HADn"T you had any of those things, measles and whatever?" "I'd had some immunizations when I was a baby. I got chicken pox because I hadn't built up any natural immunity. I'd never been with people." "Did the doctor come?" "Eve phoned him from Shrove. He said he'd come if I got worse but otherwise there was nothing to be done but let it take its course. I wasn't very bad. Eve was strict about scratching. She said if I scratched my face she'd tie my hands up, so I didn't except for one awful big spot on my forehead." Lira pulled back a lock of dark hair and showed him the small round hole on her left temple. "She was afraid of me getting those all over." "I know you didn't," said Sean, giving her a sidelong sexy look. "No, nothing like that. All that happened was that I gave Bruno shingles." "You what?" "The virus or whatever you call it, it makes chicken pox in children and shingles in grown-ups. It's the same thing. Eve didn't catch anything, but Bruno caught shingles." "My grandma had that. She had it around her middle and she was dead scared because if it meets around your waist you die. That's a fact." Lira doubted it but she didn't say so. "He got it on the side of his face and down the back of his neck. He was quite ill and he looked quite ugly with all that red on his face. I thought he disliked me because I gave him shingles, that was the way I reasoned when I was ten. But if he hadn't made me go into town with them I wouldn't have caught chicken pox and couldn't have given him shingles, so it was his fault, really. That was how I saw it. Of course now I know it wasn't that at all. I was in the way, I was a nuisance, I came between him and Eve." now she was more or less grown-up herself and sexually involved, Lira could understand what had held Eve and Bruno together. She hadn't understood at the time. It puzzled her and made her increasingly uneasy that two people could quarrel so much, could behave as if they hated each other, but still seem to need each other's company in a hungry way. She was aware too of something else. There was something Bruno wanted to do with her mother that he couldn't do unless Lira wasn't there. It was to do with the kissing and struggling and lying on top of Mother. Lira knew and had known for some time the facts of human and animal reproduction, Eve had taken care to educate her in these matters, but for some reason she never connected them with what Bruno wanted to do with Mother. And what, though less urgently, Mother wanted to do with Bruno. She didn't understand and she shied away from understanding. All she knew was that Bruno wanted her out of the house as much as she could feasibly be out of it and that Mother to some lesser extent went along with this. Without saying a word as to her destination, she went up to Shrove and watched the television in the once-locked room. It was always in late mornings and early afternoons that she watched it. Old films were what she saw and nature programs, productions for schools and the Open University, chat shows and quiz games. Some of the programs came from America. They taught her that Bruno was an Englishman who for some reason put on a half-American voice. When he was well again things got worse. It was late summer and fine weather and he took Mother out in the car every day. Lira could have gone with them, Mother was always suggesting it now as enthusiastically as she had once vetoed it, but Lira wouldn't. She remembered the day in town with a kind of horror, as if the experience had been inextricably entangled with police sirens and scratching and chicken pox. So Mother and Bruno went and she stayed behind alone, often doing no more than sitting outside on the gatehouse wall or lying in the grass wondering what would happen to her if Bruno prevailed and she was sent away. More than once he had mentioned sending her to something called boarding school. Mother said she had a lot of money when she bought his picture but now, she said, she had none and boarding schools cost a lot. Lira clung to this. Mother had no money and Bruno had no money and no prospect of getting any. Bruno himself would never go, she was sure of that with the pessimism of a ten-year-old who believes that good things never last and bad things go on forever. He was a bad thing that would never change, he was the hated third in their household, with as permanent a place in their lives as the balsam tree and the train. Two things happened that autumn. Bruno's. mother fell ill, very ill, and Mother heard on her radio that British Rail intended to stop running the train through the valley. The first time Mrs. Spurdell went out, Lira took the opportunity to have a bath. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The bath was a muddy beige colour and the bathroom carpet grass-green and beige in little squares, but the water was hot. The soap smelled of sweet peas. When she had finished she cleaned the bathroom thoroughly, washing down and polishing all the tilework. Mrs. Spurdell had been rather reluctant to leave the house. Lira hadn't much experience of human behaviour, but even she could tell Mrs. Spurdell thought she would come back and find her cleaner gone and the video, microwave, and silver with her. She nearly laughed out loud at Mrs. Spurdell's face when her employer came in the back door to find her sitting at the kitchen table polishing that same silver. That was the first occasion on which Lira got a cup of coffee in the house in Aspen Close. While they were together Mrs. Spurdell talked most of the time. Her conversation was primarily concerned with demonstrating her superiority and that of her husband and grown-up daughters to almost everyone else, but particularly to her employee. This was an ascendancy in the areas of social distinction, intellect, wordly success, and money, but principally of material possessions. Mrs. Spurdell's possessions were more expensive and of better quality than those of other people, more had been paid for them initially, and they lasted longer. This applied to her engagement ring, a massive stack of diamonds, the allegedly Georgian silver, the Wilton carpets, the Colefax and Fowler curtains, and the Parker-Knoll armchairs, among many other things. Lira had to be taught these names, shown these objects, and instructed in how to examine them for evidence of their worth. She was adjured to be very careful of all of them, with the exception of the engagement ring, which never left Mrs. Spurdell's finger. The finger was so grossly swollen above and below the ring that Lira doubted if it would come off. The husband and the children couldn't be demonstrated, but they could be talked about and photographs produced. After that first cup of coffee, reward for not decamping with the precious artefacts, a mid-morning refreshment session became the regular thing. Lira was told about Jane, who was an educationalist after having got several degrees, and about Philippa, a solicitor married to a solicitor, and erstwhile top law student of her year, now mother of twins so beautiful that she was constantly approached by companies making television commercials for the chance of using their faces in advertising, offers which she indignantly refused. Lira listened, memorising the unfamiliar expressions. Mr. Spurdell, said his wife, was a schoolmaster. Lira thought they were called teachers, that was what Bruno had called them and Sean called them, but Mrs. Spurdell said her husband was a schoolmaster and a head of department, whatever that was. "At an independent school," she explained, "not one of these comprehensives, I wouldn't want you to think that." Lira, who was incapable of thinking anything about schools, merely smiled. She never said much. She was learning. "He could have been a headmaster many times over but he isn't one for the limelight. Of course there is family money, otherwise he might have been forced to take a higher position." A fresh set of photographs came out, Jane in gown and mortarboard, Philippa with the twins. The impression was subtly conveyed that their mother was prouder--and fonder--of Philippa because she had a husband and children. Lira preferred Jane, who hadn't any lipstick on and wasn't simpering. She was longing for Mrs. Spurdell to get up and say she was going out so that she could have another bath. It wasn't easy managing in the caravan, and the swimming pool was expensive besides leaving you smelling of chlorine. At last Mrs. Spurdell put the photographs away and prepared to go out. The weather was colder today and it was a different coat she had put on, of a thick hairy stone-coloured cloth with lapels and cuffs of glossy brown fur. Lira was told that this coat had been bought twenty years ago--"in the days when no one had these ridiculous ideas about not wearing fur"--and had cost the then-enormous sum of sixty pounds. She had to feel the quality of the cloth and stroke the fur. It simply refused to wear out, said Mrs. Spurdell with a little laugh, tying her white hair up in a scarf with "Hermes" written all over it. Lira wondered what a silk scarf had to do with the Messenger of the Gods. She went without her bath. On her way to run it she paused at the doorway of Mr. Spurdell's study. This was a room she wasn't supposed to touch beyond vacuum cleaning the floor, for his books were sacred, never to be dusted, and the papers on his desk inviolate. But Lira was alone in the house now and Mrs. Spurdell would no more know she had been in there than she knew the purpose for which her hot water was often used. Once or twice she had taken fleeting looks at the bookshelves while pushing the vacuum cleaner about, but she had never examined them thoroughly. now she did. They were of a very different kind from those in the library at Shrove. Here were no eighteenth-century works on travel and exploration, no theology, philosophy, or history, no essays from the eighteen-hundreds, no poetry of a century before that, no tomes of Darwin and Lyell, and no Victorian literature. Mr. Spurdell's fiction came in the form of paperbacks. These shelves carried the kind of books Lira had never seen before. Accounts of people's lives, they seemed to be, and she recognised the names of some of their subjects, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But who was Virginia Woolf and who was Orwell? Apart from these, there were books about how writers wrote what they wrote, or as far as she could gather they were about that, one called The Common Purruit and another The Unquiet Grave. Lira sat down at Mr. Spurdell's desk and leafed through his books, wondering how it was that she understood so little of what she read yet passionately wanted to understand. Time passed quickly when she was occupied like this. It always went very fast while Mrs. Spurdell was out, but this time it seemed to fly by. Reluctantly, she had to stop reading because she needed at least ten minutes to look at the papers on the desk and there was no chance of Mrs. Spurdell being out for more than an hour and a half. It was lucky she could do the housework in half the time allowed for it. The papers were essays. She could tell that much. They had names written along the tops of the first pages, of their authors presumably. It took the minimum of detective work to infer that these were pupils of Mr. Spurdell's. He had gone through the pages with a red pen, correcting the spelling and making acid comments. Some of these made Lira laugh. What interested her most, though, were the pieces of yellow paper he had stuck to the first page of each. These were small paper squares of a kind she had never seen before and which had a sticky area on them that you could nevertheless peel off. She tried this carefully and then to her satisfaction re-stuck it. Each yellow square had something different written on it in Mr. Spurdell's writing. One said, "Should get at least an A and a B," another, "Doubtful university material," and a third, "Oxbridge?" Lira had heard of Oxford and of Cambridge but not of that place. She had to stop at this point, it would be awful to jeopardise her future chances by letting Mrs. Spurdell catch her snooping. The papers replaced exactly as she had found them, she grabbed the vacuum cleaner and was removing white hairs from the master bedroom carpet when the front door opened and closed. In a little while Mrs. Spurdell came lumberingup the stairs and into the bedroom to hang up the precious coat. Lira moved along, back into the study, only to clean the carpet of course, but while she was there she wondered if she dared borrow a book. Would he know if one was missing? If one was missing for just two days? She would very much like to read the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When she first met Sean she had read the "Sonnets from the Portuguese" and memorised several of them. ("How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.") Putting herself into Mr. Spurdell's shoes--a pair of them, slippers really, sat side by side under the desk--she decided that, yes, she would know if a book of hers was missing. If she had any books, if only she had. Mrs. Spurdell paid her for her morning's work. She always did this grudgingly and very slowly, choosing from the wad in her handbag the oldest and most crumpled five-pound notes, never handing over a ten. The rest of the sum she made up in small change, twenty- and ten-pence coins and even twos. This time she was worse than ever, giving Lira a whole seven pounds in fifty pees and tens and fives and keeping her waiting while she went offsomewhere to hunt for a fiver. Eventually she came back with it, a worn and withered note that had been torn in half and stuck together with tape. The secondhand bookshop took it. Lira had been worried they wouldn't when she handed it over in payment for three shabby paperbacks she had found among a row of others on a trestle outside. The real bookshop, the proper one in which everything sold was new, was far beyond her means. It was nearly five-thirty and Superway would be closing. She walked along the High Street and across the marketplace. Soon it would get dark, they would soon put the clocks back, and the chill of evening was already apparent. Was it cold in prison? She thought about Eve in the prison, she often did, she thought about her every day, but she never said any of this to Sean. He was waiting for her outside the main entrance with a carrier bag full of food. Superway encouraged employees to buy the products that had reached their sell-by date and at a very reduced price. Lira and Sean walked together to the car. He told her what he'd got for their supper and then he wanted to know what was in her bag. She showed him Middlemarch, a Life of May Wollstonecraft, and Aubrey's Brief Lives, and saw at once the displeasure in his face. "We can't afford to spend money on books." "It's my money," she said. "I earned it." "I wonder what you'd say, Lira, if I said that when you wanted me to get your food." She was silent. He had spoken reproachfully and like a middle-aged person. Mr. Spurdell would talk like that, she thought. "You've got telly," he said. "I don't know why you need books as well." She got his supper and while he watched his favourite serial, she started reading Middlemarch A good many Victorian girls must have lived very much as she had, being educated at home, knowing no one but the nearest neighbours, sheltered from everything. With Dorothea Brooke she could identify, though society wouldn't have allowed Dorothea a Sean. now that his program was over, she was aware that he kept glancing uneasily at her. He would have to get used to it, she thought. He would have to get used to her being more and more preoccupied with books. It came back to her, as her concentration weakened under his gaze, that Bruno had never much liked her mother reading. He had done all kinds of things to capture her attention, walking about, pacing the room, even whistling. Sometimes he had sat down beside her and taken her hand or stroked the side of her face. Lira remembered her mother jumping up on one of these occasions, shaking him off, and shouting at him to leave her alone. It was soon after this that Bruno had gone away to be with his sick mother. He had gone on the day the last train ran through the valley. Lira hadn't known it would be the last train. How could she? She never saw a newspaper and she could never watch television at the times the news was on. It was a fine warm day in October, just over six years ago and a year before the hurricane. The blackberries were over and the crabapples were ripe. Lira went down through the meadows and along the hedges looking for crabapples to make into jelly. You boiled the apples, then strained them through a cloth tied to the four legs of an upturned stool before adding the sugar. She had seen Mother do it many times and thought it was time she tried. Before she had picked a single apple, before she had even found a tree, she saw the people lined up along the railway line. She thought she was dreaming, she closed her eyes and opened them again. never in her life had she seen so many people all at once except on television and that didn't count. There must have been hundreds. They stood along the railway embankment, on both sides of the line, between the boundary of the Shrove land and the little station that was called Ring Valley Halt, and each one of them was holding a big placard. From where she was Lira couldn't read what was on the placards. She forgot about crabapples and jelly, stuffed the big plastic bag she was carrying into her pocket, and ran down the field path toward the river. Some of the placards said, SAVE OUR RAILWAY, and others, FOR BR READ USSR and LAST TRAIn TO CHAOS. On the far side a group of people were holding a long banner with WILL BR CARE WHEn WE MISS THE TRAIn? on it. Lira sensed something was going to happen, though she couldn't tell what. Besides, the sight of so many people fascinated her, there were more than on that day in town, there were more than in the film she'd seen about Ancient Rome. Reserved by conditioning if not by nature, she considered concealing herself in the bushes to watch. She didn't want to talk to anyone, talking to strangers was something she was beginning to find hard, she met so few. It had been a dry autumn and the river was low, at this point just a broad sheet of shallow water trickling and splashing over boulders. While on this side she couldn't talk to anyone, but even as she thought that, she had her shoes and socks off and was wading across. It was too late to hide. They all seemed to be looking at her. Before she could pretend to be merely taking a walk, a woman had grabbed her by the arm and, evidently mistaking her for some other child, asked where on earth she had been and to take hold of this banner at once. It was a replica of the one on the other side and it took four people to hold it up. Lira did as she was told and held on to the bit above the letters BR. A man was to the left of her and a boy to the right. Both of them said hi and the boy said, did she live around here? Up in one of the cottages, Lira said, you couldn't quite see from here, but only half a mile away. "On your own doorstep, then," the man said. "Your family use the train a lot, do they? Or should I say, did they?" "Every day," Lira said. It wasn't the first lie she had ever told. She'd been telling lies regularly to Mother about where she'd been when she'd really been watching television. "They take it for granted everyone's got a car," the man said. "Has your dad got a car?" The woman on the other side of him said, "Sexist. Why not ask if her mum's got one? Women are allowed to drive here, you know. We're not talking about Saudi Arabia." Lira was just saying they hadn't got a can-she didn't count Bruno's--and thinking of saying she hadn't got a dad, when the train whistle sounded on the far side of the tunnel. It always whistled going into the tunnel and coming out of it, it was a single-line track and maybe there was a remote possibility of another train meeting it in the dark and going headlong into it. There wouldn't be any more such possibilities, however. "The last train ever," the man said. "The last poor bloody train." When it came out of the tunnel and whistled again some of the people cheered. Lira could hardly believe her eyes when the four people holding the banner on the other side and three others with placards all began climbing down the embankment toward the line. The seven, four men and three women, took up their positions right across the line, in the path of the oncoming train, holding their banner and their placards aloft. The 170171 train could now be seen in the distance, heading this way. What if it didn't stop? What if it came right on, ploughing the people down, as Lira had seen in a television film about the Wild West? She he'd on tight to the banner, clenching her fists around the cloth, making white knuckles. "Look at them," shouted the woman who had seized her arm. "The Magnificent Seven!" As the train came on the crowd began to sing. They sang, "We Shall Overcome." Lira had never heard it before but the tune was easy, she soon caught on and began singing it too. "We shall overcome one da-a-a-a-ay. Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome one day!" The engine driver saw them in plenty of time. You could hear him applying the brakes, a long, low howl like a dog baying. The train came slowly on and ground to a halt a good hundred yards from where the Magnificent Seven held their banner and placards aloft. The crowd started singing "Jerusalem." The engine driver and another man in the same kind of uniform got down from the train and came marching up the track to argue with the protestors. All the train doors and windows opened and passengers stuck their heads out. Then they too began getting out and pouring along the line. It was more than ever like a Western film when the Indians came or the mob of robbers from Dodge City. Lira and her fellow banner-carriers moved closer to the line to get involved in the arguments. There was a lot of shouting and threatening and one man had to be restrained from punching the engine driver. It wasn't his fault, anyway. Lira thought it most unfair. But she enjoyed every minute of it, she hadn't enjoyed anything so much since before Bruno came. In fact, thinking about it afterward, she understood she hadn't enjoyed anything since the coming of Bruno. She stayed with the protestors right over lunch and well into the afternoon. They gave her sandwiches and biscuits from their lunches, all of them believing her parents were down by the station and she had somewhow got detached from them. The train people went on arguing. The Magnificent Seven stood firm. After a while some British Rail officials arrived, there was talk of the police, the protestors on the embankments sat on the grass, and a couple of people fell asleep. Lira listened to a discussion about nuclear power, destruction of the environment, and the betrayal of democracy. She noted all the words, stored them in her memory without understanding anything that was said, until at last, growing bored, she wandered away. She was still barefoot, her shoes tied to her belt with the socks stuffed inside them. From the position of the sun and the feel of the air she calculated it must be at least three-thirty. She sat down on the grass to put her socks on. As she was tying her shoelaces, she heard the train start and turned around to watch it. The protestors must have been persuaded, cajoled, or threatened into leaving the line. Gradually the train gathered speed, passed between the rows of the defeated demonstrators, and came to the station. Lira saw it leave again and finally disappear into the curve that the hills swallowed, the last train forever. She went home by way of the Shrove garden, across the smooth lawn cut by Mr. Frost that morning. Mother was sitting on the wall in front of the cottage, eating an apple. The orange car wasn't there. "Where have you been? I was worried when you didn't come home for lunch." Lies were easier and safer. "I took my lunch with me. I made sandwiches." Mother wouldn't have known. She'd been in bed with Bruno. Where was he, anyway? Before she could ask, Mother said, "Bruno's gone up to Cheshire to be with his mother. His mother's very ill." nothing could have been better, more calculated to make her happy, nothing except to hear he wasn't coming back. "He may be gone a long time," said Mother. She took Lira into the house and when they were inside and the door was closed she put her arms around her and said, "I'm sorry, Lira. I've been neglecting you, I haven't been a good mother to you lately. I can't explain, but you'll understand one day. I promise things will be like they used to be now we're alone again. Will you forgive me?" Mother had never apologised to her before. She hadn't had to until Bruno came. Lira would have forgiven her anything now Bruno was gone. It had been the Day of the Last Train. Sean said gruffly, "Did he ever do anything to you, this Bruno guy?" "Hit me, d'you mean?" Sean said, no, not that, and explained what he did mean. "I never heard of that," Lira said. "Do men really do that?" "Some do." "Well, he didn't. I told you, he hated me. He wanted to be alone with Eve and I got in his way. It wasn't always like that, he quite liked me at first, he painted that portrait of me, the one I told you about. He was always painting pictures of Eve and then he said he'd do one of me. I sat on a chair inside the little castle and he painted me. He was very kind then. I had to sit still for a long time and he bought cranberry juice for me, I'd never had that before, and biscuits with icing on that Eve wouldn't let me have. He used to buy lots of things for me when they went shopping. When I look back, I think he was just trying to ingratiate himself with Eve." "Do what?" "Ingratiate himself. Make her like him more. But then he must have realised he didn't have to do that, she liked him enough. And he changed. When he was ill and he realised he couldn't persuade Eve even to send me to a day school, that was when he changed. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I knew he'd gone, I was so happy." Sean turned off the television. It was a concession, Lira realised that and closed her book. He put his arm around her. "Who was that woman you were talking about, the one who told her husband stories?" He'd remembered, Lira thought, pleased. "Scheherazade. She was an Eastern woman, an Arab, I suppose. Her husband was a king who used to marry women and have them executed the morning after their wedding nights. He'd have their heads chopped off." "Why did he?" "I don't know, I don't remember. Scheherazade was determined not to have hers chopped off. On their wedding night she started telling him a story, a very long one that she couldn't finish, but he longed to know the end so much that he said he'd keep her alive until the morning after the next night so that he could hear the end. But it didn't end or she started another, and so it went on until he got sort of addicted to her stories and couldn't have her killed, and in the end he fell in love with her and they lived happily ever after." "What about all the other poor women he'd killed?" "Too bad for them," said Lira. "I don't suppose that bothered her. Why did you ask about Scheherazade?" e l v e O' "I don't know. I wanted you to tell me a bit more about what happened. You've stopped telling me." "Lucky to be alive, then, am l?" She laughed but he didn't. "What happened next, after Bruno'd gone that is, is that Mr. and Mrs. Tobias came down. It was the first time for about a year. Mr. Tobias said he wanted to meet Bruno, and Eve had to tell him where Bruno had gone. Seeing his paintings was the next best thing, Mr. Tobias said, so Eve took him and Mrs. Tobias into the little castle and the first thing they saw was the portrait of me. "Of course they saw other pictures, too, and Mrs. Tobias, Victoria, said she'd like to buy one. She wanted one he'd done of Shrove by moonlight. Oh, I adore it," she said and she clapped her hands, and when Eve said four hundred pounds she didn't even flinch. Mr. Tobias--Jonathan, why do I keep on calling him that, like a child?--he wrote a check for it there and then and gave it to Eve." "Didn't she wait to ask Bruno?" "I suppose she knew he wanted to sell them. Anyway, she didn't wait. She was very pleased about getting money for him. next day Jonathan started shooting and Victoria did too. There was a pair of partridges used to strut about, I'd got fond of them, red legs they were and a beautiful pattern on their backs. She shot them both. I wish I'd had a gun, I'd have shot her. When they'd shot all the birds they wanted they went back to London and as soon as they'd gone Eve sat down with me and told me the whole story of old Mr. Tobias and Caroline and her mother and why she never got Shrove for herself."

EVE'S parents had gone to work for old Mr. Tobias and his wife when Eve was five and Jonathan was nine. Jonathan didn't live at Shrove at that time, but he came down for the holidays with his mother and father, Caroline, who was Lady Ellison, and her husband, Sir nicholas Ellison. Then Sir nicholas left Caroline and Caroline went back home to her parents. Eve's father was a German called Rainer Beck, he'd been a prisoner of war in this country and after the war was over he didn't go back to Germany but stayed on and married Gracie, the daughter of the farmer he worked for. They were married for ages without having any children and Gracie had given up hope. She couldn't believe it when, after ten years, she became pregnant. The baby was a girl and they called her Eva, after Rainer's mother in Hildesheim. Agricultural labourers were nearly the worst paid of all workers and, in any case, as farms became mechanised and hundreds of acres could be run with only a couple of men, they weren't much needed. Gracie saw the housekeeper and handyman's jobs advertised in The Lady magazine while she was at the dentist's, so they applied for it and got it. One of the inducements was that a house went with the job. Old Mr. and Mrs. Tobias interviewed Gracie and offered her the job at once. Rainer was too hard for them to pronounce, so they called him Ray. The Tobiases liked making people change their names. Jonathan had been christened Jonathan Tobias Ellison but at his grandfather's suggestion he dropped the Ellison and became Jonathan Tobias. He went away to his public school but he was at Shrove during the holidays, and he and Eve grew up together. That was the way she put it, grew up together. They were inseparable, they were best friends. Old Mrs. Tobias was ill. She died when Gracie and Rainer had been there a year, and soon after that Caroline went offwith a man she'd met on holiday in Barbados. Jonathan remained at Shrove. Sometimes he went to stay with his father, but mostly he was at Shrove telling Eve he was going to marry her when he grew up. He and she would marry and live together at Shrove forever until death parted them. Ray wasn't a gardener or a butler but a handyman. Mr. Frost, who was quite young then, came up from the village on his bicycle the same bicycle, Eve said--to do the garden. There wasn't enough work for Ray to do full-time. By a great stroke of luck he got a job in the village working for a builder as a bricklayer, the job he'd been trained for all those years ago in Germany. Ray put in a few hours every week at Shrove, cleaning the windows and the cars. It was Gracie who was the important one. But for Gracie the place would have fallen apart. With Mr. Frost's daughter to help her three times a week, she kept Shrove clean and did all the cooking. She did the washing and ironing, ordered the groceries, made jam and pickles, acted as secretary to Mr. Tobias and, increasingly, as his nurse. She was indispensable. Eve went first to the village school, then to the school in town where you had to pay fees. Mr. Tobias paid her fees. She was very bright, brighter than Jonathan, Mr. Tobias said, and he adored Jonathan. Gracie thought he was going soft in the head, maybe it was the onset of Alzheimer's, when he said Eve would very likely get to Oxford. Gracie's sister had had nine months at a secretarial college and she looked on that as the summit of academic ambition. Mr. Tobias didn't have Alzheimer's but a very slow growing cancer. He was eighty and malignant growths proceed slowly in people of that age. He could get up and walk about, go out in the car with Ray to drive him, and lead quite a normal life. But sometimes he had to go into hospital for radiotherapy and then, when he came home, he was very ill for a while. There was plenty of money and he could easily have afforded private nursing, but he didn't want anyone near him but Gracie. The doctors at the hospital--they were called oncologists, Eve explained--called him their longest surviving cancer patient. The primary cancer had been detected nine years before and still he lived on. It wasn't Mr. Tobias who died but Rainer Beck. The planning authority had given permission for some "in-filling" in the village and Ray's employer was putting up a house on the site between the row of cottages and the village hall. While Ray was laying bricks for the front wall he keeled over and died of a heart attack with his trowel still in his hand. "He was clutching on to it and the cement got hard," said Lira. "The cement stuck it onto his dead hand and they had to prise it open. They had to break his fingers. It was either that or burying him with that trowel in his hand." Sean turned his mouth down. "Yuck. Do you mind?" "I'm only telling you how it was." "You don't have to go into details." When Ray was dead Gracie began worrying about her future. One week she had a husband's income to depend on and the next week she hadn't. She never would have again. She had no home of her own, a sixteen-year-old daughter dependent on her, and an employer who might die and leave her jobless at any moment. Caroline occasionally reappeared at Shrove, beautifully dressed, arriving in a big new car, still not divorced, still married to Sir nicholas and supported by him, but often with a man friend in tow. She had never liked Gracie, disapproved of the friendship between her son and "the housekeeper's girl," and made it plain Gracie wouldn't last there a week after her husband was dead. Gracie laid her troubles before Mr. Tobias. She was young enough to get a job if she left now. Her sister was a travel agent with a small business in Coventry, from which her partner had just pulled out. If Gracie would join her, learn the business, and take the partner's place, she'd help her with a mortgage on a flat. But it would have to be now, not next year or in five years' time when Gracie would be well over fifty. It happened that she said all this just at the time the doctors had discovered another lump on Mr. Tobias's spine. Once it was removed, he'd have more radiotherapy and be convalescent for weeks. He begged Gracie not to leave him. Caroline had gone off again. not that she ever did a hand's turn in the house and moreover she was too squeamish, she said, to be a nurse. Jonathan was up at Oxford. If Gracie left he would have to resort to private nurses and that would kill him. Gracie told her sister she would need awhile longer to make up her mind. Meanwhile Mr. Tobias went into hospital and the growth on his back was surgically removed. He became extremely ill. "I expect she hoped he'd die," said Lira. "Come on, Lira, the poor old fellow. He was all on his own with no one giving a bugger what happened to him. It's only natural he didn't want her to go." "She had to think of her future. Rich people like him just use people like my grandmother, Eve said. It wasn't as if he couldn't afford to pay nurses." "Money never brings happiness," said Sean with a sigh. "How do you know? Have you ever known any rich people? I have. Jonathan was ever so rich all the time I knew him and he was happy for years and years." Mr. Tobias came home and Gracie nursed him. She moved herself and Eve out of the gatehouse and up to Shrove. For a whole two weeks before he could get up she had to give him bed pans and dress the wound on his back, which started suppurating. The doctor came every day and said she was wonderful. Meanwhile Eve sat for her O-Levels and passed in eleven subjects. Mr. Tobias called her into his bedroom to congratulate her and gave her fifty pounds "to buy some dresses." What about me, said Gracie when he was up and about again, what's going to become of me? My sister's starting to get impatient. Mr. Tobias had been thinking about it and he told her the decision he'd come to. If she would guarantee to stay with him until he died, having sole care of him and nursing him--she could have any help in the house she wanted--if she'd do all that, he would leave her Shrove House in his will. He knew she loved it, he knew how she appreciated this beautiful place. It's my daughter that loves it, said Gracie, so shocked by what he'd said that she couldn't think of any other answer to make. It's Eve who couldn't bear the thought of leaving. This had held her back from agreeing to her sister's proposition nearly as much as Mr. Tobias's dependency on her. Eve worked so hard and did so well at school, was such a happy girl, because she loved Shrove and its surroundings and the whole lovely valley. And being with Jonathan whenever he was at home, thought Gracie, though not saying this aloud. She hadn't dared tell Eve there was a chance they might leave and go up to Coventry. So what do you think of my idea? Mr. Tobias had perhaps expected more enthusiasm. It came. Gracie was stunned, Gracie couldn't believe what he'd said. Did he really mean it? What about Caroline? Wasn't it Caroline's by right? Caroline hates the place, said Mr. Tobias, confirming what Gracie had long known. She couldn't wait to get away. Besides, she may not have lived with nicholas for the past ten years but he's still mad about her and he'll leave her everything he's got, you'll see. He's not a well man, poor nicholas, he'll not last as long as I will, and when he goes Caroline will be a rich woman, even allowing for the bulk of his fortune going to Jonathan. It took Gracie five minutes to say yes. Yes, she'd stay. Then you can phone my solicitor and ask him to pop in sometime next week, said Mr. Tobias. The new will was made and Mr. Frost and Mr. Tobias's doctor witnessed it. In the presence of the testator and of each other, Eve explained. That was the law. Mr. Tobias made a quick recovery after that. Makina sure that Gracie would stay spurred him on to get better. He was up and actually walking about the garden by the time Jonathan came home for the long vacation. Gracie's sister took a friend of hers into the travel agent's business, a woman who had been secretary to the managing director of a domestic airline. Having no secrets from her daughter, Gracie told Eve about the will. It made Eve feel as if Shrove was already hers. She had always felt about Mr. Tobias as if he were her grandfather and now she saw herself inheriting the place as his natural heir. It was true what her mother said that she loved it. All she wanted, at age seventeen, was to live there forever. With Jonathan, of course. Jonathan could come and live there with her. Eve got three A-Levels to A and went to Oxford. Jonathan was still there, though he had his degree, and they saw a lot of each other. "What does that mean?" said Sean. "D'you mean they was lovers?" "I suppose. Yes, I'm sure they were. Eve didn't actually say. Well, she wouldn't then. not to me. I was only ten." "Old enough to see her in bed with one man after another." Lira shrugged. There was no answer to that. Eve and Jonathan must have been lovers. What was there to stop them? Besides, Lira had her own very personal reasons for knowing they were. Back at Shrove, Mr. Tobias lived on. He often had setbacks and once he had a bad fall trying to get down the steps from the terrace, his arm was broken, and while they X-rayed it they found cancer in the bone. Gracie nursed him through it all. At the end of her first year at Oxford Eve came home for July and August and September and Jonathan with her. They spent all their time together. But when Eve went back Jonathan didn't go with her. He stayed behind to be with his grandfather, who everyone said was really dying now. There were no audio books in those days and Jonathan spent hours every day reading aloud to Mr. Tobias. Jonathan was going to be "something in the City." That was what Eve had said. Lira didn't know what it meant and Sean had only a hazy idea. "In a bank maybe," he said, "or a stockbroker." "What's that?" "Don't know really. It's like doing stuff with shares." "Anyway, he didn't. He didn't have to because his father died and left him everything, all his money, which was millions--well, a million or two--and the house in London and the place in the Lake District. He got to be something called a name' at Lloyds, whatever that is, but it wasn't work. Caroline got the house in France and something called a life interest in a lot more money. Only no one knew." "What d'you mean, no one knew?" No one at Shrove knew. Gracie and old Mr. Tobias knew Sir nicholas Ellison was dead, of course they did, Gracie sent a wreath from Mr. Tobias to the funeral, but they thought all the property had gone to Caroline. Eve knew. Jonathan had written to her at Oxford and told her, but it didn't occur to her to tell her mother, it didn't interest her much who got the money, Jonathan or Caroline, one of them was bound to have done. Mr. Tobias must have assumed it was all Caroline's. After all, he had forecast it would be. There was so much money, you see, Lira, Eve said. These people, they don't know how much money they have got. People like us, we always know, down to the last pound, maybe the last fifty pee, but the Tobiases and the Ellisons of this world, they could have two million or three or something in between, they don't exactly know. It's all in different places, making more, accumulating, and they lose count of now much there is. There was money slurping around, lots of it, more and more, some coming from here and some from there. Maybe Mr. Tobias didn't even care, didn't worry about it, didn't think about it. He was very old and very ill and very rich and the last thing he was going to get precisely sorted out in his mind was who had what when it came to money. Something unexpected happened next. Eve had been two years at Oxford, Jonathan divided his time between visiting her and visiting his grandfather, Mr. Tobias at eighty-four was very feeble and needing constant attention but not in danger. It was autumn. &racie, who had been fit all her life, suddenly had alarming symptoms. They did tests and told her she had cancer of the womb. She was rushed to hospital for a hysterectomy. There was nothing for it but nurses, a nurse for the day and a nurse for the night. Jonathan couldn't manage the bedpans and the blanket baths. The nurses were there all the time, a rota of nurses coming and going. Jonathan sat with his grandfather, wrote letters to Eve, shot pheasants. What else happened while Gracie was in hospital became clear after Mr. Tobias was dead. He bitterly resented her leaving him. It was impossible to make him understand that she had had no choice, that it was her life that was threatened. Perhaps she should have explained to him more carefully what was happening to her. But she was afraid. For once, she was thinking of no one but herself. As for him, it was as if he refused to admit that anyone but himself could have a life-endangering disease. He spoke to her in the tone of a disappointed father whose daughter has let him down by behaving immorally or in some criminal way. He constantly alluded to "the time you left me on my own." Gracie took over the care of him once more. The nurses left. Jonathan left for France and his mother. Gracie had been told not to lift heavy weights for six months, and Mr. Tobias, though so old and thin, was very heavy. When she couldn't lift him up in bed properly and prop him on pillows, he grumbled and reproached her. Eve came home at Christmas, and returned to Oxford in January. She was expected to get a first. "What's that?" said Sean. "The best kind of degree. Like getting a first prize." By the time the spring came, Mr. Tobias couldn't be at home anymore, he was too ill. He was taken to a nursing home, where he went into a coma, lingered for a few weeks, and died in May. Gracie was sad in a way, but he had been so unkind to her those past months that she had lost most of her affection for him. She knew Shrove was hers now, when she woke up on the morning after Mr. Tobias's death, she had gone outside and laid her hands on the brickwork of the wall, saying, "You're mine, you're mine." But she thought she should phone the solicitor to ask when she could legally take possession. He told her his client had left everything to Jonathan Tobias Ellison, known as Jonathan Tobias. Well, not quite everything. There was a legacy for her of a thousand pounds. "He had made a new will while she was in hospital," said Lira. "He got Jonathan to send for the solicitor and the nurses were witnesses. In the presence of the testator and of each other." "You mean Jonathan fixed it." "Eve says not. She says he told his grandfather he didn't need Shrove, he had what his father left him. But Mr. Tobias didn't understand or didn't want to. He told him he wouldn't leave it to that woman who's deserted me." "What did your grandma do?" "What could she do? Eve didn't mind too much, not then. It would be all the same to her in the end because she and Jonathan were going to get married." Jonathan asked Gracie to stay on at the gatehouse. He might live at Shrove one day but not yet. All she would have to do would be a kind of caretaker. No nursing, no cooking, it would be almost the same as if it were actually hers. Gracie wouldn't, she was too humiliated. As for Eve, it made her furious. Where was she supposed to go on the holidays until she and Jonathan were married? Gracie was adamant. She went off to Coventry and rented her sister's spare bedroom. That was nearly the end. Eve didn't come into the story for a while and when she reappeared she had no degree, first or otherwise, but she did have a baby. "Me," said Lira. "Is that all you know?" "She said she'd tell me when I was older." Eve knew Jonathan was going to South America. He had already started going to places "just to see what it was like." "Come too," he said, but of course she couldn't go to Brazil or Peru or wherever it was at the start of the university term. They quarrelled a bit about that and didn't see each other for a fortnight, but the day he went to catch his plane for Rio, Eve went to Heathrow with him to see him off. He was expected back after three months, after six months, but he didn't come back, he stayed and stayed. Eve had to leave Oxford because she was going to have a baby. In a Coventry hospital Gracie was dying. She hadn't had the hysterectomy soon enough. After she was dead, Eve and Lira stayed with Eve's aunt. She made it plain she didn't want a niece and a great-niece in her little house, she didn't like babies, but she meant to do her duty. Eve had a hard time making ends meet. For one thing, she was in a bad psychological state. She'd never got over what happened before Lira was born, though she never wished she'd had an abortion. She'd never considered it, she wanted Lira to know that. "Fine thing to tell a kid of ten," said Sean. "Okay, I know what you think of her. You don't have to go on and on." Heather got in touch with her and said, come and live with me. Eve was so unhappy with her aunt that she accepted, though Heather's flat in Birmingham was tiny with only one bedroom. They all three lived there as best they could. Heather found Eve a job teaching in a private school where they would take on staff who weren't qualified. She put Lira with a baby-minder, but that wasn't very satisfactory. When she went to pick her up in the afternoon she found the babies, all six of them, strapped into push-chairs that were stuck in front of the television. "So I had seen television before, when I was one, but I couldn't remember." It made Eve determined never to let her child watch television. And that started a train of other ideas about bringing up her child. If only she had somewhere to live, but there was only one place in the world she really wanted that to be. Jonathan didn't know where she was. She'd changed her job twice and the baby-minder three times before he found her. Lira was three and Eve had had a job handing out freebie magazines in the street, another trying to be a secretary and learning to type at the same time, and Lira had fallen over at the baby-minder's and cut her head. Jonathan had found a letter at Shrove with the aunt's address on it and, thinking it worth a try, came to find her. One evening he rang the bell at Heather's flat. When he said he'd a proposal to put before her she thought for one mad moment he was going to ask her to marry him, even now, even after all that had happened. He was friendly but cool. Would she like to live in the gatehouse at Shrove in exchange for keeping an eye on the house? That was the expression he used, "keeping an eye on." He would pay her a salary, a handsome one, as it turned out. She accepted. She really had no choice. "It got her back there, you see. It got her to the one place in the world she wanted to be, even though in the gatehouse she was like the Peri outside the gates of paradise." "The what?" "Pens were superhuman beings in Persian mythology, sometimes called Pairikas. They were bad spirits, though they hid their badness under a charming appearance, but of course they couldn't get into paradise." "Of course not," Sean said sarcastically. "And that was it, you see. That was how we came to live there and it all began."

BRUnO was gone and life went back to what it had once been. Lessons resumed. It was just as well Lira liked learning, because she seldom had a chance in his absence to get up to Shrove and watch television. Mother taught her relentlessly. Sometimes the way she instructed and lectured was almost feroCious in its intensity. Winter came and with it the sunless days and long nights. Every morning the two of them went walking, but they were gone for only an hour and the rest of the day was spent with Lira's books. Occasionally Mother would insist that they spoke only French, so breakfast, lunch, and supper were eaten in French and their discussions of other subjects were in French. She set Lira an examination in English, history, and Latin. Lira learned whole pages of poetry by heart and in the evenings she and Mother read plays aloud, Mother taking all the male parts and she the female. They read Peter Pan and Where the Raibo7u Erds and The Blue Bird. Bruno was never mentioned. If letters came from him, Mother never said so. now that Lira was older she didn't get up so early, Mother was always up before her, so Lira wouldn't have known if letters had come. She knew Heather sometimes wrote, her letters were left about. The Tobiases sent a Christmas card, as did Heather and the aunt. Did we send them cards? Lira wanted to know. Mother said no, certainly not. It was absurd celebrating Christmas if you didn't believe in the Christian God, or indeed any god at all, but she gave Lira a lesson on the Christian religion just as she taught her about Judaism and Islam and Buddhism. One day, shortly before Lira's eleventh birthday, she was looking through Mother's desk for a pad of lined paper Mother said was in the middle section, when she came upon a letter in Bruno's writing. She recognised the writing at once. Without ever having been told, she somehow knew that reading other people's private correspondence was wrong. It must have come from all the highly moral Victorian books she read from the Shrove library, the works among others of Charlotte M. Yonge and Frances Hodgson Burnett. She read it just the same. Mother had gone upstairs. She could hear her moving about overhead. Lira read the address, which was somewhere called Cheadle, and the date, which was the previous week, and the first page of the letter. It started, "My darling lovely Eve." Lira wrinkled up her nose but read on. "I miss you a lot. I wish I could call you, it's crazy us not being able to call each other in this day and age. Pleare ring me. You can call me collect if you're afraid of J. T. getting his knickers in a twist. now my ma is dead I'm not poor anymore, do you realise that? It won't be much longer now, I've just got all this stuff to see to, inevitable really, and I must grin and bear it. Just to hear your voice would--" She had to stop there because she heard Mother's footsteps on the stairs. She didn't dare turn the page over. Much of what she had read about "calling" and "collect" was incomprehensible, but not "it won't be much longer now." He was coming back. For a moment she wondered why his mother's dying stopped him being poor, but then she remembered the tale of Shrove and old Mr. Tobias and understood. It was a hard winter. A little snow fell before Christmas, but the first heavy fall came in early January. It lay in deep drifts, masking the demarcations between the road surface and the grass verge, then piling up to hide the ditch and spreading a thick concealing cloak over the hedgerow. And when it melted a little it froze again, more fiercely than ever, so that the thawed snow, falling in drops and trickles, turned into icicles, pointed as needles and sharp as knives. Icicles hung around the eaves of the gatehouse like fringe on a canopy. A crust of ice lay on top of the thick snow. It had been two days since a car had been able to get down the lane. The council, Mother said, hadn't bothered to snowplough it because they were the only ones living there and they hadn't a car. The postman stopped coming, which pleased Lira because it meant no more letters from Bruno. While the lane was blocked like this, Bruno couldn't come. The little orange car would never get through where the post van failed. And still the snow fell, day after day, adding more and more layers to the deep quilt of crisp whiteness that covered everything. They fed the birds. They had a bird table for bread crumbs, two bird feeders made of wire mesh to fill with nuts, and they hung up pieces of fat on string. One morning Lira saw a woodpecker at one of the wire feeders and a tree creeper hanging on its tail, both pecking at the nuts. Remembering Jonathan taking photographs, she said she wished they had a camera, but Mother said, no, your own mind is the best recording instrument, let your memory photograph it. And then she said the bird was like Trochilus, a kind of hummingbird. So Lira looked Trochilus up in the encyclopaedia and she thought she saw what Mother meant, for its other name was the crocodile bird, so called because it is the only creature that can enter with impunity the mouth of a crocodile and pick its teeth. It also cries out to warn the crocodile of an impending foe. Lira loved the snow. She was too old to make snowmen, but she made them. She made herself an igloo. When it was finished she sat inside her igloo, eating a picnic of Marmite sandwiches and nice biscuits and rejoicing in the snow that would keep Bruno away, wishing as hard as she could that more and more snow would fall, that it would lie heavy and impenetrable in the lane until March, until April. Mother had told her about a very bad winter when she was a little girl, even before she and Gracie and Ray came to Shrove, when the snow started "January and lasted for seven weeks and all the water pipes froze. It was a bad winter, but to herself Lira called it a "good" winter. Mother had a cold that she must have caught in town the last time she went there before the snow came. Coughing kept her awake at night so she lay down to rest in the afternoons, and when she did Lira made her way up to Shrove for an hour or two of television. She had missed the old films and school programs and quiz shows. She was beginning to understand too, in a vague, puzzled way, that the small square screen was her window to a world of which she otherwise knew very little. The second time she went up there she saw the snowplough as she came out of the cottage gate. It was clearing the lane. The big shovel on the front of it was heaving up piles of snow, spotted like currant pudding by the gravel lodged in it, and casting it up on the verges. Lira felt sure this would somehow open the way for Bruno. It was as if he had been waiting on the other side of the bridge in his orange car for the snowplough to come and make a smooth, clean road for him. But when she returned there was no car and no Bruno. She should have asked Mother, she knew that, she should have said to Mother, "Is Bruno coming back?" but she couldn't bring herself to do this. She was afraid of being told yes and of being given a definite time. Doubt was better than knowing for sure. The snow thawed and he hadn't come. All that was left of the snow were small piles of it lying in the coldest shady places, map-shaped patches of snow on the green grass. Mother's cold went when the snow did, so there was no more television but plenty of lessons. In February, on a freak warm day, Lira went up into the wood to see if the aconites were out, and when she got back a car was parked outside the cottage, a dark brown car of a shape and make she had never seen before. Instead of a letter of the alphabet at the start of the registration number there was one at the end. She had never seen that before either. The car was called a Lancia. The Tobiases, she thought, having long dropped the respectful Mr. and Mrs. They were always getting new cars. She went warily into the house, preparing to say a cool hallo before going upstairs. The memory of the partridges remained with her and now the story of Gracie and the grandfather too. She saw Bruno before he saw her, she moved so quietly. He was sitting on the sofa beside Mother, holding both her hands in his and looking into her eyes. Lira stood quite still. He was unchanged, except that his long, soft wavy hair was longer and his freckles had faded. He still wore denim jeans and a leather jacket and the two gold earrings in the lobe of one ear. Perhaps there was some truth in the theory she had read that you can sense when someone is staring very intently at you, for although she hadn't moved or made a sound Bruno suddenly raised his head and met her eyes. For a moment, a very brief instant of time, there came into his face a look of such deep hatred and loathing that she felt a shiver run straight down her back. She had never seen such a look before, but she knew it at once for what it was. Bruno hated her. Almost immediately the terrible expression had passed and a look of bland resignation replaced it. Mother also looked around, dropping Bruno's hands. Mother said, "Goodness, Lizzie, you're as quiet as a little mouse." Bruno said, "Hi, Lira, how've you been?" That was the way he talked. not like an English person and not like an American person--she had heard plenty of them on television--but as if he lived midway between the two countries, which was impossible because it would have been the Atlantic Ocean. She noticed a red blush on Mother's face. Mother hadn't told her he was coming. She must have known. Why hadn't she told her? "What d'you reckon to my new jalopy, then?" "He means his car," said Mother. "It's okay," Lira said, a television expression that made Mother frown. "I liked the orange one." "The orange one, as you call it, has gone to where all bad old cars go when they die, the breakers' yard." "Where do the good ones go, Bruno?" said Mother. "They go to people like me, my sweet. The one outside's what I mean by a good one. It was my ma's, still is, as a matter of fact, I've never transferred it. She had it for ten years and only did seven thousand miles on it." Mother was laughing. Lira thought, she didn't tell me because she knows I hate him. I wonder if she knows he hates me? In that moment she lost some of her respect for Mother, though not her love. That was the evening when, as soon as she could get Mother alone, she asked if she could start calling her Eve. "Why do you want to?" "Everyone else does." If Mother thought "everyone" a bit thin on the ground, she didn't say so. "You can if you like," she said, though not in a happy voice. Lira had been wrong when she thought Bruno hadn't changed. She would have understood that he had even if Eve hadn't pointed it out, if Eve hadn't said while they were having their dinner, "You never used to care about money, you used to be indifferent to it." He had been talking about all the things "they" could do now he had his mother's house to sell. "You'd better wait till you've sold it," said Eve in the dry voice she sometimes used. "I've practically done that small thing," Bruno said in his twangy tone. "I've got a buyer who's even keener to buy it than I am to sell." That was in the boom time of five and a half years ago. Eve said she understood you could sell anything these days, a remark that went down less than well with Bruno, who started insisting on how lovely his mother's house was, how he and she would have been delighted to live in it if only it hadn't been in the north. "You can leave me out of it," said Eve. "I live here and I'm going to live here for the rest of my life." He wasn't an anarchist anymore. He had forgotten about money and property being unimportant. Having a big house to sell and a proper car and some thousands of pounds in the bank had gone to his head. "I didn't even have a bank last time I was here, Eve." "Aren't we going to talk about anything but money?" said Eve. She was so rough with him, "scathing" was the word, that Lira really expected him to go off somewhere for the night. But the guitar music went on playing softly and persistently downstairs, sometimes Bruno sang in his Johnny Cash or his Merle Haggard voices, and she wasn't really surprised when, hours later, their footfalls on the stairs woke her and she heard them go into Eve's bedroom together. The only good that came of Bruno's return was free afternoons for watching television. Lessons didn't stop, but once more they became few and far between. Bruno was almost always there and when he was he sneered at Eve's teaching methods, picked on her for not being a qualified teacher, and went on and on about how "the kid" ought to be at school. "Why ought she?" Mother said at last. "Come on, Mother, she's not getting a proper education." "Don't call me Mother," you're only two years younger than I am. How many children of eleven have you come across that can read, write, and talk French, can do a Latin unseen, recite Lyidas, and give you a thoroughly good precis of at least four Shakespeare plays?" "She doesn't know any science and she doesn't know any maths." "Of course she doesn't. She's only eleven." "That's the age they're supposed to start these things, remember?" "You teach her, then. You were good at maths, you're always saying." "I'm not a teacher," Bruno said. "I'm not like you, I know my limitations. She needs real teachers. I bet that kid couldn't do a simple sum. I'm not talking about calculus and logarithms and all that, I'm talking about, say, long division. Come on, Lira, you've got a bit of paper there. Divide eight hundred and twenty-four by forty-two." Eve snatched the paper away. "nobody needs to divide eight hundred and twenty-four by forty-two on paper anymore. Even I know that, out of the world as I am. You have calculators to do that for you." "Calculators can't do algebra," said Bruno. And so it went on. Lira knew very well--though Eve didn't seem to--that Bruno only wanted her to go to school to be rid of her, to get her out of the way. He didn't care whether she learned algebra or got to know about biology. He just didn't want her there when he was there. She understood now, because Bruno had told her, that Eve was breaking the law in not sending her to school. Bruno made a lot of that, he was always saying how Eve broke the law, though he was breaking it himself not buying a new Road Fund licence for his car. But for all the fault he found with Eve, Bruno wanted to be with her, he wanted her to be with him. When his mother's house was sold, he wanted to buy a new one for him and Eve to live in. It could be near Shrove, only in the town, for instance, or in one of the villages on the other side of the valley. He liked it around here, he was happy enough to stay around here, knowing how Eve loved it. "I thought you wanted to be free," Eve said. "That's what you always used to say, how you loved freedom, how you didn't want to be tied down." "I've changed. Becoming a property owner changes you. You start to understand the meaning of responsibility." "Oh, really, Bruno, you'll be asking me to marry you next." "I can't. I'm already married, you know that. But I do want to live with you for the rest of my life." "Really?" said Eve. "I don't know what I want to do for the rest of my life except stay here." "But that's what I'm saying. We'll stay here. You can stay here. You'll only be four or five miles away." "I mean here. Here. On this spot. You may as well make up your mind to it, Bruno. You can buy a house if you want, I'll even drop in sometimes if you ask me, but I'm staying here." Bruno never said anything about Lira living in the house he was proposing to buy. She wanted to ask Eve what was really going to happen. Did she mean it when she said she wouldn't leave here in any circumstances? Was she definite about not living in Bruno's house? And what about Lira? Would Eve give in to Bruno and send her away to school? Lira longed to ask Eve for the truth, she desperately wanted to know, but she was never alone with Eve, Bruno was always there. In March, when the weather got a bit warmer, he and Eve started going for a lot of drives in the brown car with the out-of date Road Fund licence that had been Bruno's mother's. Eve tried to get Lira to come with them, but Lira wouldn't. She went up to Shrove instead and watched television. Bruno had said, and Eve hadn't denied it, that they went on trips looking at houses that were for sale. "If I did come with you," Eve said one evening when they were all sitting around the fire in the cottage, "if I did, which I wouldn't dream of, but if I did, what would we live on? Have you thought of that? Your mother's bit of money won't last forever. It won't last for long. While you're here, you live off me, in case you need reminding, but if I left here my money would stop. I get paid for being here, have you forgotten that?" "I'm a painter. If I don't make much it's because I refuse to compromise, you know that. But things are looking up. You know what they say, nothing succeeds like success. Those Tobiases bought my painting, didn't they? Or we could start up in business, you and me, we could be interior decorators, for instance." Something she had said seemed to strike him for the first time. "What d'you mean, you wouldn't dream of it? Why've you been coming to look at all these houses with me if you wouldn't dream of it?" "I've told you," she said, "I've told you a hundred times. You buy a house, go on, if you want to, I'll go with you and look at it, but I'm not living in it. I'm living here in this house, at Shrove. Is that clear?" They had this conversation every evening, or one very like it, until Lira didn't listen anymore. She sat reading her book or went up to bed while they argued. But one evening things took a different turn. It had been a bad day, a day on which a nasty, frightening thing happened, something quite unforeseen. The weather was perfect, the kind of April day that might have been June, but clearer and fresher than June would be. Bruno was out painting somewhere. This meant that Lira could have her Latin lesson without fear of interruption, which might be a sarcastic comment or derive simply from his presence, silent, looming, his eyes sometimes cast upward. If Lira had been able to express it in words, she would have said Bruno was taking them over, controling them, setting the pace, or calling the tune. But she knew none of these expressions, only that where Eve had ruled he was fast becoming the ruler. Eve was sharp with him or scathing but she resisted him less and less. She was gradually ceasing to give Lira lessons because of his disapproval. They could have this one because he wasn't there. As if it was something wrong or against the law, they had to do it in secret. The French lesson had to be outside in the garden. This, Lira suspected, was because if he came back sooner than he had said, he would think they had gone out somewhere, he wouldn't look for them down there under the cherry tree. The cherry blossoms were out everywhere and the woods were white, not sprinkled with white as when the blackthorn flowered in March, but a pure, clean white like a fallen cloud. When the lesson was over, Lira and Eve went out walking to look at all the cherry trees because Eve said, quoting a poet, you could see it only once a year, which meant that at her age she probably only had forty more chances. They went to the woods down by the bridge and to their own wood, and after that Eve went home in case Bruno was already there. Lira wandered off on her own. She crossed the bridge and began walking along the old railway line, disused for six months now, but the rails and sleepers still there. If you followed the line, just walking along it and through the quarter mile of tunnel, out the other side into another valley, eventually you'd come to the town and then another town and at last to the big city. not yet, but perhaps one day, she would do that. It was six o'clock in the evening but not yet sunset. The warmth had lasted and there was no wind. She walked along the line the other way, toward the station at Ring Valley Halt. Would they have taken the station name away? And what had become of the building, red brick with a canopy and a gingerbread trim, with windowboxes and tubs of flowers, which had also been the signalman's house? She didn't see Bruno until she was no more than a few feet from him, until she couldn't avoid him or hide. The station house looked just the same from a distance, but as she came closer she saw that the curtains upstairs were gone and the door marked PRIVATE stood open. Instead of flowers in the windowboxes and the beds that ran along the backs of both platforms, weeds had sprung up. Where last year there had been daffodils and grape hyacinths grew dandelions. Lira climbed up onto the platform and made her way through the door marked EXIT into the room where people had bought tickets, through that room and, suspecting nothing, out of the main door onto the sandy lane that had been the station approach. Bruno was sitting there, not on his camp stool but on the low wall with his easel in front of him. He was holding up a brush loaded with gamboge and he was staring straight at her. Of course, what he had really been staring at was the station entrance from which she had come. She went closer, she went right up to him, because retreat was impossible. The picture he was painting was of what could be seen through those open doors, the empty line, the deserted platform, paint peeling off the gingerbread fringe on the canopy, the sunflower faces of the dandelions. When Eve wasn't there he didn't bother with any of that "hi, and how are you?" He cast up his eyes, the way he often did when he saw her. She was at a loss, suddenly frightened with no real reason to feel fear. Could she just pass on? Was it possible to ignore him and go on up the sandy path until she was out of his sight? The brush approached the canvas, touched it, painted in the T H E C R O C O D L E B R D dandelion petals. His box of paints, the heap of paint-stained rags, the jar of sticky brushes were on the wall beside him. He drew the brush away and began wiping it on a strip of cloth, which she saw had been torn from an old skirt of Eve's, a skirt she remembered her wearing years before, when first they came to Shrove. He spoke in a tone that was at first mild and conversational. "You're old enough to realise what's being done to you. She's denying you your birthright--well, what's the birthright of kids living in civilised countries. We're not talking about the Third World. This is the United Kingdom in the nineteen-eighties, in case she hasn't noticed." Lira said nothing. "She's crippling you. She might as well have chopped off one of your legs or arms. In another way she's buried you. You're not dead, but she's buried you just the same. In one of the remotest parts of England. She's cut you off. You're not much better than one of those poor devils that get lost as babies and bears or wolves raise them." "Romulus and Remus," said Lira. "There you are, you see. That's just it. You know all that stuff, that god-awful useless crap, but I bet you can't tell me who the president of the United States is." Lira shrugged, the way Eve did. "You're so like your goddamn mother you might be her clone, not her daughter. Maybe you are, eh? Only you don't know what a clone is, any more than you know what H20 is or pi or anything that's not Shakespeare or fucking Virgil." The word was new to her. Strange, then, that she sensed he shouldn't have used it, it shouldn't be uttered in her presence. A blush climbed up her neck and made her face hot. "I'm gonna say just one more thing to you and then you can go home to her and tell tales out of school. That's a laugh, isn't it? Out of school is right. I'm gonna say one more thing and it's this, If you don't get yourself sent to school right now, in the next six months at the very outside, if you don't you won't have a chance of life, you'll be lost forever. All that learning'll be wasted. It's all very well her saying education doesn't have a purpose, it's not for anything, it's all very well her quoting fucking Aristotle or Plato or whoever and saying it's for turning the soul's eye toward the light or some shit like that, but you try telling that tale when you want to go to college, when you want a job, when you haven't got any qualifications, not even O-Levels. Who's going to give a shit about your French and your Romulus and Remus then?" "I hate you," Lira said softly. "Big deal. I'm not surprised. I've been telling you this in your best interests and maybe you'll realise it one day. When it's too late. The best thing you can do is go home and tell her you want to go to school. The term starts next week. You go and tell her that." Lira did go then. She walked until she was sure he could no longer see her and then she ran. She was shaking inside and something she called her heart felt as if it had swelled up until it was too big for her chest, until it must burst. If she had met Eve at that moment, as she was running along the footpath by the maple hedge, if Eve had come out to look for her and they had met, she would have thrown herself into her mother's arms and told her everything he had said. But she didn't. Eve was at home making the dinner. And by the time Lira reached the gatehouse she had slowed her pace to catch her breath, she had collected her thoughts. The awful knowledge had come to her that whatever she told Eve of the things Bruno had said, it would make no difference. Eve was somehow conquered by him, in ways beyond Lira's understanding. It was as if she didn't really like Bruno any more than Lira did herself, but still she wanted him there and she wanted him to like her. Rude to him she might be, but she wanted him to look at her in that way he had, as if she were an angel in the clouds. She even dressed in a different way to please him, with her hair loose down her back, the jade beads around her neck, and sashes and scarves and chains decorating her, things he'd bought her on their outings. The two of them clattered around in beads and chains, their hair shaggy, barefoot or wearing boots. He talked his mid-Atlantic language, and sometimes Eve, precise, pedantic Eve, echoed his expressions. Why then did Lira have this rooted idea that though Eve would never tell him to go, she would be just as happy as Lira if he were gone? Calling out to Eve in the kitchen that she was back, she went upstairs and looked hard at her own face in the mirror. She had never noticed it before but now she could see that what he had said was true in at least one respect, she did look like Eve, she was exactly a younger version of Eve, same features, same golden-brown flushed skin, clear water-brown eyes, and golden gleaming dark brown hair, exactly as curly and exactly as long. That day, when she remembered the weeds' sun-shaped faces and the yellow paint on the brush tip, she thought of as the Day of the Dandelions but she was growing out of giving names to special days and she only ever named one more. After a little while she heard Bruno come in. His arrival was followed by utter silence. She hoped for something, though she hardly knew what. Perhaps she hoped that Eve, without being told, would somehow guess her unhappiness and the reason for it. She would guess and make things right again, as she had used to do when Lira was miserable. Bruno being reprimanded over her, really reprimanded, was something she longed to see. She could bear Bruno if Bruno were changed, were made nicer. As silent as they were themselves, she tiptoed down the stairs. The two of them were on the sofa, embracing, wound around each other, devouring each other, so closely locked it looked as if it must hurt. At that sight, Lira's sense of isolation, even of rejection, was so great as to amount to panic. A sound escaped her, she couldn't help herself, a whimper of pain. They were too preoccupied with each other to hear her. Or Mother was. Bruno's blue angelic eye appeared above Mother's curved cheek. It stared at Lira coldly, unblinking. The worst thing was that it went on staring while Bruno's mouth kept sucking Mother's mouth and Bruno's hands clutched and pummelling her back. Lira turned and ran. She remembered the Andrew Lang fairy stories from long ago and thought he had put Mother under an evil spell. "O' MAGIC spells," Sean said indulgently, "they don't happen in this day and age." "This one did." "What did you do, make a wax what-d'you-call-it and stick pins in him?" She didn't understand. "I didn't have to do anything. He did it himself. I could have told him there were things meant more to her than he did. Well, two things." "Shrove and you." "Shrove, anyway. I mattered, but not as much." She hesitated. "I can't help wondering now how much I matter, Sean. I know she's in prison but it's as she said, it's not a dungeon, it's not the Tower of London. They'd let her try to get in touch, wouldn't they? She doesn't know where I am, she thinks I'm with Heather, but she can't have checked or she'd know I'm not. And then wouldn't they have the police look for me?" "You can't have it both ways, love. You can't not want them to look for you and want them to." "No, you're right. But still I think it's that she loved me when I was a child and she could sort of remake me, shape me the way she wanted, but when I grew up she lost interest. I could feel her losing interest." "You've got me now." "I know. I'll go on about Bruno and breaking the spell, shall l? He must have been very stupid to threaten her and not see it wouldn't work. I see that now but I didn't then, I was too young. I thought she'd send me away and leave the place and if that happened I thought I'd die." Bruno kept on and on at Eve to come and live with him in this house he wanted to buy. He'd found somewhere he liked but he wouldn't make the vendor an offer until he got a promise out of Eve. His mother's house was sold by then and he'd got far more for it than it was worth, as often happened in the late eighties. The place he'd found was a big house built fifty years before on the edge of the village where Eve went to catch the bus for town. Even Lira had been to see it. They took her with them in the car. She thought it very ugly with the dark wooden strips on the yellow plaster, done to look like houses she'd seen in pictures of when Elizabeth I was on the throne of England, the red roof and the windows made of hundreds of tiny diamond-shaped panes. The garden was very big, which Bruno kept saying Eve would like, and surrounded on three sides by enormously tall hedges of the cypress Lira knew was called leylandii. The ugliest tree in the world, Eve had once said. They drove through the village and Eve pointed out the place where Rainer Beck had fallen down dead while building the wall of bricks. Someone else must have finished building the house between the row of cottages and the village hall, for there it stood, looking quite old, as if it had been there for a hundred years. Almost into town, on the outskirts, they called at a supermarket that looked a bit like Bruno's new house, but fifteen times as big and only on one floor. It was another first time for Lira, going in there, and she enjoyed it tremendously. She walked slowly past the shelves, counting how many kinds of fruit juice there were, how many sorts of canned vegetables. The different varieties of biscuits numbered over a hundred. There were dozens of types of food she didn't recognise, that she wouldn't have known were food at all. The soaps and sprays and cleansers fascinated her. She could happily have spent the rest of the day there but Eve got fidgety and made her leave as soon as they had bought their fruit and cornflakes. Lira was being exposed to just the kind of thing Eve most dreaded. It was that evening, when they were quarrelling again about the house, when Lira was curled up in an armchair reading Kim in the crimson and gold Shrove library edition, that Bruno suddenly said, "Does Mr. Jonathan Tobias, your liege lord and master, by any chance know that kid doesn't go to school? That she's never been to school?" The question distracted Lira from Kim Rishti Ke and the Eye of Beauty and she looked up. The truth was that Jonathan Tobias didn't know. Even she knew that, or guessed it. Of course she was always at home when the Tobiases came to Shrove, but they didn't come often and always came on the school holidays or at half-term. If Jonathan Tobias had ever asked Eve how she was getting on at school she no doubt lied to him. Lira hadn't actually heard her do so but she wouldn't have been surprised. "He doesn't know, does he?" "It's no business of his," Eve said. "It's everyone's business in the community. If he knew, I doubt if he'd let you stay here. It's not just the not going to school, it's all the rest of it. Keeping her isolated here, not employing a woman to clean because you don't want any more prying eyes, keeping the money yourself you're supposed to pay to this nonexistent woman, not to mention letting the kid run wild at Shrove, taking what she wants out of the library. Look at her now. That's probably a first edition she's got there. A first edition in the hands of an eleven-year-old who's never even been to school!" "I didn't keep her isolated enough," Eve said quietly. "I didn't keep myself isolated the way I promised myself I would. I've been weak, I've been a fool. The biggest mistake I made was letting you in." He said to Lira, "Go to bed. It's nearly nine o'clock at night and you've no business down here." "Don't you dare speak to her like that!" Eve stood up, facing him. "This is Lira's home, she can do as she likes. Do you really think threatening me is likely to make me come and live with you in that mock-Tudor monstrosity? Don't you know anything about human beings?" He flinched from the flash of her eyes. "I thought you liked the house," he said sulkily. "I thought you did. You didn't say anything about it being a monstrosity." "And you who called property-owners bourgeois! Truly money is the root of all evil if it changes people the way it's changed you." Lira got up, took her book, and said she was going to bed. She got halfway up the stairs and stopped, listening. They were off again. Did she want to hear what was said or didn't she? She couldn't be sure. If he made Eve believe he'd tell the Tobiases, wouldn't she have to give in? Wouldn't she have to send Lira to school and go and live with him, whatever she said about not being forced by threats? Would school be like the school in ne Eyre? She crept down again and listened. "I don't have to tell Tobias, Eve." Bruno had stopped calling Eve "Mother." "I only have to contact the County Education Authority. No, it's not spite, it's not revenge, it's my duty. It would be anyone's duty." Eve said in a wheedling voice, the kind of tone Lira had never heard her use, "And if I agree, that is if I go and live in that house with you, you'll keep silent about this?" "More or less. Hopefully, I'd persuade you that what you're doing is wrong, but I wouldn't take any direct action. not for a while, anyway." "I think you're right when you say they would take her into care. I also think it probable I should lose this house and my job. Without this place I really don't know what would become of us." Lira came closer to the door. "There's no point in being so goddamned sarcastic." "I'm not being sarcastic. I mean it. I'm simply being frank about the facts. Without this place I don't know what would become of us. There's nowhere I could go and keep Lira." "There is a place you can go. A real home. A far better home than this antiquated little dump. A hovel without a bathroom!" Lira heard Eve's little laugh. "And you called yourself an anarchist. You were a free spirit." "All right. I can be frank too. Have you ever heard of an anarchist with money or a free spirit with a hefty bank balance? Can't you see it's for the best, Eve? Can't you face up to it and go the whole hog, come and live with me and give up this whole crazy project? Let the kid go to school and lead a normal life like other kids. I could afford fees for boarding school, you know, a good coed private school. She could come home at weekends." There was silence. Lira held her breath. The door was suddenly flung open and Lira saw the wild face Bruno wasn't allowed to see, the dilated eyes and curled lip, the nostrils narrowed like a cat's. "Go to bed at once! How dare you listen at doors! Perhaps you should go away to school, perhaps I've been wrong all these years. I haven't just sheltered you, I've spoiled you. Go to bed now." Lira seldom cried but she did that night. She wept until she slept, woke again at the sound of Eve and Bruno coming up to bed together, whispering tenderly, no longer angry, reconciled, content with each other. Years later, three or four years, she went back to look at the house Bruno had wanted to buy. It was on the other side of the valley, about two miles away by road or one as the crow flies and as she walked, wading through the river where the water was low, and crossing the disused railway line. By this time the rails and sleepers had been taken away and the line was a grassy track between embankments overgrown with gorse and wildflowers. Climbing the slope, she looked back at the station house where on the frightening occasion she had encountered Bruno painting. The painting he had done Eve had liked and had hung it up in the cottage living room. Every time Lira looked at the dandelion faces in the foreground she remembered the gamboge on his raised brush as he spat out those harsh words to her. She climbed the hillside, took the footpath, then went across the fields that were private land yet where no one ever came but the sheep that grazed there. It was scarcely a village, just a church, a meeting hall and a green with a few old houses and the four newer ones built around a half-moon-shaped road. The people who had bought the house she called Bruno's, though it never had been his, though he had never even made that offer for it, had cut down all the Leyland cypresses and painted the walls pink. A child's climbing frame stood in the middle of the lawn. Lying down asleep inside a wire enclosure was a big yellow dog with a feathery tail and long ears. She might have lived there herself. But perhaps not, perhaps there had never really been a chance of that. She sat on the green for a while, then lay face-downward in the sun, the prickly scented grass pressing into her skin. When she got up she could feel with her fingertips the ridges the grass had made on her cheek, like wrinkles. This time, for a change, she went back through the woods, though it was a longer way around. There were still great spaces in there where giant trees had fallen and no new ones yet been planted. Rocky outcrop appeared all over this hillside, among the trees as well as on the open heathland. It was very pale grey rock that sometimes looked white, like bones lying among the brown beech leaves and the gnarled dark tree roots. You might fancy you saw a skull, but when you approached more closely you could see it was only a bowl-shaped lump of rock, just as the bone-white strips among the brambles were limestone, not a weathered femur or humerus. "Did she give in to him, then?" said Sean. "I don't know. I don't exactly know what happened. I never saw him again." Sean put up his eyebrows. "What, you mean you never saw him after that night?" "I told you, I didn't get up very early. I came downstairs at about nine and Eve said he'd gone out painting. It was midsummer, you see, and sometimes the light was best for painting very early in the morning. He often went out early. now he didn't need to, he painted all the time. We had our lessons. We'd got into the way of having them while he was out of the house. I can't remember but I think it was French that morning and maybe history. Yes, it was history because I remember Eve wanted me to read Carlyle's French Revolution and I couldn't, it was too hard for me, too many difficult words." "Surprise, surprise," said Sean. "She was cross. She grumbled at me and called me a coward for not trying harder. I mean, you have to understand she was hardly ever cross with me and never about things like that. But she was irritable and jumpy that morning. When it got to midday she said she'd made a picnic lunch for me, it was too nice a day to stay in, I should be out in the fresh air. That was unusual too, if there was to be a picnic she always came with me, but not this time. You may wonder how I remember all this, all the details, but the fact is I've thought about that day a lot ever since. I've turned it over and over in my mind." Bruno's car was parked outside the cottage, where he always left it. That signified one thing to Lira, that he couldn't be far off. If he went to paint more than a mile away he always went in the car. Carrying her picnic, she made her way cautiously toward Shrove House. This time she wasn't going to let herself come upon him by chance as she had when she went marching confidently through the station. He was nowhere to be seen, he must have gone northward through their wood or down the lane toward the river bridge. The sun was too hot to walk or sit out in, and in the shade under the trees flies swarmed. She let herself into Shrove, into its silent rooms that were as cool in summer as they were warm in winter, replaced Kim on the library shelves and took down Stalky and Co. For the next four hours she sat watching television. On those days when she had been out for a long time she always had to brace herself before going home and confronting him again. It had got worse as she knew him more thoroughly, not better, and on the way home she reflected how terrible the future was, filled with days of meeting and being with Bruno, or else and she hardly knew if this would be worse going away to the school of his choosing. And still she would see him, for her weekends and holidays would be spent in the "monstrosity," exiled from Shrove. His car was gone. Her heart leapt up, then dipped again. Of course it most likely only meant he and Eve had driven off somewhere and would return in time for supper. She went despondently into the house. Eve was at home and alone, preparing a chicken to roast, mixing the stuffing, and setting the giblets on to boil. "Where's he gone?" She no longer used his name when speaking of him. Eve's face showed nothing, neither happiness nor sadness, it was blank, her large brown eyes empty. "He's gone. Gone for good. He's left us." At once Lira was enormously happy, bubbling over with delight, with joy. Some precocious sense of what was fitting restrained her from crowing or cheering. She said nothing, she just looked at Eve. Her mother set down the spoon she was holding, rinsed her hands under the tap, dried them, and put her arms around Lira, hugging her tight. That evening they read Shakespeare together. Lira took Macheth's part and Eve Lady Macheth. As Eve predicted, there was a lot of the scene where the wife urges the husband to murder the old king that Lira couldn't understand, but Eve didn't get cross when Lira spoke sentences wrong or put incorrect stresses on certain words. Afterward, they played a tape of Mozart's Sinfonia Concetante and then had a French conversation, all things they hadn't been able to do when Bruno was there. Lira was so happy that she should have slept soundly that night but she didn't. She fancied she heard all sorts of sounds, creaking boards and thumps and something heavy being dragged down the stairs. It could all have been in dreams, it was impossible to know. For instance, she had no reason to believe Eve didn't come to bed until four or five in the morning, only a feeling or intuition that she hadn't. It wasn't as if she had been into the other bedroom to look. The car she thought she heard at one point was probably farther away than she believed, not passing the gatehouse door but a hundred yards away in the lane. She said nothing about it in the morning, for she and Eve had never been in the habit of telling each other their dreams. nothing could be more boring, Eve sometimes said, than other people's dreams. But later, while her mother was up at Shrove, cleaning the house in her role as Mrs. Cooper, Lira went into the little castle that Bruno had used as a studio. His easel was there and his two boxes of paints as well as innumerable extra tubes of colour, the names of which fascinated her, though she had never cared to show her interest in front of him. Rose madder tint, light viridian, Chinese white, burnt umber. How strange of him to have gone without his painting things. Even stranger that he hadn't cleaned the brushes he always complained were so expensive, but left them dipped in an inch of turpentine in a jam jar. Pictures, finished, half-finished, blank canvases, rested against the wall. Her own portrait was there. It was not for a long time that she connected the paint rags in the little castle with Bruno's departure. Then, during that morning visit, they were just rags, a rather larger than usual pile of them filling up nearly half the floor space. A much larger than usual pile, in fact. Old skirts of Eve's torn into strips, a sheet that went on her own bed until she put her toe through a hole in it, a ragged towel. Another odd thing about the paint rags, which didn't particularly register at the time but remained in her memory, was the colour of the paint on them. One had a streak of sap green on the edge of it and another looked as if it had mopped up a spill of Prussian blue, but for the most part they were stained reddishbrown--and not just stained, coated in that colour. Lira tried to decide what colour it might be. not crimson or scarlet lake or vermilion, it wasn't bright enough for that. Too dark for rose madder tint and not dark or dull enough for Vandyke brown. Light sienna? Burnt sienna? Either was possible but that didn't explain why Bruno had used so much of it. Did the mess in here and the stack of canvases mean he was coming back? She looked for his clothes in Eve's wardrobe, the leather jacket, the check shirts, the sweatshirt with UnIVERSITY OF CALIFORnIA, BERKELEY mysteriously printed on it. Everything was gone. Sometimes he had left his gold earrings on Eve's dressing table, but these too had gone with him. The awful possibility that, having gone, he might still tell tales of Eve to the Tobiases or to education authorities brought her down from euphoria into the depths again. She had to ask. "He won't be telling anyone anything," Eve said. "Believe me. I promise." A letter came addressed to him and Eve opened it. He had asked her to do that, she said. Inside the envelope was a note from an estate agent who wrote that he would have phoned but it appeared that Mr. Drummond and Mrs. Beck were not in the directory. Was Mr. Drummond still interested in making an offer for The Conifers? The name, for some reason, made Eve laugh a lot. She wrote a letter to the estate agent but Lira didn't see what she had said. They went out together to post it, up the lane to the main road where there was a little old post box with VR on it for Victoria Regina, which meant it had been there for a hundred years. The month was July and Lira was eleven and a half. The good weather lasted for only a short time, it rained and grew cold and Eve and Lira stayed in, doing more lessons than they had for months. Lira could write French composition now and recite from memory Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn." Because it was so wet, the Tobiases didn't come down as they had said they would, and in August Jonathan Tobias came alone. Lira noticed he had some grey in his hair. Perhaps because Victoria wasn't with him, he spent more time at their house than he had done for years. Lira couldn't help overhearing some of the things that were said, for Jonathan seemed to think that when a person was reading they were deaf to everything. Victoria, he said, was in Greece with friends. To Lira, Greece was a place full of grey stone temples with colonnades and marble statues and where gods lived in the rivers and trees. It hardly accorded with her ideas to hear that Victoria and her friends found beaches there to sunbathe on and big hotels to stay in, the kind of thing, Jonathan said, that they preferred over Shrove or Ullswater. Sometimes, aware that she had looked up from her book, he would lean closer to Eve and speak in a whisper. Wishy-wishywishy, the way she remembered Heather murmuring. And Eve nodded and looked sympathetic and whispered something back. It troubled Lira that Jonathan seemed to think Bruno was only temporarily away, for this made his departure seem less than permanent. "I can't help being envious, Eve," he said one sunny afternoon. The summer had come back and they were all having tea in the garden, under the cherry tree. The bird cherries were ripening to yellow and red and there was scarlet blossom on Eve's runner beans. The courgette plants had flowers shaped like yellow lilies and the gooseberries were dark red beads, but beads that grew hair on their crimson skins. "Of me?" said Eve. "Envious of me?" "You've got someone you can be happy with. You're in a good relationship." Lira waited for Eve to deny it or even tell him not to say "relationship." She didn't. She gave Jonathan a mysterious sidelong glance, her eyes half-closed. "I don't want you to envy me," she said. "I'd rather you were jealous." There was silence. At last Jonathan said, "Of him?" "Why not? How do you think I have felt about Victoria?" Eve got up then and carried the tea things into the house. Instead of following her, Jonathan sat there on the grass, looking glum. He pulled a daisy out of the lawn and picked the petals off. Lira thought he was getting to look old. The freshness had gone out of his face and there were lines across his forehead. His eyes had once been of the most piercing clear blue, but the colour was muddied like a blue china bowl with dirty water in it. She expected him to stay to supper and perhaps for the night. Where Bruno had been, beside Eve in bed, he would be found in the morning. But he didn't even stay to eat with them and was gone by seven. The next day Lira thought Eve seemed particularly pleased and happy and she connected this with the appearance of Jonathan at their door a nine in the morning, calling in to say good-bye on his way back to London. Sean said, "This is five years ago you're talking about, right?" She nodded. They were in bed now, snuggled close together for warmth under the two quilts. Sean had bought a second one he'd seen in a closing-down sale. The caravan got bitterly cold at night, but if they kept a heater burning, the condensation was streaming down the walls by morning and their pillows felt damp. Lira, her head on his shoulder, his arms tightly around her, thought of those warm dry weeks, her bedroom with the windows wide open at night, lessons, lessons, lessons, every day in the garden, and Eve saying, "You see, if you went to a so called proper school you'd be on holiday now, you wouldn't be learning anything but just running wild." "Wasn't that around about the time of the big storm? What they called the hurricane? I remember because it was when I'd just got to be sixteen. I'd got my first job and I had to get up at five. I was in our kitchen at home, making myself a cup of tea, and the oak tree next door blew over and came through the roof. It was only a lean-to, our kitchen, and the roof broke like an eggshell. Lucky I was quick off the mark, I got out just in time. It must have been like September." "It was October. October the fifteenth." "What a memory! I reckon you had a lot of trees come down at Shrove. Is that how you remember?" The Day of the Hurricane, the last day she ever gave a name to. "You're not to hurry me, Sean. I'll get to that soon. We got the hurricane very badly at Shrove. We were one of the worst-hit places, and you'll see why I remember it, the precise date and everything. But there was something else happened first." The outbuildings at Shrove House were seldom used. They had been stables once and there was a coach house. The stables were built in the same architectural style as the house, of small red bricks with white facings, a pediment over the central building, and above it a clock tower on which the clock face was blue and the clock hands gold. The weathervane on the tower was a running fox with brush extended. Mr. Frost kept his lawnmowers, the big one he rode on and the small one with which he did around the flowerbeds, in the section of stable to the left of the coach house. Other garden tools were kept in there as well as a ladder and an industrial vacuum cleaner. As far as Lira knew, no one had ever kept cars in the stables. Perhaps they might have done so when old Mr. Tobias was alive, but Jonathan always left his car standing out in the courtyard in front of the stables, and visitors left their cars there too. The stables were really useless, no one went into them, and they remained standing, Lira had heard Jonathan say, only because they were pretty and also a listed building. That meant they were of historic value and must never be pulled down. She had never been inside them, though she had once seen Mr. Frost come riding out of the section by the coach house on the little tractor that pulled the mower. She came to search them as a last resort. It was years since she had needed the library steps to climb up to the picture frame for the key to the television room. At nearly twelve she was almost as tall as Eve, would be much taller by the time she was grown-up. Eve, in any case, had long ceased to bother to hide the key or even take it out of the lock. She must have decided Lira was too old now to be seduced by the charms of television, too mature to be intrigued by locked rooms, or thoroughly conditioned in the discipline of a sequestered life. These days she even pushed the vacuum cleaner about in that room in Lira's presence and seemed to take it as quite natural her daughter never asked what the box with the screen on it was. When she needed the steps but couldn't find them it was for quite another purpose, their primary purpose. The Confessions of an English Opium Eater was on the top shelf, far out of reach. The book would have been out of Jonathan's reach and he was six feet three. Although she knew that it was all of two years since she had put the steps back in the library, that she had several times used them in the library since then, she still went to look behind the long curtains in the morning room. Returning to the library, she saw why they had been replaced. The new ones were up in the dark corner, farthest from the windows, wooden ones this time, perhaps of dark oak, and almost invisible against the dark oak floor where the carpet ended. They were not really steps at all but more like a piece of a staircase consisting of three stairs. Jonathan must have brought them with him when he came in August. Lira could see without attempting to move them that even when she stood on the top stair she wasn't going to be high enough to reach that shelf. She started to search the house for the missing steps. Eve said she wasn't old enough yet for De Quincey, she wouldn't understand the Confessions, there would be plenty of time for her to read it when she was older. And Lira hadn't even wanted it that much when she first came into the library. The title had drawn her to it, for it seemed to have something to do with those drugs she heard about on television. But she wanted it now. She wanted it because she couldn't have it, she couldn't reach it, it was up there in its faded blue binding with the faded gilt flowers on its spine, smugly sitting where it had sat undisturbed for years, for perhaps a hundred years. The steps wouldn't be in any of the bedrooms but she searched them anyway. She found clothes that must be Victoria's in the wardrobe of what she had always thought the nicest bedroom, a big, light room that looked across the water meadows to the river. A skirt hung there and a pair of jeans and the green silk shirt she had been wearing the first time Lira ever saw her. There were also an embroidered white cotton nightdress and a matching dressing gown. It looked as if Victoria had been sleeping in that room while Jonathan slept in the big room at the front. The steps weren't in there either, or in any of the cupboards, or downstairs in any of the rooms that gathered around the kitchen, the boot room and the pantry, the washing room, the larder, and the storeroom. Lira went outside to the stables. She could hear the drone of Mr. Frost's mower from the bit of lawn behind the shrubberies. The stables were never locked. There were no locks on the doors, though the coach house had a padlock fastening together the handles on each of its double doors. For some reason, she left looking in the section where the mower had been till last, which was strange because it was the obvious place. Except for the one where the tools were kept, the stables were all quite empty. She couldn't open the coach house doors, only peer through the cracks in them. They were old doors with quite a big split between two of the boards. She could just make out a car inside. The steps were propped up against the wall between where the tractor had been and where the small mower stood. Lira took them into the house, carried them into the library, and climbed up to get The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. It was while she was coming down with the book in her hand that the significance of a car in the coach house where no car had been before fully struck her. Mr. Frost was now in sight, wheeling around the big lawn on his tractor, wearing gloves and ear muffs. He didn't see her. She replaced the steps, then thought better of it, carried them out again and propped them up in front of the locked doors. High up under the pediment were two small windows. Lira climbed the steps to the top. That brought her just high enough to see over one of the windowsills. The car stood in the middle of the coach house floor with plenty of space around it. Even so, she couldn't see the name of the make, but she could see the registration plates with the letter at the end of the number instead of the beginning. It wasn't too dark to make out the colour, a deep brown, the burnt sienna of Bruno's paintbox. Bruno was gone, but this was Bruno's car, the Lancia car Bruno's mother had had for ten years and only driven seven thousand miles. The sound of the mower approaching made her look around. Mr. Frost got off his tractor to open the stable. He never talked much, he wasn't the kind of grown-up to ask what she was doing. "Mind you don't fall," he said. Going home, carrying the book, she had thought of that night after Bruno had left, how she had slept so uneasily and dreamed so much she couldn't tell in the morning what had been dream and what real. The car she had heard--that had been Bruno's car. She had heard Eve driving Bruno's car up here to hide it in the coach house. Sean was asleep. Lira wondered how long he had been asleep, at what point in her narrative he had ceased to listen. Scheherazade. Did the king or sultan or whatever he was fall asleep while she told her stories? Was that in fact the reason she never reached the end of each tale? Because her husband fell asleep first? Sean was snoring lightly. She pushed him over onto his side so that his back was toward her. Another thing she wondered about was if the sultan and Scheherazade made love before she started on the story or in the middle or what? They must have done that, that was the point of his marrying all those women, wasn't it? There was nothing about it in the book she had read. There wouldn't be, she thought, people cut things out of versions meant for children. Even for children who'd seen what she had seen. Invisible in the dark, she smiled to herself at Sean's squeamishness. She hadn't told him about the smell of those stained rags or, to spare him, about the red paint fingerprints on the stone floor of the little castle. Up in the vaulted ceiling among the beams a spider had caught the death's-head moth in its dusty web. Sean wouldn't have wanted to hear about that, either, the rare moth long dead among the dusty threads, but the skull pattern on its back still palely gleaming. A disused airfield near the place where the caravan was parked provided them with somewhere for Lira to have her driving lessons. With Sean in the suicide seat--his words--she drove up and down the old runways and learned how to do a three-point turn on the flat area outside a dilapidated hangar. "You'll pass your test first go," Sean said. As november began, Lira began to think more and more about Eve and about her trial, which was surely due. She regretted now that when she had the chance she hadn't learned more about crimes and justice and courts. Eve would have known, Eve could have told her. For instance, would they have it here in the city, which had once been the place the train started from? Or would it be far away in London at what she thought might be called newgate? I must go to London sometime, she thought to herself. It's absurd never having been to London, even Sean's been to London. She ought to start buying newspapers, but she didn't know which one would be best. Already she had seen enough of them to know that the little ones with the tall headlines would only print the most sensational or sexy parts of a trial while the big ones with pictures of politicians might not print it at all. Television might have it on only once and that maybe on the evening Sean was watching his football. Life wasn't easy in the caravan. If you wanted to be warm you also got wet. Sean got hold of a tarpaulin from a farmer who had used it to protect a haystack from heavy rain and they spread it right over the caravan. That helped, but it also made it dark. All their water had to be fetched from the stream and boiled. It was impossible to wash clothes and bed linen, which had to be taken to the one launderette still remaining within a ten-mile radius. They used two inches of water in a bowl and tried to wash themselves all over in that. Lira had got very good at sneaking baths at Mrs. Spurdell's, quite often managing to have one while Mrs. Spurdell was actually in the house, waiting till she was on the phone she spent hours on the phone talking to her daughter or her friends--and taking two minutes in the tub before giving the bathroom a thorough clean. Even so, Mrs. Spurdell had once or twice remarked on the quantity of water she had heard gurgling down the plughole. At the school half-term, when Mr. Spurdell had also been in the house, bathing was impossible, the risk was too great. His study was upstairs next door to the bathroom and he was usually in the study, or liable to go in there. On that late October day, a Monday, she arrived at Aspen Close determined on having a bath. Mrs. Spurdell would be out for an hour, having her hair done. Lira had overheard her making the appointment. She was therefore dismayed to find Mr. Spurdell at home, apparently recovering from the flu, which had struck him down on the previous Friday afternoon while he was reading, according to his wife, Spenser's Faerie Queene with the A-Levels English form. He wasn't up but she had no reason to believe he was asleep. Mrs. Spurdell said he would probably get up later and come down in his dressing gown. Then, if she was still at the hairdresser's, Lira could make him a cup of tea. Mrs. Spurdell put on her new Burberry. She tied a plastic rain hood around her head, not because it was raining, it wasn't, but to make sure she had it with her to protect herself on the way home. Lira thought she would have to do what she had advised Sean to do. Knowing nothing of hotels, she just the same understood that they must have a great many bathrooms. The Duke's Head, which she passed on her way to Aspen Close, must have more bathrooms than any private house. If Sean didn't want to pay for the swimming pool or the showers, why didn't he just walk into the Duke's Head, march upstairs as if he was a guest there, find a bathroom, and have a bath? Who would know? He'd have to make sure to take a towel with him, of course. He could put a folded towel inside his jacket and take a plastic bag to put it in after it got damp. It was stealing hot water, Sean said, it was dishonest. He was quite shocked. Stay dirty then, said Lira. She wouldn't think twice about doing it, in fact she'd probably do it on her way to meet him after work. Realising that she couldn't because she had no towel made her feel cross and she thumped her way into the study, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind her. Mr. Spurdell had acquired two new books since she was last in there. Lira cared very little about Mrs. Spurdell having a new Burberry or her hair done or unlimited hot water or Mr. Spurdell driving a six-month-old BMW, but she did envy them the books. She resented them for the books, it made her hate Mr. Spurdell especially, though in many ways he seemed nicer than his wife. She sometimes saw him on Friday afternoons returning home just before she was due to leave. The new books he had got were a Life of Dickenr and The Collected Short Stone of Saki What wouldn't she give to read that Life of Dicken! She could never afford it, she wouldn't even be able to afford it when it came out in paperback. Quickly she forgot all about Mr. Spurdell. She ceased to listen for him. The Dickens in its brown-and-gold jacket was in her hands, she was sitting at the desk reading the introduction, when he came quietly into the room. It was only because of the little dry cough he gave that she knew he was there. She jumped up, clutching the book. He was a small man, as thin as Mrs. Spurdell was fat. Lira had sometimes thought they were like Jack Sprat and his wife, he able to eat no fat and she no lean. He looked old, an old man who should have retired by now, his jowls melting into a withered neck, his head bald but for a white fringe around the back. Over striped pyjamas he wore a brown tweed dressing gown with a cord around the waist tied in a neat bow. His genial smile brought her immense relief. She wouldn't have to go back to Sean now and tell him she'd got the sack. Relief became indignation when he said, still smiling, apologising as if to an ignorant child, that it was a pity there were so few pictures in that book. "I don't want pictures," Lira said and she knew her tone was surly. Up went his white tufts of eyebrows. "How old are you?" he said. After she had spoken the truth she remembered too late the lie she had told his wife. "I'm nearly seventeen." "Yes, I would have guessed about that. Some of my pupils are your age, only they prefer to be called students." He held out his hand for the book and she gave it to him. "Thank you. I haven't read it yet." Without knowing in the least how she could tell, she fancied this was the way teachers behaved. Bossy. Commanding. Imparting information. As she thought this, he imparted some. "Dickens was a great English writer, some would say the greatest. Have you read any of his books at school?" "I don't go to school," she said, and added, "anymore. I don't go anymore." What did he think, that she took days offschool to come and work for his wife? "But I've read Dickens. I've read Bleak House and David Copperfeld and Oliver Twist and nicholas Nickleby and A Tale of Two Cities." His evident astonishment gave her a lot of pleasure. She thought he'd ask her why she left school so young, she was prepared for almost anything, but not for him to point to the several volumes of Dickens he had in paperback and ask her if she had read Our Mutual Friend. "I told you the ones I've read," she said but not this time in the surly voice. "Well, you're a surprising young lady. not quite what you seem, is that right?" Lira thought this was truer than he knew. She changed the subject, asked him if he would like her to make him tea, and when he said he would, preceded him downstairs. Mrs. Spurdell was back before the kettle had boiled, recounting to her husband some long tale of how the hairdresser had read their daughter's name in a magazine, as the author of a letter to the editor about family law. The hairdresser--"who was really quite an intelligent girl, considering"--had cut out the letter but forgotten to bring it. She would bring it next time. Philippa was so modest she hadn't said a word about it. She hadn't mentioned it to her father, had she? While this was going on, Lira went back upstairs. She finished the study, she made the bed Mr. Spurdell had recently vacated, and ran the vacuum cleaner across the carpet. By then it was time to leave. Mrs. Spurdell was paying her, fishing about in a jar on the windowsill for a five-pound note and claiming to have mistaken a ten-pee piece for a fifty-pee, when her husband came back into the kitchen and handed Lira Our Mutual Friend and The Old Curiosity Shop. "I should like them back sometime but there's no hurry." "You'd better write your name on the flyleaf, dear," said Mrs. Spurdell. She laughed reminiscently. "Do you remember how Jane used to write inside her books, This book was stolen from Jane Spurdell'?" It was extremely rude but Lira didn't care. Having something new to read was wonderful. She'd been spinning out the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, making it last, which was an irritating way to have to read something. Mr. Spurdell giving her Our Mutual Friend was rather interesting, a sort of coincidence, because that was the book she'd tried to read when she gave up on The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Eve had been right about that, she wasn't old enough for it, and she hadn't been old enough for Our Mutual Friend, either, but she would be now. She'd started to read it that same evening, when she got back from finding Bruno's car in the Shrove coach house. It was a strange thing but she'd never really considered telling Eve what she'd found or asking her why the car was there. She thought she knew why and then she wasn't sure if she did or not. It might only mean that Bruno was coming back, that for some reason he had gone without his car and Eve was storing it for him, he hadn't gone for good. Eve had said he had, but Lira no longer entirely trusted her to tell the truth. After concentrating on it for all of an hour, she had abandoned the De Quincey and attempted Our Mutual Friend. Perhaps she was tired because she hadn't been able to cope with more than the first page. She still lay awake a long time, wondering about the car and what might have happened to Bruno. nobody had ever known where Bruno was except his mother and now she was dead. His wife hadn't known and neither had his wife's friend the dentist. The estate agent had but Eve had written to him. That was the night she dreamed Bruno was with them still but about to leave. His silky brown hair was tied back with a piece of ribbon so that you could clearly see the two gold rings in his ear. And his face had even more than usual that angelic look, like a saint in a painting, that so belied the rough speech that sometimes came from that cherubic mouth. She didn't see him leave in the dream. Eve told her he had gone, and later she heard a gun being fired. She was walking in the wood and she heard shots behind her. But this was all in the dream, not in life. On the actual night after Eve said Bruno had gone she had heard no shots, she had heard nothing but a heavy object dragged downstairs and a car being driven away. Where had the car been all day? Bruno couldn't have gone away in it or it wouldn't have been there for Eve to drive up to Shrove in the nighttime. But it wasn't there, it hadn't been outside when Lira came home. So had Eve hidden it somewhere? Lira realised she could have hidden it almost anywhere, behind the birch tree copse or under the overhanging branches of a hedge, she could have hidden it a few yards from the gatehouse and Lira wouldn't have seen. Watching a football match that was coming from somewhere in Germany, Sean didn't for a while try to stop her reading. He no more expected her to watch football than she expected him to read Dickens. They had a bottle of wine the supermarket had on sale, the week's special offer. Rain lashed the tarpaulin that covered the caravan. A howling gale blew the rain in savage spurts against the uncovered parts of the windows so hard it sounded as if they must break. The caravan rocked and shivered. Lira and Sean sat close together with one of their quilts wrapped around their legs. While Lira read about Eugene Wrayburn, Sean watched the German team soundly beat the English one. He switched off with a sigh and, having first put his arm around her, began to comb her hair. It was a cunning move on his part, he knew the sensuous pleasure she took in it, stretching like a cat and extending her neck as the comb passed slowly through the curtain of smooth dark hair. He said softly, "What had happened to him, Bruno, I mean?" Lira closed her book. "I don't know. I mean, I didn't know then. I found out later." She considered. "You'll have to wait till I come to the hurricane." "Okay, then what about those Tobiases? They split up, didn't they?" "not until the following year. But I never saw Victoria again. Jonathan wrote to Eve and told her he was living at Ullswater and Victoria was living in the London house, and soon after that Victoria left altogether. I think she went off with someone." "So your mum started hoping again?" "Yes. But that was a way off. I don't know what she felt about the divorce they got divorced two years later--she never showed me her feelings about that. Somehow I think she understood she'd played it all wrong before." "She should have made herself harder to get," said Sean. "Or easier. If she'd gone with him to all those places he wanted her to go to, even to London sometimes, if she'd done that I don't think he'd have ever taken up with Victoria. Eve was prettier than Victoria and cleverer and he'd known her since forever. She had all the advantages. Except that she'd never go away from Shrove, not even for a weekend." She looked up at him. "Should I have made myself harder to get, Sean? I was easy, wasn't I? just jumped into your arms." "Oh, you." He laughed and, putting the comb down, hugged her in his arms. "You was a real little innocent, you didn't know no better." "Was I? Shall I tell you about the hurricane?" "Wait a minute, I'll fill up your glass. There's one thing I want to know first. Didn't no one come looking for Bruno?" "Who was there to look? If his mother had still been alive it might have been different. If he'd said he wanted to buy that house. If he'd been to a lawyer or whatever it is you have to do when you buy a house. If the sale of his mother's house hadn't gone through and he'd still been waiting for the money. If he'd still been living in those rooms over the greengrocer's. But as it was, nobody knew where he'd lived and no one needed to get in touch with him." "It gives you the creeps when you come to think of it." "I went back into the little castle and everything of his was gone, the paintings, the canvases, the paints, and that pile of rags. It was all gone and the place had been scrubbed out. Even the ceiling, she'd cleaned the ceiling and got rid of the spider's web with the moth in it." "Those rags, what was it you thought was on them?" Sean spoke in a low voice, tentatively. "You never thought that was paint, did you?" "I did then. now I think it was blood." Sean was silent, his face grim. After a moment or two he said, "Tell about the hurricane, then." "There's one other thing first. That picture Bruno painted of me, it turned up on our living room wall. One morning I came downstairs and there it was. Eve had taken away the Shrove at sunset picture and put the one of me there instead." "What did she do that for?" "I don't know. It didn't look like me, but I suppose she liked it. I'll come to the hurricane now." As if to encourage her, the wind slapped another burst of rain against the window behind them. The caravan rattled. It hadn't rained that night, the night of the Storm, the Hurricane, the Great Gale. The storm had been dry, an arid tempest that came up out of the Atlantic, bearing salt on its back. Salt lay in drifts on the windows of Shrove the next day, white as frost, dry crystals the wind had sucked off the sea. "All the leaves were still on the trees," she said, "that was the worst of it. If the branches had been bare the gale wouldn't have been able to pull the trees over, but they were still in full leaf, leaves don't really fall till november, and they made the treetops like great sails." "Was you at the gatehouse, you and your mum?" "When weren't we there? We never went anywhere." She would have slept through it, enormous though the noise of it was. A heavy sleeper, at the age of eleven she would have slept through bombs falling. Eve woke her up. Eve, who was frightened of nothing, was frightened of this. She woke her up for companionship, for someone to be with, not to be alone while the world was torn to pieces around her. It was just after four in the morning. Pitch dark and the wind roaring up the valley like an invisible train, a ghost train. The real train that had once run along the valley had never sounded as loud as this. They still had electricity when she came downstairs, rubbing her eyes, peering about her, but the lights went out as she entered the living room. Somewhere out there the wind had brought the power lines down. "What is it? What's happening?" Eve said she didn't know, she'd never heard wind like this. not in this country. We didn't have hurricanes. "Perhaps it's not a hurricane," Lira said. "Perhaps it's the end of the world. The Apocalypse. Or a nuclear bomb. Someone's dropped a nuclear bomb." Eve, putting candles into jam jars, said how did she know about things like that? How did she know about the Apocalypse? Who had told her about nuclear bombs? The television, thought Lira. She didn't answer. "Of course it's not a bomb," said Eve. The candle flames guttered as the windows rattled. Something of the wind penetrated even in here. The curtains bellied out and flattened again against the glass. Eve tried the radio before she remembered that electricity worked that too. For the same reason she couldn't make tea. The nearest gas was five miles away. Lira thought how isolated they were, the nearest house in that village where Bruno had nearly bought a house two miles distant. It was like being marooned on an island in the midst of a rough sea. She looked out of the window, the glass shuddering against her face. It was still too dark to see much beyond the tendrils of creeper that cloaked the gatehouse till the leaves fell. These streamed out in the wind like blown hair, pulling a black curtain across the window. An enormous crash from somewhere not too far distant drove her back into the middle of the room. "Come away," said Eve. Roof tiles clattered off one by one, three of them, each making a sharp crack as it fell and smashed on the stones. The wind was both constant and sporadic. All the time it blew at a steady rate, but it came in gusts too, each one thunderous, tearing through trees and leafy branches, between tree trunks, among bushes, each gust blowing itself out on a howl and a final crash. The earth shook and the ground heaved. "The trees," said Eve, and then, "the trees." Her face was white. She put her hands over her ears, then brought them down and clasped them, wringing them. Dismayed, Lira watched her pace the room. This was Shrove where it was happening, Shrove which meant more to her than anything in this world or out of it. These were Shrove trees and at each nearby or distant crash Eve winced. Once she put her hand over her mouth as if to stop herself crying out. At about six it started to get light. Dawn had been a yellow bar across the eastern horizon. Lira crept out into the kitchen to look at it, for Eve wouldn't let her go upstairs. The wind abated not at all with the pale spreading of light but seemed to take new life from it, roaring and tossing and circling with a shrill whistling sound. A single leafy branch spun in the air and crashed to the ground. The walls of the gatehouse shuddered. The windows rattled. Lira watched the darkness recede from the sky, the livid streak fade, the grey colour whiten, and a mass of high, clotted, scurrying cloud reveal itself. The cherry tree lay across the garden, its branches and dense foliage spread over the lawn, the flowerbeds, Eve's kitchen garden, its roots pointing dark brown, thready fingers into the air. As she watched, the whistling wind, the invisible engine, struck the ash that marked the edge of the lane and the giant tree shuddered. It seemed to hold itself suspended before a quivering convulsed it and it toppled over out of Lira's sight, leaving a sudden white space where all her life had stood this strong, stout, leaf-crowned barrier. She gasped, putting her hand up to her lips. "Come away," said Eve. "Don't look." It wasn't until the afternoon that the gale blew itself out. Eve had tried to go outside before that but the wind had beaten her back. Broken branches and twigs, dying leaves, covered the front garden and the lane. One of the Shrove gates had come loose from its fastenings and slammed shut, tendrils of solanum trapped between its iron curlicues. Lira had never seen her mother in such a tragic mood. She was unhappier than she had been when she heard of Jonathan Tobias's marriage. She was worse than unhappy, she was distraught. The sight of the fallen cherry tree made her weep and she kept crying out that it wasn't real, it couldn't be true. "I can't believe it, I can't believe it. What's happening? What's happened to our climate? This is madness." From the gatehouse they couldn't see much. The balsam still stood, though stripped of one of its limbs, but fallen trees blocked their view on all sides. It was as if the gatehouse had been surrounded by a barricade of broken tree trunks and branches, as if the wind, invested with purposefulness and malice, had built it up to hem them in. They were in the midst of a fortification of wind-hewn timber. Lira could see that they would have to climb over logs and scramble through leafy boughs to get out the front gate. Eventually they emerged together at three in the afternoon, clambering over the balsam's huge bough, which blocked their way. Lira felt very small and alone but she would have considered herself too old to take Eve's hand if Eve hadn't taken hers first. Hand in hand, they stumbled toward the gateway of Shrove. Inside the park, devastation lay on both sides of them, ruined trees and shrubs in heaps where they had fallen, havoc as if man-made, Eve whispered, like pictures she had seen of countryside after battles. Tree stumps stood with shredded trunks pointing skyward. A bird's nest, a huge structure of thick twigs and woven reeds, had been torn from some once-high treetop and lay in their path. "Paradise destroyed," Eve said. Two of the great cedars had gone. The limes were down, most of the ancient trees, only the slender supple birches and the little pyramidal hornbeams remaining. Laying waste the park, the wind had spared the house, which stood staring calmly at them, its glazed eyes all intact, its roof unscathed. All that was changed was that a stone vase had tumbled off a pillar at the foot of the steps. A pale sun, weak and watery, though no rain had fallen, gleamed like a puddle of silver among the soft drifting clouds. Beyond the gardens, beyond the water meadows, a waste of felled willows and splintered poplars, beyond the shining ribbon of the river, the high hills showed hollow places in their woods, holes in the fabric of tree cover as if scissors had ripped rents in cloth. The air was scented with sap from the ripped leaves and salt from the distant sea. All was silent, the birds silent, but for a plover making its unearthly cry as it wheeled above them. "Eve was in an awful state," Lira said to Sean. "She was like someone bereaved. Well, like I imagine someone bereaved would be. You know you read in books about people tearing out their hair. She almost did that. I found her sitting in our living room clutching handfuls of her hair. She moaned and cried and threw herself about as if she was in pain. I didn't know what to do, I'd never seen her like that. "I wonder if she'd have been half as bad if it wasn't trees that had been destroyed but me. That was when I began to get the feeling Shrove was more important to her than I was. It frightened me and I didn't know what to do. "There wasn't anyone I could turn to, you see. There wasn't anyone. Well, the milkman came and he was useless. now the trains didn't run anymore he could only talk about the weather and I'd had enough of weather for a lifetime. Mr. Frost came to see if there was anything he could do. I said, you could get her a doctor and I think he thought I was crazy. What's she got wrong with her, then, he said, and I couldn't answer him, I knew he'd think Eve was mad or I was. No one's phone was working, he said, and it might be a week before we got our electricity back. I was left alone with her and I felt helpless. I was only eleven. "She calmed down a bit next day. She lay on the sofa. We couldn't cook anything but we'd got bread and cheese and fruit. I went up to Shrove and found a packet of a dozen candles. I found a Calor gas burner we could boil a kettle and an egg on, though it took hours. She fell asleep in the afternoon and I went up into the wood, the bit we called our wood. "I don't know why I went really. It didn't upset me the way it had her, but I'd seen enough fallen trees and destruction to last me forever. But I still went up there. Maybe I thought that if somehow the wind hadn't done much damage there, if for some reason it had escaped, that would be something to tell her and cheer her up. "Afterward I wished I hadn't gone. I wished I'd stayed at home with her. It caused me such a lot of worry." "What d'you mean?" Sean asked. "You'll see. It was what I found there," she said. "Of course it didn't matter in the end." As soon as she came close to the wood, to what had been the wood, she knew her hope had been forlorn. From a distance you couldn't see what lay beyond the outer circle of trees, she and Eve hadn't been able to see when they walked up the lane on the previous day, for the oaks and chestnuts on the perimeter remained standing. Like a whirlwind the gale had bored its way in through the outer ring and once inside behaved like a maddened animal, spinning in circles and destroying every vulnerable thing in its orbit. not quite everything, she saw as she came carefully between the standing oaks. A few young trees still stood. Here and there a giant had resisted the onslaught while one or two mature trees leaned at an angle, their final collapse delayed. But between them lay devastation. The leaves on the tumbled limbs and branches were still fresh. They were still as if growing from twigs that proceeded from branches that grew from a living, rooted trunk. A sea of leaves lay before her. There was no wind now, only a little breeze, a joke of nature playing with destruction, that fluttered all the leaves, scalloped oak and pointed cherry, five-fingered chestnut and oval beech. The leaf sea was a dark quivering green from which protruded here and there an upturned root like a fin, or a broken trunk like the funnel of a wrecked ship. It reminded her of the sea after a storm in a picture in the library at Shrove, for the real sea she had never seen. For a while she stood there, just looking. Then she waded into the sea of green. Once she began, the image ceased to hold, the comparison was wrong. This was not a matter of striding through water, but of clambering across a rough terrain. Where once had been paths and clearings were broken wood and torn brambles, concealed stumps to trip her up and shattered logs to block her way. Yesterday she would have been incredulous if anyone had told her she might not find her way through the wood. But so it was. Everything was different. The wind had laid it waste and made a nearly impenetrable wilderness where yesterday morning had stood the ranks of trees and between them, in the depths, had stretched aisles of mysterious green shade. All was havoc now and all was curiously the same. Was it here, for instance, that the great isolated beech had stood, spreading its branches in an arc so huge as to form a circle of deep shade with a radius of fifty yards in which no grass or plant could grow? Or was it here that the larches had been, conifers leafless in the winter but green with new needles in the spring? She couldn't tell, but when she found the beech, felled and prone, its vast trunk grey as a wet seal, its wrenched-out roots clotted with earth and stones, when she saw that she could have cried like Eve. Struggling onward, climbing over fallen trunks and pushing aside sheaths of thick foliage, she made her way aimlessly, hardly knowing what she was seeking. Somewhere it hadn't happened? A region of the wood miraculously untouched? There was just one place. But this only because no trees had stood in the clearing she came to. She had an idea where she was now, in the very heart of the ruined wood, its centre, where once a ring of cherry trees and field maples had encircled a grassy space. On the tree stump in the middle of that grass she had sometimes picnicked. She moved toward it now and sat down on the broad, flat, smooth stump. She looked about her, aware for the first time of the silence. No birds sang. There had always been birds in the wood but at the hurricane's assault they had departed. The maples and cherries were mostly fallen but some still stood, the biggest and oldest leaning at a steep angle. She wondered if it would be possible to save those half-fallen trees, if there was some way of hauling them up and holding them. Who would do it? Who was there to care? She got up and made her way to the half-toppled cherry, put her hands on its trunk. It felt firm, as steady as an upright, growing tree. There was nothing to do now but go back, to try to find her way back through the welter of broken branches. She ducked under an overhanging limb of maple, looked down and recoiled, jumping backward and hitting her head. She scarcely felt the pain. Her breath indrawn sharply, she put her hand up over her mouth, though she had no inclination to cry out. Almost at her feet, at her feet until she had retreated that step or two, lay a long bundle of sacking. She could see it was a sack, of the kind Eve said they used to put potatoes in and of which there was a pile in the stable at Shrove, though it was stiff with earth and gravel. And it wasn't just a sack, it was a bundle with something inside it. A length of string, now quite black, had been tied around the top and another length around the bottom. No, not the top and the bottom, Lira found herself saying, not that but the head and the feet. She came a little closer, not frightened but awed. It had made her flinch and jump back at first, now she was curious. Whatever this was, the storm had unearthed it, tearing up a tree root and heaving it out of its burying place. Its burying place... She was conscious of the smell now. It was a smell she had never smelled before. Strange, then, that she knew it was of something rotten, something that decayed, reminding hen-yes, she knew what it was--of long ago, when Heidi and Ruth used to come. One of them had buried a meaty bone and later, perhaps weeks later, Eve while gardening had dug it up, stinking, maggoty, as green as jade, a beautiful colour really.... She knelt down. She held her breath, somehow knowing she must hold her breath. There was a tear in the sacking at the top of the bundle just above the string. She picked at it, making the hole bigger. It split open quite suddenly and a flood of soft brown, silky hair spilled out. It spilled into her hands, thick and slippery. The hair came off in her hands and she was holding it. She stumbled away and was sick among the broken branches.

IT was Bruno?" Sean said. She nodded. "You poor kid. A kid might never get over something like that." She wished he wouldn't say "somefink" but there was nothing to be done about it. "Well, I did. I got over it. I didn't even dream about it. It's a funny thing, you know, but you can't help being sick. It's not what your mind does, it's your body. I was curious, I really wanted to know, I suppose you could say I was interested. I knew it was Bruno's hair, I knew it was Bruno dead in there, and I hadn't liked Bruno, I'd hated him, I was glad he was dead, but I threw up just the same. Weird, isn't it?" He didn't understand. "You must have been shattered to bits. You didn't know what you was doing." Useless to persist. She gave up trying. "I didn't know what to do next. There wasn't anything I could do but go back home and leave that thing lying there for anyone to find." "Let's get this straight," said Sean. "She'd killed him, right? She's real bad news, your mum, isn't she? She'd killed him like she killed the man the dogs went for?" "Oh, yes, she'd killed him. I don't know how. I never said anything about it to her. I was only eleven but I knew she'd killed him and--well, there didn't seem anything to say, if you know what I mean." He didn't know. She could tell that. "She was in a state, anyway. She was depressed, in a real black depression, for quite a long time. I wasn't going to tell her a thing like that, not something that would worry her as well." "There must have been someone you could tell. Tobias, like, or the old chap--Frost was his name? No one'd have expected you to get the police, not at your age, but hopefully they'd have done that for you. Didn't you never think of that?" It was dark in the caravan. She looked at him in the dark and made out his puzzled expression. "She's my mother," she said quietly. He didn't respond, and when she said how it had worked out for the best, how the body was concealed once more, he hardly reacted. "She killed him because he threatened everything," Lira said. "He was going to part her and me and make us leave Shrove." "Okay. No need to get excited." Sean hesitated. "How did she do it?" "I don't know. I didn't hear any shots that day he disappeared, but I wouldn't have so far away. You remember that blood on the rags in the little castle? I think she may have used a knife." He had gone a little pale. "Wasn't you scared of being with her? I mean, she could have turned on you." "Oh, no." Lira laughed. "I was like the bird that lived inside the crocodile's mouth, I was safe whoever else wasn't." "I wish you hadn't told me, not that about the sack and the hair. I shall't get no sleep." "I shall," said Lira, and she was asleep very quickly, her arm around his waist and her forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. If he lay awake, haunted by what she'd told him, she was oblivious of it. Cautiousness made her rather quiet next morning. She boiled the water for their tea and her perfunctory face-washing in silence. It was perhaps unwise to go into too many details with him. She had told him rather too much on the previous night but now she would be more careful. That remark of his about the police she hadn't liked. Eve had been arrested, had no doubt appeared in one court, was somewhere in a prison, but still there must be many things they didn't know and need not know. It wasn't one of her days at Mrs. Spurdell's, but still, "I'll come into town with you," she said. It was almost the first thing she'd said that morning. She took the spare set of car keys with her. For the first time she went all the way into the Superway car park with him, noting where he put the car. He went off into the store and she, having bought a pair of bath towels at Marks and Spencer, wandered casually into the Duke's Head, where she encountered no one in the front hall or on the stairs. There was no soap in the bathroom. She should have thought of that but how was she to know? She took a bath just the same, enjoying a prolonged soak in the hot water, free from any anxiety about Mrs. Spurdell returning unexpectedly, and dried herself on both of the thick fleecy towels. On her way out a man in a suit and tie asked her if she needed help. Lira said she was looking for Mrs. Cooper. She didn't know many names, having come across so few people, and had to fall back on those from fiction or, as in this case, the name of Eve's invented cleaner. "Is she staying in the hotel?" Lira said she was expected today or tomorrow. The man looked in his book and said she'd made a mistake but cast no suspicious glances at the Marks and Spencer's carrier full of wet towels. He didn't seem at all cross or anxious for her to go and as he talked to her about the fictitious Mrs. Cooper, speculating as to where this woman might be staying or how a member of his staff could have made an error, Lira was aware that the way he looked at her and the way he spoke were full of admiration. As Sean would put it, he fancied her. From Sean alone had she experienced this, had accepted it without thinking others might share his feelings. now she was beginning to understand desiring her wasn't some idiosyncracy of his but might even be common. She felt her power. "Don't hesitate to come back if we can help you at all," the man said as she left. At the rear of Superway she got into the car and started the engine. She drove around the town, teaching herself things Sean hadn't been able to teach her on the airfield. How to start on a hill, for instance, and how to stop in a hurry. He would have been cross because she hadn't got a licence or insurance, but that didn't matter because she wasn't going to tell him. After returning the car, she had to wait nearly an hour for the bus to get her back and then there was a mile-long walk from the bus stop in the rain. The days that followed her discovery of Bruno's body remained very fresh in her mind. They were dark days, there was no electricity and they lit log fires to keep themselves warm. Because Eve did almost nothing, sat staring at the wall or hid herself in bed, Lira did her best to clear up the front garden, moving all but the biggest and heaviest branches. She went up to Shrove every day on her own, fetching back useful things from the kitchens, firelighters and nightlights, stone hot-water bottles, tinned food, coffee and sugar. It was stealing, she now supposed, though she hadn't thought of that at the time. One afternoon she went up to watch television. She hadn't associated the television with the electricity supply but she did when she switched it on and nothing happened. It occurred to her to try the phone, though she had never used a phone, but that too seemed dead and stayed silent no matter how many of the buttons she pressed. She and Eve had no idea of what might be happening in the outside world. That, she now understood, was what Eve had always wanted, to be isolated, to be cut off from all that lay beyond Shrove. But she had hardly wanted it to this extent. Lira suddenly thought of the radio in Bruno's car. That didn't work off the main electricity, somehow it worked off the car itself, perhaps by some means from the engine. Bruno's radio would tell them what the hurricane had done, if the whole world was devastated, if the electricity had gone for good, if all the phones had been destroyed. But it was no good thinking of that. She wouldn't know how to start the engine or turn the radio on and, even if she could find out, the car was locked away in the stable and the key hidden somewhere. The next day it no longer mattered, for the electricity men came to mend the lines. Their van went past the gatehouse, bumping over broken twigs and dead leaves. Later, when she went out, she came upon them up on the high poles, restringing cables, and one of them, thinking perhaps that she came from Shrove itself, called out to her that her TV antenna was broken. The storm had torn it from the roof and it was hanging over one of the chimneys. Lira didn't know what he meant. She had never heard of a TV antenna. To her the complicated grid thing that looked like one of the shelves from their oven was just something you saw on roofs, probably a kind of weather vane. After the men had gone and the lights and heating came on again, she went up to Shrove to watch television. This time it came on but not properly. The picture ran about all over the place, it rolled over as if someone were turning a handle inside it, lines formed, or the screen looked like a piece of coarsely woven grey material. You couldn't see the people's faces clearly and their voices sounded as if they all had colds. It was a long time before Lira made the connection between the failure of the television and the broken oven shelf on the roof. She thought it had simply gone wrong. It was old and it had gone wrong. She felt helpless, knowing there was nothing she could do without telling Eve. Her viewing afternoons were over. Jonathan never watched television, this set had been his grandfather's and he certainly wouldn't get a new one or have the antenna mended. She walked sadly back to the gatehouse. Watching Eve, who hardly spoke, who went through the motions of getting their supper while her thoughts were far away, Lira decided that her mother had no more cause for grief than she had, who had lost just as much, who had lost her only friend. She had grown up a lot in the weeks that followed the hurricane. It was as if she aged three or four years. She began to know all sorts of things, she was sure, that people don't usually know at eleven. For instance, how to be alone with a woman nearly mad with misery and grief, while feeling--yes, she'd felt it even then--that somehow it was wrong to care so much about a thing, a place, a piece of land, a house. If she cared in the same way about the television set, she was only a child while Eve was grown up. It only made her pity her mother the more. She had to look after her, be kind, not trouble her, encourage her in the only thing that distracted her, giving lessons, imparting knowledge. Lira sometimes worked at her textbooks from early morning until late in the evening just to keep Eve's mind off the destruction and the mess out there. The other thing that helped this fast growing up was her anxiety over Bruno's body. Eve had buried it in the first place because she wanted it hidden, because if it was found she might be in serious trouble. Lira had some inkling of the kind of trouble from reading the Victorian novelists. Oliver Twist was her handbook and so was The Woman in White. Did they still hang murderers? She couldn't ask Eve. And what did hanging actually mean? What bit of you was hung up? She knew a lot more about beheading. From reading about the French Revolution and Mary Queen of Scots and the wives of Henry VIII, she knew quite a lot about chopping off heads. Would they hang Eve? She was really frightened when she thought of that, she was a child again, more like five than eleven, afraid of bad men coming and taking her mummy away. Like Eve and the spoiled woods, she wanted to hide herself and pretend it wasn't real. Besides, if she asked Eve about hanging it might make her think she had something more to worry about. Lira didn't ask. She and Eve worked at English literature and history and Latin from morning till night. Until the day came when Eve didn't get up at all. She lay in bed with her face turned to the wall. Lira went out for the first time for days. It was the last day of October, the thirty-first, Halloween, a dry grey breezy morning. The ruined wood looked different because all the leaves had died. They hadn't turned brown like the leaves on the remaining living trees, but still green, had dried up and curled and shrivelled. As she pushed her way through the wreckage the dead leaves crackled. From the depths a pheasant gave its rattling cry and above her in the single standing tree she heard doves cooing. The birds had come back. Her heart was in her mouth (as she had read) or perhaps she was only starting to feel sick again as she came to the clearing where the flat, smooth stump stood. But there was no fear of being sick this time or of smelling the smell of maggoty bone, for the bundle had gone. She had a moment of absolute panic, of wanting to run and not knowing where to run to. Someone had come and found Bruno and taken him away. Then she saw what had happened. The body in the sack was still there, was somewhere down there, inside there. The leaning cherry tree had fallen and hidden it. The cherry tree she had clasped in her hands to test how stable it was had not been stable at all, had fallen next time the wind blew, and its broad solid trunk dropped on top of the bundle, driving it back into its grave. Lira examined the place carefully. There wasn't a sign of that bundle unless you knew what to look for, unless you detected the corner of a sack protruding from where the lowest branch grew out of the cherry trunk. She tried pushing it under but it wouldn't go, so she dragged across branches and fetched armfuls of twigs, piling them up to conceal what remained of Bruno. No one could find it now until men came to clear the wood. She hadn't thought of that at the time, she had simply been relieved, had believed it hidden forever, but no more than a few days after this a lot of workmen came in a lorry with chainsaws and axes. Jonathan came too. The men began by clearing the gatehouse garden and then they started work on the fallen and damaged trees in Shrove park. That worried Lira a lot. She was sure they would move into the wood and begin shifting the logs and broken trees. For a whole day she worried about it until Jonathan--who sat for hours in the cottage with Eve, the two of them sighing and shaking their heads over what the hurricane had done remarked in passing that the "little" wood was to be the last place to be cleared. It might be two years before they began to clear the "little" wood. Eve got up for Jonathan and pulled herself together. She washed her hair and braided it on the back of her head, she put on her tight black top and her blue and purple skirt and smiled and made herself beautiful for Jonathan. He came and he did what Lira hadn't seen him do for years, put his arms around Eve and kissed her. When Eve sent her away and said to write her history essay upstairs--she called it her "homework" as if all her lessons weren't done at home Lira listened outside the door. She heard Eve tell Jonathan it was half-term. Perhaps it was. In that case what she said wasn't really untrue. Of course, that depended on what you meant by a lie. It was a lie if by lying you meant intending to deceive. Eve certainly intended to deceive Jonathan into thinking Lira went to school. They talked for a long time about the hurricane damage. Both knew a lot of statistics about this being the first hurricane in England for so many hundred years and about so many million trees being destroyed. They talked about the Great Storm of 1703. It was all rather boring. After she'd heard the bit about delaying till last the clearing of the wood where Bruno's body lay, Lira decided to go upstairs and start writing about the rise of napoleon Bonaparte. At that moment Jonathan changed the subject and told Eve quite abruptly that Victoria had left him for a lover and the two of them were living in Caracas. There was no hope of a reconciliation, this was what the court called "irretrievable breakdown." Just as Eve began to say something Lira thought might be interesting there came a great thudding at the front door. Eve said in a theatrical way, "What fresh hell is this?" and then explained with a laugh that someone called Dorothy Parker had said it first. The person at the door was only one of the workmen looking for Jonathan to ask about some tree or other, whether to chop it down or leave it as it was, a torn-in-half tree. Lira went upstairs and, not being sure whether Caracas was the capital of Venezuela or Ecuador, looked it up in her atlas. Jonathan stayed for less than a week. Just one night Lira was almost sure he'd spent in Eve's bedroom. It was a feeling she had, no more, for she hadn't heard them go to bed, had slept soundly all night, and when she came down in the morning there was no sign of him. But she was older, she was beginning to be very aware of things like that. In January she was twelve. next time Lira went to Mrs. Spurdell's it was for one of the afternoon stints, so there was time to put up her hair the way Eve had for special occasions, in a thick braid on the back of her head. It made her look several years older, she decided. She took with her the books she had borrowed. Mr. Spurdell seldom got home before she left but he did that day, and he had been in no more than ten minutes when a woman arrived in a red car. Cleaning the bedroom windows, Lira saw her come up the path toward the front door. She was tall and good-looking in a masculine way, with dark hair tied back at the nape of her neck. Her trouser suit was dark grey with pinstripes and her shirt was red silk. But the most attractive thing about her was her warm and intelligent expression that made her look incapable of saying an unpleasant or stupid thing. Lira waited for the doorbell to ring. Instead she heard the front door open. She must have a key of her own, she thought, and guessed who this was. Jane, who wrote in her books that they had been stolen from her. But she had been much younger then, of course. Jane, the daughter who had something to do with education. now she could see a resemblance to the photograph. How could a poor shrivelled-up little man like Mr. Spurdell and a fat white-haired creature like his wife have a daughter as nice to look at as this? It was a great mystery. She finished her windows and went downstairs. No one bothered to introduce her, she wasn't surprised about that. Mr. and Mrs. Spurdell just went on talking as if she wasn't there, as if she were a robot cleverly programmed to sweep floors and dust furniture. Lira said to Mrs. Spurdell that she had finished. Was there anything more she wanted her to do? Mrs. Spurdell said no, there wasn't, and gave her a look as from a feudal lady to a serf, so Lira went into the kitchen and sat at the table, waiting to get her money. After a moment or two Mr. Spurdell appeared. He saw the books she had brought back on the kitchen table and began to interrogate her about their contents. Who was Miss Gradgrind? What did Dickens mean by Mrs. Sparsit's Coriolanian nose? What did Mr. Boffin collect? Who was Silas Wegg? Lira was surprised but not disconcerted. She had had plenty of this from Eve and was answering his questions with the enthusiasm of the scholar who thoroughly knows her subject, when the good-looking education woman came into the kitchen. She raised her eyebrows and gave Lira a wink. "Come offit, Dad, what d'you think you're doing, putting her through an examination? You're lucky she's too polite to tell you where you can put your questions." She held out her hand to Lira and said, "Jane Spurdell. You must excuse my father. He never really leaves school." "That's all right," she said and, thinking quickly, gave Sean's name. The elder Spurdells had never asked her surname. "Lira Holford." Mr. Spurdell wasn't at all put out. "This young lady is a dark horse, Jane. I caught her reading my Dickens. I suspect she is on sabbatical, or else she is in our house cleaning for purposes of research. What can they be, I ask myself. Shall we set out to discover her secret?" "Speak for yourself, Dad,"Jane Spurdell said, "and leave me out of it. Her secret, if she has one, is her own affair." She smiled at Lira in a very friendly way. "I say, I do like the way you've done your hair. Is it very difficult?" Lira was explaining that while it wasn't very difficult to do it took a long time, you had to allow yourself half an hour, when Mrs. Spurdell arrived with her purse in her left hand and a handful of loose change in the other. Lira could tell she didn't at all like finding her conversing on equal terms with her daughter. "Perhaps you should have been a hairdresser," she said unpleasantly. "When you've finished the demonstration, I'd like to get through the business of your pay." Jane Spurdell looked ashamed of her mother, as well she might, Lira thought, and even more embarrassed when she asked for a loan of two pound coins to bring the total up to twelve. Mr. Spurdell had gone upstairs but as she was going he appeared in the hall with paperbacks of Little Dorrit and Vanity Fair. Lira said nothing about having already read Vanity Fair. She was watching, with barely suppressed laughter, Mrs. Spurdell's face as Jane said good-bye and it had been nice to meet her. In the car, going home, she thought of telling Sean about Jane, how nice-looking she was and how friendly. But she didn't tell him. Without quite knowing why, she sensed he wouldn't like it. He had hated school, alternatively called the teachers power mad and a bunch of snobs. He would think being an educationalist a job for a woman only if she couldn't get a man. Instead, because he was curious to know, she spoke about the year at Shrove that followed the hurricane. It was strange how much he loved stories. How would he manage if he ever got a girlfriend who couldn't tell him stories? But, of course, he never would get another girlfriend, for they were to be together forever and ever. "My TV was broken in the storm--well, I thought of it as mine-and I knew I'd never get another. I did lessons all the time instead and gradually Eve got better. It was a lovely summer that year, that was the start of all the lovely summers, the best we'd ever had." "The greenhouse effect," said Sean. She was surprised he knew and then angry with herself for being surprised. "Well, maybe," she said. "I wouldn't know. Eve said they had summers like that at the beginning of the century, before the First World War." "How did she know? She wasn't old enough to know." Lira shrugged, the way Eve did. "The milkman said, hot enough for you? He said it every day, he must have picked it up somewhere. The heat didn't stop the men. They worked hard at Shrove, clearing up all the mess, and it didn't look so bad. They'd even planted some new trees in the park and down by the river. The trees did very well because it was like wetlands down there. Even Eve said things weren't as bad as she'd feared and Mr. Frost said every cloud has a silver lining and now with them big old trees gone you could see views you'd never seen before. I think that was the longest sentence I ever heard him speak. "Jonathan came down to Shrove a lot that year. It was funny really, he never seemed to notice that I was home all the time. I mean, through May and June and July, when everyone else of my age was at school. And in the same sort of way he didn't seem to notice that Mrs. Cooper never came to clean while he was staying at Shrove, though once he was there for nearly two weeks. I suppose he'd had people waiting on him all his life, he took it for granted things got done, cleaning and meals got ready, and his clothes washed. He ate his meals with us, or Eve took them up to him at Shrove. She collected his washing too and washed and ironed it and took it back to him. "I never heard him say thank-you or even mention it, though perhaps he did when I wasn't there. There were nights I think she spent at Shrove with him, then and at lots of times in the future. If she did, she left the gatehouse after I was asleep and came back very early in the morning. Things were back where they had been before he married Victoria, or she thought they were. She hoped they were. "They talked for hours about his marriage. They forgot I was there, I didn't have to listen outside the door. She was always asking him about Victoria and the divorce, but I never heard him say a word about Bruno. And all the time Bruno's car was up in his stables and Bruno's dead body was lying in his wood. Rotting in his wood and the worms eating him." "Lira," said Sean warningly. "Do you mind?" "Sorry. You are squeamish. I don't think Jonathan was interested, I don't think he cared. He was only interested "Jonathan Tobias, and people were important to him only as being useful to Jonathan Tobias. Maybe we're all like that. Are we?" "I'd put you first, I know that." "Would you? That's nice. I kept remembering the story she'd told me about old Mr. Tobias and my grandmother and how Eve'd thought then that she and Jonathan were going to get married. It didn't matter about her mother not getting Shrove because she and Jonathan were going to be married. She'd thought like that when I was little and he came down for those three weeks and it was all happening again. "She thought he'd marry her when he got his divorce. She'd been trying to get him for seventeen years."

WHEn you're telling someone a serial story you don't say that now you've come to a bit where nothing much happened. It makes your listener not care much about the outcome. Somehow Lira knew this and stopped herself saying it to Sean. Yet, when she was twelve and thirteen, nothing much had happened. Eve had made her work ferociously hard at English and history and languages. She had taught her to sew and to knit and unravelled old sweaters for Lira to knit up again. They had listened to music together, but there had been no drawing or painting, as this perhaps was a reminder of Bruno. Lira missed the television and felt sad on the day the council rubbish collectors came and she saw the old set thrown into the back of the truck. But nothing of great moment happened. No one came to clear the wood. The British Rail workmen did take up the rails and sleepers where the line had been, but they didn't fill in or block up the tunnel, and the tunnel mouth now yawned like the opening of a cave. Bruno's car remained locked up in the stable. Once every five or six weeks Lira went to make sure that it was still there. Occasionally, she checked Eve's jewel case to see if the gold ring was still there. It was, it always was. And when Eve wasn't wearing earrings, there were three pairs in the case. Jonathan came and went. If he talked about Victoria it was only to complain about the amount of money she would expect from him when the divorce went through. Money and property. She would want the Ullswater house and no doubt would get it. He sent a postcard from Zimbabwe and that autumn brought two people with him to Shrove that she had never seen before, a man called David Cosby and his wife, Frances. They came down for the shooting. "David is Jonathan's cousin," said Eve. Lira knew about cousins, she had read about them in Victorian novels. "He can't be his cousin," she objected. "not if Caroline didn't have brothers or sisters and his father didn't." "David is his second cousin. He is old Mr. Tobias's nephew's son. He loves Shrove, he loves it nearly as much as I do, I know he wishes it was his." "If he loves it so much why hasn't he been before?" "He's been living in Africa for twelve years but now he's come home for good." David Cosby's face was as dark and shiny a brown as the panelling in the library at Shrove while his wife's was wrinkled and yellow. The result of the suns of Africa, thought Lira, who had just read King Solomons Mines. They stayed two weeks. This time Eve seemed to be in a rather different position. Lira noticed it without quite being able to say how it was different. Perhaps it was that the three of them at Shrove, unlike Victoria and her friends, didn't treat Eve in any way like a servant. She went up there for dinner three times--Jonathan had caterers to come in and cook the partridges they shot--and left the washing up for Mrs. Cooper to do in the morning. The funny thing was, of course, that there was no Mrs. Cooper, so Eve had to run up there while they were all out with the guns or in their car and play her pretending-to-be-thecleaner game. It was a strange thing to do and it made Lira uneasy. Eve became altogether rather strange in those two uneventful years. Or perhaps she had always been strange and when she was a child Lira hadn't noticed. She had just been Mother. now, although Lira still knew very few people, she knew more than she ever had before. She could make comparisons. She could begin to question their way of life at the gatehouse, particularly her own. Why did Eve never want to know anyone or go anywhere? Did other people have such a passionate attachment to a place as she had to Shrove? What was the purpose of doing such a lot of lessons, doing them all the time, on Saturdays and Sundays as well, Eve teaching and she learning for hours on end day in and day out? Why? Eve had stopped going into town. She had found a grocer who would deliver once a week, and what he didn't bring the milkman would. When she did go, a rare once every two or three months, it was to buy books for Lira to learn from, and for another, stranger, reason, to take money out of the bank. now Jonathan's checks were sent to the bank by post and the money later drawn out to be hidden at home. One day, after Eve had come back from town, having paid her only visit there of the entire winter, Lira saw her go into the little castle, carrying a small brown paper parcel. Eve, as far as she knew, had never possessed a handbag. Lira only knew handbags existed because she had seen Victoria and Claire and Frances Cosby carrying them. She saw Eve go into the little castle with the package and come out after a minute or two without it. Later on, choosing a time when Eve was up at Shrove being Mrs. Cooper, Lira investigated the little castle. It appeared quite empty. There was nothing now to show it had ever been occupied, either by dog or man. She didn't take long to find the loose brick and thence the iron box and the money. Dozens of notes filled the box, five-, ten-, twenty-, and even fifty-pound notes. She didn't try to count them, she could see there were hundreds of pounds. Besides, she had very little idea of what money was worth. She could have said what five pounds would buy in the time of Anthony Trollope but not what it would buy today, though she suspected a lot less. Eve had never hinted at the amount of money Jonathan gave her. All that Lira knew was that it came in checks. She sent these checks to the bank, brought back the money and hid it here in the wall. Wasn't that the purpose of a bank, to look after your money? Lira didn't really know. Perhaps everyone behaved like this. Perhaps no one really trusted banks. But Lira found herself often watching her mother after that, watching her behaviour, anxious to see what she would do next. She watched her as once she had listened at doors. There was no listening anymore because Eve never talked to anyone but Lira and occasionally Jonathan on his rare appearances. Sometimes she tried to catch Eve unawares, watch her when she didn't know she was being watched. She would go to bed early, then creep downstairs to watch Eve unobserved from the stairs. But she never saw her do anything except ordinary expected things, reading and listening to music or marking one of Lira's essays or test papers. She was fourteen before she began asking herself, what will become of me when I grow up? Shall I live here with Eve forever? When she has taught me all the English there is to learn and all the history and French and Latin, what will we do then? What shall I do with all of it? "Be me," Eve had said, "me as I might have been if I stayed here, happy and innocent and good." Did she want to be Eve? Did she want to be those things? That spring, while Jonathan was staying at Shrove on his own, the woodsmen came back to clear the "little" wood. "Bruno had been dead for nearly three years. I wanted to know how long it took before a body turned into a skeleton but I didn't know how to find out. There weren't any medical books at Shrove or any on forensics. You see, I thought that if he was bones by now, they might not notice so much if they dug him up. I was hoping the sack would have rotted and Bruno just be well, scattered bones." "It beats me," said Sean, "the way you can talk about it. A lovely young girl like you, it's weird. You're always the same, like talking about death and stuffthat makes other people throw up, you talk about them like they're normal." She smiled at him. "I suppose it is normal for me. Dead bodies don't upset me. I know I was sick when Bruno's hair came off in my hand but that wasn't me, it was a sort of reflex. I expect even doctors do that when they first start." "You could have been a doctor, d'you know that?" "I still could," said Lira. "But that's not the point. Maybe other people are taught as children to flinch from death and blood and all that, I mean they're conditioned, but I never was. You've got to remember Eve taught me everything she knew about academic things, but there must be thousands of things children know who lead an ordinary life and go to school that I never heard of. There can't," she said rather proudly, "be many people who've read the whole of Virgil's Aeneid in the original and seen two people murdered by the time they're sixteen." He recoiled a little. The look on his face made her smile again. "Don't worry about it, Sean. It can't be changed, that's the way it is. I'm different from other girls and in some ways I expect I always will be." "You've got me now," he said. It was something he liked saying and when he said it he always took hold of her hand. "Yes, I've got you now. Anyway, as I was tellins J you the men went up to start working in the wood and I was very anxious. I don't know if Eve was. She was always out and about with Jonathan when she wasn't teaching me. But as it turned out they never found anything. Jonathan had given them instructions to leave some of the logs lying and some dead trees to provide habitats for the wildlife. The cherry log was one they left. It was just chance or luck, whatever you like to call it." "Luck?" said Sean. "Luck for Eve, wasn't it? I think she'd been waiting to see what happened. As soon as she knew all was well up there, she got Jonathan to recharge the battery on Bruno's car." "She did what?" There hadn't been any real risk. Jonathan hadn't suspected Bruno was dead. In his eyes, Bruno was just a young healthy man who had been living with Eve, who got tired of her or of whom she got tired, and who moved away. True, he had left his car behind, but Eve had furnished Jonathan with all sorts of reasons for that, it had been his mother's, it was old, where he would be living he had nowhere to park a car. Jonathan was no doubt pleased to be told the car was going at last, Bruno was coming for it, the Shrove stable would be vacated. Recharging the battery on jump leads from his own car engine was a small price to pay for that. Lira didn't know if this was how it was, she told Sean, but it seemed a fair guess. Eve didn't say a word to Lira about Bruno. It was Lira who overheard her telling Jonathan that Bruno would come for the car tomorrow, the day incidentally that Jonathan himself was going back to London. "I wondered what she'd do, how she was going to handle it. I even pretended to go out for a long walk in the afternoon to give her a chance to move the car. She did move it and she went offin it, but only to town. She came back an hour later with the boot full of groceries and left the car parked outside the cottage." "What did she say when you asked when Bruno was coming?" "I never did ask," said Lira. "She expected me to ask, but I didn't. I knew where Bruno was. I knew he couldn't be coming. I knew his body was up in the wood under the leaves I'd piled around it. We were absolutely silent with each other about it. There was Bruno's car and she was using it--we were using it, she drove me to the village once and into town, I had a rash and had to see the doctor--but she never mentioned Bruno and neither did I. Then one day the car wasn't there anymore." "What d'you mean?" "She got rid of it. I don't know how or where. But she must have done. She must have driven it somewhere in the night. I've no idea what happened to it, I don't know about things like that, I don't know how you'd get rid of a car." "Just leave it parked somewhere, I reckon. Hopefully someone'd nick it." Sean considered. "If the police got it in the end they'd try to find the owner and they could, that'd be easy, they'd do it in seconds on the computer." Lira said thoughtfully, "The owner was dead. I don't mean Bruno, I mean his mother. It was still in her name, he said so." "I don't reckon they'd go to the trouble of tracing who the car'd been passed on to and if they tried they wouldn't find him, would they? And they wouldn't search either, not for a man of his age. They'd reason he'd gone off abroad somewhere. Your mum was clever." "Oh, yes, she was. If they searched for him they never came near us. We never saw a policeman since that one came about Hugh with the beard. When Mr. Frost died it was an ambulance that came, not the police." Mrs. Spurdell greeted Lira with the news that her daughter Jane had just been appointed Senior Adviser for Secondary Education to the County Council. She was bursting with pride. Since Lira had very little idea what this appointment signified she could only smile and nod. Mrs. Spurdell said it was a team leadership role and payment was on the Soulbury Scale, information that served only to confuse Lira further. Though she had said nothing about an errand of mercy two days before and Mrs. Spurdell spoke constantly of her advance plans-she announced that she was on her way out to visit a friend in the hospital. Lira guessed the visit was taking place only because there was exciting news to impart and wondered just how ill the friend was when she saw her employer take some weary-looking grapes from the refrigerator as a gift and transfer them to a clean plastic bag. As soon as Mrs. Spurdell had gone, Lira had a bath. Then she went into Mr. Spurdell's study to see if he had any new books and spent a happy half hour reading a short story by John Mortimer. It was about courts and barristers and judges and opened to her a whole unknown new world. It also made her think about Eve and wonder when there would be anything in the papers about her. How long must it be before she came to trial? To save buying one, she always went quickly through Mr. Spurdell's newspaper. As usual, there was nothing. Time to get down to the cleaning, but before she started she looked up Jane Spurdell in the telephone directory. It was the first time she had ever looked up anyone in a phone book but it wasn't hard to do. She was listed twice, not as "Miss" but as Dr. J. A. Spurdell. Lira would never forget the address. By a curious coincidence that might be a good omen of something, the number was the year of her birth and the street name startlingly familiar, Shrove Road. She'd never forget it but why should she want it? Perhaps it was only that she'd liked her, she liked her better than any woman she'd ever known except Eve. Of course that wasn't difficult, seeing that the other women she'd known were Heather and Victoria and Frances Cosby and Mrs. Spurdell. When you liked people, Lira decided, you wanted to know everything you could about them. Mrs. Spurdell kept her waiting while she rummaged about in one handbag after another for fifty pee. This made her late and Sean was already there, out on the pavement, when she got to Superway. He had news for her, he was quite excited, but insisted on saving it up until they were in the car on the way home. "They want me to go on a training course." "Who's they?" "Superway. It's a management training course. They're pleased with me, the way I do my work and the way I always get in on time and all that. It's in Scotland, it's a six-month course, and hopefully at the end of it if I'm any good I'd go on to what they call Phase Two." Lira didn't know what to say. She didn't really understand, so she listened. "I've never said any of this to you, love. I've never talked about myself much. But I've always reckoned to not being much, if you know what I mean--well, rubbish, to be perfectly honest with you. I was useless at school and I left the day after I was sixteen. I'd been skiving offfor months before that. No one ever suggested CSEs to me, I mean it'd have been a laugh. I never even saw myself doing nothing but unskilled labouring work, and that's what I did do. Then Mum got her new fella and they didn't want me, so I moved out. Well, I reckon I've told you all that. I got the car and the van and I took to the road and if I thought about it at all I reckoned I'd be living from one odd job to another until the time come to draw my pension. And now this has come up. It's sort of shook me. It's given me something to think about, I can tell you." She was moved by him because she hadn't known he could be so articulate. He was so beautiful. It would mean something to her if he could speak and think as handsomely as he looked. "What will you be?" she said slowly. "I don't know about will." I said it's given me something to think about. As for what I'd well, hopefully I'd be a manager one day. I'd sort of have my own store, maybe one of them big new ones on an estate." "We went to one of those, Eve and Bruno and me." He made a movement as if to brush this aside impatiently. "Yes, you said. I'd have a lot to learn. I'd be an assistant manager first. It'd take awhile. But I'm young, love, and I'm keen." She wouldn't mind going to Scotland. now she had begun, she liked travelling about and imagined moving from place to place during the next few years. "Are you going to, then?" "I told them I'd like to think about it. I said to give me a couple of days." i The caravan was cold and damp. It usually was these eve. rungs when they got home. Lira lit the burners on the oven, the oven itself, opening the door, and started the oil heater. Very soon the condensation began, the water running down the windows and lying in pools. She didn't much mind, as she said to Sean, you didn't have to look at it. So long as she had fish and chips or take away, books to read, and a warm bed with Sean to make love with, she didn't care much. now that she had television and knew she could have it whenever she wanted, she seldom watched it. There was something to be said for being brought up without luxury, without many material possessions. Unlike Eve, she had never wanted Shrove or thought it might be hers. One gloomy evening rather like this one when Jonathan was in a gloomy mood, she heard him tell her mother he had made his will and was leaving Shrove to David Cosby. "It should remain in our family," he said like a character in a Victorian novel. "He's ten years older than you," said Eve. "His son can have it, then. They're all fond of the place. There's one thing, Victoria won't want it, she won't ask for this place in settlement, she hates it." Aged fourteen, taller than Eve, looking like a young woman, Lira was developing a woman's understanding. She had begun to ask herself how it could be that Jonathan, who had known Eve since he was a boy, who had been close to her, her lover off and on (and now very probably on again), could have so little comprehension of how she felt about Shrove. He could talk with casual indifference about it to Eve, who loved it better than any person, better, perhaps, Lira sometimes thought, than her own child. He could talk about it to her as if it were just a piece of property, a parcel of land, even a nuisance. And he could talk about leaving it to a cousin whom, until this year, he hadn't seen for twelve years, without its apparently crossing his mind that he might leave it to Eve, as his grandfather had promised to leave it to Eve's mother. Lira suspected that he too didn't like Shrove much. It was October now and this was only the second time he'd been down this year. His real life was elsewhere, doing things she and Eve knew nothing about. And he knew nothing about what they did. He never asked. It was as if Shrove was something to be packed up in a box when he was away from it and she and Eve puppets to be packed up with it. next day he was back again at the gatehouse telling Eve his divorce decree had at last been made absolute and Victoria had "taken him to the cleaners." He was free now. Lira heard him ask Eve if she ever heard from Bruno these days. She said she hadn't and she never would, that was all over and she was free as air. She was as free as he was. Lira was listening outside the door and Eve and Jonathan were sitting in there in the dusk, the lamps unlit. She heard her mother say that about being free and then she heard the silence. next morning Jonathan went off to London and thence to France, where his mother was dying. A postcard with a picture of a French cathedral on it came after about a week to say that Caroline Ellison was dead. Smiling rather unpleasantly, Eve said she supposed he thought a churchy card was suitable for announcing a death while one with mountains or trees on it wouldn't be. Jonathan didn't sound griefstricken, though it was hard to tell from a postcard. Eve was sure he would come back now, but he didn't and six months later they got a card from him in Penang. Before that, before the winter started, Lira found Mr. Frost lying dead on the grass beside his tractor. No one knew how old he was. Eve said very old because his daughter had been only a few years younger than her own mother, who would be seventy if she had lived. For the past few years he had done nothing beyond sitting on the tractor and driving it around the lawns. It was Eve who pulled out the weeds and put the mowings on the compost heap. It was in early november, an exceptionally dry, sunny november, when Lira found him. He had been giving the grass its last cut before the winter. She was walking up from the river, taking the short cut across the Shrove garden. The sound of the mower had stopped ten minutes before and she thought he must have finished for the day. But the tractor was still there, in the middle of the sunny lawn, yellow leaves of lime and chestnut falling onto the grass, onto the tractor's black leather seat and scarlet bodywork, and onto the body of the old man lying beside it. At first she didn't know he was dead. She was immensely curious. Her hand on his forehead encountered the coldness of marble. She could see that his veiny blue eyes were dead, they were quite lightless, and there was no breath from his slack mouth or movement of his chest. He no longer looked like a person but rather like one of the statues on the terrace, a prone figure in pale, cold stone. The strange thought came to her that Eve would bury him. At once, immediately, she knew this was nonsense but she had thought it. She ran to the cottage and Eve came back with her and they went into Shrove House and phoned for an ambulance. They couldn't think what else to do even though they knew he was dead. Mr. Frost had died of old age. His heart had broken--it had literally broken--with age. And who, now, was to do the Shrove garden? No one, in the depths of winter. There was nothing to do when the snow came and the frost set hard. On the day Lira became fifteen, the snow fell so thickly and for so long they had to dig their way out of the front door. But snow seldom lasts for long in England. In February, where it had lain were clumps of snowdrops, and by March the grass was starting to grow, there were catkins on the hazels, and the blackthorn was in bloom. Lira had her lessons in the morning and after lunch Eve went out on the tractor to cut the Shrove grass. The wide stretches of lawn were easy to mow. It wasn't much more than a matter of sitting on the seat and steering, but the edges had to be cut as well and the awkward bits between the new trees. Eve was on her knees pulling out the weeds after sunset, almost until dark. Lira had never asked her why. She stopped asking questions of her mother after Bruno disappeared. It wasn't a conscious decision on her part not to ask but as if a voice inside her bade her be silent. Asking was dangerous, asking would only do damage, provoke lying, cause embarrassment. Don't ask. So she had never asked, why go on pretending to Jonathan that Mrs. Cooper exists? What harm can it do to you or me if a woman comes here to clean? She had never asked, what did you do with Bruno's car? And now she didn't ask, why are you doing this work in the garden? Why don't you find a successor to Mr. Frost? not only was she silent about these things, she also supported Eve in her subterfuges. It seemed natural to do so, it seemed right. For a long time now, when the rare people she saw asked her about school, how she was getting on, if she was on holiday, she had been saying, all right and yes, she was. Jonathan had once asked her, as he was leaving, if Mrs. Cooper was expected next day and Lira had said yes, knowing it would be Eve herself who would clear up at Shrove. She even told Eve he'd asked her. Wasn't she the crocodile bird who warned its host of impending danger? It was now Eve who performed the tasks that had once been Mr. Frost's. Lira wondered if Jonathan even knew Mr. Frost was dead. Perhaps Eve herself simply kept the checks for his pay that Jonathan sent her. She now had the entire care of Shrove House, its gardens and its grounds in her hands, with Lira helping. Lira hated gardening but she couldn't be there and watch Eve do it all on her own, so she trimmed the edges with the long shears and pushed the little hand mower about, so bored she could have screamed. Then, around midsummer, Eve found a man to do it. It was a very hot summer, the hottest of Lira's life except the one when she was a six-month-old baby. The grass stopped growing and the sun burned it brown, so there was watering to do instead of mowing. Sometimes Eve was so tired with carrying watering cans and pulling the hosepipe about that she fell asleep on their sofa and Lira had to get the supper. The weeds still grew too. nothing stopped the nettles growing and the burdock. Eve said, "I have to keep it going. I have to look after the young trees. It's so beautiful, I can't let it get in a mess. There's not a lovelier place in England. I can't bear to think of it all going to ruin." Her hands were stained and cracked, the fingers ingrained with dirt, the nails broken. The sun had burned her face dark brown but her nose was peeling. Lira saw threads of grey in her dark hair, which had nothing to do with the sun but perhaps something to do with her hard life. now that Lira was older she was beginning to see that Eve had made her life hard of her own volition, had made all kinds of difficulties for herself where there might have been ease and pleasantness. But she never asked why. She did ask, why him? when the old man appeared at the gate saying he'd heard in the village they might be wanting someone to help out at Shrove. From whom had he heard? The postman perhaps, the milkman. Eve was to tell Jonathan he'd heard from Mrs. Cooper. He wasn't quite as old as Mr. Frost, his hair wasn't even grey, but his face was very lined and withered. A hump grew out of his back, which made Lira shrink a little when she saw it. She had always been accustomed to physical beauty or at least conformity. The old man's back was curved as if his spine had been bent into a bow the way you could bend a willow twig. He had strong arms and very large hands. Eve said, yes, he could come twice a week. She sounded reluctant, grudging, and Lira understood that she had wanted to keep Shrove all to herself. It wasn't just a matter of not having people who might gossip or tell tales about the place, or it wasn't that anymore. She wanted exclusive possession of Shrove. If she was going to take Gib on--that was the only name they knew him by--it was because she was worn out, she had hurt her back and had to rest, she could no longer cope alone. "But why him?" said Lira. "He lives alone, he's not very bright, he won't try to take over. He can't talk much, didn't you notice?" Gib had an impediment in his speech that made him hard to understand. He liked riding the mower, he worked hard, and if he couldn't tell a cultivated plant from a weed, he did his best, trimming the edges and sometimes proudly leaving in the midst of smoothly hoed earth a fine specimen of dandelion Eve said he had lovingly nourished up. She went around after he had gone, pulling up the weeds he had nurtured. Jonathan came in August, while Gib was still with them, and talked a lot about the holiday he was about to take in British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains. He had no wife now and since his divorce he had brought no other woman to Shrove except his cousin's wife, Frances Cosby. But he didn't ask Eve to go with him to Canada. Once or twice Lira thought he came very near to doing this, but he didn't ask her. Perhaps he remembered the rebuff he had received all those years ago when Lira was little, or else he thought she wouldn't be able to leave Lira and they couldn't take Lira because she, of course, was at school. Would Eve have gone if he'd asked her? Would they somehow have managed about Lira, said she could take time off school? Seeing her mother's sad, almost grim expression after Jonathan had gone, she thought that this time Eve would have said yes. He didn't ask her but he did, at last, have the bathroom done. It was ten years since he had first promised to do it, but when Lira pointed this out Eve only shrugged and said they must be thankful for small mercies. Jonathan had gone to the bathroom to wash his hands, only there was no bathroom, there was just the kitchen sink. Perhaps it wasn't pretence when he said he thought a bathroom had been put in years ago, he was sure of it, he thought Victoria had arranged it. Perhaps he really believed that. Eve only smiled and claimed she had forgotten his promises. But the builders came before he had left Shrove, built an annex onto the back of the gatehouse, and turned it into a bathroom. One of the builders was Matt. They had always wondered what he did, Eve and Lira, and now they knew. He was a bricklayer, like Rainer Beck. The other one was some relation of his, a young man with yellow hair dyed pink at the front. The weather was so hot that Lira lay out in the back garden in the sun after bathing in the river. She had a black swimming costume that had been Eve's. The noise Matt made when he saw her was a whistle on two notes, the meaning of which was lost on Lira, who took no notice of it. She took almost no notice of either of them, for neither was handsome and she already knew that she preferred good-looking people. The whistle was repeated and Eve came out and told her to cover herself up or come indoors. She explained that Matt and his cousin found Lira attractive, now she was growing up, and that was their low and vulgar way of showing it. Lira digested this and pondered it for a long time. She wondered why there wasn't anything low and vulgar about the way Jonathan had made a similar sound when he saw Eve all prepared for him and dressed up in a black-and-scarlet skirt and black jumper from the good-as-new shop in town. But perhaps his laughing afterward and kissing Eve made it all right. Gib was taken ill. The postman who brought Eve the message said he was often ill. He wasn't strong and the jobs he took on never lasted, though he tried, he did his best. By this time it was autumn and the grass at least no longer needed attention. And the rain came at last, day after day of it, until the river rose above its banks and flooded the wetlands, so that the trees stood in water to halfway up their trunks. They were quite alone, Eve and Lira, in those last months of her sixteenth year. Gib didn't come back and there wasn't, any way, much to be done in the garden. The oilman came and filled the tank while Eve and Lira were out walking, so they didn't see him, and the postman took to delivering their few letters before either of them was up. As for the milkman, he disappeared and was replaced by a man with red hair who whistled all the time. He told Eve their milkman had gone into a home because the dairy had found out about his mental age and said he could no longer. work for them. Jonathan was on the other side of the world, in Hawaii, as they knew from a not-at-all churchy card with a picture of a girl surfing on white waves. A card came from Heather on holiday in Cornwall and another one at Christmas with a note in it saying she'd moved to London and this was her new address. Once the spring had come, Eve began to fret about the garden. She seldom went to town anymore, but she had to make the occasional visit. She had to go to buy Lira's jeans, her first pair, that Lira had been nagging her about for ages. When Eve came out of the jeans shop she saw an advertisement in the newsagent's window next door. It said, "Strong man will do indoor and outdoor decorating, clearing sites, general labouring, gardening, and odd jobs." There was a box number, which Eve said meant he came into the shop and collected the replies he'd had. Lira didn't think much more about it because Eve hadn't been able to put a phone number on her reply and had said it would come to nothing, no one wrote letters anymore. But he must have written and his letter come while Lira was still in bed in the morning because Eve announced one day that she thought she'd found a gardener and not, she hoped, a septuagenarian this time. She probably didn't guess how young he was, either. "His name is Sean Holford," she said, "and he's coming for an interview on Tuesday."

SEEInG her morher's picture in the paper was a shock, worse than seeing what the dogs did, much worse than finding Bruno. She was sitting in Mrs. Spurdell's kitchen waiting for her money and enjoying her own clean scented-soap smell. She had managed a bath and was screwing up her courage to ask Mr. Spurdell if she could borrow his Morte drthur, which wasn't a paperback, when he came into the room carrying a newspaper. He didn't say anything, he looked at her and, when his wife appeared, rummaging for change in two handbags, made her look at the paper too. They both stared at Lira. Then Mr. Spurdell said, "Isn't that an almost uncanny resemblance?" Mrs. Spurdell said nothing. She was looking rather cross, the way she always did if Lira appeared to be briefly the focus of attention. Shaking his head as if in incredulity, Mr. Spurdell handed Lira the paper, pointing with one finger at a photograph. Lira's heart began to beat very fast. The picture was of Eve. She stared at it. It showed a much younger Eve and had apparently been taken some years before and as she looked she remembered. Jonathan had taken it. Eve and she had taken the dogs back to Shrove one summer evening and Jonathan had come down the steps and taken a photograph. She should have been in it but she'd been shy and had hidden behind a tree. The day that picture was taken was the Day of the nightingale. How it came to be in a newspaper she had no idea. "You're the spitting image of her, my dear," said Mr. Spurdell. "It struck me as soon as I saw it. Quite amusing, eh? I thought to myself, I'll run downstairs and show this to Lira before she goes. not that I imagine she'll be overjoyed to find she looks like a murderess, eh?" They didn't know then, they hadn't guessed. Lira forced herself to smile as she looked up and met his eyes. "I don't see the likeness myself," Mrs. Spurdell was saying. "That creature, the one in the paper, is quite spectacularly good-looking, criminal or not. If you didn't know you'd take her for a film star." Lira wanted to scream with laughter, though she knew it was hysteria, it hadn't much to do with amusement. She tried to read what the paper said, but the print swam and bobbed about. The headline she could make out, ALLEGED KILLER BURIED MAn S BODY. She must get hold of this paper. Mr. Spurdell was already holding out his hand for it. "I suppose, strictly speaking, we shouldn't call her a murderess or a criminal. She is still on trial, she hasn't been found guilty yet. Can I have my paper, please, my dear?" Even if he thought it odd, she must have that paper. Knowing her voice must sound hoarse, she said, "Could I--do you think I could keep it?" He gave his indulgent humouring laugh, a laugh she sometimes thought, seeking words for it, heavy with patronage and patriarchy. "And how am I to do my crossword puzzle?" The problem was solved by Mrs. Spurdell's snatching the paper out of her hand and thrusting into it--for once in the form of one note and two coins--the twelve pounds for her four hours' work. Lira got up and left without another word, without even a good-bye. She had forgotten all about the Morte drthur. The nearest newsagent had no morning papers left. The next one was closed. On some previous occasion in Aspen Close she had heard Mr. Spurdell talking about the evening paper that used to be on sale but which had ceased to exist some months before. By the time she met Sean she was nearly distraught, pouring it all out to him in an incoherent stream. Sean was always good in a crisis. He liked comforting her, keeping calm, showing his manly strength. He liked her weak and vulnerable. Tomorrow they would buy the newspapers, they would buy all the newspapers. Hadn't Mr. Spurdell said the trial wasn't over? It would have been going on again today. They would watch the television, every news there was. When they got home he made tea for her. He hugged her and said not to worry, she had him, he would do all the worrying for her, leave it to him, and he began kissing her and stroking her. That led of course to making love and they were in bed for an hour, consequently missing the six o'clock news. At nine there was nothing about Eve and nothing at ten. Sean, who had seen hundreds of television programs and videos about murders and police investigations, said this might be because it wasn't a sensational enough case. It wasn't a child or a young girl who had been murdered or something that had attracted a lot of public attention when it happened. "I just wish I knew more about it," said Lira, who was a lot calmer by now. "I wish I knew about the law." "You can't know about everything." "I'd like to be a lawyer. One day I'll be a lawyer." Sean laughed. "Dream on, love. The other day you was going to be a doctor." She was in a fever of anticipation when they drove into town the next morning. It wasn't one of her days in Aspen Close and she would either have to pass a solitary day wandering about the marketplace and spend hard-earned cash on the cinema or else go home on the bus. But she couldn't wait till Sean came home before seeing the papers. They bought three, all so-called quality newspapers, but the story was almost identical in each of them. This time there was no picture of Eve. In the first one, which Lira read feverishly, still sitting in the car, the headline was, GATEHOUSE MURDER PREMEDTATED, SAYS QC. The account was very long, filling nearly half a page. Try as she would, Lira couldn't take in more than the first two paragraphs. "I don't understand it, Sean. I don't know what it means. It says she's been charged with the murder of Trevor Hughes. Who's Trevor Hughes? I've never heard of him." "You better read it all. Read all three of them. Look, love, I've got to go or I'll be late. I wouldn't want to be late, not at this juncture. You can stay here in the car, no one'll see you." She sat in the car in the Superway's underground car park and read the accounts in all the papers. none of them had a word about the murders Lira knew Eve had committed. All the accounts were about this Trevor Hughes, a sales representative, aged thirty-one, who had been missing from home for twelve years. It appeared that he had quarrelled with his wife and, instead of leaving for a holiday with her as they had planned, had gone off on his own. Mrs. Eileen Hughes said she had identified her husband from his watch and his wedding ring, which had his name and hers inside it. A dentist had identified him by his teeth. How did they do that? Lira wondered. If she enquired of Sean he would ask if she wanted to be a dentist as well and tell her to dream on. They had found shotgun pellets buried with the man. Buried in the wood? But surely only Bruno was up there. now they were talking about his man being buried as well. It didn't seem as if Eve had said anything in the court or anyone had said anything on her behalf. But it was going on again today. At the end of the article it said the trial continues. Lira felt bewildered. She wanted desperately to know, she wished there was someone she could ask, but the only person she could think of was Mr. Spurdell. Reading the newspaper accounts, she had been afraid of coming on her own name but she hadn't, her name wasn't mentioned. Would it be mentioned tomorrow? She passed a tedious yet anxious day mooning about the town. The admiring manager was off today, so it wasn't even interesting taking a clandestine bath in the Duke's Head. She bought three paperback books, spending two-thirds of the twenty-four pounds she had earned that week. Sean would be cross. She sensed already that Sean was going to expect her to be pleased if her mother got sent to prison for years and years. How long would it be anyway? At least they'd stopped hanging people. In the afternoon, after having a hamburger and a sundae in McDonald's, she went to the cinema and saw Ho7vardr End. Why had she never read any E. M. Forster? Because he was born too late to be in the Shrove library, she thought rather bitterly. next week she'd buy A Pasage to India, that was by him she was sure, and anything else he'd written. It took considerable strength of will to make herself leave the cinema and not sit there and watch the program all the way through again. Sean was waiting. He was sure the trial would be on TV tonight. They switched on at six and again at nine and ten, but it wasn't on. Lira said, "I've been thinking. I know who Trevor Hughes was. He was the man with the beard. It says here he went missing twelve years ago and that was twelve years ago. I was four. I thought the policeman who came called him Hugh. D'you remember I said Hugh? But it wasn't, it was Trevor Hughes." "The man the dogs went for," said Sean. "The one she shot." "They must have searched the gatehouse and found the ring with the initials and the date inside. But why him?" "It's a mystery," said Sean. "Like you say, why pick him? Why not the others?" "I don't know. I don't know anything. I feel so ignorant." Lira thrust her hands through her hair and looked at him mutinously. "We can't go to the police, there's no one we can ask. It's beyond me, it's driving me mad." When he saw the new books, Sean didn't say a word. She realised that she couldn't always predict how he would react. He was kind, he was good to her. She thought of the men in the books she'd read and the book she was reading now, she remembered Trevor Hughes and Bruno and Jonathan and thought she was lucky to have Sean. Once or twice she repeated it to convince herself, she was lucky to have Sean. Quite a long time had passed after Eve told Jonathan the new gardener's name before Lira met him. She first saw him on the day he started, but didn't let him see her. It was mid-March and cold, she had been out for a long aimless walk and was coming back, her boots sinking into the marshy ground above the river. That winter she had been taking more and more of these walks, she had been growing increasingly frustrated with solitude, with sameness, with never seeing another face but Eve's. Lessons had become repetitive and she sensed that Eve had taught her almost all she knew. All that was left now was to write more essays about Shakespeare, examine more pieces of eighteenth-century prose, translate more de Maupassant, and do more Latin unseens. She had read all the books in the Shrove library she would ever want to read. Television was almost forgotten, what it had been like, why she had enjoyed it. Was the whole of life going to be like this? Sean had asked her later on why she hadn't run away. He hadn't understood the extent of her learning and the depths of her ignorance. At the thought of running away, before she met him, she had felt almost faint with fear. She had never been on a bus or in a train, never bought anything in a shop herself, scarcely been in one, never made a phone call, and most important of all, never had any sort of relationship with a contemporary. So she went for long walks, sometimes to the isolated villages, there to gaze at a village shop or the notice board inside a church porch, to read a bus timetable or stand outside a school and watch the children come out. She was teaching herself about the world Eve had kept from her. Once, anticipating Sean's question, she had even said, I could run away. But the very words, unspoken except in her mind, had terrified her. She saw herself standing in an empty street at night with no idea where to go, how to find food or a place to sleep. She imagined herself not running away but running home, throwing herself pathetically into Eve's arms. But what was going to become of her? She often imagined the future and in the blackest way. She saw herself old, thirty or more, and Eve a really old woman, the two of them going on just the same, everything the same except that the new trees had grown tall with thick trunks and spreading crowns. Would she become the Shrove gardener when Eve was too old to do the work? Or the successor to Mrs. Cooper? She would be sent to town with the shopping basket and list, to cross the bridge and wait for the bus. She saw herself crossing the marketplace, avoiding with fear the jostling teenagers, let out like effervescent water from an opened bottle. Stepping into the road to avoid them, keeping her eyes downcast like a nun she had seen in a picture. Afraid to speak to anyone but shopkeepers, and then only to ask in a whisper for what she wanted. Thinking this way, she came dispiritedly up among those trees that were still saplings and saw someone in the Shrove garden. He was a long way off and for a moment she thought he must be Jonathan. But Jonathan wouldn't be clipping the yew hedge. Jonathan never did anything, he never pulled out a weed or plucked a dead head from a rose. The man was working on the hedge with a pair of hand clippers. It must be the new gardener. She was still too far away from him to see much, but even from a hundred yards off she could tell he was young. not young as Jonathan or Bruno were, but really young, the same sort of age as herself. She had never thought of hiding from Mr. Frost or Gib, but she was suddenly urgently sure that this man mustn't see her. He mustn't be allowed to see her casually approaching him. It was easy to avoid his eye, a matter of keeping to the trees and, when the garden was reached, making her way toward the house. Why she was behaving so covertly she didn't ask herself, for she couldn't have replied. She approached stealthily, careful not to step on a twig or, when she reached the path, let her feet make a sound on the gravel. now he was no farther away from her than the length of their sitting room in the gatehouse. She looked at him between the branches and the dull pointed leaves of evergreens. He had finished the hedge and was lifting armfuls of clippings into a wheelbarrow, a tall, straight young man, a boy, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. His hair was raven black. She thought of it like that because that was the way the poets wrote. His face was turned away from her. She thought she might shriek with disappointment if she didn't see his face. But at the same time she knew she'd make no sound whatever he did, wherever he went. Had she made a sound? She wasn't aware of it, unless her breathing itself had become noisy. There must have been something to make him turn from the barrow he was about to wheel away and look in her direction. He couldn't see her. She could tell that. She stared. He was absolutely beautiful. His face was a pale olive colour but with a flush on the cheeks, and his eyes were a dark bright blue. She saw a perfect nose and perfect lips and thought of the stars in those old films she had seen and of engravings of statues in ancient books and portraits by Titian. His hands were long and brown. Once she had admired Jonathan's hands but no longer. This man had stars in his eyes and his gaze showed that he dreamed of wonderful things. The gods she read about lived in groves like this, half-concealed by leaves. Because he couldn't see her and could now hear nothing, he shrugged a little and began wheeling the barrow away. He should have had a spear and a winged chariot but all he had were shears and a wheelbarrow. Lira didn't mind. She didn't even mind him going and she didn't want him to come back. In a strange way she had had as much as she could take for the present. An unexpected energy filled her and she ran all the way home, arriving breathless and throwing herself down on the sofa. In a voice as casual as she could make it, she said to Eve, "Which days does the new gardener come?" "Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Why?" "nothing. I just wondered." The following afternoon she went to Shrove and searched for a picture he might resemble. She had done that when Bruno came, but this was different. That had been for the satisfaction of curiosity, this was an act of worship. Upstairs, next to the painting of Sodom and Gomorrah, was a portrait of a young man in black silk and silver lace. Eve called it "indifferent eighteenthcentury two-a-penny stuff," but Lira had always liked it and now she gazed in wonder. Their new gardener in elegant fancy dress made her shiver, but pleasurably. The next day was Friday and she watched for his car from Eve's bedroom window. It was a big old car, dark blue with patches of rust on the bodywork, and if she hadn't known a car had to have a driver she'd have thought it was moving along by its own volition. Rain fell all day on Monday, so he couldn't come, and it was Wednesday before she had a glimpse of him. His car was parked on the gravel by the coach house. She let herself into the house, went upstairs and into the bedroom with the fine views, the one Victoria had used and where she had left her clothes in the wardrobe. It made her jump to see him just outside the window, almost directly below her. Clematis climbed across the garden front of Shrove House. He was on the steps, the old ones that used to be in the library, j tying the clematis vines to the trellis. If he had turned his head to the right and lifted it a little he would have seen her. Any noise she might make wouldn't attract his attention today. He was wearing a headset and had a Walkman attached to the belt of his ens. . i In the week that had gone by she had sometimes wondered if she was remembering him as more beautiful than he actually was. now she saw that he was even more beautiful than she remembered. Why did she care so much? She was dreadfully bewildered by it all. Was it just because he was the first person of her own age she had ever known? But she didn't know him. He looked around suddenly and saw her. She was seized with shyness, with shame almost, and felt the blood rush into her face and burn her cheeks. He put up one hand in a salute and grinned. This made her retreat at once and run out of the bedroom. There was a mirror in a gilt frame hanging on the wall halfway down the stairs. Although she had never done this before, she stopped on the staircase and looked at herself in this mirror. She thought she was--well, very pretty. Better than that perhaps. nice eyes, big and dark, a full mouth, good skin, Eve always said, and lots of long dark hair. But--did all girls look like this? She need not be quite so naive. In the town she had seen others, but how could she judge? The old television images had grown vague and misty now. Why, anyway, did it matter? She continued to stare at herself, as if contemplating a great mystery. For a moment or two, for five minutes perhaps, she had forgotten the boy on the steps. Narcissistically, she communed with herself, studying her smooth face and soft pink lips, the slim body and full breasts. How would she look in a dress like Caroline's? Red silk, low-cut. That almost made her laugh. She was wearing blue jeans, a black sweater with a polo neck, and Eve's old brown parka. Because she knew he was in the back garden, she let herself out of the front door without a thought. She didn't peer from a window first but came straight out. And there he was, standing on the paving, studying the climbing hydrangea that clustered all across the front of Shrove House. She stood quite still, staring at him, not knowing what to do, without a word to say. He smiled. "Hi, there." Something tied her tongue. "D'you live here?" She must speak. This time she wasn't blushing. She fancied she had gone pale. "I saw you at the window, so I thought maybe you lived here. But the lady said no one did. At any rate you're not a ghost." That should have made her laugh but she couldn't laugh. She found her tongue but not her poise. "That was my mother said that. We live at the Lodge." "Out in the sticks, isn't it? It could give you the creeps." Eve would hate him for "the creeps." "The sticks" she failed altogether to understand. "I have to go," she said. "I'm late." "See you, then." She didn't dare run. Guessing he was watching her, she walked down the drive, through the park, certain his eyes were on her. But when she looked back he was gone. His car passed her almost before she was aware of it and there he was waving to her. She was too confused to wave back. At the gatehouse she read Romeo and uliet. "Would that I were a glove upon that hand / That I might touch that cheek." Her future, the loneliness and the sameness, the oddities of Eve,,=. all were forgotten. His was a face "to lose youth for / To occupy age with the dream of..." She turned to poetry, for she had no other comparisons and no other standards. Talking to Eve, she longed to speak his name but was afraid to. Once she had uttered it, she wanted to talk about him all the time, yet she knew nothing about him. "Where does Sean live?" "In a caravan somewhere. What possible interest can it have for you?" "I wanted to know where Gib lived." It was true. Let Eve believe that, knowing so few people, she was more interested in those she did know than others who had led different lives might be. "Where does Sean keep his caravan?" This time she need not have used his name but she did use it. "How should I know? Oh, yes, he said down by the old station. Have you been talking to him?" Lira looked at her between the eyes and said, "No." This was the place where she had been so frightened. She had come through the station, carefree, enjoying the day, happy in the sunlight, and had seen Bruno sitting there with his painting things, in his lifted hand a brush loaded with gamboge. He had frightened her with his naked hatred. "You've never told me why you came that day," Sean said. "D'you know, it was seven months ago. We've known each other seven months. What made you come?" "I wanted to see where you lived. The way I felt, you want to know everything about a person, where they live, what they eat and drink, what they like doing, the way they are when they're alone. You want to see them against different backgrounds." She thought about it. "Against every possible background. You want to see how they'll be in the rain and what they do when the sun shines on them. How they comb their hair and fill a kettle and wash their hands and drink a glass of water. ou want to see how they go about doing all the ordinary things." Sean was nodding earnestly. "That's right, that's it. You're a clever girl, love, you sort of know it all." That made her impatient. She waved him away. "I didn't mean to see you. I certainly didn't mean you to see me. I just meant to see where you lived and--well, creep away." "But I saw you and I come out." She said reflectively, as if talking of other people, another couple. "It was love at first sight." "Right on. That's what it was." "I wasn't hard to get. I didn't keep you guessing. I went into the caravan with you and when you asked if I'd got anyone, I didn't know what you meant. I said I'd got my mother. You tried again, you said, was I seeing anyone? It was hopeless. You had to ask me if I had a boyfriend. Then you said, would I come for a walk with you, and I knew it was all right because that's what people said in all those Victorian novels I'd read." "And the rest," said Sean, "like they say, is history." "You must get the newspapers today. I won't be going in till the afternoon. I'm going to ask Mr. Spurdell to explain it to me. I mean, explain why Trevor Hughes." "And what you going to do if he twigs?" "If he guesses, d'you mean? He won't." Later, when she had finished her work, and she made sure she finished in good time, she went along the passage and tapped on Mr. Spurdell's study door. He had come in about a half hour before and gone straight up there. He was wearing his half-glasses, gold-rimmed, and they made him look older and more scholarly than ever. "If you haven't done my room, you'd better leave it," he said. It angered her rather that he hadn't even noticed. She had taken particular care over the study, dusting his books and putting them back meticulously in the correct order. "May I ask you something?" "That rather depends on what it is. What is it?" She plunged straight into the middle of things. "If someone murdered three people, A, B, and C, and the police knew about C, why would she I mean he or she be accused in court of murdering A only?" "Is this some crime thriller you're reading?" Easier to say it was, though she was doubtful as to what he meant. "Yes." He loved explaining, he loved answering questions. She knew he did and that was why she had been so sure he wouldn't suspect anything. Anyway, he was far more interested in instructing than in her. "It seems probable that though the police know about C, they cannot prove he or she murdered him. The same may apply to B. He or she is indicted for the murder of A because they are certain that is something they can prove in such a way as to make a case stand up in court. There, does that help you find whodunit?" "Why not accuse--indict--the person with killing A and C?" "Ah, well, they don't do that. You see, if your putative murderer were to be found not guilty by a jury and acquitted, the police could come back with C--or for that matter B--and bring him into court all over again on this different charge. If they charged him with both and he was acquitted, they would have lost all hope of punishing him." It was always "he" and "him," as if nothing ever happened to women and they did nothing. "I see," she said, and then, "Where would he she be while they were waiting to come into court?" He began talking about something called the Criminal Justices Act 1991, a legal measure to do with sentencing and keeping people in prison, but when he got to the point of the Act just being implemented "now, while I speak, Lira," his phone began to ring. She turned to go but he motioned to her to stay while he picked up the phone. "Hallo, Jane, my dear," she heard him say, "and what can I do for you?" The conversation wasn't a long one. She felt that she would have liked to send some message to Jane Spurdell, something like her good wishes, but of course she couldn't do that. Replacing the receiver, Mr. Spurdell said, "I thought you might like to borrow another book." He added rather severely, "Something worthwhile." This was perhaps a reference to what he believed she was reading at the moment. She took her opportunity. "How long do they send a murderer to prison for?" Since her introduction to newspapers, she had heard, she thought, of quite short sentences for killing people. "I mean, does it vary according to how they've done it or why?" "If someone is convicted of murder in this country, the mandatory sentence is imprisonment for life." She grew cold. "Always?" she said, and he thought she didn't know what "mandatory" meant. "The word signifies something of the nature of a command. Something mandatory is something which must be. We don't have degrees of murder here, though they do in the United States. If it was manslaughter, now, the sentence might be quite short." The term meant nothing to her. It would look suspicious if she kept on questioning him. He had picked two Hardy novels in paperback off his shelves. She hadn't read them, she thanked him, and went downstairs to get her money. n HAT day Eve had been in the witness box. Lira was astonished to read that she admitted killing Trevor Hughes. Yet she had pleaded not guilty. Perhaps you could explain that when you understood her counsel was trying to get the charge changed from murder to that word Mr. Spurdell had used, "manslaughter." Sean seemed to know all about it. Today there was a photograph of Trevor Hughes, a faceless man, his features buried in that thick, fair beard. Eve said she had killed him because he tried to rape her. She was quite alone in the house, there was no one living nearer than a mile away. She got away from him, ran into the house to get her gun, and shot him in self-defense. Prosecuting counsel questioned her very closely. You could imagine there was a lot more than appeared in the paper. He asked her why she had a loaded shotgun in the house? Why did she not lock herself in the house and phone for help? She said she had no phone and he made much of a woman being nervous enough to have a loaded gun at hand but no phone. When she knew he was dead, why had she not phoned for help from Shrove House, where there was a phone? Why had she concealed the death by burying the man's body? Before she had given her evidence someone called Matthew Edwards gave his. They didn't put things in order in the newspaper but arranged them in the most sensational way. It took Lira a moment to realise this was Matt, and reading what he had said took her back to that early morning long ago when she'd looked out of the window and seen him releasing the dogs from the little castle. He told the court of the freshly dug earth he had seen and the dogs running about sniffing it and how Eve hadn't been able to answer when he asked if they'd been burying bones. Lira remembered it all. Eve hadn't answered, she'd just asked him if he knew what time it was and told him the time in an icy voice, six-thirty in the morning. The trial would end next day. That meant this day, today. It would be over by now. Counsel for the Defence made a speech in which he spoke of Eva Beck's hard life. She had more cause than most women to fear rape, for she had already suffered it. Lira stopped reading for a moment. She could feel the thudding of her own heartbeats. Unconsciously, she had covered the paper with her hand as if there was no one behind her, as if Sean wasn't there, reading it over her shoulder. "You'll have to read it, love," Sean said gently. "I know." "Want me to read it to you? Shall I read it first and then read it to you?" She shook her head and forced herself to take her hand away. The uncompromising words seemed blacker than the rest of the account, the paper whiter. At the age of twenty-one, returning to Oxford from Heathrow, where she had been seeing a friend off on a flight to Rio, Eve Beck had hitched a lift from a truck driver. Two other men had been in the truck. It was driven to a lay-by where all three men raped her. As a result she had been very ill and had undergone prolonged psychiatric treatment. The rape had made her into a recluse who wanted nothing more from life than to be left alone and do her job as caretaker of the Shrove estate. The society of other people she had eschewed and was virtually unknown in the nearby village. She had been living with a grown-up daughter who had since left home. Lira sat very still and silent when she had finished reading. All her questions were answered. She could feel Sean's eyes on her. Presently he laid his hand on her shoulder and, when she didn't reject him, put his arm around her. After a moment or two she said quietly, "Ever since I was about twelve, which was as soon as I could have ideas about it really, I've believed I was Jonathan Tobias's child. I didn't like it much, I'd stopped liking him much, but at least it meant I had a father." "He still could have been." "No. She never told me all that stuff, that in the paper, but she did say she hadn't seen Jonathan for two weeks before she went to see him off for America. One of those men in the truck was my father. There are three men about somewhere, they might be in the town here, or driving a lorry that we've passed on the road, and one of them's my father." She looked at him and away from him. "I expect I'll get used to it." She could see Sean didn't know what to say. She made an effort. "It's mostly not true, what they said. She killed people because they threatened her living at Shrove. She killed them because they tried to stop her having what she wanted. No one's said anything about the way she loves Shrove. And as for me, I'm just the grown-up daughter who's left home." He put his arms around her. Grown up. Sean had asked her about that. not the first time they met at the caravan or the second, but soon. She had gone for a walk with him, as promised, telling Eve she was spending the evening in Shrove library, there were books there she wanted that were too heavy to carry home. After the walk they sat in the caravan. He had a beer and she had a Coke. That was when she started telling him how she'd lived, isolated, almost without society, in the little world of Shrove. "How old are you?" he'd asked, admitting she looked a year or two older than she was but still afraid she might say she was only fifteen. That first time he didn't even kiss her. Two evenings later it was too hot to walk far, a close, humid, throbbing dusk, and they had flung themselves down in the long seed-headed grass by the maple hedge. She had looked at his face, six inches from her own, through the pale reedy stems. There was a scent of hay and of dryness. The feathery seedheads scattered brown dusty pollen on his hair. He parted the thin strands of grass and put his mouth on hers and kissed her. She couldn't help herself, she had no control. Her arms were around his neck, she was clutching his hair in her hands, kissing him back with passion, putting everything she had read about love and desire into those kisses. It was he who restrained them, who jumped up and pulled her to her feet and began asking her if she was sure, did she know what she was doing, if they were going "all the way" she must be sure. It wasn't possible for her to think about it. When she tried to think, all that happened was that she saw images of Sean and felt his kisses, growing hot and weak, growing wet in an unanticipated way that no instruction or reading had led her to expect. She tried to think calmly and reason it out but her mind became a screen of Sean pictures, Sean-and-herself-together pictures, her body shuddered with longing, and she got no further about being sure or knowing what she was doing than she had in the meadow. It came down to this, when next she saw him she would do everything and anything he wanted and everything she wanted, but if she never saw him again she would die. She read Romeo and uliet again but it no longer seemed to be about what she was feeling. On Monday evening it was raining, so they met in the caravan and made love as soon as they met, falling upon each other in a breathless joyful ecstasy. It seemed a long time ago now. Sean switched on the television and they watched the news. For the first time, so far as they knew, it contained something about Eve. They had to wait until almost the last item. The last was about attempts to put an end to bullfighting in Spain, but before that the newscaster announced laconically that Eva Beck, the killer in the Gatehouse Murder case, had been found guilty and sent to prison for life. Sean held her, he kept his arm around her all night, hugging her tightly when she awoke whimpering. But still he didn't understand how she felt. She no longer had any identity. With Eve's denial-for whatever good purpose she had ceased to be anyone, and, with the revelations of Eve's history, had been made worse than fatherless. No words could be found to express what she felt. She had nothing to say to Sean, so she spoke about the everyday mundane things, what they would eat for supper, what food items he should bring back from the store. It was clear that he was relieved not to talk about Eve or the trial or Lira's own new vulnerability, and it pained her, it angered her. Once or twice, during their disturbed night, he had told her she must put "all that" behind her. Just as he was leaving she surprised him by saying she was coming too. "It's not your day for Mrs. S is it?" She shook her head. He must think she was coming into town because she didn't want to pass this day alone in the caravan. She sat beside him, saying how nice the weather was, a wonderful sunny day for the start of December. In just over a month's time she would be seventeen, but he didn't know when her birthday was, though he might have guessed. When they were first together they hadn't talked much. It had been all lovemaking and the aftermath of lovemaking and its renewal. Anxious as ever not to be one minute late, he hurried into the store. The car keys were in his pocket, but she had brought the spare set. A map he never used, his sense of direction was so good, was tucked into the back of the glove compartment. She studied it, left it lying unfolded on the passenger seat. They couldn't do much to her if they caught her driving without a licence or insurance. The way she was feeling today she didn't much care what anyone did to her. It no longer mattered if they caught her and found out who she was, because she was no one, she had no identity. She was just the grown-up daughter who had since left home. She drove past where the caravan was and out onto the big road. The world seemed entirely different here and had seemed so for the past three months, but for all that it was only about twenty miles from where she was going. Passing a garage, she glanced at the gas gauge. It was all right. The tank was nearly full. She began to wonder how she would feel when she came to the bridge and saw the river with the water meadows beyond and the house floating, as it seemed, above the white mists that lay low on the flat land, when she saw the domain that was the only place she had ever known until a mere ninety days ago. But when the time came she experienced no startling reaction. It was a brisk breezy day without mist. The sun shone with a sharp winter brightness. Shrove House had never appeared so brilliantly unveiled. From halfway across the bridge, half a mile distant, she could pick out the dark spindly etching the clematis made on the rear walls and the features on the faces of the stone women in the alcoves. The sun flashed sharply off the window from which she had watched Sean the second time she had seen him. She drove up the lane. Someone had been hedging along here, had mercilessly ripped back the high hawthorns. The gatehouse appeared suddenly, as it always did when the bend was passed. It looked the same as ever and the gateway to Shrove was the same except that the gates, for the first time that she could remember, were shut. The gates that, except on the day after the storm, had always stood folded back like permanently open shutters at a window were so firmly closed that the park could only be seen through their elaborate iron scrollwork and the curlicued letters, SHROVE HOUSE. She walked up the garden path to the gatehouse. Her key she had always kept. She pushed it into the lock and opened the front door. Inside it was icy cold and smelling of damp. The smell was the stench of hollows in the roots of trees where fungus rotted. The kitchen was dim and dark because the blind was pulled down. Raising it a little, she looked out, and then she let the string go and the blind spring up to its roller with a crack, she was so shocked by what she saw. The back garden, which had been neat with Eve's vegetable beds and flower borders, with the new tree planted to replace the fallen cherry, the small lawn, all of it was a wilderness of thin straggly weeds. These had not sprung up among the untended cultivated plants but were weeds growing on dug earth. The whole garden had been turned over with spades. For a moment she couldn't imagine what had happened. Had someone else lived here temporarily, dug the garden and then departed? Had some new and zealous gardener taken over and left again? Then she remembered what the paper had said about Eve burying the body of Trevor Hughes. Somewhere out there it must be that she had buried him, where Matt said the dogs had sniffed the earth. The police had excavated here, looking for more perhaps, looking for a graveyard. Their spades had made this wilderness. She thought of the numberless times they had sat out in the garden under the cherry tree, the work Eve had done, hoeing, planting, harvesting, but it affected her very little. It troubled her no more than walking in a cemetery. She pulled the blind down once more and turned her attention to the interior of the gatehouse. Having been away from it for so long, she saw these rooms with new eyes, eyes educated enough by variety to find them strange, the vaulted ceilings, the pointed Gothic windows, the dark woodwork. It seemed remarkable now that she had lived here all her life, or as long as she could remember. This room, the living room, was not as it had been when she left it. Of course, she couldn't tell how soon Eve had gone after her own departure. But she wouldn't have left it like this, the pictures crooked, the ornaments on the mantelpiece in the wrong order, the hearth rug out of alignment. It struck Lira that she had no idea who owned this furniture. Was it Eve's or did it belong in the lodge? Had it been there when Eve and she first came? The sofa had never stood quite like that, pushed flat against the wall. Someone had searched this room. The police had searched it. She had seen this sort of thing in a detective serial on television. There was something missing from the room. A picture. A pale rectangle on the wall showed where it had once hung, her own portrait, the picture Bruno had painted of her. It had never, in her opinion, looked much like her. The colours were too strong and her features too big. But Eve had liked it. Perhaps Eve had been allowed to take it with her, had it with her now, would keep it through those long years. The idea was comforting. Had the police also searched the little castle? The green studded door was still unlocked. If they had searched, surely they would have locked it after them. Lira loosened the brick at the foot of the wall between the lancet windows, pulled it out and found the iron box. The money was still there. She took the box with its contents. Back in the gatehouse she went upstairs. She looked into Eve's bedroom, neat as a pin, desolate. The jewel case was there in the drawer, but it was empty. No gold wedding ring, of course,,,, '." she had expected that, but no earrings, either, or jade necklace or brooches. She wondered what had become of them. From the cupboard in her own bedroom she took her warm quilted coat, the two skirts Eve had made her, the red-and-blue sweater Eve had knitted. The curtains were drawn in here, for no good reason that she could see. She drew them back and looked across the ruined gatehouse garden to the grounds of Shrove. It gave her a little shock to see David Cosby walking across the grass between the young trees. He had a dog with him, a red-and-white spaniel. Once she was sure he wasn't looking in this direction, she drew the curtains again. His walk was taking him nowhere near the little wood. Lira put the metal box and the clothes into the boot of the car and locked it. She wondered if she dared leave it there for the ten minutes it would take her to do what she had to do and decided she must. The sun still shone with unseasonable brightness. It was so late in the year that the shadows were long, even at noon. The ground was dry for early December, under her feet softly crackling strata, layer upon layer of them, of fallen leaves. She made her way into the little wood, not wanting to go but aware that she had to. This was as important a mission as the quest for the iron box of money. Much of the clearing operations she had witnessed but not this replanting. It was unexpected, an unforeseen act. new trees with the deer and rabbit guards on their thin trunks stood everywhere in carefully planned groups. She took heart from the sight of the two dead larches left to stand as a feeding place for woodpeckers and the broken poplar that had put out new branches. The cherry log lay where it had lain from the time of its fall, or she thought it lay like that. How could she be sure? It was deep now in dead leaves, awash with them almost, with a tide of brown beech leaves that hid two-thirds of the log. But all those leaves had fallen since October.... She squatted down and began burrowing into the leaves with her hands. The relief at the feel of sacking against her fingers was so great she almost laughed aloud. Wedged beneath the log, the bundle was still in place, winter after winter was burying it deeper. Leaves would turn to leaf mould and leaf mould to earth. One day the log itself would be buried as the level of the ground gradually and very slowly rose, while Bruno slept on, undisturbed. There were no policemen standing by the car taking notes, no David Cosby with his young inquisitive dog. She got into the driving seat and drove down the lane, over the bridge, and took the road to the village where Bruno had wanted to take Eve to live. There, in the village shop, she bought a pack of ham sandwiches, a can of Coke, and a Bounty bar for her lunch. It amused her a little that she had found buying these things in this shop so easy, she who had never dared go in there in former days. But before that she investigated the contents of the iron box. The previous time she had looked into the box, and helped herself from it, she had had very little idea of the value of money, what was a lot and what wasn't much. It was different now. She had lived a lifetime of experience in three months, had earned money and knew what things cost. Sitting in the driving seat in a secluded spot by the churchyard wall, she opened the box and counted the notes. They amounted to something over a thousand pounds, to be precise, a thousand and seventy-five. Lira could hardly believe it. She must have made a mistake. But she counted again and again she reached the figure of a thousand and seventy-five. The money lay heavily on her, not on her hands, but like a burden on her back. She shook herself and tried to see it differently, as a blessing. No longer daring to leave it in the car, she carried the thousand pounds stuffed in her pockets as she went over to the shop. Because there was so much of it she felt she could afford a ham sandwich instead of cheese. The car restored to the Superway car park, she wandered about the town, afraid to steal a bath at the Duke's Head in case she got caught and they found all that money on her. There wasn't time to go to the cinema. Instead she went to the bookshop, acquiring undreamed-of marvels, among them The Divine Comedy in translation, Ovid's Metamorphoses in the original and translation, before telling herself she must be careful with the money, she must be prudent. They needed that money, she and Sean. All the same, she postponed telling him about it. Later would do, another day would do. nor did she show him the new books. She had been to Shrove, she said, she had fetched her clothes. All he was concerned about was her driving the car uninsured and without a licence. He was rather angry about that. She hadn't dreamed, when first she knew him, that he would turn out so law-abiding. The first hint of it she'd had was when the man who owned the land beside the old station discovered that the caravan was parked there and told him to move on. Lira, remembering that day when she had stood with the demonstrators and the last train had come down the line, said he need not move more than a dozen yards. If he parked it by the platform he would be on British Rail land and they never came near the place, they wouldn't find out. Sean wouldn't do it. He said he knew he was wrong being on that man's land without permission, he wasn't sticking his neck out again. He'd move over the bridge and up through the fields and woods to Ring Common, where anyone could be. It was four or five miles away. Of course he went on coming to Shrove to do the garden. Lira never spoke to him while he was on the mower or doing the edges or weeding, it amused her to walk past him with a casual "hi" or even a shy "hallo" if Eve was with her, remembering their lovemaking of the previous evening. How had she known that her association with Sean wouldn't be acceptable to Eve? That Eve and she were Capulets and Sean a Montague? Instinctively, she had known it, and had kept their love an absolute secret. At the same time it brought her enormous pleasure to watch him about the grounds of Shrove when he had no idea she was watching him. Observing his handsomeness and his grace, she liked to remember and to anticipate. She even enjoyed the pleasure-pain of needing to go up to him and touch him, kiss him and have him touch her, needing it passionately but still making herself resist. One day she saw a man talking to him. It was a shock to realise that the man was Matt. The past couple of times Jonathan had been at Shrove he had brought Matt with him. It was a long time since they had seen Jonathan, she and Eve, though weeks rather than months. The years when he had scarcely come at all were gone by. He had been at Shrove in April and now it was June. Matt was talking to Sean about something or other, pointing at this and that in what seemed to Lira a hectoring way before going back to the house. "What was he saying to you that day?" she asked Sean five months later. "Matt. When you had to stop the tractor and take off your visor?" "I don't know. What does it matter? I reckon it was only to boss me about. Maybe it was to cut the tops off the lilacs, prune the lilacs. I never knew you was supposed to do that." "We didn't know Jonathan was coming. He didn't warn us, but he often didn't. I told Eve I'd seen him. I knew she'd want me to do that so that she could get dressed up and wash her hair before he came. That was the evening he first started talking about the money he'd lost. He didn't mind me being there, he talked about it in front of me. He was what they call a name at Lloyd's. D'you know what that means?" "Sort of. I saw about it in the papers. They were a sort of insurance company, only very big and sort of important, and something happened so they had to fork out more than they'd got." "It was to do with that Alaskan oil spill, that was the start of it. And they had more claims that they could--I think meet' is the word. Instead of making money, all the people who were names found they had to pay money. Jonathan was one. He said he didn't know how much it would be yet but he thought a lot, and luckily he had the house in France to sell that had been Caroline's. He looked very miserable. But, you know, we didn't take it very seriously, Eve and I. Or Eve didn't. I wasn't interested. She was interested, she was interested in everything that concerned him, but even she didn't believe he was having a job finding money. She was so used to the Tobiases and the Ellisons having so much of it. They were the kind of people, she said to me, who'd say they were poor when they were down to their last million." Sean shrugged. He put his arm around Lira. "Feeling a bit better, are you, love? About you-know-what?" She knew what. The revelation in the paper. Eve's past life. "I'm all right. Only I'd like to go and see her." "Your mum?" "not yet. Maybe after Christmas. I'll find out where she is, where they've put her, and then I'll go and see her." "You're amazing, you really are. After what she done? After she murdered three blokes? After the way she brought you up? She's bad news, love." "She never did me a bit of harm," said Lira. "She's my mother. You can understand why she killed those men. I can understand it. There was one place in the world she had a sanctuary, there was one kind of life she could live and stay, well, not mad, and they all wanted to take it away from her, one after the other." "not Trevor Hughes." "Yes, he did. In a way. Jonathan had said she was there to see how she got on, but she knew he meant how it suited him. She was on trial. It wouldn't have suited him if his dogs had had to be destroyed because she'd set them on someone. "And Bruno was going to make her leave unless she sent me away. You can understand why she killed them, she didn't have a choice. They'd got her in a corner and she acted like an animal would. And now I've read what happened to her before I was born, I know she was getting her revenge too, she was taking vengeance on three men for what three men had done to her." "not the same men," Sean objected. "Oh, of course not. Don't you understand anything?" Immediately, she was remorseful. "I'm sorry. I'll tell you about the last one, shall I?" He shrugged, then said a rather sullen, "Yes." "I'll tell you about how she shot him." T HIS would be the last of Scheherazade's stories, she said. not a thousand and one nights but nearer a hundred. Three and a half months of nights to tell a life in. "When did I run away, Sean?" "It was August. No, it wasn't, it was September the first." She began counting on her fingers. "That was something I never learned. I never learned much arithmetic. I make it a hundred and one nights tomorrow." "Is that right?" They were coming home from work on the following day, the hundredth day.