Lira had carried the money with her to

Aspen Close, she dared not leave it in the caravan. Stopping work at lunchtime, she had walked around the town until she found a shop to sell her a money belt. In the public lavatory in the marketplace she packed all the notes into the belt and put it on over her jeans. She was so slim the belt looked smart, not cumbersome. She still hadn't said anything about the money to Sean and he believed that all she had fetched from the lodge were her clothes. Glad of the quilted coat, she rubbed her cold hands together. The heater in the car worked only fitfully. "I'd got to June, hadn't I?" she said. "It was when Jonathan first started going on about money. He'd brought Matt with him." "He was always coming out in the garden telling me how to do my job," Sean grumbled. "Did he? I didn't know that. Matt was a builder up in Cumbria but his business had failed. If it wasn't for him, Eve wouldn't be in prison. He hated us. I think it was because he'd once thought Eve beautiful but he disgusted her." Sean nodded. "That'd be it. She treated him like dirt." "If it wasn't for him, the police wouldn't have suspected anything and Eve would still be at the gatehouse and so would I." "I ought to thank him then, hadn't I?" She smiled. "Jonathan sort of took him under his wing. Matt was getting married or he wanted to get married and Jonathan had some idea of getting him a place to live near Shrove and having him manage the grounds. While he was there he went out every night shooting rabbits by the car headlights. There was all this banging of guns night after night and the lights blazing over the fields. I hated it, I never liked Matt." "Them little devils have to be kept down, love. I never seen so many rabbits as there was last summer. And pigeons, they tear the crops to bits." "When he stayed at Shrove he slept in a room over the coach house. There are seventeen bedrooms at Shrove, but he had to sleep out there. He had to use the outside lavatory behind the stables and wash under the tap that was there for watering the horses." Sean said seriously, "Tobias couldn't have him in the house, not a servant. Matt wouldn't have expected it." Lira gave him a look. She shook her head a little at him, but he had his eye on the road. "Jonathan told Eve you were just a temporary measure. Those were his words. He was going to give you the sack at the end of the summer, at Michaelmas--whenever that is--and have Matt and his wife live over the coach house. He said he'd have things done to it to make it possible to live there. Put in one of his famous bathrooms, I expect." "He did give me the sack. Well, he got Matt to do it." "I was in a panic when he first said it. I thought he'd get rid of you and you'd have to go and I'd never see you again." They had reached the place where the caravan was. Sean put his arms around Lira and hugged her. "You didn't trust me." "I don't think I trusted anyone by then, not even Eve." Inside the caravan they lit the gas and the oil heater. The warmth came quickly, though it was a damp, smelly heat. Sean lit a cigarette, making the atmosphere worse, and opened the bottle of wine he had brought from Superway and began unwrapping the samosas and onion bhajis for their supper. Pulling off her coat, Lira hugged herself inside the comfort of the sweater Eve had made. She talked, drinking her wine. Eve hadn't liked that idea of Matt and his wife living at Shrove. Jonathan said it meant she could get rid of Mrs. Cooper, she wouldn't have to handle the wages and the organisation, she'd have nothing to do but be there and, of course, she'd be in authority over them, they'd have to do as she said. Why can't we go on managing as we are? she wanted to know. It would be easier for her this way, Jonathan said, and besides, he had to find something for Matt, he had a duty to Matt. Lira knew what her mother was really feeling. By this time she understood most of Eve's deeply emotional attitude toward Shrove. Eve didn't want anyone, anyone at all, coming between her and that house and that land, that domain. She even resented Sean's being there. Mr. Frost had been there before she came, was there when her own mother was, she accepted him like she did the train and the inevitable weekend guests, but Sean was new. Of course, she said none of this to Jonathan, and that night Jonathan stayed at the gatehouse. Lira felt very strange about that because she was deep in a sexual relationship of her own and she understood what went on beyond the wall dividing their bedrooms. The next day she found Eve standing in front of the mirror, peering closely at her face, plucking out a grey hair. She came up behind Eve, not meaning to do this, not meaning to make the contrast. It all happened by chance that her face was reflected behind Eve's, a yard or so and twenty-two years between. Eve turned around and said, "Mater pulchra, ha pulchrior." Lira didn't know what to say. She could hardly reply that it was true the mother was beautiful but the daughter more so, or pretend not to understand. A lame "I think you look lovely" was all she could manage. But she wondered what the hectic light in Eve's eye portended and her wild behaviour that day and her sudden bursts of too-loud laughter. As it happened, she overheard what Eve said to Jonathan. She'd got in the habit of listening at doors. It was a way of trying to save her life. Sometimes, these days, she felt her whole life was in jeopardy. If Matt came, would Eve stay? If she and Eve went, where could they go? If Sean went, what would she do? She would die. As soon as she sensed Eve or Jonathan or both of them wanted her out of the way, she knew they were going to talk secrets she should have been privy to, because it was she most of all that they threatened. That evening she had been at the caravan with Sean. Well, more than the evening. She had been with him from the time he stopped work at four until nine, when he drove her back to Shrove. Home again at the gatehouse, she thought at first that they had gone out somewhere or to Shrove House. Jonathan's jacket was hanging over the back of a chair but that meant nothing. She went to her bedroom and looked out of the open window toward the house, expecting to see them walking in the pale red light of the sunset afterglow. But they were much nearer at hand. They were sitting on a rug spread out on the grass in the garden just below her window. Or Eve was sitting, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, while Jonathan lay on his back, looking up at the thin moon that had appeared in the still-light sky. They weren't speaking but Lira knew that once they did speak she would be able to hear every word. She crouched on the bed with her chin on the windowsill, thinking about Sean, how he had said to her that evening to come and live with him in the caravan. He had asked her, he had said he missed her too much when she wasn't with him, and what was there to keep her here? She couldn't answer that. She couldn't say, I'm frightened to go. In a way she wanted to terribly and in another way she didn't want to at all. Yet it was only a couple of years before that she'd been always asking herself what would become of her and how would she ever get away? The silence down there was oppressive. When she was beginning to think she might as well go down there and join them, Eve spoke. "Jonathan, will you marry me?" It was a worse silence this time. Anything would have been better than this silence. He was was no longer looking at the moon but at Eve. She said with great bravery--how Lira admired her courage!--"I asked you to marry me. Women can do that, can't they? We were going to be married once, when we were very young. It all went wrong, we both know why, but is it too late to make it right?" He sounded ashamed, Lira thought. "I'm afraid it is too late, Evie." Eve made a little sound. She whispered, "Why is it?" "The time for that's gone by, Evie. I'm sorry but it's just too late." "But why is it? We're always happy when we're together. Don't I make you happy? Hasn't it always been--good with me?" "I shall't marry again. I'm better alone and maybe you are too. I'll be frank, I don't want to be married. I've tried it and it didn't work. Victoria and I were all right until we got married. It was then that things started to fall apart. It would be the same with you and me." "Then I have humiliated myself for nothing," Eve said in a hard voice, but almost at once she had turned back to him and suddenly cast herself upon him, clutching him in her arms and crying, "Jonathan, Jonathan, you know I love you, why won't you stay with me? Why have you kept me like this for all these years? I've waited for you for so long, I've waited forever and still I can't have you. Jonathan, please, please..." Lira couldn't bear any more of it. She jumped off the bed and ran away into Eve's room, the way she had done when she was a child. "She should have known better than that," said Sean. "It was ironical, wasn't it? There was I being begged to go and live with you and not daring to and there was she begging Jonathan to marry her and being rejected." She didn't like his reply, though it was complimentary to herself. "No, well, you're sixteen, aren't you, love? And she's a bit past her sell-by date." "Jonathan was older than she." "He's a man. It's different. I bet he didn't stay that night." She digested the first part of these remarks. This was a point of view she hadn't previously come across and she found it deeply unsatisfactory. "He went back to Shrove about half an hour later, and he and Matt went off the next day. I thought he'd never come back but he did." "Too right he did and that Matt with him. It was the end of August. Matt come up to me all smiles like he was going to give me a raise. It was ten minutes before I was due to leave and I was using that bit of time to thin out the plums. There was so many plums on that damn tree the branches was breaking. He said like he was my boss, Holford, we shall't need your services after the weekend, thanks very much. It was a Wednesday and he said he wouldn't need my services after the weekend. I said, is that what you call giving a person notice? He went on smiling. Take it or leave it, he says to me, you get paid up to Friday afternoon, and he just walked off." Lira hadn't seen Sean on that Wednesday evening, so the news of his dismissal reached her secondhand. She was nearly frantic when she heard. They weren't in the lodge but at the house. It was such a rare thing for her and Eve to be asked up to the house when Jonathan was there that she had sensed something awful was going to happen. Jonathan came to the gatehouse at about four in the afternoon. She and Eve were indoors, it was rather a chilly day for late August, and Jonathan talked to them from the window. He didn't come in. He-just said, come up to the house for a drink about six, I've got something to tell you. Eve was sore. She seemed truculent and sulky. No one but Lira would have guessed that what she was suffering from was simple unhappiness. Tell us what? she asked. He didn't answer. I'll take you both out for a meal afterward, if you like, he said. Probably Eve was imagining all kinds of dreadful things--though nothing so dreadful as the truth. Jonathan received them in the drawing room, very grand. They sat in one of the groups of crimson-and-gold chairs and sofas that were arranged in each corner of the room around a marble or ormolu table. A good deal of the glory was lost when Matt came shambling in with bottles and glasses on a tray and peanuts in a packet. Matt's hair was down on his shoulders now but it had gone grey and he had grown a big belly, so Lira couldn't imagine what sort of a woman would think of marrying him. She had never seen a drunk person or heard the word Jonathan used and would have thought Matt ill if Eve hadn't explained later. "How dare you come in here pissed? Put the bloody nuts in a dish and then get out." Jonathan had been drinking too, she could smell it on his breath when he leaned toward her and asked her if she was allowed a glass of wine. "I've just had Matt give that young man of yours the push," he said to Eve. "What young man of mine?" "The gardener." "You've sacked him? Why?" Lira could hear the relief in Eve's voice. She was aghast, but Eve was relieved because she was expecting something worse. So that was all Jonathan had got them up there for, Eve was no doubt thinking, to tell me he's got rid of Sean Holford to make room for Matt and Mrs. Matt, and now he'll be wanting me to get rid of Mrs. Cooper. And what am I going to do? Lira thought feverishly. Suppose he's gone, suppose he never comes back, suppose I never see him again? "I told you I'd got something to tell you, Eve. It's not that I've fired the gardener. It's not that Matt will be taking over. No one will be taking over. The fact is I'm going to have to sell the house. Shrove House will have to be sold." Trembling for her mother, Lira turned slowly to look at her. Eve was stone-still. She had gone white and suddenly she looked tremendously old, not thirty-eight but sixty-eight, an old woman with a lined forehead and mouth that has fallen in. "Don't look like that, Evie," Jonathan said. "D'you think I want to do it? I've no choice. I told you about my financial difficulties. I've got to put more into Lloyd's than I dreamed was possible. It's been a frightful shock to me. But you must know what's happened to the names, it's been all over the papers day after day--no, I forgot, you don't read the papers. The fact is I've got to find close to a million and I can't do it without selling Shrove. If I get fifty thousand for Mama's house in France I'll be doing well, it's more than I can hope for, thirty's more likely. I've been trying to sell it for two years. Again I was going to say you know what's happened to the property market but, no, I don't suppose you do know. I have to sell Shrove. When I do it will just cover me. I shall just keep my head above water." Eve was staring at him. This was the first time Lira had ever drunk wine and she was making the most of it. It helped. She held out her glass for more and Jonathan filled it absently. "For God's sake, Eve, say something." He tried, incredibly, facetiousness. "Say something if it's only good-bye." Lira saw her make an effort. She saw her suck in her lips and raise her shoulders as if in pain. The voice, when it came, was breathless and thin. "You can sell Ullswater." "The Ullswater house belongs to Victoria now--remember?" "Why were you ever such a fool as to marry her?" "D'you think I haven't asked myself that over and over?" "Jonathan," said Eve, holding her hands tightly clenched together, "Jonathan, you can't sell Shrove, it's unthinkable, there has to be an alternative." She thought of one. "You can sell the London house." "And where am I supposed to live?" Eve, who hadn't taken her eyes offhim, seemed to stare even more intently. not liking the look in her mother's face, the glazed, hardly sane look, Lira shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Eve said, "You can live here." "No, I can't." Jonathan was growing irritable. "I don't want to live here. Things are bad enough without my having to live in a place I dislike." He sounded like a petulant child. "All right, I know I've never told you I don't like this place, but the fact is I don't, I never have. It's isolated, it's miles from anywhere, and you mayn't have noticed this, but it's damp. Of course it is, stuck in a bloody river valley. Victoria got fibrositis through staying here." "God damn Victoria to hell," said Eve in a voice to make Lira jump out of her skin. Jonathan wasn't put out. "All right. Willingly. I wish she was in hell. I'm sure I've suffered from her more than you have, more than you dream of. never mind her, anyway. I have to sell this house, I have to have the million it'll fetch." "You won't be able to sell it. Even I know that. I may live out of the world but I've got a radio, I know what goes on. The house market's the worst it's been in my lifetime. You won't find a buyer. not at the price you're asking you won't." Jonathan refilled Eve's glass from the dry sherry bottle. She lifted the glass, watching him. For a moment Lira thought she was going to throw the contents of the glass at him but she didn't. nor did she drink from it. Jonathan said calmly, "I have. I have found a buyer." Eve made a little pained sound. "A hotel chain. They're embarking on a project called Country Heritage Hotels. Shrove will be their flagship, as they call it." "I don't believe you." "Come off it, Evie, of course you believe me. Why would I say it if it wasn't true?" "The deal," said Eve, "the contract, whatever, I don't know about these things--is it settled?" "not yet. They've made an approach and I've told my solicitor to tell them a tentative yes. That's as far as we've got. You're the first person I've told." "I should think so," Eve said scornfully. "Of course I'd tell you first, Evie." "What will become of me, of us? Have you thought of that?" Jonathan began saying he would find her a house. Matt and 32o 3l his wife would stay at Shrove until it was bought by Country Heritage and then they would have to have a home found for them. His idea was perhaps to find a pair of semidetached cottages. On the other side of the valley possibly, and he named the village where Bruno had nearly bought a house. Property was for sale all over the place and much of it going for a song. There was no question of abandoning Eve. He hoped she knew his responsibility toward her. Unfortunately for her, the hotel chain wanted the gatehouse for use as their reception. They had specifically stated this in their offer. Eve said flatly, "I will never leave here." "That's all very well. I'm afraid you must. Do you think it's pleasant for me having to tell you this? Come to that, d'you think I like selling half my property? My grandfather would turn in his grave, I know that." "He-wouldn't," said Eve. "not where he is, rotting in hell." "I don't see the use of talking like that. It doesn't help." "I will never leave here. They will have to take me away by force if they want me to leave here." It was a prophecy soon to be fulfilled. The next day, after a sleepless night, a night when she didn't go to bed at all, Eve went up to Shrove to plead with Jonathan. By that time Lira was already telling the news to Sean, and Sean was urging her to come to him, to leave her mother and Shrove and come and live with him. She was old enough, the law couldn't stop her. Coming back, she encountered Matt in the stable yard with a fat middle-aged woman in an apron. The presence of his wife didn't stop him eyeing Lira up and down in a lecherous way--just as he had eyed Eve all those years ago--and telling her she'd grown up into a lovely girl who'd soon have all the boys after her. Jonathan came back with Eve and they spent the day arguing, Eve alternately pleading and shouting, occasionally weeping. As far as Lira knew, they spent the day like this. At four she went out to meet Sean and didn't get home till nearly ten. Eve didn't say anything, she uttered no word of reproach. Lira could hardly believe her eyes when Jonathan put his arm around Eve, lifted her off the sofa, and led her upstairs to her bedroom, where he closed the door on the pair of them for the rest of the night. Outside, the usual banging started and the flaring lights as Matt went rabbit-hunting. Lira drew her curtains. She sat on the bed thinking about Sean. He would never come back to Shrove to work. Apple-picking had already begun in the Discovery orchards to the north of here. In less than a week he'd be moving on to earn as much as he could picking apples from dawn till dusk through September. How did two people communicate when neither had a phone? Sean didn't even have a postal address. He said he'd drive over on Monday and they'd meet in the little wood. Why the little wood? she'd asked and he'd said because it was romantic. He'd also said she'd got to tell him if she was coming Didn't she love him enough to come? Secure in her love and companionship now, Sean said, interrupting the story, "I still don't know why you had to keep me on the hook so long." "I've told you often enough. I was scared. I'd never been away. As far as I could remember, I'd never even slept in any bed but mine at the gatehouse." He patted the bed they were sitting on. "We never slept much, did we, love?" "Jonathan was practically living at the gatehouse that week end," said Lira. "They were all over each other, more than I'd ever seen them. Eve'd never been demonstrative in public. Perhaps I wasn't public, perhaps she didn't care, I don't know. They were hugging and kissing in my presence but for all that, Jonathan could never be got to say he wouldn't sell Shrove. She'd plead and cajole and kiss him and at the end of it he'd just say, I've got to sell." " Then Eve gave up. On Sunday evening Lira heard her say, "If it must be, it must be." She reached for Jonathan's hand and held it. Jonathan gave her a look that to Lira, who now knew about such things, seemed full of love. "We'll find a nice house for you and Lira, you'll still have the countryside, the place itself..." Jonathan stayed the night but left early in the morning before Lira was up. She came downstairs to find Eve seated at the breakfast table, glittery-eyed and galvanic with barely suppressed energy, her hands clasping and unclasping. "He's going to sell Shrove, he's absolutely determined." "I know," Lira said. The tone of Eve's voice changed and became dreamy, reminiscing. "He's asked me to marry him." "He hasn't!" "The irony of it, Lizzie, the irony! Of course I said no. No, thanks, I said, you're too late. What's the good of him to me without Shrove?" It was for Shrove she had wanted him. If he had married her a year ago he could have put Shrove in her name and kept it safe from his creditors. She laughed a little, not hysterically but madder than that, a manic laugh. Still, Lira couldn't believe she had been as abrupt with Jonathan as she implied, for he was back at the lodge in the late morning. When she heard Eve say she'd go pigeon-shooting with him later, Lira thought the world was turning upside-down faster than she could cope with. Eve never killed birds or animals. now she was saying the pigeons destroyed the vegetables she grew and would have to be kept down. Jonathan sounded quite happy to teach her to shoot with the four-ten, the gun, Lira thought, she had used to shoot the man with the beard. Only Jonathan, of course, had no idea of that. neither of them seemed deflected from their purpose by the fact that in a month or two Shrove would be sold, Eve would have left the gatehouse, and it would hardly matter to her whether the vegetables survived or not. In the afternoon Lira went up into the little wood to meet Sean. In arranging where to meet she had been careful to arrange this trysting place a good distance from where Bruno's body lay. They made love on a bed of soft dry grass, walled-in by hawthorn bushes. But afterward, holding her in his arms, Sean grew grave. He had to work for his living. He wasn't going on benefit if he could help it. For the next two days he could take a job clearing a house of furniture for a dealer in town, but after that he'd have to move on to where the apples were. He wanted her. Would she come? He couldn't wait forever, he couldn't really wait beyond Thursday. And after that how would they get in touch with each other? She hadn't liked that, the fact that he wouldn't wait. In the romantic plays and books she had read, the true lover had been prepared to wait indefinitely, not make conditions and threats. She got him to say that he'd come back here next Saturday, same time, same place. By then she promised she'd have made up her mind. She would have separated herself from her mother and come to him or else she'd be staying. Was it her imagination that he had seemed reluctant? Instead of ardour, her request to him had been met with doubts about whether he could make it, much depended on where he was, he would do his best. When he had gone and she had watched him go, heading for the place where he had parked the car, far up the lane, when she had seen the last of him as the trees absorbed him, the tears came into her eyes and she started to cry. They were tears of frustration, of impotence and self-pity at her own indecisiveness. Wiping her eyes on the backs of her hands, then rubbing them with her fists like a child, she walked slowly back the way she had come. It was nearly six, she calculated, the sun still high in the sky but some of its heat departed. Sean and she had been together for three hours but it had seemed no more than three minutes. She was thinking about her dilemma once more, wondering if some middle way could be found, some compromise, whereby she could continue to be here with Eve and keep Sean nearby, when she heard the first shot. Lira's instinct, whenever there was shooting on the grounds, was to take herself as far away from the neighbourhood of those reports as possible, even to cover her ears. Her dread was of actually seeing a bird fall to the ground, bloody and with feathers flying, or a rabbit brought down as it fled for cover. But this time she was not exactly sure where the shot had come from, it was often hard to tell. At any rate, it wasn't in this wood and wouldn't be in their back garden. She saw Matt first. Although she knew of Jonathan's intention to shoot pigeons, when she caught sight of Matt in the far distance, almost up by Shrove House, she thought it was he who was after the birds. Then she saw Jonathan and Eve standing together between the largest remaining cedar, the blue atlantica glauca, and the group of new young trees. They weren't very far from her, no more than a hundred yards, quite near enough for her to see that they had only one gun between them. Jonathan had been demonstrating something and now he put the shotgun into Eve's hands. Holding it gingerly, she raised the barrel in a clumsy way, with what seemed an effort. He gave her a kindly glance, then adjusted her hands, moving them farther apart. Their shadows had lengthened as the sun sank and now streamed out thin and dark across the leaf-patterned grass. When Jonathan clapped his hands to make the pigeons fly Lira stopped looking, opened the gate, and let herself into the gatehouse garden. She had forgotten to cover her ears. The gun went off, once, twice, three times. There came a cry no bird could have made, a high-pitched scream quite clearly audible from where she was. She stood still. For a moment a little child again, she saw in her mind's eye the bearded man as he died on the grass in the dusk. Almost without realising it, she had put up her hands over her ears. But there was to be no more firing. She took away her hands, she turned around and saw Matt running across the grass, waving his arms. Between the trees, on the open green that the sun and shadows dappled, Jonathan lay sprawled on his back. Eve had dropped the gun and stood looking down at him, her hands clasped under her chin. Lira ran into the house. _)HE"D shot him," Lira said. "I knew at once it was on purpose. If he was dead he couldn't sell Shrove and it would go to his cousin David Cosby, who loved the place and wouldn't dream of selling it. It was the only way to make sure she got it. Marrying him wouldn't have worked, he'd still have sold it. "The way she looked at me, I read it all in her face. The trouble was Matt. Who knows what she'd have done if Matt hadn't been there? Pretended to find Jonathan dead that evening or next day and made people believe he'd been out shooting alone? But Matt had seen. I don't mean he'd seen her do it, but he'd seen them together firing at the pigeons. "Eve said to me, tell the police you saw nothing, tell them you don't even live here, you're just visiting, and then she said, why tell them anything? You don't have to be here. Matt didn't see you. So I went and sat in the little castle and they didn't know I'd been there. I think I knew then that she wanted to handle it all on her own. "The police knew she had killed Jonathan but they could never prove it wasn't an accident, no one saw it happen, you see. I've been thinking a lot about it since the trial and that's the conclusion I've come to, that once they knew she'd killed Jonathan they remembered Bruno going missing and then they started thinking about the man called Trevor Hughes. They'd actually questioned her about him and she'd denied ever seeing him, but they'd got a record of it, they never forgot. I expect that's what happened. "When they searched the gatehouse they didn't find Bruno's earrings because she was wearing them. She was wearing them the night before I left so I'm sure she still had them on the next morning. They did find Trevor Hughes's wedding ring with his initials inside and his wife's. "They must have asked Matt if he knew anything about Trevor Hughes. Or else Matt went to them of his own accord and told them what he remembered that morning when the dogs behaved in that strange way. If she'd killed him they wondered what she'd done with his body and eventually they started digging. "I'm sure they'd have liked to indict her for shooting Jonathan, but they were afraid she'd be acquitted. And they got nowhere trying to trace Bruno. But when they found Trevor Hughes's bones they found shot among them that came from that four-ten shotgun, that same one Jonathan was using to teach her to shoot pigeons. And they must have found his watch too for his wife to identify. I expect it went on for weeks after they first arrested her. I'd really like to know how they managed that--I mean, did they charge her with murdering Jonathan and then give that up and charge her with manslaughter instead just to hold her? And when did they think they'd got enough evidence to be sure of getting a conviction on the Hughes murder charge?" Sean was staring at her incredulously. Lira smiled at him. "I told you, I'd like to be a lawyer. I'm interested in the law." "You're a bright girl. You shouldn't be cleaning for that old woman." Lira shrugged. It didn't seem important, it was only temporary. She began clearing their take away containers off the table. "D'you want a cup of tea?" "In a minute," he said. "I've got something to tell you first. now it's my turn. I've got something to tell you." She filled the kettle, lit the gas, and, catching sight of his expression, turned it low. "What, then?" "I've been accepted for the management course." As soon as the less than enthusiastic words were out, she regretted them, knew she should have congratulated him. But she had said, "Well, you knew you would be." A flush darkened his face. "It's not been as straightforward as that. As a matter of fact, it was touch and go. They only took five out of two hundred applicants." "And you're one of the five? Great." She must have sounded kind but indifferent, maternally indulgent perhaps. He said, "Listen to me, Lira. Come and sit down." Her sigh was audible but she sat down next to him. "The course starts in the new Year but they want me up there next week. It's in Scotland, a place near Glasgow. They wanted to put me in a flat with the other four, that's the way they fix it, but I'll have you with me, so I said I'd see to my own accommodations. I never said caravan, I wasn't telling them all my private affairs." "Glasgow?" she said. "That'll be a long way from wherever Eve is. But I don't suppose it'd be for long, would it? Didn't you say six months?" "Lira, hopefully this is only the start. You've not been following me. This is a new way of life. It's great the things they'll do for you once you've shown you're up to the course. For one thing, the idea is to manage one of their stores and they're building new branches all the time. There's one they're putting up now on the M3. Hopefully I could be assistant manager of one of them by this time next year. They'll help you with a mortgage on a flat." He must have seen she didn't know what he meant. While he explained what a mortgage was, she fidgeted about, suddenly wanting a cup of tea more than anything in the world but not quite liking to get up and make it. He took hold of her hand, imprisoning it. "It's a great chance for me. It's sort of made me see myself differently, like I'm not the person I reckoned I was, I'm better, I could be my own man, a responsible person with a real career." Yes, she thought, you even talk better. It's made you articulate, you can suddenly express yourself� Then he shocked her. "There's something else I want to tell you, love. I want you to marry me, I want us to get married." It was as much as she could do to speak. "Married?" "I knew it'd be a surprise." He leaned toward her and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. Fondly he said, "You silly nana, 33o 33' you've gone all red. If it's on account of your mum, I don't mind that. It'll be just the same to me as if you was any other girl with a normal family." "Sean..." she began but it was as if she hadn't interrupted him. "I'll get paid when I'm training, that's another great thing. Hopefully you won't have to work no more. I wouldn't want my wife going out cleaning anyway. And when the kids start coming you'll want to be at home..." This time she shouted to break the flow. "I'm not yet seventeen years old!" "That's okay. You have to be over sixteen to get married, not over seventeen. It's seventeen for a driving licence." She burst out laughing. It was too much. Unlike him though this would be, he had to be making some elaborate joke. It was a moment or two before she understood, before she saw from his hurt face that he was deadly serious. "Oh, Sean, don't look like that, don't be so illy." "Silly!" "Well, of course it's silly talking about marrying and having children and one of those things, a what-d'you-call-it, a mortgage. We've got our lives to live first. I'm not even grown up really. In the law I can't sign a contract or make a will or anything." "Shut up about the fucking law, will you?" She flinched a little, got up and went to the stove. "I want my tea if you don't," she said in a chilly voice, Eve's voice. He was sullen as she had never seen him. Suddenly she realised that she had never crossed him, everything had gone pleasantly for him until this evening, but now the sultan was looking at her head and sharpening his sword. "I don't mind coming to Scotland for a bit," she said in a conciliating voice. "I'd quite like somewhere else for a change. We could try it. You might not like the course." He took his tea without a thank-you. "You'd better listen to me, Lira. Have you thought where you'd be without me? You'd be lost, you'd be nothing. Thanks to the way that bitch brought you up, you wouldn't last five minutes on your own. You don't even know what a mortgage is! You never knew what the Pill was! The best you can do to earn your living is cleaning or picking apples. You don't know nothing except for rubbish out of books. She's crippled you for life, and you're going to need me to get you through it." It was an echo of Bruno, Bruno's words outside the old station. She brought the teacup to her lips but the tea seemed tasteless. "I'll be your husband, I'll look after you. There's some as'd say it was a pretty big thing I was doing, considering who and what your mother is. You don't reckon I'd rather live in this clapped-out old van than in a decent flat, do you? It'd be okay sharing with those guys, but I've a responsibility to you, I know that, and I'll be taking the car and the van up to Glasgow on Friday. I won't say I'll be taking them anyway, whether you come or not, because you'll have to come, you don't have no choice." "Of course I have a choice." "No, you don't. It's like this, you have to come with me just because you can't be left here with no place to live, no family, no friends, and--you have to face it, love no skills. The truth is you're more like six than sixteen. It's not your fault but that's the way it is." She said nothing. Taking her silence for acquiescence, he turned on the television. She thought he looked pleased with himself. The look on his face was Bruno's when he thought he had persuaded Eve to move into that house with him. After a little while he opened a can of beer and began to drink from the can. He must have been aware of her eyes on him, for he turned around, grinned, and made the thumbs-up sign, intended no doubt to reassure. She picked up the book Mr. Spurdell had lent her, First Steps in Englirh Law, and found the place she had reached in it the day before. That was the first broken night she had had since she shared a bed with Sean and almost the first that they hadn't made love. She lay awake, thinking how much she had loved him and wondering how that could have changed. How could you feel so passionately for a person and then, suddenly, not care anymore at all? A few words, a gross gesture, an insensitive assumption, and it was all gone. Had it been like that for Eve and Bruno? She was out all day on Saturday, roaming the fields by herself, but on Sunday it rained and she lay in bed, reading. When she refused to get up and tidy the place, shake out the mats, help him fetch water, he accused her of sulking. They both went to work in the morning and met as usual at five. It was dark, pitch dark, when they reached the caravan, and there was no water. They had forgotten to fetch the water before they left. Lira took the bucket and a torch. It struck her as somehow silly that it was pouring with rain yet they had no water. She held the bucket under the pipe that protruded from the hillside, filled it, and made her way back, once nearly falling on the slippery mud. Once in the caravan she opened a can of Coke. She was washing her hands at the sink before she saw what he had done to the books. She glanced into the living area as she reached for the towel. A piece of book jacket, a torn-offtriangle, red lettering on a black background, lay on the table. It brought a constriction to her throat. They had no wastebasket, only a plastic sack under the sink. The sight of its contents made her feel rather dizzy. Sean wasn't looking at her, he was watching television, a can of beer beside him, a lighted cigarette in his left hand. She had the feeling he was consciously not looking at her, forcing his eyes to fix on the screen. Easier than rummaging in that sack was to see what he had done by examining the books that remained. Mary Wollstonecraft was gone and The Divine Comedy and the Metamorphoses. Middlemarch was gone. With bile rising into her mouth, she saw that he had spared Firrt Steps in Englirh Law and the two Hardy novels. Those belonged to Mr. Spurdell and he knew it. Sean was always law-abiding. He wouldn't destroy "other people's" property. She didn't count as other people, she was his. She walked across and switched off the television. He jumped up, and for a moment she thought he would hit her. But she had misjudged him there. Sean wouldn't hit a woman. "Why?" she said, the single word. "Come on, love, you know why. You've got to put all that behind you, that life. You've left the place, she's gone, you're out in the real world now. Them books, they was just a way of hiding yourself from real life. Hopefully you're not going to need them in the future. We've got our whole future before us. Isn't that what you said yourself?" Had she? not in that context, she was sure. He was triumphant, he was in charge. She felt as angry as she now guessed Eve must sometimes have felt. "They were my books." "They was ours, love. We've been through that before. Okay, so you bought them with the money you earned. How would you like it if I said that Coke you're drinking was mine because it was my money paid for it? It's the same thing." It was illogical and Eve had taught her to be logical, to be reasonable. Eve must have felt like this when Bruno pretended to have a social conscience to cloak his need to possess her utterly. She must have felt like this when, after seventeen years of striving and repudiation, of hope and humiliation and desertion, Jonathan had at last asked her to marry him. Lira was impotent, she had nothing to say, she could only imagine how he would twist what she said. She set their food out, she made tea, she put the television on again and was rewarded by his seizing her hand and squeezing it in his own. Together they watched an episode in a Hollywood miniseries. Or Sean watched it while she fixed her eyes on the screen and took her mind elsewhere. She could clean a house and fetch water from a spring and read books but it was true what he said, in other ways she was more like six than sixteen. She couldn't manage on her own. Even if she worked eight hours a day for Mrs. Spurdell or someone like Mrs. Spurdell, she would still only earn �120 a week, and she doubted if she could do eight hours' housework a day. Where would she live? How would she afford anything? Was there anyone in the world who would pay her to translate Latin into English for them? She knew nothing about it but that she doubted. Besides, she knew from investigating in Mr. Spurdell's study that you had to have certificates and things, diplomas, degrees, before people would employ you to do things which weren't housework or putting packets on a shelf in a supermarket. She had nowhere to live. Jonathan Tobias might have helped her about that but he was dead. She had no father, only one of three men who knew nothing of her existence. Eve didn't seem to care for her. Eve didn't know where she was or what had happened to her, but perhaps, in Eve's position, she wouldn't care, either. Or Eve might care very much, might be in an agony of anxiety, when she found out, as she must have, that Lira had never got to Heather's. But no one had come looking for her, no one had put pieces in the paper about her or on the television. Lira knew there was no one to look after her but Sean. There was only Sean. He held her hand. Soon he had his arm around her. She was full of cold dislike for him, which she somehow knew would have warmed into simple irritation after a night's sleep. If he would leave her alone. If he would leave her to come to terms with it in her own way. She had to, after all. She had to make the best of it because without him she was useless and helpless. Only he wouldn't leave her alone. He must have been able to tell how hostile she was to him, he must have sensed her reluctance to be touched by him and understood something by the way she took his hand off her leg when he began running it up and down her thigh. They would have to share a bed, she was resigned to that, but when she realised he intended making love she spoke a firm, "No!" And then, "No, please, I don't want to." But making love wasn't at all what happened. She had asked him once if he would ever force her and he had treated the question as ludicrous. But he took no notice when she told him she didn't want him, she didn't want to do it. He silenced her by clamping his mouth over hers. He held her hands down, tried to force her thighs apart with his knee, and when that didn't work, with his foot. To justify himself, he pretended she was playing coy and laughed into her mouth as he thrust like a dog in the street, as he shoved his penis hard inside her, held her arms stretched out the width of the bed, pinioning her. She was powerless. It hurt, as it had never hurt even the first time. When it was over and he was whispering to her that he knew she had really enjoyed it, he could always tell if a girl liked it, she thought of Eve and Trevor Hughes. Eve had had a pair of dogs to call, but she had nothing. He fell asleep immediately. She cried in silence. It was weak and foolish, she was a baby to do it, but she couldn't stop. Eve would never have tolerated such treatment. Eve never permitted persecution. not since what had happened on the way back from the airport. Her own suffering was nothing like as terrible, but bad enough, a foretaste of a possible future. Eve had revenged herself on three men for what three men had done to her. That was why she had done those things, for vengeance more than for fear or safety or gain. More for vengeance than for Shrove. Was this then what her own life would be? Making love when she wanted to and also making love when she didn't want to. Or doing that when she didn't want to. After what had happened, she thought she would never want to again. She remembered the day of Jonathan Tobias's wedding and how Eve had used the occasion as an opportunity for a lesson, as she so often did. She had taught Lira about marriage and marriage customs but had said nothing of having to do what a man wanted when you didn't want to, of men getting their way because they were stronger, of working for them and waiting on them and submitting to their right to tell you what to do. Perhaps she hadn't because Lira had been only a child then. It was a lifetime ago and she was a child no longer. But once more she was in a position where she couldn't run away. And it was worse than last time when all she needed was courage. now she had nowhere to run to. One other thing Eve had done for her, though, apart from teaching her so many of the things Sean said were useless, and that was to teach her to rough it. Life had never been soft. They made their own pleasures with the minimum of aid, without toys, television, videos, CD players, external amusements. Eventually, after years, they had got their bathroom. The gatehouse had an old fridge and an even older oven, but there was no heating upstairs, no down quilts or electric blankets of the kind she'd seen at Spurdells', no new clothes--those jeans and the padded coat were the only things she possessed not made by Eve or from the Oxfam shop--they'd had none of that take away or processed food she'd got used to with Sean but never really trusted. They'd made their own bread at the gatehouse, grown their own vegetables, made their own jam and even cream cheese. Everywhere they went they'd had to walk once Bruno was gone. Her mother had given her a kind of endurance, a sort of toughness, but what use was that in the world of Spurdells and Superway? You didn't need to be tough, you needed certificates and diplomas, families and relations, a roof over your head and means of transport, you needed skills and money. Well, she had a thousand pounds. She could see the money belt on the table where he had thrown it when he stripped her. If he knew about the money, he would want it. Once he wanted it, he would take it. He would say that what was hers was theirs and therefore his. She got up, washed all traces of him off her body, pulled on leggings and the blue-and-red sweater for warmth and, curling the money belt up as tightly as she could, thrust it inside one of her boots. Keeping as far from him as she could, on the far edge of the bed, she went to sleep.

ROUDLY showing Lira her box of decorations that had all come from Harrods, Mrs. Spurdell said it was too early to dress the tree yet. But there was no point in deferring the purchase of it until later when the best would be gone. Philippa and her children were coming for Christmas. Jane was coming. Having once told Lira Philippa's Christian name, Mrs. Spurdell had since then always referred to her as Mrs. Page while Jane was "my younger daughter." It was the first Christmas tree Lira had ever seen. Indeed, it was the first she had ever heard of and the rationale for uprooting a fir tree, winding tinsel strings around it, and hanging glass balls on the branches was beyond her understanding. As for Christian customs, Eve had taught her no more about Christianity than she had about Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. She could hear Mr. Spurdell moving about in his study upstairs. His school had broken up for Christmas. With the two of them in the house she had no chance of a bath. She scrubbed out the tub and put caustic down the lavatory pan. While she was cleaning the basin it occurred to her to look in the medicine cabinet. There, among the denture-cleaning tablets, the vapour rub, and the corn solvent, she found a cylindrical container labelled, MRS. M.

SPURDELL, SODIUM AMYTAL, OnE TO BE TAKEn AT NIGIT. Of its properties she knew nothing except that it evidently made you sleep. She put the container in her pocket. If she didn't have her money in her hand before she gave notice, she thought it quite likely Mrs. Spurdell would refuse to pay her. While she pushed the vacuum cleaner up and down the passage, she worked out various strategies. Determined to be honest and not to prevaricate, she knocked on the study door. "Do you want to come in here, Lira?" Mr. Spurdell put his head out. "I won't be a minute." "I'll do the study last if you like," she said. "I've brought all your books back." "That's a good girl. You're welcome to more. I've no objection to lending my dear old friends to a sensible person who knows how to take care of them. A good book, you know, Lira, is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit." "Yes," said Lira, "but I don't want to borrow anymore. Can I ask you something?" No doubt, he expected her to ask who said that about a good book but she already knew it was Milton and knew too, which was very likely more than he did, that it came from Areopag itica. He was all smiling invitation to having his brains picked. "How can you find out where someone's in prison?" "I beg your pardon?" The smile was swiftly gone. now for the honesty. "My mother has gone to prison and I want to know where she is." "Your mother? Good heavens. This isn't a game, is it, Lira? You're being serious?" She was weary with him. "I only want to know who to write to or who to phone and find out where they've put her. I want to write to her, I want to go and see her." "Good heavens. You've really given me quite a shock." He took a step forward, glanced over the bannisters, and spoke in a lowered voice, "Don't give Mrs. Spurdell a hint of this." "Why would I tell her?" Lira made an impatient gesture with her hands. "Is there a place I could phone? An office, I mean, a police headquarters of some kind?" She was vaguely remembering American police serials. "Oh, dear, I suppose it would be the Home Office." "What's the Home Office?" Questions that were requests for information always pleased him. Prefacing his explanation with a "You don't know what the Home Office is?" he proceeded to a little lecture on the police, prisons, immigration, and ministries of the interior. Lira took in what she needed. She drew breath and braced herself. Sean's words came back to her, about being more like six than sixteen, about being helpless. "Please, may I use your phone? And may I look in the phone directory first?" He was no longer the benevolent pedagogue, twinkling as he imparted knowledge. A frown appeared and a petulant tightening of the mouth. "No, I'm afraid you couldn't. No to both. I can't have that sort of thing going on here. Besides, this is the most expensive time. Have you any idea what it would cost to phone to London at eleven o'clock in the morning?" "I'll pay." "No, I'm sorry. It's not only the money. This isn't the kind of thing Mrs. Spurdell and I should wish to be involved in. I'm sorry but no, certainly not." She gave a little bob of the head and immediately switched on the vacuum cleaner once more. When the bedrooms were done, she came back to the study and found him gone. Quickly she looked for Home Office in the phone book. Several numbers were listed. She wrote down three of them, knowing she didn't want Immigration or nationality or Telecommunications. The house was clean and tidy, her time up. It seemed harder than it had ever been to extract twelve pounds from Mrs. Spurdell, the last pound coming in the shape of fifteen separate coins. Lira thanked her and said she was leaving, she wouldn't be coming anymore. Mrs. Spurdell affected not to believe her ears. When she was convinced, she asked rhetorically how she was supposed to manage over Christmas. Lira said nothing but pocketed the money and put on her coat. "I think you're very ungrateful," said Mrs. Spurdell, "and very foolish, considering how hard jobs are to come by." She began shouting for her husband, presumably to come and stop Lira from leaving. Lira walked out of the front door and shut it behind her. All the way down Aspen Close she expected to have to run because one of them was pursuing her but nothing like that happened. If the manager who admired her had been on duty in the Duke's Head she would have asked him if she might use his phone, but there was a woman in reception. While she was occupied at the computer, Lira walked upstairs and had a bath. not waiting for Sean but going home on the bus, it occurred to her as she climbed to the front seat on the top, that for a six-year-old--like the milkman with a child's mental age?--she hadn't done badly. Surely she had been resourceful? She had acquired a soporific drug, discovered how to find her mother, had even found the phone number, had given in her notice, had a bath, and lacking a towel, dried herself on the hotel bathroom curtains. Would she have done better if she'd grown up in a London street and been to boarding school? Sean had finished at Superway. He had unpacked his last carton of cornflakes and last can of tomatoes. A little wary of her still but no longer sullen, he described how the manager had shaken hands with him and wished him well. "Does anyone know about me?" Lira asked him. "I mean, the people at your work? Do they know you've got a girlfriend who lives with you and who I am and all that?" "No, they don't. I keep my private affairs to myself. So far as they know, I'm all on my own." "Will you drive to Scotland?" "Course I'll drive. What you got in mind? First-class train tickets and a stopover in a luxury hotel? You've got a lot to learn about money, love." He began fretting about a new law that had come in, excluding caravans from all land except where the owner's express permission was given. The sooner they were gone the better. Would the law in Scotland be different? He'd heard it sometimes was. Lira knew more about it than he did, she had read it up in Mr. Spurdell's newspaper. For instance, she knew that if your caravan was turned off a piece of land and you weren't allowed to park it anywhere else, the local authority was bound to house you. It might not be a real house or a flat, it might be only a room, even a hotel room, but it would be omewhere. She wasn't going to say any of this to Sean and risk a sneer about her cleverness and her aspirations. All the time they had been there she had kept the caravan very clean. Cleanliness was ingrained in her, Eve had seen to that, and she could no more have left her home dirty than she could have failed to wash herself. For all that, it was a poor place, everything about it shabby, worn, scraped, scuffed, chipped, broken, cracked, and makeshift-mended. But the gatehouse had been shabby too. Would she want anything like the "monstrosity" Bruno had picked or the Spurdells' house, she who had been spoiled for choice by Shrove? The caravan and the car, a home and a means of transport. With those, life would be possible, some kind of future would be possible. She watched Sean speculatively. Spartan living wasn't all that Eve had taught her. No one had known where Bruno was and no one had cared except an easily fobbed-off estate agent. Trevor Hughes had had an estranged wife, glad to see the back of him. No one knew Sean wasn't alone. Her existence, her presence in his life, all this he had kept secret. He had left Superway and at this branch they would think no more about him, no doubt he was already forgotten. At the Glasgow end they would expect him to turn up for the course on Monday. If he didn't come they wouldn't set in motion a police alert but conclude that he had changed his mind. She knew little about life, but the experiences she had had were of a peculiar nature. Few could look back on a similar history. She knew from experience, from the disappearance of Trevor Hughes and Bruno Drummond, that the police do little about searching for missing men in their particular circumstances. In this case it was unlikely an absent man would even be reported missing. Sean's mother had long since lost interest in him. His brothers and sisters were scattered in distant places, long out of touch. The chain-smoking grandfather was too ancient to bother. The people he called his friends were pub acquaintances and caravansite neighbours like Kevin. While Sean watched television, she looked at herself long in the glass, the cracked piece of mirror ten inches by six that was all she and Sean had to see their faces in. It had seemed to her that Eve had never changed. The woman she had run away from a hundred days and nights ago was in her eyes the same woman, looking just the same, as the mother who had brought her to Shrove when she was three, not older or heavier or less fresh. Yet now as she looked at her own face it was a youthful Eve that she saw, different from the Eve of the present, an Eve she had forgotten but who came back to her as herself. As Jonathan had once said, as Bruno had said, she was a clone of that Eve, fatherless, her mother's double, her mother all over again. With her mother's methods, with her mother's instincts. What would Eve have done? not put up with it. never yielded. Eve would have argued, remonstrated, reasoned--as she had--and when all that was to no avail, when they wouldn't agree or see her point of view, appeared to give in and conciliate them. Retreating to the kitchen where he couldn't see her, she reread the instructions on the label of the sodium amytal carton. One would evidently send him to sleep. Two, surely, would put him into a deep sleep. And while he slept? He had often reproached her for not being squeamish enough, for an ability to confront violence and blood and death. She had never been taught a horror of these things. If she was horrified by any of violent death's aspects it was at her own weakness in vomiting when she found Bruno's body. Eve had taught her to be a perfectionist, to be good at everything she did. She would do this well, cleanly, efficiently, and without remorse. "What time do we start in the morning?" she asked him. "First thing. Hopefully we can be on our way by eight." "At least it's stopped raining." "The weather forecast says an area of high pressure's coming. It's going to get cold, cold and bright." "Shouldn't you put the towing bar on tonight?" "Christ," he said. "I forgot." She doubted if she could do it herself. In the past, when he had done it, she hadn't bothered to watch him. This evening, of course, she watched him all the time, studying what he did, assessing him in every possible situation, as she had done in those early days when she was in love with him. Perhaps, at sixteen, you were never in love with the same person for long. It was violent, it was intense, but of short duration. Did teachers like Mr. Spurdell, or people like Eve, ever ask if Juliet would have gone on being in love with Romeo? Sean worked by the light of a Tilley lamp and a rechargeable battery torch. Wrapped in the thick padded coat, she sat on the caravan steps in the quiet and the darkness, appreciating for the first time how silent it was here and how remote. Like Shrove. This place had the advantages of Shrove. not a single light was visible, not an isolated pinpoint in any direction across the miles of hills and meadowland. The black land rolled away to meet the nearly black sky. If she strained her ears the gentle chatter of the stream was just audible. Above her now the stars were coming out, Charles's Wain pale and spread out and Orion bright and strong. The white planet, still and clear, was Venus. The air had that glittery feel to it, as of unseen frost in the atmosphere. Metal clinking against metal occasionally broke the silence as Sean worked, that and the soft ghostly cries of owls in the invisible trees. She hooked her thumbs inside the money belt, feeling its thickness. How was it she knew that if she let Sean live and went up north with him he would sooner or later find out about that money and demand it himself? She did know. She could even create the scene in her mind with her telling him it was hers, hers by right of her mother, and Sean saying she wasn't fit to have charge of money, he'd look after it and put it toward the home they'd buy. He finished coupling the car to the caravan. They went back inside and he washed his hands. It was late, past eleven, and as he kept saying, they had to get up early. "Don't you worry, I'll wake you," he said. "You know what you are, sleep like the dead. I don't reckon you'd ever wake up without me to give you a shake." She didn't argue. Her dissenting role was past and now she was all acquiescence. Eve had given in to Bruno over the house and to Jonathan over the sale of Shrove. Perhaps she had murmured, "Yes, all right," to Trevor Hughes before she bit his hand. You gave in, you smiled and said a sweet, "You win." You lulled them into believing theirs was the victory. "Wake me up at seven and I'll make you tea." It wasn't unusual for her to say that, she often said and did it. He never had a hot drink at night, always had one in the morning. She put the pill container behind the sugar basin, opened the drawer where they kept cutlery, their blunt knives and forks with bent tines, and checked that the one sharp knife was there, the carver. It was good to be the kind of person who didn't flinch from weapons or the consequences of using them. He was already in bed. Her throat felt dry and her stomach muscles tightened as they had on the previous night and the night before. On neither of those nights had he touched her. Last evening he hadn't even kissed her. But she was afraid just the same, of his strength and her own weakness, knowing now something she'd never realised and would once have refused to believe, that a woman, however young and vigorous, is powerless against a determined man. When she came to bed and switched off the light she fancied she could feel his eyes on her in the darkness. Gradually, as always happened, she became accustomed to the absence of light, and the darkness ceased to be absolute, became grey rather than black. The moon had risen out there, or half a moon to give so pale a light. It trickled thinly around the window blinds. His eyes were on her and his lips tentatively touched her cheek. He must have felt her immediate tension for he sighed softly. An enormous relief relaxed her body as he rolled over on his side away from her. She withdrew to the side of the bed, to put as many inches as she could between herself and him. She would sleep now and in the morning she would kill him. D REAMInG, she was herself and not herself. She was Eve, too. She looked down at her hands and they were Eve's hands, smaller than hers, the nails longer. A shrinking had reduced her to Eve's height. Yet she was in the caravan where Eve had never been. She knew she was dreaming and that somehow, by taking thought, by a process of concentration, she could be herself again. It was dark. She could just make out the shape of Sean lying in bed and a hump in the bedclothes beside him as if another body lay there, her body. She had come out of her body the way the Ancient Egyptians believed the Ka did. But it felt solid, her hand tingled when she drew a nail across the palm. It was no longer Eve, for Eve had come in and was standing at the foot of the bed. They looked at each other in silence. Eve's hands were chained, she had come out of prison, and Lira knew--though not how she knew--that she must go back there. In spite of the chains, painfully, with a great effort, Eve reached up and took the gun down from the caravan wall. There was no gun there but she reached up and took it down. A little moonlight gleamed on the metal. Long ago, years and years ago, Lira had known that her mother took the gun down from the wall but she had never seen her do it. Eve came up to her, holding the gun in her manacled hands. She did not speak, yet her message communicated itself to Lira. It would be easy. Only the first time was hard. Sleep would still be possible and peace of mind and contentment. Long days of forgetfulness would pass. Eve smiled. She began to whisper confidingly how she had wrapped herself in a sheet, taken a kitchen knife, and crept upstairs to the sleeping Bruno. Lira cried out then. She reached for Sean, for the bed, for the body of herself and entered it again, her body growing around her, waking as she woke. And then she was up, huddled and crouching in a far corner. The moon still shone and its greenish light still infiltrated the caravan, seeping between window frames and blinds. It was icy cold. Gradually full wakefulness returned. The cold brought it back. Strangely, the dream had been quite warm. She fumbled around in the half dark, first for Mrs. Spurdell's pill container, then for the sweater Eve had knitted. As she pulled it over her head, the dreadful feeling came to her that once her eyes were uncovered again she would see Eve standing there, chained, smiling, advising. She opened her eyes. They were alone, she and Sean. It struck her as very strange, almost unbelievable, that she had meant to kill him. More cold would come in but still she opened the caravan door. The steps glittered with frost. She prised the top off the pill carton and threw the pills into the long wet grass in the ditch. The frost burned her bare feet and when she was back inside again sharp pains shot through them. Despair seemed to have been waiting for her in the caravan. It was there in the cold darkness and the smell of bodies and stale food. The world hadn't fallen apart when Eve told her to go. It was falling apart now, one staunch rock after another tumbling and landsliding, Eve, Sean, herself. Soon the ground beneath her feet would founder and split and swallow her up. She gave a little cry and in an agony of grief and loneliness, flung herself facedownward on the bed, breaking into sobs. Sean woke up and put the light on. He didn't ask what was the matter but lifted her up in his arms, held his arms tightly around her, and pulled her close to him, burrowing them both under the covers. Murmuring that her hands were frozen, he squeezed them between their bodies, against his warm body. "Don't cry, sweetheart." "I can't help it, I can't stop." "Yes, you can. You will in a minute. I know why you're crying." "You don't, you can't." Because I can't kill you, because I'll never kill anyone, because I'm not Eve. "I do know, Lira. It's because of what I done the other night, isn't it? It seemed funny at the time, like a joke, and then I got to remembering what you'd said to me when we first done it, back in the summer, like I'd never make you if you didn't want to, and I'd said I never would. I've been ashamed of myself. I've hated myself." "Have you?" she whispered. "Have you really?" "I didn't know how to say it. I was like embarrassed. In the light, in the daytime, I don't know, I couldn't say it. I'm not like you, I can't express myself like you. I've felt that too, maybe you never knew it but I have, you being like superior to me in everything." "I'm not, I'm really not." "It's so bloody cold in here I'm going to light the gas. I don't reckon we'll sleep no more. It's nearly six." Wiping her wet face on the sheet, she watched him get up, wrap himself in the clothes that lay about, and then put a match to the open oven. Her eyes hurt with crying and she felt a little sick. What he said next surprised her so much she sat bolt upright in bed. "You don't want to come with me, do you?" "What?" He got back into bed and pulled her down under the bedclothes. He hugged her and held her head in the hollow of his shoulder. His hands were always warm. That hadn't really registered with her before, or she had taken it for granted. She remembered the sunny summer days and how she had watched him, that first time, from among the trees at Shrove and his puzzled look as he stared unseeing at her, aware as people mysteriously are of being observed. He said it again, "You don't want to come with me," but not this time in the form of a question. Shaking her head under the bedclothes, she realised that the movement indicated nothing to him and she whispered a small, "No." "Is it because I--I forced myself on you?" "No." "I'd never do it again. I've learned my lesson." "It's not because of that." "No, I know." He sighed. She felt his chest move with the sigh and was aware of his heart beating under her cheek. "It's because we're not like the same kind of people," he said. "I'm an ordinary--well, I'm working class and you're you may have been brought up in that cracked way but you're you're lightyears above me." "No, no, Sean. No." "You only got to listen to the way we talk. I know I get words wrong and I get grammar wrong. Hopefully that'll change when I get into management. I might say you could teach me, but that wouldn't work. In a funny sort of way, I knew it wouldn't work when it first started last summer, only I wouldn't admit it even to myself. I suppose I was in love well, I know I was. I'd never been in love before." "nor I." "No, I reckon you never had the chance. I had but I never was. not till you. Only, love, how'll you make out on your own?" "I'll manage." "I do love you, Lira. It wasn't just for sex. I loved you from the first moment I saw you." She put up her face to him and felt for his mouth with her mouth. The touch of his lips and the feel of his tongue on hers quickened her thawing body. She felt the quick familiar ripple of desire. He sighed with pleasure and relief. They made love half-clothed, buried under the piled covers, his hands warm and hers still icy, while the blue gas flared and the water from condensation flowed down the windows. It was eight when they woke up, much later than he had intended. She was making tea, wearing her padded coat, when he said, "I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll leave you the van." She turned around. "The caravan?" He thought she was correcting him again. "Okay, teacher, the caravan. Always got to be right, haven't you? Always know best. That's what you'd better be, not a doctor or a lawyer, but a teacher." "Did you really mean you'd leave me the caravan?" "Sure I did. Look at it this way, I was going to take the van on account of you, but if you're not coming it'd be better for me to share with those guys, it'd be easier." "You could sell it." "What, this old wreck? Who'd buy it?" Her hesitation lasted only a moment. "I've got some money," she said. "I found it when I went to Shrove. It was Eve's but she'd have wanted me to have it." "You never said. Why didn't you tell me?" "Because I'm horrible--or I thought you were. Don't be cross now. It's a lot, it's more than a thousand pounds." She was ashamed because she'd thought he'd grab the money as soon as he got the chance and here he was shaking his head. "I always said I'd not live off my girlfriend and I won't. Even"--he smiled a bit ruefully--"if you're not my girlfriend no more. You'll need it, love, whatever you do. I'd get in touch with that Heather if I was you. Hopefully, she's been wondering what you've been up to. It'll be a relief to her. And then maybe you and her can go together to see your mum." Lira gave him his tea. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Sean. I'm going to cook us a big breakfast of eggs and bacon and fried potatoes and fried bread and if it stinks out the caravan, who cares?" "We'll meet again one day, won't we?" he said as he started on his first egg. "You never know, we might both be different." "Of course we'll meet again." She knew they never would. Whatever became of him, she would be different beyond recognition. "You'll need someone to look after you." He fretted a bit as he packed his bags. They were Superway plastic carriers, the only luggage he had. Guilt over her made him fret. "You'll get hold of Heather, won't you? That money you've got, it's not all that much. I'll tell you what, I'll drive you into town, it's on my way. You can phone her from there." "All right." "I'll feel easier, love." Instead of hating the new situation, he was relieved. Just a bit. She could tell that, she could see it in his eyes. Tomorrow it would be more than a bit, it would be overwhelming. He wouldn't be able to believe his luck. As it was, now, he was forcing himself to put up a big pretence of being sad. "I'll worry about you." "Write down where you'll be," she said, "and I'll write to you and tell you what's happened to me. I promise." He gave her a sidelong look. "Don't put in too many long words." The two phone boxes in the marketplace were both empty. Sean parked in front of them. He felt in his jacket pocket and gave her all the change he had, coins to phone Heather and coins to phone the Home Office. There were enough of them to last even if people at the other end kept her waiting while they went off to find someone. First, he said, she must get on to directory enquiries for Heather's number. She'd got the address still, hadn't she? "But maybe you'd better come with me, after all, love. Just for a week or two, until we've found someplace for you to go, until you're sure of this Heather." She shook her head. "You've left the van behind, remember? You've left me the van." That he was grateful for her use of his term she could see in his eyes. They seemed full of love, as they had been in those early days, at apple-picking time, in the warm sunny fields. She put up her face and kissed him, a long soft passionless kiss. It troubled her, and always would, that she had thought of killing him. Even if she hadn't really been serious, even if it was a fantasy created out of stress and memory, it would always be there. More than anything else, it would be responsible for making any further love or companionship or even contiguity between them impossible. "Drive off," she said. "Don't wave. I'll be okay. Good luck." But she watched the car go, she couldn't help herself. And he did wave. He did a funny thing, he blew her a kiss. She was left in the cold marketplace, on the pavement, with shoppers all around her. The phone boxes weren't empty anymore. A woman had gone into one of them and a boy into the other. She sat down on the low brick wall built around a flower bed, an empty flower bed, the earth thinly sprinkled with frost. It didn't matter to her how many people went into those phone boxes, if a queue of fifty formed, if someone went in and vandalised them like they'd done to the one outside Superway, pulled the phones off the wall, it wouldn't matter to her because she didn't mean to phone anyone. What she had to do now was think of how to find out where a certain street was. She thought about it. If she didn't fix her mind on something practical it would fill up with fear, with the realisation of her utter aloneness. Sooner or later she was going to have to confront that, but not now. A picture of herself as a silly little ignorant girl sitting on a brick wall weeping rose before her eyes and she resolved not to let it become real. She would go into a shop and ask. They didn't know. The shop was full of small objects Lira thought were called souvenirs, brooches and key rings and little boxes, fluffy animals and plastic dolls and china mugs, that she couldn't believe anyone would want to possess. The people who worked there all came from outside the town. You could get a street plan, one of them said. How do I, she asked, and if they looked at her strangely, they nevertheless said, a paper shop, yes, that's the best place, there's one three doors along. And there was. And they had a street plan. They didn't seem to think it was a funny thing to ask for. It was a long way away, her destination, two miles she calculated from the rough scale. On the way she passed street people who had been out all night on the pavement or in doorways if they were lucky. It brought back to her what Sean had said about "poor buggers sleeping rough." Would she be one of them? It was a possibility. A thousand pounds wasn't the fortune she had thought it when she first took the iron box. It didn't seem much when you could pay a twentieth part of it for that pair of shoes she saw in a shop window she passed. The shops stopped soon after that and there came a place with a red fire engine half out of its door. Seeing one like it on television made identification possible. next door was a big imposing building with a blue lamp over the door and a notice board on either side of the entrance. The blue lamp, like the one on the car, told her what it was before she read the County Police sign. She stopped and stared at the poster on the notice board. The strange thing was that she recognised the painting in it as Bruno's before she knew it for her own portrait. The big features, the strong colours that had never been her features and colours. No one passing would know it for her. If anyone came by they would never connect the brown-and-yellow daub on the poster with the girl who stood looking at it. No doubt, it was the best the police could do. It was all they had. Probably they had never before come upon a missing person who had never had her photograph taken. The poster said, HAVE YOU SEEn THIS GIRL? It said she was missing, gave her name and age, her height and weight and the colour of her hair, that anyone knowing her whereabouts should be in touch with them. Lira turned away. She felt enormously more cheerful, she felt full of hope. Eve hadn't forgotten her, Eve did need her. If no one had found her it was because the only likeness of her that existed was Bruno's strange daub. She began to walk fast along this street of small red houses, all linked together in a long row of roofs and chimneys and tiny gardens, each with its car at the pavement. Warmth began to spread through her and she felt the blood come into her cheeks. The house she was going to wouldn't look like these, she had decided, but either like Mr. and Mrs. Spurdell's or else like the one Bruno had nearly bought, or a mixture of the two. That sort was beginning to appear now, prim, neat houses each hugging to itself its small, walled piece of land. The name of the place where she had grown up and the year of her own birth. Shrove Road was on the edge of the town where the country started. number 76 wasn't at all what she had expected but a house that looked as if left over from some distant past time when there were no other buildings but the church and the manor and the farms. This one had been a small farmhouse, she thought, which even now stood in a big piece of land with trees on it. She was suddenly afraid. Of no one being at home, of her assumptions and assessments being all wrong, of walking back again to the bus stop past the street people. The bell by the front door didn't chime like the one in Aspen Close or toll like the bell on the door at Shrove. It buzzed. She took her finger away as if the insect that made the buzzing had stung it, then, more confidently, pressed again. Jane Spurdell didn't recognise her. Lira could tell that and, inspired, she grasped a handful of her hair and pulled it to the back of her head. "I know. It's Lira. Wait a minute, Lira Holford." "Yes." "Come in. You must be cold." A glance outside had told her Lira had come on foot. From where? "I'm miles from anywhere." "I'm used to being miles from anywhere," Lira said, and that was the start of telling her. not all, not a hundred nights of life story, just the essentials and an outline of her present state. Jane Spurdell made coffee. They sat in her living room, which was a mess, but a nice mess with books on shelves and piled on tables and even on the floor. "I want to study the law but I've a long way to go, I know that. I've got to get"--she couldn't remember the names of the examinations--"oh, GC Levels or something. And I want to find my mother and go and see her. I've got a thousand pounds and a caravan to live in." "The law sounds a good idea. Why not?" Jane Spurdell said. "You can use my phone if you want to phone your mother." She looked a little wary. "I'm not sure about the caravan, I mean if you came to ask me if you could park it here, I'd have to think about that one." "No, I've got it on a place where they'll make me move and when I can't they'll move me and find me somewhere to live. They have to." Lira finished her coffee. She was warm now and feeling strong. "I came to ask you one thing I know you can do for me." "Yes?" Lira didn't want to face it that for a moment she had sounded like her father. She said in a rush, "Please, can you arrange for me to go to school?" It was relief that Jane felt. Lira could tell that. Whatever she had expected it hadn't been that. She had anticipated begging, requests for money, time, attention--even, perhaps, affection. "Yes, of course I can," she said, relief beaming in her smile. "nothing easier. It's not difficult. You can start somewhere in January. I only wish more people were like you. Is that all?" Lira gave a great sigh. She was going to be all right and she wasn't going to burst into tears of relief or make confessions. A good time was beginning and she was going to think of that and be a Stoic. "That's all I want. To go to school." She held out her cup. "And please may I have another cup of coffee?" the end.

The End