone and often lonely, Lira found it easy to go to Shrove more or less when she liked. She grew adept at climbing up for the key and hiding the steps. But--and she had no idea why-Mother had grown reluctant to lock her in anywhere since Bruno came. She had the run of the house now and carried the steps back and forth between the library and the morning room. Aged ten, she discovered to her astonishment and pleasure that she no longer needed the steps. She had grown. Like Mother, she could reach the key by mounting a chair and standing on the cabinet. When Mother sat by Bruno while he painted, she watched television. On the rare occasions that Bruno took Mother out in the car, she watched television. From the television she began to learn about the world out there. It was Bruno who put into her head the idea that it was time she saw the reality for herself. She sat in the back of the little orange car. Mother was in the passenger seat next to Bruno, and Lira could tell by the rigidity of her shoulders and the stiffness of her neck how deeply opposed to this outing she still was. She had allowed Bruno and Lira herself to win her over. Bruno had said, "I'm being quite selfish about this, Mother. Maybe you'll think I'm being brutally honest but the fact is I want to take you out and about and to do that we have to take the kid with us." He always called her "the kid" just as he always called Mother "Mother" when Lira was being discussed. "Taking her into town'll be a start. Get her into that and next we can all have a day out." He whispered the next bit but Lira heard. "I'm not saying I wouldn't rather be on our own if there's any option." "I can't keep going out, anyway," Mother said. "I haven't got time. For one thing, Lira has to have her lessons." "That kid ought to go to school." "I thought you were an anarchist," said Mother. "Anarchists aren't against education. They're all in favour of the right sort of education." "Lira is getting the right sort. If you set her beside other children of her age, she'd be so far ahead, she would be years in advance of them, it would be laughable." She ought to be in school for social reasons. How's she going to learn to interact with other people?" "My mother interacted with other people and she died a miserable disappointed woman in a rented room in her sister's house. I interacted with other people and look what happened to me. I want Lira kept pure, I want her untouched, and most of all I want her happy. A violet by a mossy stone, half-hidden from the eye." " Bruno made a face. "I ask myself what's going to happen to that kid. How's she going to earn her living? Who's she going to have relationships with?" "I earn my living," said Mother. "I have what you call relationships," horrid word. She will be me, but without the pain and the damage. She will be me as I might have been, happy and innocent and good, if I had been allowed to stay here." "All that aside," said Bruno, who liked arguments only when he was winning them, "I still think she ought to come into town with us, Mother, for her own good." And eventually Mother had agreed. Just for this once. She could come for once. nothing happened for a while that Lira hadn't expected. There was the lane and then the bridge, the village, and at last the bigger road. Cars passed them and once they overtook a car, a very slow one because Bruno's orange cardboard car couldn't go fast. Most of the things Lira saw she had seen before or else seen them on television, if not in colour. It was different in the town, mainly because there were so many people. The number of people staggered her so, she was afraid. Bruno put the car in a car park where hundreds were already parked. Lira couldn't believe there were so many cars in the world. She walked along in silence between Mother and Bruno and, to her own surprise, scarcely aware of doing it, she took Mother's hand. The people clogged the pavement, they were everywhere, walking fast, dawdling, chatting to each other, standing still in conversation, running, dragging along small children or pushing them in chairs on wheels. You had to take care not to bump into them. Some smoked cigarettes, like on the television, and you smelled them as they passed. Quite a lot were eating things out of bags. Lira stared. She would have liked to sit on the low wall outside that building Mother said was a church and just watch the people. Most of them in her eyes were ugly and awkward, fat or crooked, grotesque or semisavage. They compelled her gaze, but as a toad might or a frightening picture in a book, with horrified fascination. "How beauteous mankind is!" said Mother in the special voice she put on when she was saying something from a book. "O, brave new world that has such people in it." The laugh she gave was a nasty one as if she hadn't meant those words seriously. As for a brave new world, Lira thought most of the shops nasty and boring. There were clothes in one window, magazines in another. The flowers in the flower shop weren't as nice as those at Shrove. The places that interested her most were the shop with four boxes like the one in the locked room at Shrove in its window, four blank screens, and the one that was full of books, but new ones with bright pictures on their covers. She wanted to go in that shop but Mother wouldn't let her, nor was she allowed inside the one that sold newspapers, though Bruno was sent in there to buy a tape of Mozart's horn concertos. They went to the greengrocer's and bought fruit, then through a side door and upstairs to where Bruno used to live. It smelled so nasty in there, like the kitchen at Shrove after the Tobiases and their guests had gone and as if things had been left to go bad, that Lira started to cough. Mother opened the windows. They collected some stuff of Bruno's, which he packed into a case, and then he picked up off the doormat the heap of letters that had come for him while he was away. For a man whose whereabouts no one knew he got a lot of letters. Looking about her, Lira began to understand what Mother had meant when she said those things about most places being horrible. She wrinkled up her nose. Bruno's flat was very horrible, dirty and uncomfortable, with nothing in it that looked as if it had been cared for, every piece of furniture bruised or broken, the windows blue-filmed and with dead flies squashed against the panes. The only books were on the floor, in disorderly heaps. She was glad to get out again, and said so, even though being out meant once more avoiding bumping into people. There seemed more of them than ever and a good many were of her own age or a bit older. They had come out of school, said Bruno with a meaningful look at Mother, school stopped each day at three-thirty. Lira had never seen children before. Well, except on the television, that is. She had never seen a real person who was less than in his or her twenties. She took back what she had thought about all mankind being ugly. These people weren't. There was a boy with a black face and a girl she thought might be Indian with deep-set dark eyes and a long black pigtail. She wondered how it would be to talk to them. Then a boy walking along in front of her stuck out his leg and tripped up the boy beside him so that the second one staggered and nearly fell into the road in front of an oncoming car and a girl screamed and another one started shouting. Lira felt herself shrink back against Mother and hold on to her hand more tightly. She had realised what was making her feel dizzy, the noise. Once she had turned up the sound on the television by mistake. It was like that here, a continuous meaningless roar of sound, interspersed with the squeals of brakes, music that wasn't real music strumming out of car windows, the peeppeep-peep of the pedestrian signal at a traffic light crossing, the revving up of engines. As they made their way back to the car park, a siren started up. Bruno told her it was the siren on a police car and he said the sound it made was supposed to imitate a woman screaming. "Oh, it can't be, Bruno," Mother said. "Where on earth did you get that from?" "It's a fact. You ask anyone. They invented it in the States and we copied it. That's supposed to be the sound that most gets under people's skins, a woman screaming." "Well, don't talk about it to me, please," Mother said, so loudly and sharply, that one of the ugly people turned to stare at her. "I don't want to hear. It just expresses the worst side of men." "All right, all right," said Bruno. "Sorry I spoke. Please excuse me for living. Will madam condescend to accept a lift home, her and her charming, courteous offspring?" As soon as she was in the car Lira fell asleep. She was exhausted. The people and the noise and the newness of it all had worn her out. At home she lay on the sofa and slept, though not so deeply that she failed to hear Mother tell Bruno she had told him so, Lira hadn't liked it, it had been too much for her and no wonder. Wasn't it a horrible place, a travesty of what a country town should be and once had been, noisy, dirty, and tawdry? "She wouldn't feel that way if you hadn't sheltered her from everything the way you have." "I feel it and God knows I haven't been sheltered." "You know what you'll do, don't you, Mother? You'll turn the kid psychotic. Or maybe schizophrenic, one of those whatd'you-call-its." "Talk about what you understand, Bruno, why don't you?" With half an eye open, she thought they would start quarrelling again. They were always quarrelling. But instead they did what often impeded or ended their quarrels. Their eyes met, they reached for each other and began kissing, the kind of kissing that soon got out of hand, so that they were grappling and climbing all over each other, grunting and moaning. Lira turned over and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. In the days that followed she felt unwell, what Bruno called "under the weather," something unusual for her. She remembered the town and its people not with longing or nostalgia, but with rewlsion. The peace of Shrove and its lands was more than usually pleasurable. She lay in the long grass and the cow parsley, watching the insect life moving among the mysterious green stems and the nodding seed heads, saw a raspberry-winged cinnabar moth climbing a ragwort stalk. There was no sound but the occasional heavy hum of a bumble bee passing overhead. A week after their day out in the town she became ill with chicken pox.