Martin was horrified. Had he, in effect, killed poor Mr Deepdene with kindness? It rather looked like it. Mr Deepdene had been seventy-four and perhaps his heart hadn't been very sound, and although he had known the money was coming, the actual arrival of the cheque would be a different matter from hopeful, perhaps doubtful, anticipation of it. Martin imagined him opening the envelope, taking out the brief one-line note, then the cheque, and his aged tired heart suddenly-what exactly did happen in a heart attack?-well, whatever it was, his heart failing and stopping with the wonderful, unbelievable shock of it, his body falling back into the armchair, the cheque fluttering from his lifeless hand... "You want to mind how you go on that ice, Martin," shouted Mr Cochrane above the vacuum cleaner. "You want to watch your step, it's very treacherous, look at my arm. I reckon I've dislocated something, put something out, so don't be surprised if I don't turn up next week, Martin." The death of Mr Deepdene troubled Martin for most of the day. A client, an up-and-coming country singer, took him out to lunch, but he didn't really enjoy himself and he didn't feel he was being very lucid as he tried to explain, over coffee, why the cost of setting up a music room in the singer's Hampstead home might be tax deductible while a swimming pool certainly would not be. He kept imagining Mr Deepdene, whom he saw as small and bent and frail, reading the sum delineated on that cheque and then the pain thundering up his arm and his chest. Was he wrong to do what he was doing or attempting to do? Was he playing God without the wisdom and experience essential to a god? All he had done with his philanthropy so far, it seemed to him, was frighten an old woman into insomnia and shock an old man to death. There was, of course, Suma Bhavnani, but for all he knew Suma Bhavnani might have died on the operating table. Yet surely his project was so simple, just to provide homes for a handful of needy people who suffered particularly from London's housing shortage. He wrote a letter of sympathy to Judith Lewis and that made him feel better-or perhaps it was knowing that in an hour he would be with Francesca which made him feel better. Mr Deepdene, after all, might well have had a heart attack whether he had sent him a cheque or not. He was old, past his three score and ten, and it was what people called a lovely way to go, dying like that in the midst of life... Bloomers was glowing with flame-coloured light, its window banked with pots of pink cyclamen. Francesca came out to him, wearing the rose-velvet dress. She must have just changed, after the other girl had gone, especially for him. If it could be said that Martin disliked anything at all about Francesca, it was her clothes. Most of the time she wore jeans, flounced skirts with hems that dipped, shapeless tunics, "antique" blouses, shawls, big loose cardigans, scarves with fringes. She dressed like the hippies used to, a pair of scuffed seven-league boots poking out under a skirt of wilted flower-sprigged cotton. These things couldn't spoil her beauty, they merely disguised it. But in the rose velvet her beauty was enhanced, you could see the fragile wandlike shape of her, her tiny waist, her long legs, and the rose colour was exactly that of her cheeks. She put her arms round him and kissed him with tenderness. As soon as they were in the flat he gave her her Christ- mas present. The cut-glass bottles with the silver stoppers had come to seem inadequate somehow, so after lunch with the country singer he had bought some Ma Griffe cologne with which to fill them. It was odd, but although she admired the bottles and said they were pretty, beautiful really, she'd never seen anything so delicate, he sensed that she was disappointed. He asked her directly, but she said no, not a bit, it was just that she hadn't got anything for him and she felt bad about that. After they had had dinner-steaks which he grilled and a salad which she made-he asked her if Russell would expect her to phone him, but she said she and Russell had had a violent quarrel and weren't on speaking terms. "It was about you, Martin. I told him I was in love with someone else." Martin held her hands. She came closer to him on the sofa and laid her head on his shoulder. "You're going to leave him and get a divorce and marry me, aren't you?" "I want to, I don't know..." "There's nothing to stop you. I love you and you say you love me..." "I do love you, Martin!" "You could stay here. We could go up there tomorrow and fetch your things and you need never go back there again." She said nothing but put her arms round him. Later, in the bedroom, he watched her undress. She seemed to have no self-consciousness about this, no false modesty, and no desire provocatively to show off. She undressed rather slowly and concentratedly, like a young child. Her body was extraordinarily white for someone with such dark hair and eyes, her waist a narrow stem, her ankles and feet finely turned. She managed to be extravagantly thin, yet curvy and without angularity. He thought of fairy girls in Arthur Rackham drawings-and then, laying her clothes on a chair, she turned her left side to him. Her upper arm was badly bruised and there was a kind of red contusion on her forearm. But that was as nothing to the bruising on her hip, black and blue and swollen, and all down the side of her thigh to her knee. "Francesca... to was He could tell she wished he hadn't seen. She tried ineffectively to cover her body with her arms. "How on earth did that happen to you?" The explanation would never have occurred to him, he had never lived in that sort of world, if he hadn't seen the ashamed misery in her eyes and remembered what she had said about a quarrel. "You don't mean that Russell...?" She nodded. "It's not the first time. But this-this was the worst." He took her very gently in his arms and held the bruised body close to his. "You must come to me," he murmured. "You must leave him, you must never go back." But on the following day she wouldn't let him fetch her things from the house in Fortis Green Lane. At the end of the week-end she must go home again as they had arranged, she must be home before Russell and Lindsay returned. Martin didn't persist. The last thing he wanted was to spoil the three precious days they had together. On Saturday afternoon they went shopping in Hampstead. Martin had never before been round dress shops with a woman and he found it boring and alarming, both at the same time. Francesca admired extravagantly a coat and dress in grey suede, a pair of tapered pants in cream leather, and a dress that seemed quite impractical to Martin, being made of transparent knife-pleated beige chiffon. Francesca didn't notice prices, he knew that, she was naive about that sort of thing like a child in a toyshop. It crossed his mind to buy her the coat and dress, but then he saw it was three hundred pounds and he didn't have that much in his current account. Besides, what would Russell say-what would Russell do?-ii she brought something like that home with her? Jn the end, because she looked so wistful, he asked her to let him buy her the little short-sleeved jumper which was the latest thing to catch her fancy. Martin thought fifteen pounds a ridiculous amount to pay for it, but that didn't matter if it made Francesca happy. They went to the theatre and then to supper at Inigo Jones. Norman Tremlett called in unexpectedly in the morning at about ten-thirty. Francesca had only just got up and she came out of the bathroom in her dressing gown. It was very obvious she had nothing on underneath it. Martin saw with a good deal of pride and pleasure that Norman's eyes were going round in excited circles like a dog's following the movements of a fly. He stayed for coffee. Francesca didn't bother to go and dress. She was quite innocent of the sensation she was causing and sat there talking earnestly about the play they had seen as if Norman were her brother or she wearing a tweed suit and a pair of brogues. "You're a dark horse," Norman whispered admiringly as Martin saw him out. "I never would have thought it of you. D'you often do this sort of thing?" Deep down, Martin rather loved being treated as a Casanova. But it wasn't right to allow it, it was a reflection on Francesca, on her-well, virtue, if that term still had any meaning today. "We're going to be married." "Are you? Are you really? That's perfectly splendid." Norman hesitated on the doorstep. "At the wedding," he said, "I suppose-I suppose you'll have Adrian for your best man?" Martin laughed. "It won't be that sort of wedding." "I see. Right. That's fine. Only if you do need any-well, anyone, you know what I mean-well, you know where to come." I On New Year's Day Francesca wore the jumper he had bought her. It showed up the bruises on her arm and she wrapped herself in one of her shawls. At four o'clock she said she ought to go. She would pack her things and go and get a taxi in Highgate High Street. Russell and Lindsay would be home by six at the latest. "Of course I'm going to drive you home, Francesca." "Darling Martin, there's no need, really, there isn't. It's been snowing again and it's bound to freeze tonight and you might have a skid. You don't want to damage your nice car." "The taxi might skid and damage nice you. Anyway, I insist on taking you. I'm not going to be put off this time. Russell won't be there to see us arrive if that's what worries you. I'm going to drive you home, and if you try to stop me I shall just put you in the car by force. Right?" "Yes, Martin, of course. I won't argue any more. You're so sweet and kind to me and I'm a horrid ungrateful girl." "No, you're not," he said. "You're an angel and I love you." He had never thought much about the house she lived in, but now that he was going to see it he felt the stirrings of curiosity. He had probably driven along Fortis Green Lane in the past, but he couldn't recall it. It was Finchley really, that area, borders of Muswell Hill. While Francesca was packing her case he looked it up in the London Atlas. There was no telling from that whether the district was seedy terraces, luxury suburban or given over to council housing. She came out and he helped her into the blue-andred-striped coat with the hood. "If I'd known it was going to be so cold," she said, "I'd have brought my fur." She gave him one of her serious, very young, smiles. "I've got an old fur coat that was my grandmother's." "When we're married I'll buy you a mink. It'll be my wedding present to you." He drove up North Hill and into Finchley High Road. Fortis Green Lane ran up out of Fortis Green Road towards Colney Hatch Lane. Francesca didn't issue direc- tions, she wasn't that sort of woman. He got the impression, when she was with him, that she was content to let him organise things and steer her life his way. She wasn't so much passive as gracefully yielding. He took a left turn out of Fortis Green Road and they were in the street where she lived. By now it was growing towards dusk and what daylight remained was dear and blue. Mustard yellow lamps, true opposite in the spectrum to that blue, were coming on in Fortis Green Lane. It was a long wide winding road, disproportionately wide for the small squat houses which lined it. Here and there was a short Victorian terrace, red brick and three storeys high, but the small low houses predominated and eventually took over altogether. They stood in blocks of four, some of brown stucco, some of very pale anaemic-looking brick, with small metal-framed windows and shallow pantiled roofs. In their front gardens snow lay on the grass. They weren't bad houses, they weren't slums, but Martin thought he would go to almost any lengths to avoid living in such a place. He had always, in his heart, despised people who did. Couldn't Russell Brown, who was thirty-five years old and no slouch apparently, a teacher and a writer, have done better for his wife than this? Poor Francesca... Number 54 was the end house of a block which meant it had a side entrance. It stood on the corner of a side road depressingly called Hill Avenue in which were similar houses stretching away to be lost in the twilight. Their roofs were so low that over the tops of them you could see the branches of trees which Martin guessed must be in Coldfall Wood. He got out of the car and helped Francesca out. There were no lights on in her house. Her husband and child hadn't yet returned. Carrying her suitcase, Martin began to unlatch the small white wrought iron gate. "You mustn't come in, darling." She had taken his arm and was looking nervously up into his face. "Would it matter so much if Russell and I were to meet? We're sure to some day. I'm sure he wouldn't do anything to me." "No, but he might do something to me later." The truth of this was evident. He had seen the bruises. It wasn't much of a disappointment not seeing the inside of her house. Compared with what he felt about parting from her, not to see her again for perhaps a whole week, it was nothing. He didn't think she would kiss him good-bye with the chance of some neighbour seeing, but she did. Out there in the street she put her arms round his neck and kissed him on the mouth, clinging to him for a moment. But Francesca was like that, too innocent to be aware of the cruelty and malice in other people's hearts. He got back into the car. She stood there, waving to him, her small bright face made pale by the lamplight, her beautiful hair tucked inside her hood. He turned the car to go back the way he had come and when he looked round again she was gone.

XI

Although Martin had confided to Francesca most of what had happened to him in the past, his present circumstances, and his hopes for the future, he hadn't said anything about the pools win. He didn't quite know why he hadn't. Perhaps it was because she was still living with her husband. He had a vague half-formed idea of Russell Brown as a thoroughgoing villain, in spite of his education and his talents. Suppose Francesca told Russell that the man she was in love with had won a hundred thousand pounds on a football pool? If he knew that, Russell might try to extort money from him. Martin thought he would only tell Francesca after she had left Russell and was living here with him in Cromwell Court. After that week-end he didn't see her again, as he had feared, until the following Monday. On the afternoon of that day Dr Ghopal phoned to say that the operation on Suma Bhavnani had taken place on January 5 and been a complete success. This news had a tonic effect on Martin. Playing God was possible, after all. At lunchtime he had had a sandwich in the Victoria Stakes with Caroline and she had regaled him with a long sad tale about a young couple who were friends of hers and who were paying 60 per cent of their joint wages for the rent of a furnished flat. They had no children and the girl couldn't have children, so they wouldn't get a council place, said Caroline, for five years, if then. The furnished flat was four draughty rooms in Friern Barnet. By telling a few white lies about knowing someone who knew someone who might possibly have an unfurnished flat to let in April, Martin managed to get these people's name and address out of Caroline. That night, after he had taken Francesca to dine at the Cellier du Midi and sent her home to Russell in a taxi, he added this new name to his list. It now read: Miss Watson, Mr Deepdene, Mrs Cochrane, Mrs Finn? Richard and Sarah Gibson. He crossed off Mr Deepdene's name, put a question mark after Mrs Cochrane's. Then he composed a letter to the Gibsons, beginning by mentioning the connection through Caroline Arnold and going on to ask if they would care to meet him one evening in the coming week to discuss accommodation he might be able to offer them. It obviously wasn't a good idea baldly to state in the preliminary letter that he was dispensing money in large quantities. Look what an effect that had had on Miss Watson and Mr Deepdene. Better meet and talk about it face to face, which was perhaps what he ought to have done and could still do with Miss Watson. He hadn't said any more to Francesca about leaving Russell. He had hoped she would say something. Perhaps she hadn't liked to, she was such a self-effacing girl. Next time he saw her he would insist on their making definite plans. He went about the flat, thinking what it would be like when she was there all the time. He would buy a three-piece suite, of course, and put that cane stuff in the bedroom. Or they could go out on the balcony; they would be an improvement on his two shabby deck chairs. The bathroom ought to be recarpeted, Francesca would like that, a white carpet with a long pile. And maybe he should buy a wardrobe-the cupboard was full of his own clothes-and a dressing table. Mr Cochrane would probably make a terrific fuss once he found out Martin was living with a woman. Martin could just imagine his face and his comments. They could always pretend to be married or, come to that, Mr Cochrane could be told to go and Francesca do the house- work. Martin didn't want her to work in that flower shop or anywhere else once she had left Russell. It could only have been a couple of hours after he got Martin's letter that Richard Gibson phoned. He was forthright and he sounded suspicious. "Look, Mr Urban, Sarah and I have been badly let down about this sort of thing before. If you're really making us a firm offer, that's fine and I'm grateful, but if it's just a possibility or someone else is likely to step in and get the place over our heads-well, we'd rather not know. And I'd better tell you here and now, we can't pay key money or a premium or anything. We haven't got it." Martin said the offer was firm and there was no question of key money, but he'd rather talk about it when they met. Richard Gibson said any evening in the following week would suit him and the sooner the better, so Martin agreed to go up to Friern Barnet on Monday. He got back early from the Flask on Saturday because Francesca was coming at two. She got there at five past, wearing the jumper he had bought her and smelling of Ma Griffe. He began at once to tell her of his plans for the flat when she came to live with him. When was she going to tell Russell? When would she leave? He supposed that she would want to bring a lot of her other possessions as well as clothes and they would have to... "I can't come and live here, Martin." She spoke in a small nervous voice and she had begun to twist her hands together in her lap. He stared at her. "What do you mean, Francesca?" "I've thought about it a lot. I feel awful about it. But it's not possible. How could we live here? It wouldn't be big enough." "Not big enough?" He felt stunned. He repeated her words stupidly. "What do you mean, not big enough? Nearly all the people in the other flats here are married couples. There's this huge room and a bedroom and a big kitchen and a bathroom. What more do you want?" "It's not what I want, Martin, you know that. It's Lindsay. Where would we put Lindsay?" He must have been a fool or totally obtuse, he thought, but it hadn't occurred to him that she would be bringing the child with her. To him Lindsay was a part of Russell, or rather, she and Russell were part of the life lived in Fortis Green Lane. In leaving it behind, Francesca would be leaving behind all that belonged to it, walls, furniture, husband, child. But of course it couldn't be like that. He ought to have known. He ought to have known vicariously if not from experience that a mother doesn't desert her two-yearold child. Lindsay would become his child now. The idea was very disturbing. He lifted his eyes to meet Francesca's mournful eyes. She would never know what an effort it cost him to say what he did. "She can sleep in here or have a bed in our room." "Oh, dear, you do make it hard for me. Darling Martin, don't you see it wouldn't be right for the three of us to be living all crowded together like that?" It was hard to tell when Francesca was blushing, her cheeks were always so pink. "She'd-she'd see us in bed together." "She sees you and Russell in bed together now." "He's her father. I can't take my little daughter away from her father and her home and her own room and bring her here where she'll have to sleep in a living room or on a couch or something." Her lips trembled. When he put out his arms to her she laid her head against his shoulder and held on to him hard. "Oh, Martin, you do understand?" "I'll try to, darling. But what alternative do we have? There isn't anywhere else." His pride was bruised by her rejection of his home and he thought of the little box she lived in. After she had gone he began to feel angry with her. Did she expect him to leave the flat he was fond of and buy a house or something just to accommodate the child she had had by another man? This thought was immediately succeeded by another, that it was his Francesca, his love, that he was using those harsh words about. They would find a way, of course they would. Once Francesca had told Russell she wanted a divorce it might be that he would leave. Surely that was what husbands usually did? Martin wondered if he could possibly bring himself, say for a couple of days each week, to live in the house in Fortis Green Lane. He got to Friern Barnet at the appointed time of eight on Monday evening. The flat was as nasty as Caroline had led him to believe, with bare stained floorboards, the walls marked all over where other people's posters and pictures had hung. It was furnished partly with Woolworth chipboard and plastic and partly with pre-World War I pitch pine. The Gibsons gave him Nescaf6 and kept saying how surprised they were that he was young. Sarah Gibson was pale and rather big and dark-haired with a face like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her husband was fair and upright and looked like a guards officer, though, in fact, he turned out to be a hospital porter on thirty-seven pounds a week. When Martin told them-he found it very difficult to do this, he even began to stammer-that his intention was to give them money to buy a flat, they refused to believe him. "But why?" Sarah Gibson kept saying. "You don't know us. Why should you want to give us money?" Martin said that he had "come into" a fortune, which was strictly true. He explained his motives. He even described his experiences with Miss Watson and Mr Deepdene. He had wanted to find a young couple, he said. "Okay, that's fine for you, but what about us? We'd be under an obligation to you all our lives. We'd be sort of tied to you. Anyway, you must want something out of it." Martin felt helpless. He couldn't think of any more to say and he wished he hadn't come. Then Richard Gibson said, "If you're really serious, we'd borrow it from you. I mean, we're both teachers only we can't get jobs. We'd borrow it from you, and when we get proper jobs we'd start paying it back like a mortgage." That wasn't what Martin had wanted but it was the only arrangement the Gibsons would agree to. He said he would have to do it through a friend of his who was a solicitor. His friend, Adrian Vowchurch, would draw up an agreement for an interest-free loan, and he would be in touch with Richard Gibson in a day or two. Sarah Gibson sat staring at him, bewildered and frowning. Her husband, seeing Martin out, said, "I honestly don't expect ever to see you or hear from you again. You see, I don't believe you. I can't." "Time will show," said Martin. He felt angry. Not so much with the Gibsons as with the world, society, civilisation, so-called, which must be in a pretty terrible state if you couldn't perform an act of altruism without people thinking you were mad. Sarah Gibson had thought he was schizophrenic, he had seen it in her eyes. He drove down across the North Circular Road and into Colney Hatch Lane, passing very near to Francesca's home. But Francesca wouldn't be there now, it was Monday and she had gone to Annabel's, she had told him so on Saturday. How much he would love to see her now! Maybe the time had come for him to tell her about the money and how he had come by it, or if not that, it would simply be lovely to be with her and talk to her. He was aware of something he never remembered knowing before he had met her- loneliness. It was nearly nine o'clock. Why shouldn't he go to Annabel's place in Frognal and pick her up and drive her home? He didn't know Annabel's surname but he knew the house she lived in. He had parked outside its gate after their second meeting to say good-bye to Francesca. Would she mind his calling for her? He didn't think so. She had met Norman Tremlett at his flat, now it was time for him to begin meeting her friends. For all his convincing arguments, he felt apprehensive as he drove across Hampstead Lane. Annabel knew of his existence, he told himself, even Russell knew of it. He wasn't doing anything clandestine or dishonourable. He was simply calling at a friend's house for the woman who was going to be his wife. Young men all over London were doing the same. He drove down past the Whitestone Pond into Branch Hill. A little snow still lay in patches on the brown turf of Judge's Walk. There was mist in the air, a damp icy breath. He drew the car into the kerb at the top of Frognal and crossed the road. As soon as he was alone with Francesca he would tell her he intended to put the flat on the market and buy a house for the three of them. Would she consent to live in Cromwell Court with him just until he could do that? The house outside which he had parked that night in November was large, almost a mansion, with a front garden full of leafless shrubs and small grey alpine plants dripping over steps and the rims of urns. It appeared to be divided into three flats and Martin was rather taken aback to find that there were no names but only numbers to the bells. He had taken very little notice of the house on that previous occasion, but now looking up at its brown bricks and halftimbering, red shingles, and red tiles, seemingly numberless windows of both plain and stained glass, he wondered how any young girl on her own, a friend and contemporary of Francesca's, could afford to live in a place like this. Then, because the top storey seemed the smallest and the least grand, he rang the top bell. After about a minute a woman opened the door. She was probably forty, a good-looking blonde, very well-dressed but for her footwear which was a fluffy pair of bedroom slippers. Martin apologised for disturbing her. Could she still tell him in which of the flats someone with the Christian name of Annabel lived? He was calling for his fiancee who was a friend of hers. Martin balked a little at calling someone else's wife his fiancee, yet it had the required respectable ring to it. "Annabel?" said the woman. "There isn't anyone called that here." "There must be. A young girl living on her own." "There's myself and my two sons, we have the top floor. Mr and Mrs Cameron have the middle flat. They're elderly and they haven't any children. The ground floor's occupied by Sir John and Lady Bidmead-the painter, you've probably heard of him-and it's them the house belongs to. They own it. I've known them for twenty years and they certainly don't have a daughter." It had occurred to Martin while she was speaking that Francesca hadn't actually pointed to this house and said Annabel lived there. It was possible she had meant the house next door. He went next door, a slightly smaller place, semi-detached. An elderly man answered his ring. The owner of the house was a Mrs Frere who occupied the whole of it and whom he referred to as the employer of himself and his wife. Martin called at two more houses but at neither had Annabel been heard of. The astonishment he felt softened the edge of his disappointment at not seeing Francesca. He tried to remember what had happened on the evening of November 27. She had got out of the car, turned back to say to him, "Call for me at the shop," and then disappeared in the heavy rain. It had been pouring with rain and he hadn't been able to see much, but he knew she had asked him to park here, had said that Annabel lived just here. Was Annabel an invention then? Had Francesca made her up? There came into his mind the confusion over where Russell's parents lived. She had said Oxford that first time, he knew she had. He went up into the flat and without put- ting a lamp on, sat at the window, looking down over London. He saw spangled towers drowning in mist, he saw them, yet he saw nothing. He closed his eyes. Annabel as a creation to be presented to Russell for an alibi was feasible comb to him? What motive could she possibly have had? Perhaps she lived a fantasy life in a fantasy world; he had heard of people like that. Perhaps none of the people she had told him about existed-but that wasn't true, of course they did. Russell got his name in the papers and there was no doubting the fact of Lindsay. He put the lights on and drew the curtains and poured himself a whisky. What was the matter with him that he doubted her like this and questioned the very foundations of her being? She had small fantasies, that was all. She slightly distorted the truth as some people did to make themselves appear more interesting. That night in November she had told him she had a friend living in an exclusive part of Hampstead to impress him, and later she couldn't go back on what she had said. Russell's parents very likely lived in Reading or Newmarket, but the two great universities had come into her head as more glamorous and intriguing. He lay awake most of the night, thinking about her and wondering and sometimes feeling rather sick. Lately he had been in the habit of phoning her every day, but he let the next day and the next go by without speaking to her. Francesca didn't work on Thursdays. She had told him she spent her Thursdays shopping and cleaning the house and taking Lindsay out. Perhaps she did. He wondered if anything she had told him was true. He went to dinner with his parents, the usual Thursday night Three Bears get-together. His mother said a neighbour of hers had seen him shopping in Hampstead with a very pretty dark girl, but Martin shook his head and said she was mistaking him for someone else. In the morning he phoned Adrian Vowchurch and ex- plained the arrangement he had come to with Richard Gibson. Adrian gave no sign of surprise at hearing that Martin had fifteen thousand pounds to lend or that he proposed to lend it free of interest. Martin had an appointment with a client at eleven. It was while he was talking to this man that Francesca phoned. He had to promise to call her back in half an hour, and for that half-hour endeavour to quiet his excitement and his fear while he explained to the client how, if he would spend thirty days out of the country on business each year, he might get thirty-three hundred and sixty-fifths of his income free of tax. When he was alone his hand actually trembled as he picked up the receiver. The explanation of the Annabel affair was so simple and obvious that he cursed himself for doubting her and for his three days of self-torture. "Darling, Annabel moved away just after Christmas. She lives in Mill Hill now." "But they hadn't even heard of her in any of those houses I called at." Her voice was soft and sweetly indulgent. "Now you called at the house where the old lady lives?" "I just said so, and at the next two down." "But you didn't call at the fourth down?" "Is that where she lives?" "Lived, Martin," said Francesca. "Oh, Martin, did you really think I'd been lying to you and deceiving you? Don't you trust me at all?" "It's because we're not really together," he said. "It's because I hardly ever see you. Days and days go by and I don't see you. It makes me wonder all the time about what you're doing and your other life. Francesca, if I put my flat up for sale and buy a house for you and me and Lindsay, would you come and live with me just till the sale went through?" "Martin, darling..." "Well, would you? It needn't be for more than three months and then we could all go and live in the house. Say you will." "Let's not talk about it on the phone, Martin. I'm wanted in the shop, anyway." He would have sent her flowers but that would have been coals to Newcastle, corn in Egypt. Instead, he took her a box of hand-made chocolates when he went to call for her at the shop on Monday. He parked the car in Hillside Gardens at a quarter to six and walked down through the cold misty dark to the shop. The grey fog in which its orange light gleamed fuzzily gave it the mysterious look of an enchanted cavern. Francesca wasn't alone. Lindsay was with her, perched up on the counter and occupied in pulling the fronds off a head of pampas grass. "The nursery was closed," Francesca said. "Their heating's broken down. I thought of phoning you-but I did want to see you even if it couldn't be for long." He held her in his arms. "You've had a hard day. Come to me and you needn't work, you can be at home with Lindsay all the time. I'll buy us a house." "Listen," she said, "I had a long talk with Russell. He says he'll divorce me after two years' separation, but the trouble is Lindsay. Russell adores her. You have to understand that. And he says-he says"-her lips trembled and she had difficulty in bringing out her next words-"that if I-take her to live with you-he'll ask the divorce judge for custody of-of her-and-and-he'd get it!" "Francesca, I think that's nonsense. Why would he?" "He knows about these things, Martin. He's studied the law." "I thought he was a history teacher." "Well, of course he is, but he's studied the law as well. He says he's been as much a mother to Lindsay as I have, fetching her from the nursery and getting her tea and putting her to bed, and he says the judge would see he could look after her on his own like he often has, and he'd be leading a moral life while I'd be taking her to live in two rooms with my lover!" Lindsay threw the pampas grass on to the floor and began whimpering. Francesca started to say more about what Russell would do if she took his child to live under Martin's roof, but Lindsay stamped across the counter and pinched her mother's lips together. She said to Martin, though not in a friendly way, "We're going home in a taxi." "Francesca, let me drive you home. You'll never get a taxi out there, and the fog's getting thicker." "Really, no, Martin." Francesca struggled and mumbled like Papageno with his padlock. "Stop it, Lindsay, I'll put jou on comthe floor." "But why won't you let me drive you? We'll be there in ten minutes." Martin hesitated. "Anyway, think of me, it would give me ten minutes of your company." "I want to see my daddy," said Lindsay. "Is it Russell seeing me that worries you? I promise to drop you a hundred yards from the house. How's that?" "All right, Martin," said Francesca in the sweet meek voice he loved. "You drive us home. I don't mean to be ungrateful, it's very very kind of you." xn The drive took much longer than ten minutes because of the dense fog. The sky itself, smoky, choking, gloomy white, seemed to have fallen through the dark on to the upper reaches of Highgate. Each car was guided by the tail lights of the one in front, lights that looked as if their feeble glow came through cloudy water. Lindsay sat on Francesca's knee, helping herself to chocolates out of the box Martin had brought. She liked most of the flavours but not violet cream or liqueur cherry, and when she had taken a bite out of these she pushed the remains into Francesca's mouth. Silver paper went all over the floor of Martin's nice clean car. Francesca could see Martin was offended at this cavalier treatment of his present, but she didn't care about that. He didn't like Lindsay and he showed it, and to Francesca this was so monstrous that whenever she felt like giving the whole business up and just getting out or telling the truth, she thought of how he looked at and spoke to Lindsay and she hardened her heart and went on. He was looking at her like that now while they were stopped at a red traffic light. It was the kind of look a polite host gives to a guest's uninvited dog. "You see, Martin, she'd soon make a mess of your lovely tidy flat." "Maybe, but things would be different if we had a house. We could have a big kitchen and a playroom; we'd have a garden. Look, I can see that's valid, what you said about it's not being right to let your child sleep on a couch in the . living room. So suppose I put the flat on the market tomorrow and start to look for a house for the three of us and you stay with Russell just until the house is ready to move into. How does that sound?" "I don't know, Martin." "Well, darling, will you think about it? Will you, please, because I ask you and I want it so much? You see, I don't know what else to suggest. You do want to come and live with me, don't you?" It was so cold and foggy and she had a long awkward journey ahead of her. She hadn't the nerve to say no. She touched his arm and smiled. "Well, then. You won't live with me at the flat and you won't come and stay there with me till we can get a house, so I'm asking you to think about this idea. Will you think about it, darling?" "I really don't think I'll ever..." Francesca started to say when Lindsay clamped a chocolate-smeary hand over her mouth. She didn't have to finish because Martin was parking the car. They had arrived. She put Lindsay out on to the pavement and got out herself. It was very cold and wet out there, rain penetrating the fog in large icy drops. Martin wanted her to kiss him so she put her head back in through the window and held up to him red lips that a raindrop had already splashed. "I'll phone you in the morning, Francesca." "Yes, do," said Francesca vaguely. She was holding on to Lindsay with one hand and clasping the chocolate box against herself with the other. Lindsay was pulling and stamping. "And you'll have come to a decision? You'll decide it's yes, won't you?" Francesca had more or less forgotten what she was meant to be deciding. Again she said she didn't know, but she managed a radiant smile, keeping her options open. Martin drove off waving, though with that hurt look on his face which so exasperated her. When the car was out of sight she started to walk along Fortis Green Lane in the opposite direction to that which Martin had followed. He had put them down outside number 26 and when they reached 54, Francesca stopped for a moment and looked curiously at the house. It was unlit. On its doorstep was a bottle of milk with a cover over it to stop birds pecking at the cream. "Mummy carry," said Lindsay. "Must I?" "Must. Lindsay carry sweeties." "That's an offer I can't refuse." Francesca picked her up and Lindsay gave her a wet sticky kiss on the cheek and waved the chocolate box about. Perhaps it would be a good idea to turn up Hill Avenue? Francesca rejected it and tramped on. The pavement was coated with greyish-black, soupy, liquid mud that splashed up her legs. She realised that what she had thought was rain was in fact condensed fog dripping from the tall bushes in front gardens. She felt like one of those women who abound in Victorian fiction, women who are discovered at the beginning of a chapter wandering over heaths or stumbling along city streets at night and in the most inclement weather with a child in their arms. Very likely she looked like one of them too in her lace-up boots and long skirt and woolly shawl wound round her head and her grandmother's old fur coat, spiky and dewed with drops of fog. In spite of the cold and the heavy weight of the little girl and her own tiredness, Francesca suddenly laughed out loud. "Not funny," said Lindsay crossly. "No, it isn't, you're quite right, it isn't a bit funny. You'll find out when you're grown-up that we don't always laugh just because things are funny. There are other reasons. I must be mad. Why did I let him bring us up here, Lindsay? I suppose I was so utterly pissed-off with seeing that look on his face. One thing I do know, I'm not going to see him any more. I'm not going on with it, this is the end, this is it. And Daddy can go-go jump in a pond!" "Lindsay wants Daddy." "Yes, well, he won't get home till after we do even at this rate, so shut up. I want my daddy, I want my daddy, you're a real pain sometimes." "I want my daddy," said Lindsay. She screwed up a chocolate paper and threw it into someone's garden. "We're going to have a bus ride first. You'll like that, you never go on buses. Come on, hoist up a bit. Can't you sort of sit on my hip?" Lindsay replied by dropping the box and pinching Francesca's lips together. Francesca picked up the box which was now much splashed with mud and growled through Lindsay's fingers and pretended to bite. Lindsay screamed with laughter, took her hand away an inch and clamped it back again. "Come on, you crazy kid, we'll freeze to death." By now they had come out into Coppetts Road and Francesca was looking about her for bus stops when a taxi, which had perhaps dropped an inmate or a visitor, came out of the gates of Coppetts Wood Hospital with its light on. The driver didn't seem to know the whereabouts of Samphire Road, Nbled, even when Francesca said it wasn't far from Crouch Hill Station, but he agreed to let her direct him. Lindsay started screaming that she'd been promised a bus, she wanted a bus, and she made so much noise that Francesca could tell, by the back of his neck, that the driver was wincing. She stuffed Lindsay with more chocolates to shut her up and then they played the growl and snap game most of the way home. The fare was two pounds which Francesca could ill afford. The pavements here were even stickier and more slippery than in Finchley. It was a depressed, semi-derelict region to which the taxi had brought them, a place where whole ranks of streets had been demolished to make way for new council building. Acres of muddy ground stood bare between half-dismantled ruins, and some of the streets had become mere narrow lanes running between temporary fences ten feet high. Even in the driest weather the roadways were muddy, smeared with clay from the tyres of tractors and lorries. There was an air of impermanence, of dull, unhopeful expectancy, as of the squalid old giving place to a not much more inviting new. But Samphire Road was sufficiently on the borders of this resurgent neighbourhood for it and the streets which joined it and ran parallel to it, to be left alone. Samphire Road, with its rampart-like houses of cardboard-coloured brick, its grave-sized front gardens, its ostentatious treelessness, was to be allowed to live out its century undisturbed and survive until at least 1995. Sulphur-coloured lamplight turned the fog into just such a pea-souper as Samphire Road had known in its youth. Francesca unlocked the front door of number 22, painted some years before the shade of raw calves' liver, and let herself and Lindsay through an inner door into the hall of the ground floor flat. Inside it was as cold as only an old house can be that has no central heating and has been empty for ten hours, and when the month is January. It was damp as well as cold, with a damp to make you cringe. Francesca put lights on and humped Lindsay into the kitchen where she lit the gas oven and switched on an electric wall heater. Breakfast dishes were still stacked in the sink. She unwrapped Lindsay's layers of clothes and then her own layers, spreading her fur coat over the back of a chair to dry. The two of them squatted down in front of the open oven and held out their hands to the pale bluishmauve flames. After a while Lindsay said her feet were cold, so Francesca went to look for her furry slippers. In the hall it was as cold as out in the street. There were only two other rooms in the flat, the front room where there were two armchairs and a dining table and a piano and a sofa that converted into a double bed, and the bedroom at the back where Lindsay slept. Francesca drew the curtains across the huge, draughty, stained-glass french windows and lit the gas fire. The gas fire had to be on for at least an hour before she could put Lindsay to bed in that ice box. The slippers were nowhere to be seen, so Francesca went into the other room (known as the sitting room but where no one could have borne to sit between November and April) and found the slippers under the piano. The bed wasn't made. It hadn't been made for several days and it hadn't been used as a sofa more than half a dozen times since Lindsay was born. Lindsay said, "Where's my daddy?" "Gone to some meeting about historic Hornsey." "I'm not going to bed till my daddy comes." "Okay, you don't have to." Francesca made her scrambled eggs and buttered fingers of brown bread. She sat at the table drinking tea while Lindsay plastered chocolate spread on bread and biscuits and even on to a piece of Swiss roll. Lindsay adored chocolate spread, they had had to take sandwiches of it for their lunch. Francesca wiped it off Lindsay's chin and the tablecloth and the wall where a blob of it had landed. She was thinking about Martin. It was like heaven being in the flat in Cromwell Court and in that warm car and eating in the Villa Bianca. She loved comfort and luxury and longed wistfully after them, perhaps, she thought, because she had never known them, had been too busy living to look for them before. That weekend with Martin had shaken her, the warmth and ease, so that, in spite of the boredom, she had actually thought of becoming the girl he thought she was. Not just sweet and obedient and passive and clinging and Victorian, but the girl who was going to get a divorce and marry Martin and live with him forever... "There's my daddy," said Lindsay. The front door banged and there was a sound of feet being wiped on the doormat. Francesca didn't get up, and though Lindsay did, bouncing off her chair, she wasn't going to venture into that freezing passage, not even to greet her long-awaited father. He opened the kitchen door and came in, throwing back a lock of wet black hair out of his eyes. "Hi," said Francesca. "Hi." He picked up the little girl, held her in the air, then hugged her to him. "And how's my sweetheart? How did you get on in Mummy's shop? I bet they made you manageress." He sang to the tune of the Red Flag, "The working class can kiss my arse, I've got the boss's job at last!" "Oh, Tim," said Francesca, "we've had an awful evening out in the sticks. Wait till you hear!"

"So I just don't see the point of carrying on with it," said Francesca. She and Tim confronted each other across the kitchen table and across the greasy pieces of paper and copy of the Post which had wrapped the fish and chips brought in by Tim for their supper. The kitchen was now very warm and smoky, the windows running with condensation. Lindsay had been put to bed ten minutes before. "Can I have another cigarette, please? I can't smoke when I'm with him-it doesn't go with the image and it nearly kills me, I can tell you." Tim gave her a cigarette. He frowned a little, pushing out his red lips, but he spoke quite lightly in his usual faintly ironic drawl. "Yes, but, honey, why suddenly throw your hand in now? Why now when everything is going so extremely well? I mean, even in our wildest fantasies we didn't foresee he'd fall for you quite so heavily. Or has he?" Tim's eyes narrowed. "Maybe mah honey chile wasn't being strictly truthful when she said Livingstone wanted to marry her." "Well, I'm not always absolutely truthful, Tim, you know that. Who is? But I don't tell pointless lies. Oh, dear, I nearly came a cropper over Annabel, though, didn't I?" Francesca giggled and her eyes met Tim's blue eyes and she giggled even more. "Oh, dear. Now we must be serious. What I mean is, I don't see the point of carrying on with it because it's not getting us anywhere. All it'll do is lose me my job. If he takes to coming into the shop after me, I'll have to leave to get away from him. What did we think we'd get out of it, Tim? I can't even remember." "Of course you can remember. Money, Prospects, Opportunities." Tim lit a Gauloise. "And, incidentally, my little revenge." "Isn't it a funny thing? He says he loves me and all that, but he doesn't exactly confide in me. He's never said a word about winning the pools, and I don't believe he has." "You don't believe in your Uncle Tim's total recall? I tell you, if I died and they opened me up they'd find the perm on that pools' coupon written on my heart. Of course, there's just the weeniest chance Miss Urban didn't send it in. But if Miss Urban did send it in, then sure as fate is fate, she's won herself the first dividend, all or part of, the lucky, lucky girl." Tim always referred to Martin as Livingstone or, when his camp mood was on him, as Miss Urban. Francesca, for reasons she didn't understand but thought might be sick reasons, found the camp mood almost unbearably sexy. Tim, when he was that way, made her go weak at the knees and she didn't want that happening now, she wanted to be serious. "Well," she said, "when you sent those awful yellow chrysanths you said to get in his good graces and get him to take me out a bit because he'd got wads of money and hadn't got a girl friend. You said he might let me have the money to start my own florist's, or at least give me some big presents. But nothing like that's happened. He just fell right in love with me. He's not even that interested in sex-well, not very I mean, you'd have raped me if I'd gone on with you the way I have with him. But he's in love. It's not just wanting to screw me, it's real love. And the only place it's going to get me is living with him in his flat or some house he wants to buy. And what's the use of that? What's the use of going on with it, Tim, if I only get to where I have to run away and hide to avoid living with him?" "One would think, wouldn't one," said Tim thoughtfully, "that Livingstone would have given you something more by now than those very strange decanters or whatever they are. Five grand is nothing, but nothing, to spend on a ring, say, or a bracelet in these inflationary times. What about furs? An' mah honey chile shiverin' in her ole coonskin." "He did say something about a mink," said Francesca, giggling, "when we're married." She groped about under the fish and chip papers. "He did give me some chocolates tonight only Lindsay's gobbled most of them. Here you are." "She's a chip off the old block all right, she's only left the nougats and the coconuts." "The latest is he wants to sell his flat and buy a house for him and me and Lindsay, so I suppose he must have money." "Now she tells me. Francesca, what d'you think Krishna Bhavnani told me today? That it was Livingstone put up the money for his kid's operation." "Are you going to put something about it in the Post?" "If you're quitting, yes. If you're keeping on, no. Just as untruths have been known to appear in the Post, so have truths sometimes been suppressed." Francesca laughed. She came behind Tim and put her arms round his shoulders and stroked the Nureyev face. "Tim, I could keep it up a little bit longer. I could see him on Wednesday, if you really think it's worth while. Now I know about the Indian boy, I could have a go at getting a fur coat. Or a ring. We could sell a ring." Tim rubbed his face against her hands, making purring noises. "Did you switch our blanket on?" He had bought them an electric blanket for Christmas. "When I took Lindsay to bed," she said. "Then why don't you take me to bed and tell me all about the times you've misbehaved yourself with Dr Livingstone?" "Miss Urban," said Francesca somewhat breathlessly. "Mah honey chile should tak' shame talking like dat befo' her Uncle Tim, Lawd God!" Francesca and Tim had been living together for three years. Tim had moved into the flat in Samphire Road instead of just spending nights there, when Francesca found she was pregnant with Lindsay. They had never really considered getting married and couldn't have done anyway since Francesca was still married to Russell Brown. After Tim had met Martin Urban in fhe wood he had several times invited him to Samphire Road but Martin always refused, Tim hadn't known why. He had been wounded by it, Francesca thought, though Tim never showed that he could feel pain. Then had come the Saturday in November when Tim checked his pools and found, as usual, that he had won nothing while the formula he had given Martin must have scooped the first dividend. It had disturbed Francesca to see Tim waiting for Martin to phone. Her placid happy-go-lucky nature was ruffled by Tim's intense neurotic anxiety. The days had passed and there had been nothing. As taut as a bowstring, Tim had gone to that interview at Urban, Wedmore, Mackenzie and Company, but still Martin hadn't spoken. The worst thing for Tim had been Martin's refusing to come to the party. Getting a party organised at Samphire Road was no mean feat. They had cancelled it at the last minute because there was nothing to celebrate and no point in opening the champagne. "I fear," Tim had said, camping it up, pretending, "she's keeping it all the darkest because she doesn't want to have to give any to poor me. Though what I've done I never will know, save be friendly and helpful. Maybe I wasn't quite friendly enough, which some girls, you know, can resent." Francesca couldn't hazard an opinion on that, but she knew Tim had hoped for something from Martin, even a loan to help them buy a place that would be a cut above Samphire Road. He walked up and down shouting that he would be revenged. He would get hold of some of that money by hook or by crook. After that it was a short step for Francesca to go round with the flowers and-hang on hard. She was a good-tempered easy-going girl and nothing put her out for long. Tim had once told her that one of the things he liked about her was that she had no morals and no guilt. This made playing the part of Martin's Francesca, the moral and guilty Francesca, rather difficult at first, but Tim had instructed her and even set her a course of reading, Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction mainly, with suitable heroines. She had worked hard at moulding herself according to these models and sometimes after meetings with Martin she felt quite tired. She spent a lot of the time in his company silent and apparently raptly listening, while in fact she was concentrating on how to escape in a taxi and get out of being driven up to Finchley. Now she was faced with the additional problem of how to make Martin believe she loved him and wanted to live with him while refusing to submit to any plan for their living together he might make. Accordingly, the next time he phoned she said that she would hate to think of him selling his flat in order to buy a house. She knew how much he loved his flat. "But I'll have to sell it one day, darling. When you're free and we can get married we'll need a house." "I'd much rather you waited till then, Martin." "Yes, but that doesn't solve the problem of how we're going to live then, does it?" That lunchtime Francesca went across the Archway Road and sold the two cut-glass scent bottles for seventeen pounds fifty. All those taxis were making inroads into her resources and if Martin was taking her to dinner at the Mirabelle, as he had promised, on Wednesday, she ought to have a new dress. She ought to try and rake up enough to buy the burgundy crepe Kate Ross, who owned the flower shop, had for weeks been trying to sell for twenty-five pounds. Martin had got into the habit of ringing the shop every morning at ten. At two minutes to ten on Wednesday he phoned, sounding excited, and said he had had a wonderful idea which he would tell her about that night. Francesca went into the room at the back and tried on the burgundy crepe which Kate had brought in with her and got Kate to agree to take twenty-three pounds fifty for it. It started to snow at about five, great flakes like goose feathers. Kate always went home at half-past because she didn't have a day off or Saturday afternoon. Martin gasped at the sight of Francesca in the dark red dress with her hair piled up and a dark red-and-white speckled orchid tucked into a curl. He stared at her adoringly. These transports of his, though she knew they were sincere, always irritated Francesca. She preferred a lecherous reaction, which was what she had had from Russell Brown and those other men who had preceded Tim and which she had, in his own individual way, most satisfactorily from Tim. But she smiled and looked rather shy and said quietly, "Do I look nice?" "Francesca, you look so beautiful. I don't know what to say. I wish I was more articulate; I should like to write poems to you." "I just hope I'm going to be warm enough," said Francesca, her mind on mink coats, but Martin assured her she would be exposed to the open air for no longer than it took to cross the pavement. "So what's this wonderful idea?" she said when they were in the car. Martin said he wasn't going to tell her until they were eating their dinner. Francesca had an enormous appetite and a hearty capacity for alcohol. She and Tim were both the sort of very thin people who can eat as much as they like without putting on weight. But she never ate and drank anywhere near as much as she wanted when with Martin, it didn't fit the image. Tonight, however, she was going to start off with quenelles of lobster, quenelles of anything being among her favourite food. To precede it, a brandy and soda would have gone down well. Francesca asked for a dry sherry. Martin's shyness and awkwardness increased during the meal. He had become almost tongue-tied by the time Francesca started on her roast pheasant, and although this suited her well enough, she couldn't help speculating as to what it might be about the wonderful idea that was so inhibiting. Then, suddenly, like a man confessing a sin that has long been on his conscience, he began. Fascinated, she watched the slow process of the blush spreading across his face. "I haven't told anyone this except my parents. In November I won a hundred and four thousand pounds on the football pools. No, don't say anything, let me finish. I decided I'd keep half and give half away: You can imagine my reasons for wanting to do that." Francesca couldn't at all, but she said nothing. She felt a curious breathless excitement as if she were on the brink of enormous revelations. Yet he was only confirming what Tim had said all along. "You see, I felt grateful to-well, to fate or God or something for having had such a fortunate sort of life. I made up my mind to help people who were having housing difficulties, but I haven't got very far with that. It's much harder than you'd suppose to get people to accept money. All I've managed to do so far really is pay for a boy to have a heart operation." "That's not housing difficulties," said Francesca. "No, that was to be the one exception. Apart from that, I'm considering my cleaner's sister-in-law who's having a nervous breakdown because of noise in the place where she lives, and I've managed to get a young couple on very low wages to accept a loan." He was smiling tentatively at her, leaning forward, waiting for her approval. Francesca looked blankly at him. It occurred to her that he might actually be off his head. But, no, he was just innocent, he didn't know he was born... Suppose she were to throw herself on his mercy, tell him who she was and that Tim was her lover and Lindsay's father and that they were doomed to live in worse conditions than maybe any of those people he had talked about? She couldn't do it. It was impossible. He refilled her wine glass and said, "So now I've told you. I don't want to have any secrets from you." As if he'd just confessed to some weird perversion, thought Francesca. "But the point of telling-well, I've been a complete fool. I've been worrying about buying homes for other people and worrying about where you were going to live when you left Russell, but it never occurred to me till last night that I don't have to sell my flat or get a mortgage. Apart from what I'm going to give away, I've got fifty thousand of my own. I've got my own half-share of the win." "So what's the wonderful idea?" said Francesca carefully. "To buy a flat for you and Lindsay to live in." He paused but she said nothing. "I mean, that solves everything, doesn't it? Lindsay can have her own room, Russell can't possibly accuse you of corrupting her, and after two years when you've got your divorce we can sell both flats and buy a house. How does that suit you? I'm not going to make any conditions, Francesca"-Martin smiled and reached across the table for her hand-"only I hope I can come and stay sometimes, and I'll be the happiest man on earth if you'll choose a flat that isn't far from mine." "So we're going house-hunting on Saturday. He's out on Cloud Nine already, planning colour schemes and fussing about something called cubic footage." "Miss Urban was always house-proud. She'll make some lucky chap a wonderful wife one of these days. What did you have to eat?" "Lobster quenelles, roast pheasant, and roast potatoes and calabresse and sauteed mushrooms and asparagus, and a sort of chartreuse souffle with cream." "You should have asked for a paper bag and said you wanted to take some home for your aged relative." Francesca giggled. She sat on Tim's lap and took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it in her own. "But, seriously, Tim, what's the future in letting him buy a flat for me to live in? I shan't live in it. But I can't think of any way of getting out of it, short of flatly saying I won't leave my husband." "Suppose I said give it just two weeks more? Just till Monday, the twelfth of Feb.? If he's going to buy mah honey chile a love nest, he's got to furnish it, hasn't he? In these scandalous times five grand is the least, but the leastest, he can expect to spend on furnishings." "He said I could have the cane chairs out of his living room." "What a miscreant he is!" said Tim. "Still, you won't stand for that, will you? Not a girl of spirit like you. You'll ask for five thousand to splash about in Heal's." "Oh dear," said Francesca with an enormous yawn, "I'll try, I'll do my best, but not a minute more after Feb. the twelfth."

XIV

Francesca didn't know whether to fix on the first flat they saw so that she could go home early, or pretend to find nothing to please her so that things would have progressed no further by the time her deadline came. In the event, she did neither, for as soon as they were really doing something together, conducting practical business, Martin made clear his belief in man as the master. In this, as in all matters on a higher level than that of deciding what she should wear or perhaps what they should eat, he took it for granted he made the decisions, asking for her approval only as a matter of courtesy. During the two days since their dinner at the Mirabelle he had been in touch with estate agents, had made himself familiar with the specifications of every flat for sale in the area of Highgate and Crouch End, and had already viewed several. This led to his making of a short list and from it a shorter list which by Saturday afternoon had fined down to one. The flat in question wasn't quite as near Cromwell Court as he would have liked, but it was in other respects so suitable that he thought they must overlook that small defect. Francesca hadn't expected to react with either enthusiasm or dislike to the prospect before her. She had expected to be bored. Her feelings on entering the flat surprised her very much. She had never lived anywhere very spacious or elegant or even ordinarily attractive. There had been her parents' mansion flat in Chiswick, big and cold and pervadingly dark brown, a furnished room in Pimlico, and a furnished room in Shepherds Bush, the little house she had shared with Russell, the basement squat she had shared with Russell's supplanter, her three rooms in Stroud Green. Home to Francesca had never been much more than a place to keep out the rain where there was a table to eat meals off and a bed to go to with someone she liked. But this was another thing. The fourth floor, the penthouse, of Swan Place, Stanhope Avenue, Highgate, was a different matter altogether. The living room was very large and you went into the dining part of it through an arch. One wall was all glass. The heating made it too hot for even her thin coat; she could have gone naked. Looking out of the big plate-glass windows on to hilly streets and patches of green and snowy roofs, being led into the pastel blue kitchen and the pastel apricot bathroom, Francesca found herself thinking that she would like to live here, she would like it very much indeed. It was a crying shame that she couldn't, or that the price to pay for doing so was too high, because she would like it-oh, wouldn't she! And Lindsay would like it and probably Tim too, though you could never tell with him. It was just too awful that she could have it only by being s stuffy old Martin's kept woman. She wondered how much it cost. "What do you think?" said Martin in the car. "It's lovely." "I'm glad you like it, darling, because although you'll think me very high-handed and a real male chauvinist pig, I've actually already told the agent I'll have it and I've put down a deposit." "What would you have done," asked Francesca curiously, "if I'd hated it?" "I knew you wouldn't. I think I know you pretty well by this time." "How much is it, Martin?" "Forty-two thousand pounds." Francesca was silenced. She felt quite weak and swimmy in the head at the thought of so much money. Martin said it would be a good investment, house property was the best investment these days, and before they got married he would sell both flats and buy a house. The property market, he had been told, was due for another steep rise in the spring. With luck he ought to make a big profit on both flats. They went back to Cromwell Court where Martin had got chocolate eclairs and a Battenburg cake in for tea. Francesca partook heartily of both. It was the most miserable shame she didn't find Martin in the least attractive. If only she fancied him she could have put up with the yawning dullness and the accountant's talk and the pomposity for the sake of that lovely flat. But she didn't fancy him, not a scrap, which was odd really because, like Tim, he was tall and dark and though not so good looking, he was younger and cleaner and he didn't permanently stink of Gauloises. Francesca pondered rather regretfully on the anomalies of sexual attraction while Martin lectured her gently on house property and the registration of land and stamp duty and the making of searches and the mysteries of conveyancing. Francesca ate another chocolate eclair. Martin wasn't the sort of person who would even consider going to bed in the afternoon, he would think it perverse. She let him hold her hand across the spread of sofa cushions. "I suppose it'll be months and months before you actually own it?" she said. "Oh, no. I'm paying cash, you see. My friend, Norman Tremlett-you met him here-he'll do a survey for me on Monday. I've already talked to my solicitor-he's another friend, we were all at school together-and he says, provided the survey's favourable there's no reason why the contract shouldn't be ready for my signature by February the twelfth, that's Monday week. Then I'd get completion as soon as possible, maybe three weeks, and you could move in." Francesca thought how when she and Russell had tried to buy a house, what difficulties and obstacles there had been! The first two they fixed on had been sold over their heads while the building society hesitated over giving Russell a mortgage. Securing the one they had finally lived in took months and months, nearly a year of their hopes being raised and dashed. But they, of course, had had no money and no old-boy network. It no longer mattered, it was history, ten years gone, swept away by oceans of water under the bridge. She smiled at Martin. "What about furniture, darling?" "I thought of making a separate deal with the owner for the carpets and curtains and the bedroom furniture and the fridge and cooker. He wants to sell. Of course, if there was anything special you wanted, we could go shopping together next Saturday." Was there any point now in waiting till February 12? None except that she had given Tim an undertaking. Martin seemed to take it for granted that she would now be spending every evening with him. Francesca pointed out that while she was still with Russell she couldn't go out every night and leave him to look after Lindsay. Perhaps she might manage another day in the week as well as Monday... "I want my parents to meet you," said Martin. She insisted on going home at six o'clock and he insisted on driving her. This time he didn't drop her a hundred yards away but set her down outside number 54 and there he waited to see her into the house. Francesca stood outside the white iron gate, waving impatiently at him, while he sat in the car, refusing to go till she did. After a few seconds she saw it was useless. She must either make it look as if she were going into that house or else give up the game. There was a light on in the hall but nowhere else. She unlatched the white gate and walked quickly to the side entrance which was a wooden door set into a six-foot-high fence. It was rather more than dusk and not quite dark. Francesca boldly tried the handle on the wooden door, and when it worked pushed the door open and found herself on a concrete strip of back yard. It would be rather awful, she thought, but rather funny too if someone saw her lurking there and called the police. After a little while she heard Martin's car go, so she opened the wooden door again and got out as fast as she could, running away down the side street on to which the garden of 54 abutted. It wasn't until her next meeting with him that she learned how Martin had come back to "see if she was all right." How, from a car in the street, he could have known whether she was or wasn't he didn't say. But while there, he said, he had seen Russell Brown come out of the house and walk away towards Coldfall Wood. First of all he told her that he had felt so happy about the new flat and their future that on Sunday he had decided to rush in (as he put it) where angels fear to tread and had actually called on Miss Watson. There in her employer's house in Hurst Avenue he had explained what his letters perhaps hadn't explained and had convinced her of his good intentions. She had agreed, in tears and some bewilderment, to accept ten thousand pounds with which to buy a small terraced house in the Lincolnshire town where her married sister lived. "So that's twenty-five thousand disposed of. Do you think it would be wrong of me if I only gave away another twenty? You see, I'm going to have rather more expense than I thought with your flat." Francesca said with perfect sincerity that she didn't think it would be wrong at all. Every time he talked of giving money away to these people she didn't know and didn't want to know, she had to turn her face away so that he greeted with grave disapproval. In her experience, parents never like you spending money, even your own, but she had reckoned without the passion for wise investment which throbs in the heart of every good accountant. Francesca noticed too that Martin's mother took it very coolly. She had a sensitive awareness of women's reactions, and she understood that Margaret Urban, mother of an only son, would now be able to convince herself that if her son and his fianc6e lived under separate roofs before marriage, they wouldn't sleep together before marriage either. "A very sound idea," said Walter, "buying the place before prices go up again. Of course you'll elect to describe it as your principal residence?" "It won't be his residence at all, Walter," said Mrs Urban. Her husband took no notice of this interruption which had made Francesca discreetly smile. "Because if Swan Place is your secondary residence you won't forget, will you, that you'll be liable for Capital Gains Tax when you sell it." "Do you know," said Martin, "I had forgotten. The tax payable would be a third of my profit, wouldn't it?" "Thirty per cent," said Walter. They talked about tax and tax avoidance all through dinner. Mrs Urban watched them placidly from under her slate-blue fringe, but Francesca was so bored she couldn't control her yawns. On Saturday afternoon they paid another visit to Swan Place and saw the owner, a Mr Butler, and he and Martin went through what Martin called "negotiating a price" for the carpets and curtains and bits of kitchen equipment and bedroom furniture. Afterwards he took Francesca out to tea at Louis' in Hampstead. He said that they would go and buy any other furniture she might want next week-end, and when she said she could do that on her own, he said he thought he would like to be there too. After all, it would one day be his furniture as well as hers. Francesca didn't much care, she had given up, the long drag was nearly over. She would see him on Monday and say she couldn't leave Russell or contrive to have a tremendous quarrel with him, and that would be that. When Francesca had eaten as many cream slices and rum babas as she could manage-it was too late in the day to worry about sticking to a Victorian lady's appetite-Martin suggested they go across the road and see the Bunuel film at the Everyman. But Francesca wasn't having that. If Goldie upstairs would keep an ear open for Lindsay she wanted to go round the pub with Tim. So she said she had to get back to Lindsay because Russell was having dinner with his publisher and someone who might be interested in doing The Iron Cocoon for television. This was an excuse in which Tim had rehearsed her and she was glad to have an opportunity of using it. Martin, of course, drove her up to Fortis Green Lane. Once more she had to hide in the side entrance. After Monday, she thought, she would never set foot in Finchley again. February 10, February 11... It would soon be all over. Francesca tried to think of ways of breaking off with Martin that were not too brutal. It was no good discussing this with Tim who would have advised the bald truth, presented as savagely as possible. Martin walked into the shop at a quarter to six on Monday, February 12. Last time, thought Francesca, last time. She gave him a vague kiss. She hadn't bothered with pink panne velvet or burgundy crepe but was wearing her favourite collection of garments, a patchwork skirt, a Hungarian peasant top with a long cardigan over it, and her Olaf's Daughters boots, which were heaven to wear in the shop whatever Martin might think of them. "I'm awfully sorry, darling, but before we have dinner I've got to go round to my solicitor's and see about this contract. You won't mind, will you?" Francesca didn't particularly mind. She wouldn't have minded if they had spent the entire evening at his solicitor's. All that interested her was how to pave the way for disappearing permanently from Martin's life. Perhaps it would be best to stage a quarrel over dinner or make use of an idea which had come to her earlier in the day. This was to say that she was pregnant and that it was Russell's child, so she would have to stay with him, wouldn't she? Francesca thought she could really enter into the spirit of this. And it had the great merit of not humiliating or even much disillusioning Martin. Francesca was amoral and greedy but she wasn't entirely heartless. Martin sometimes reminded her of a big kind dog, a Newfoundland perhaps, that one might have to abandon at the Battersea Dogs' Home but which one wouldn't kick in the face. She would try to let him down as lightly as possible, for her sake, she admitted, as well as his. She hated scenes, recriminations, fuss. Martin introduced her to Adrian Vowchurch as his fiancee. There was a Mrs Vowchurch somewhere, clattering about in the kitchen regions. Francesca sized Adrian up. She didn't like little hatchet-faced men with supercilious eyes and the sort of public school accent so affected as to be a joke. He shook hands with her and said insincerely, she thought, that it gave him really tremendous pleasure to meet her at last. While he and Martin talked more or less incomprehensibly, it was borne in on Francesca that they were there for the express purpose of signing the contract for the purchase of the Swan Place flat. She could see it, or what was probably it, lying on a blotter on a mahogany desk. Adrian saw her looking and said they hoped for cornpletion within a couple of weeks, allowing for searches (whatever that might mean) and would Mrs Brown like to have a look at the contract? Francesca hesitated. It seemed too unkind to let Martin buy the flat when she hadn't the slightest intention of ever living in it. Somehow the purchase of the flat hadn't seemed real until she saw what, in black and white, it involved. This agreement is made the Twelfth Day of February, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty, between John Alexander Butler, of Flat 10, Swan Place, Stanhope Avenue, Highgate, in the County of London left-brace Hereinafter called "the Vendor"), and Mrs Francesca Brown.... Martin had given him her address as 12, Cromwell Court. It was absurd on the strength of that one week-end, but it was rather touching. She read the rest of the first page. She'd thought that he brought her here just to witness his signature. And once this contract was exchanged with Butler's, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for him to get out of buying the flat. Even she knew that. What she ought to do was ask him to postpone signing it, and when they were alone tell him the truth. She found she lacked the courage to do that. She looked up and met the cold, suspicious eyes of Adrian Vowchurch. He didn't like her. It was far more than that. He distrusted her and resented her presence. He gave an infinitesimal shrug and passed a fountain pen to her. "Can we have your signature then, Mrs Brown-er, Francesca?" She took the pen. "Not there," he said. "Up here." Martin gave a soft indulgent laugh. She didn't quite understand, but she signed where Adrian told her to, and then Julie Vowchurch, who had come in and given her a tight smile signed as witness. Francesca felt excited and puzzled and rather frightened. Martin refused the Vowchurches' offer of drinks and they drove up to Hampstead and had dinner at the Cellier du Midi. "You don't know how relieved I am," said Martin, "that I told you about winning that money. We'll never have secrets from each other, shall we?" "No," said Francesca, trying furiously to think. She couldn't wait to be home with Tim. "Now we've got your flat fixed up and the future settled, I want to get the other thing settled too. I mean the philanthropy part or charity or whatever you like to call it. So I'm going to have another go at Mrs Cochrane, and I really think the last ten thousand had better go to Mrs Finn. Have I told you about her? She used to be our cleaner and she's a bit crazy, poor old creature, and I'll have to reach her through her son. But I'm sure she's a deserving cause... Are you all right, darling? You look as if you're off somewhere in a dream." "I'm awfully tired. I won't come back with you, if you don't mind. I'll just get a taxi in Heath Street." His face fell. "But I could see you tomorrow, if you like." "Darling," he said, "if that's a promise I shan't mind letting you go." Tim was sitting at the kitchen table doing his reporter's expenses, the greatest work of fiction, he sometimes said, since War and Peace. He was smoking what smelt like his hundredth Gauloise of the day and drinking retsina out of a bottle. The oven was on and the wall heater and as usual the condensation was running down the walls. "Oh, Tim," said Francesca, "I feel very peculiar. Wait till I tell you. Can I have some wine, please, and a cigarette?" "Have you had a heart-rending renunciation scene?" "No, listen, Tim, we went to his solicitor and he had this contract thing for buying the flat and I read it and it said something about being between John Alexander Butler and Francesca Brown. And I nearly didn't sign it because it seemed a bit mean and rotten making him pay for something I wasn't going to live in, but you needn't look like that, I did sign it, and..." "Thank Christ," said Tim, and his sallow face had become even paler, the red mouth and the black brows stand- ing out like paint. "Think-you're sure it was made just between this Butler guy and you?" She nodded with eagerness. "And you signed it on your own? Livingstone didn't sign it?" "No." "When you went to see old Urban didn't he say something about Livingstone having to pay Capital Gains Tax on one of his properties if he sold them both?" "Yes, he sort of reminded Martin about some law about that. He said if Martin owned two flats and sold them both, he'd have to pay this tax on one of them. Thirty per cent of his profit, he said. What's he done, Tim? He didn't say anything to me, he didn't mention it after we'd left the solicitor's. And I didn't say anything, and I didn't break things off either..." "Break things off?" said Tim. "You'll see that guy every night till completion if it kills you and me. Don't you see what he's doing? He's buying it in your name so that he can avoid giving the government two or three grand tax. In other words, in a couple of weeks' time, barring acts of God, that forty-two thousand quid luxury apartment will become the exclusive, undisputed, unencumbered property of mah honey chile." "Oh, Tim, I really have done it, haven't I? This is better than a ring or a bit of furniture." "And revenge will be very sweet," said Tim. He put out his arms and she came into them and they hugged each other.

XV

It was rare for any post to arrive for Finn or Lena. There would be the electricity and gas bills every quarter and the little pension from Finn's father's firm, and at Christmas a card from Brenda. That was all. Months could pass by without Finn's receiving a single item addressed to himself, and it was therefore with the nearest he ever got to astonishment that he picked up the long white envelope from the doormat. The direction was to T. Finn Esq. and it was typewritten. Finn was on his way to Modena Road where he was papering walls. When he was in the van he took out the letter and read it.

Dear Mr Finn,

I do not think we have ever met, though our mothers are old friends. Perhaps Mrs Finn has mentioned to you that they had tea together a few weeks ago. I expect you will be surprised to hear from me, but the fact is that I have a business proposition to put to you and I wonder if we could meet and discuss this. Could you ring me at the above number in the next few days? I shall be there between 9:30 and 5:30.

Yours sincerely, Martin W. Urban.

Finn started the van and drove off to Parliament Hill Fields. Martin Urban had been wrong in saying they had never met. Finn seldom forgot a thing like that. He remembered Martin quite clearly as a spotty adolescent when he himself was eleven or twelve. Lena had taken him with her to Copley Avenue because it was the school holidays and Queenie was ill with flu. He had opened a bedroom door and seen Martin sitting at a desk, using a protractor and a set square. The older boy had turned on him a look which Finn at the time had taken for outrage and disgust but which later he understood. That look had in fact only been astonishment that Finn had seemed to be attempting to bridge the huge social gulf between them. What did the grown-up Martin want of him now? If it was true that Mrs Urban had admired the partitioning of Lena's room, it might be that she had talked about it to her son and he was looking for a builder to do a conversion job for him. Finn was more or less willing, providing the money was right and he wasn't hassled about time. The words "business proposition" seemed to imply something like that. He let himself into the house in Modena Road and walked from room to room, assessing the stage he had reached. Once the paper was up in the ground floor front room and the hall floor retiled, he would be finished and at leisure. But he would see how he got on before making that phone call. Remembering that look of Martin's all those years ago in Copley Avenue, he was slightly surprised to read that bit about their mothers being old friends. "A few weeks ago" wasn't exactly accurate either. A few months was more like it; it had been November 16, he recalled, his birthday. Just as well, he reflected, that the woman hadn't been back again during the terrible month, the weeks of Lena's sufferings. No wonder he hadn't yet finished the work for Kaiafas... She had said there were maggots coming out of the walls. That had been at the beginning when she could still see colours and smell smells, the real and the imaginary. After that she could only see in black and white and grey and had lain crying all night, all day. He had never left her. If she had gone to the hospital they would have put her in the locked ward. He hadn't dared sleep unless she was drugged v backslash and out, for she would spring upon him if she thought he was off guard. Twice she had tried to set the place on fire, and when he prevented this she burned herself instead. There were still burn scars on both her wrists and in the hollows of her elbows. But she had come out of it at last. She always did, though Finn was afraid the time might come when she wouldn't. She could hear people's voices again and see colours again and remember who he was. On the day she held his hand and asked him if he had worn her birthday present yet he knew she was better and he brought the bird back from downstairs. Mrs Gogarty started coming in to give him a break and he got back to work. In the past week Lena had twice been up to Second Chance, and this afternoon Mrs Gogarty was taking her to a street marketsomewhere in Islington, he thought it was, miles away from Parliament Hill Fields. Coming back to Lord Arthur Road at six, Finn found them occupied with the Tarot, not telling fortunes this time but studying the pictures on certain cards. Mrs Gogarty had just bought the pack off a stall for seventy-five pence. It appeared that the Hermit and Eight of Cups were missing. Lena gave a strong shiver as she picked up and looked at the Ten of Swords. It showed the body of a man, pinned to the ground by the ten sharp blades down the length of his back and lying by the waters of a lake. Finn covered up the card with the pretty Queen of Pentacles, and he thought how if ever he killed again it must look like an accident-it must be taken for an accident, for Lena's sake. She gave him a tremulous smile and began to produce from a bag for his inspection the things she had bought that day, a man's trilby hat, a pair of wooden elephant bookends, a green china quadruped with its tail missing, half a dozen copies of a magazine called Slimming Naturally. Later on, Mr Beard, who kept the fur and suede cleaner's shop in Brecknock Road and who had once tried, with some success, to raise up the spirit of Cornelius Agrippa, was coming round and bringing his Ouija board. Finn felt a quiet relief that things were getting back to normal. While they waited for Mr Beard, Mrs Gogarty set out the Tarot for Finn and foretold an unexpected accession of wealth. Finn waited a couple of days before phoning Martin Urban, and then he did so from a phone box by Gospel Oak Station at ten in the morning. "You wanted me to ring you. The name's Finn." "Oh, yes, good morning. How do you do? Nice of you to phone. I expect you gathered from my letter that I've got a proposition to put to you that's rather to your advantage. It's not something I'd feel like discussing on the phone. Could we-er, meet and have a word, d'you think?" "If you want," said Finn. "A pub? I'll suggest somewhere half-way between our respective homes, shall I? How about the Archway Tavern? If tonight would suit you, we could say eight tonight in the Archway Tavern." He rang off without asking Finn how he would recognise him or telling him what he himself looked like. Finn wasn't much bothered by that, he knew he would somehow smell out in the man the studious and superior adolescent of long ago. But for a little while he did wonder why, if Martin Urban only wanted him to divide a room into two or make two rooms into one, he hadn't felt like even hinting at it on the phone. Mr Bradley was spending the evening as well as most of the day with Lena. His daughter-in-law was having an operation for gallstones, and he couldn't get into the house till his son came back from the hospital at nine. It was a cold, misty evening with not much traffic about and few people. Finn wore the yellow pullover and the black scarf with the coins on, and Lena's birthday present. He walked into the Archway Tavern at two minutes past eight and stood still just inside the door, looking about him. As he had ex- pected, he knew Martin Urban at once, a tallish, squarebuilt man, becoming burly and looking older than his age. He was sitting at a table, reading the Evening Standard, and as Finn's pale piercing eyes fixed him he lifted his own. Finn walked up to him and he got to his feet. "Mr Finn?" Finn nodded. "How do you do? You're very punctual. It's good of you to come. I've been thinking about it. I didn't give you much notice, did I? I hope that's all right." Finn didn't say anything. He sat down. "What will you drink?" "Pineapple juice," said Finn. "Pineapple juice? What, just by itself? You're sure that's all right?" "Just pineapple juice," said Finn. "The Britvic." He expected Martin Urban to drink beer. He was the sort who always would in pubs except perhaps for the last drink. But he brought himself a large whisky, at least a double measure, and a small bottle of soda water. Finn supposed he was nervous about something or someone and that someone was very likely himself. He inspired trepidation in otherwise quite confident people, but he didn't know how to put them at their ease and wouldn't have done so even if he had known. He sat silent, pouring the thick yellow juice from the bottle into a small squat glass. They hadn't been alone at their table, but now the other man who sat there finished his beer, picked up his coat, and left. "And how's your mother these days?" "She's okay," said Finn. Martin Urban turned his chair away from the table and edged it a little nearer to Finn's. "Cheers," he said and he drank some of his whisky. "My mother does see her sometimes, you know. She looks in when she gets a chance." He waited for a rejoinder to this but none came. "I think it was November when she last saw her. She thought-well, she was a bit worried about her." "Well, well," said Finn. "She was always very fond of her, you see. They'd known each other for a long time." It was apparent to Finn that he was trying to avoid saying that Lena had been Mrs Urban's cleaner, a statement about which Finn wouldn't have cared at all. He swilled the juice round his mouth, savouring it. A particularly good batch, he thought. "That stuff you're drinking, is it all right?" Finn nodded. He watched Martin Urban's face flush to a dark brick-red. "I don't want you to think I'm criticising, finding fault or anything like that. If you don't own your own home these days or have a council place it's pretty difficult to find anywhere to live, let alone anywhere decent. And to buy somewhere you don't just have to be earning good money, you need a bit of capital as we caret like. What I'm trying to say is, when my mother told me the way Mrs Finn was living-through no fault of anybody's, actually-I thought, well, maybe I could do something to change all that, to sort of benefit you both, because we're all old friends, after all, aren't we?" Finn finished his drink. He said nothing. He was beginning to be aware that an offer was to be made to him, but for what and in exchange for what he couldn't tell. This man was as shy of approaching the point as Kaiafas was. Reminded of the Cypriot, he seemed to hear a voice saying in another pub, "I give it to my friend Feen instead," and at that recollection, at certain apparent parallels, he raised his eyes and let them rest on the flushed, square, somewhat embarrassed, face in front of him. greater-than you. "I hope I haven't offended you." r i; v Finn shook his head. "Good. Then I'll come to the point." Martin Urban looked round to see that they weren't overheard and said in a lower voice, "I could manage to let you have ten thousand pounds. I'm afraid I can't make it more than that. You'd have to go outside London, of course." Finn's gaze fell and rose again. He was overwhelmed by the munificence of this offer. His fame had indeed spread before him, and it wasn't his fame as a plumber and decorator. Yet one to him were fame and shame; he was without vanity. He drank the remains of his pineapple juice and said, "It's a lot of money." "You wouldn't do it for less." Finn did a rare thing for him. He smiled. He spoke one word. "When?" Martin Urban seemed slightly taken aback. "When you like. As soon as possible. You're going to accept then?" "Oh, yes. Why not?" "Good. That's splendid. I'm very happy you don't feel you have to put up any show of refusal, that sort of thing. It wastes so much time. Let's drink to it, shall we?" He fetched another pineapple juice and a second whisky. Facing Finn again, he seemed to become doubtful and his expression took on its former shade of mystification. "I have made myself plain? You have understood me?" Rather impatiently Finn said, "Sure. You can leave it to me." "That's fine. It's just that I thought you might not exactly have known what I meant. Would you like me to send you a cheque?" "I haven't got a bank account. I'd like cash." "Cash? My dear chap, that'd make quite a parcel." Finn nodded. "Pad it out a bit with newspaper. You can let me have half now and half later. That way you needn't let me have the rest till you know I've done what you want. Right?" "I suppose so. Are you going to be able to do it on your own? You know how to go about it?" "Find someone else then," said Finn. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. I have offended you. Anyway, it's no business of mine how you go about it. I want to think that once I've let you have the money you're on your own, you're free." Martin Urban swallowed his whisky very rapidly. He wiped his mouth, he sighed. "But you will-you will do it, won't you?" "Haven't I said?" He was far worse than Kaiafas, Finn thought. And now, as if it was any concern of his where Lena lived or what Lena did, he began talking once more about buying her a house, moving her out of Lord Arthur Road. "You can still get small houses for less than ten thousand in the country towns. If you don't mind going a good distance there are still building firms putting up houses for that. I'd get her to decide where she'd like to live-near some relative maybe-and then you and she could have a Saturday out there, calling on the agents." Finn understood it. Martin Urban wanted him out of the way, a long way away, once the deed was done. He didn't understand how ludicrous it was recommending some country town for Lena, Lena who would go mad, madder, maddest away from her precious tiny segmented home, the only home she could bear to live in, away too from her friends, from Mrs Gogarty and Mr Bradley and Mr Beard. Finn almost felt like telling Martin Urban to shut up, to think, to look at reality, but he didn't do this. He sat silent and impassive while the other talked on about surveyors' reports and freeholds and frontages and party walls. For he was understanding more and more. Martin Urban, like Kaiafas, believed that if he talked in this way of mundane, harmless, and practical matters he wouldn't quite have to realise the enormity of the deed for which he was to pay those thousands of pounds. At last he paused for breath and perhaps for some sign of appreciation. Finn got up, nodded to him and left without speaking again. He had been given no further instructions, but he didn't doubt that such would be sent to him in due course. Over the Archway concourse the snow was dancing down in millions of soft plumy flakes that whirled like fireflies in the light from the yellow lamps.

XVI

The parcel containing the first instalment of the money was brought to Finn by an express delivery service. A man in a green uniform handed it to him at the door. Finn took it upstairs. The house in Lord Arthur Road had its Saturday smell of baked beans and marijuana as against its weekday smell of stale waste bins and marijuana. Finn had unwrapped the parcel and was counting the money when he heard Lena coming down the stairs. Her footsteps were almost jaunty. Mr Beard was taking her to a meeting of the Tufnell Theosophists. Lena didn't have many men friends so it was an exciting event for her. Finn opened his door. "Will you be bringing him back with you?" Smiling a little and bridling, she said she didn't know. She would like to; she would ask him. Her eyes shone. She was wearing the mauve dress with the fringe and over it a red cloak lined in fraying satin. If you half-closed your eyes and looked at her you might fancy you were seeing-not a young girl, never that, but perhaps the ghost of a young girl. She was like a moth from whose wings most of the dust has rubbed away, a faded fluttering moth or a skeleton leaf. She laid her hand on Finn's arm and looked up into his face as if he were the parent and she the child. "Here," he said, "get something for your tea then." He thrust a bundle of notes, forty, fifty, pounds into her hands. She smelt of camphor, the mistletoe-bough bride who has been resurrected after fifty years in the trunk. Over the banisters he watched her go down, stuffing notes into her Dorothy bag, into her cloak pocket, miraculously spilling none. Rich now, young again, sane again, down the dirty pavements to her psychic swain. Finn returned to his room. Putting the money away with the rest in the bag under his mattress, he reflected once more on Martin Urban's recommendations. At the thought of Lena alone in a small country town, of Lena alone anywhere, he smiled a narrow smile of contempt. For a moment he imagined her removed from Lord Arthur Road, the only place he could remember where she had found fragments of happiness and peace; removed from him and her dear friends and the second-hand shops and her little cosy segmented space. He thought of the terrified feral mania that would overcome her when she smelt the fresh air and felt the wind and had to hunt for sleep, always elusive, in the spacious bedroom of a bungalow. But Martin Urban, of course, hadn't talked of transferring Lena to the country because he sincerely believed Finn should buy her a house with the money. His talk of prospective house-buying had been the precise equivalent of Kaiafas' references to his homeland and Anne Blake's expressed regret that he had ever left it. They couldn't bring themselves, these squeamish people, to put their desires into plain words. Finn wondered at it. He thought he could simply have said, fixing his water-bright eyes on his listener, "Kill this woman, this man, for me," always supposing he was ever in the unlikely situation of wanting anyone else to do anything for him. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he opened a large can of pineapple and ate it with some whole-meal bread and a piece of cheese. He was rather surprised that he hadn't yet been told who his victim was to be. He had expected Martin Urban to bring the money himself and in a note or by circumlocutory word of mouth to give him a name and a description. In the middle of the floor, between the mattress and the pineapple can and other remains of his meal, lay the wrappings from the parcel. They lay in a puddle of sun- light cast by the only sunbeam that had managed to insert itself through the Chinese puzzle of brick walls and penetrate the room. Finn had told Martin Urban to wrap the money up in newspaper, and now his eye was caught by the picture on the front of the copy of the North London Post which had been around the notes and under the brown paper covering. He stretched out a long arm, picked up the newspaper and looked more closely at this picture. He seldom so much as glanced at a newspaper. He had never seen this copy before, but he recognised at once the scene of the photograph. It was the path between the railway bridge and the end of Nassington Road by Parliament Hill Fields. He recognised it because he had been there and because it was there that he had killed Anne Blake-and also because he had seen this photograph in another newspaper, that which Kaiafas had used to wrap his payment as a macabre joke. So Martin Urban knew. Indeed, it must be because Martin Urban knew that he had picked him to do this particular, as yet unspecified, job for him. How did he know? Finn felt a prickling of the skin on his forehead and his upper lip as a little sweat broke. There was no telling how Martin Urban knew, but know he must or why else would he have sent Finn that newspaper with that photograph in it? The unfamiliar sensation of fear subsided as Finn reflected that Martin Urban would hardly, considering what he was paying for and was about to have done for him, pass his information elsewhere. He shook the newspaper, expecting a note to fall out. He turned the pages slowly, looking for some hint or clue. And there, on page seven, it was. A paragraph ringed in red ball-point, with a street number inserted and a name underlined. Finn read the paragraph carefully, committing certain details to memory. Then he put on the yellow pullover and the PVC jacket. This was an occasion for covering his distinctively pale hair with a grey woolly hat and his memorable eyes with dark glasses. Both these items of disguise were acquisitions of Lena's. Finn locked his door and went down to the garage in Somerset Grove. There he replaced his licence plates with a pair bearing the number TLE 315R. These he had two years before removed from a dark brown Lancia which had been left parked in Lord Arthur Road during a day and a night. He had known they would come in useful one day. Slightly disguised and in his slightly disguised van, Finn drove up to Fortis Green Lane and parked a little way down from number 54. It was just on three o'clock. It was impossible to tell whether the house was at present empty or occupied. The day was chilly, the kind of day that is called raw, with a dirty-looking sky and a damp wind blowing. All the windows in 54 Fortis Green Lane were closed and at the larger of the upstairs windows the curtains were drawn. It was too early to put lights on. The front garden was composed entirely of turf and concrete, but the concrete predominated. On the strip of it that ran round and was joined to the walls of the house was a dustbin with its lid on the ground beside it. The lid lay inverted with its hollow side uppermost and the wind kept it perpetually rocking with a repetitive faint clattering sound. Finn thought that if there was anyone in the house they would eventually come out to pick up the dustbin lid and stop the noise. Quite a lot of people passed him, young couples, arm-inarm or hand-in-hand, older people who had been shopping in Finchley High Road. Their faces looked pinched, they walked quickly because of the cold. Nobody took any notice of Finn, reading his newspaper in his plain grey van. The dustbin lid continued to rock in exactly the same way until five when a sharper gust of wind caught it and sent it skittering along the concrete to clatter off on to the grass. Still no one came out of the house. Finn gave it an- other half-hour and then, when he could tell by the continued darkness of the house that it must be empty, he drove home. Lena was having tea with Mr Beard. There was a net curtain with scalloped edges spread as a cloth on the barnboo table and this was laden with all the things Lena had bought for tea, lattice pastry sausage rolls and anchovy pizza and Viennese whirls and arctic roll and Mr Kipling almond slices. Mr Beard was talking very interestingly about Dr Dee and the Enochian language in which he was instructed by his spirit teachers, so Finn sat down to have a cup of tea with them. Lena kept giving him fond proud smiles. She seemed entirely happy. He tried to listen to Mr Beard's account of Dee's Angel, but he found himself unable to concentrate. He kept thinking, turning over in his mind, how was he going to do it? How was he going to kill this stranger he hadn't yet seen and make it look like an accident? The next day he went back to Fortis Green Lane in the morning. The dustbin and its lid had gone. Finn sat in the van on the opposite side of the wide road this time and watched people cleaning cars and pruning rose bushes. No one came out of or entered number 54, and the bedroom curtains were still drawn. It wasn't until Monday evening, though he went back again on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, that his watching was rewarded. First, at about a quarter to seven, a tallish man in early middle age appeared from the Finchley High Road direction, unlatched the white gate, walked up the path and let himself into the house. He was wearing a thigh-length coat of a sleek light brown fur and dark trousers and a dark grey scarf. The appearance of this man rather puzzled Finn who had expected someone younger. He watched lights come on in the hall, then the downstairs front room, then behind the drawn bedroom curtains. The bedroom light went out but the others remained on. After a while Finn went off and had a pineapple juice at the Royal Oak in Sydney Road and then he walked about in Coldfall Wood, in the dark, under the old beech trees with thensteely trunks and sighing, rustling boughs. Finn wasn't the kind of person one would much like to meet in a wood in the dark, but there was no one there to meet him. The lights had gone out in the house when he returned. It was as well for Finn that he was never bored. He sat in the van, on the odd-numbered side of Fortis Green Lane and, putting himself into a trance, projected his astral body to an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas where it had been before and sometimes conducted conversations with a monk. Such a feat he could now accomplish with ease. The transcending of space was relatively simple. Would he ever accomplish the transcending of time so that he could project himself back into history and forwards into the future? He slept a little after his astral body had come back and awoke angry with himself in case his quarry had passed by while his eyes were shut. But the house still remained dark. Finn thought he would wait there till midnight, the time now being ten to eleven. While he had been there cars had passed continually, though the traffic had never been heavy. At just seven minutes to eleven a white Triumph Toledo pulled up outside number 54 and after a little delay a woman got out. She was young and tall with a straight nose and lips curved like the blades of scimitars and hair like a bronze cape in the sulphur light. Finn lowered his window. He expected to see emerge from the car the man in the fur coat, but instead he heard the voice of Martin Urban call softly, "Good night, Francesca." That settled for Finn certain questions that had been perplexing him. This was the right place, after all, this was it. He had doubted. He raised his window and watched the woman stand by the gate, then open the gate and walk up one of the concrete strips to a door between the house wall and the boundary fence. She waved to Martin Urban, opened the door and let it close behind her. Finn felt relieved. He watched the white car slowly depart, then gather speed. As it disappeared into a turning on the right-hand side, his eyes following it, there passed very close to the van's window on the near side, almost brushing the glass, a brown furriness like the haunch of an animal. Finn turned to look., Russell Brown was crossing the road now, unlatching the white gate, walking up the path. Although the woman must now have been in there for at least a minute, no lights had yet come on. Though, since she had entered by the back way, she might have put lights on only in the back regions. Russell Brown unlocked the front door and let himself into the house. Immediately the hall light came on. Finn switched on his ignition and his lights and drove away.

XVII

It saddened Francesca to have to give in her notice. She had liked working for Kate Ross, being among flowers all day, arranging flowers in the window and in bouquets, delivering flowers and seeing on people's faces the dawning of delighted surprise. Tim had once said that there was something especially flower-like about her and that-he was presumably quoting-her hyacinth hair, her classic face, her naiad airs had brought him home from desperate seas. He had been rather drunk at the time. But there was no help for it; she had to leave. February 24 would be her last day at Bloomers, and Adrian Vowchurch had promised completion of the purchase of the Swan Place flat two days later. "You'll be too grand, anyway, to work in a flower shop," said Tim, and he put his mouth to the soft hollows above her collar bone. Francesca made purring noises. The air in the room was so cold that their breath plumed up from the bed like smoke. "Why don't you ask Livingstone to buy you a garden centre?" "That would be pushing it," said Francesca primly. "I think I've done marvels actually. I shan't be getting any more out of him because I shan't be seeing him. Not after he's paid for the flat and that Adrian person has done the what-d'you-call-it. He won't know where to find me when I've left Bloomers." "He'll be able to find you in delectable Swan Place, though perhaps mah clever honey chile won't give him a key?" From the electric blanket came up waves of heat that made them both sweat, but that morning Francesca had found ice on the inside of the windows. The atmosphere held a bitter and quite tangible dampness. Tim lit a Gauloise and smoked it in the darkness. The glowing tip of it was like a single star in a cold and smoky sky. "I don't think I'm going to go there at the beginning. I did think of moving in like he expects me to and after I'd been there a few days stage a tremendous irrevocable sort of row with him and say I never wanted to see him again. But I don't think I could. I'm not good at rows. So what I think now is I'll just stay home here very quietly for two or three days and then I'll write him a letter. I'll tell him in that what I'd have told him in the row, that it's all over but that I know the flat's mine and I need it and I'm going to live in it. How's that? Shall we go and live in that lovely place, Tim, or shall we sell it and buy another lovely place?" "That will be for you to say." "What's mine is yours, you know. I think of you as my common law husband. Can you have a common law husband if you've already got an uncommon law one?" Tim laughed. "I'm wondering what steps, if any, Miss Urban will take when she discovers your coup. You'd better not count on keeping the furniture." He drew on his cigarette and the star glowed brightly. "I must say I shan't be sorry when mah honey chile isn't deceiving me every night with another woman." "You must feel like a ponce," said Francesca. "Ponces never seem to mind, do they?" "The minding, as you call it, fluctuates in direct proportion to the immoral earnings." He stubbed his cigarette out and turned to her. "It has nothing to do with the activities. Personally, I hope you're giving Livingstone a good run for his money." "Well, yes and no. Oh, Tim, you've got one warm hand and one icy cold one. It's rather nice-it's rather fantastic...." Francesca brought Martin a large specimen of xygocactus truncatus from the shop. It had come late into flower and now, at the end of February, its flat scalloped stems each bore on its tip a bright pink chandelier-shaped blossom. Martin was childishly, disproportionately, pleased by this gift. He put it on the window sill in the middle of the window with the view over London. It was snowing again, though not settling, and the flakes made a gauzy net between the window and the shining yellow-and-white city. That was Wednesday and Martin let her go home in a cab, but on Thursday she spent the day and stayed the night in Cromwell Court. Martin took the day off and they bought bed linen and towels, a set of saucepans and a French cast-iron frying pan, two table lamps, a Japanese portable colour television, and a dinner service in Denby ware. These items they took away with them. The threepiece suite covered in jade-green and ivory velvet, the brass-and-glass dining table and eight chairs would, of course, have to be sent. Francesca said she would be bringing her own cutlery and glass. She was bored with shopping for things she doubted she would be allowed to keep. They had dinner at the Bullock Cart in Heath Street. Martin said he had heard from John Butler and that he and his wife would move out of Swan Place first thing Monday morning. He would give the key to the estate agent, or if Martin liked he could call in and fetch it himself during the week-end. "We could collect it on Saturday," said Francesca who could foresee the difficulties of any other course. When Mr Cochrane rang the bell at eight-thirty in the morning Francesca opened the door to him. She was wearing the top half of Martin's pyjamas and a pair of blue tights. Martin had come out of the kitchen with the Worces- ter sauce apron on. His expression was aghast. Mr Cochrane came in without saying anything, his eyes perceiving the flowering cactus, his nostrils quivering at the scent of Ma Grille. He closed the door behind him, said, "Good morning, madam," and walked into the kitchen where he put his valise down on the table. "How's your sister-in-law?" said Martin. "Home again," said Mr Cochrane. He looked at Martin through the bi-focals, then carefully over the top of them. Then he said, "Yes, home again, Martin, if you can call it home," and, carrying a tin of spray polish and two dusters, he went into the living room where he scrutinised the cactus and, lifting up each item and examining it, the sheets and towels and saucepans and lamps they had bought on the previous day. At last he turned to Francesca, his death's head face convulsed into a smile. "What a blessing to see him leading a normal life, madam. I like a man to be a man, if you know what I mean." "I know what you mean all right," said Francesca, giggling. "Is there anything special you'd like me to do, madam, or shall I carry on as usual?" "Oh, you carry on as usual," said Francesca. "I always do," and she gave him her best and most radiant smile. It was her last day at the shop since Kate had said she needn't come in on Saturday morning. Next week, when she had disappeared, would Martin come to the shop and ask Kate about her? It wouldn't really matter what Martin did after Monday, after the deal was completed and the money handed over. Perhaps she should screw up her courage and really move in on Monday afternoon as Martin thought she was going to, move in, invite him that evening-and tell him the truth, that legally the flat was hers and she intended to live in it without ever seeing him again. She would never summon up that courage. The only way was to do as she had told Tim she would do, disappear, write to him, when he made a fuss let Tim explain to him, finally take possession when it had all blown over. The flat is yours, hang on to that, she told herself. It's yours in the law and nothing can shake that. Martin called for her at ten to six and they went back to Cromwell Court where he cooked the dinner. At about eleven he drove her up to Fortis Green Lane and Francesca was again obliged to take refuge in the back garden of number 54. Tonight the house was in darkness. She stood against the stuccoed wall, listening for the car to go. As it happened, she came out too soon. It hadn't been Martin's car but a small grey van pulling away. Martin was still there, still watching the house-watching for lights to come on? She told him she had left her key in the house and would have to wake Russell to let her in. "Please go, darling. I'll be all right." Reluctantly, Martin did go. Francesca was actually trembling. She had to sit down on the low wall for a moment. When she got up and turned round to look warily at the house she half-expected to see its occupant glaring at her from an upper window. But there was no one. It was colder tonight than it had been for a week, the sky a dense unclouded purple and the air very clear. She really needed something warmer on than the red-and-blue-striped coat over her corded velvet smock. Each time Martin landed her up here she tried walking in fresh directions to find a taxi, but now she had exhausted them all. So was it to be down to Muswell Hill or across to Finchley High Road? Martin had headed for Muswell Hill... Francesca, who wasn't usually very apprehensive or given to improbable fantasies, found herself thinking, suppose his car broke down and I walked past it and he saw me... his Now that her task was so nearly accomplished, she was growing hourly more and more frightened in case anything should happen at the elev- enth hour to stop her getting the flat. People said it was virtually impossible to withdraw from such a deal once the contracts were exchanged. He wouldn't have to withdraw, though, he would only have to have a new contract made with his name on it instead of hers. Nothing must happen. She only had Saturday to get through now. They had agreed not to meet on Sunday, she would be too busy packing. She pulled up the hood of her coat and set off along wide, cold, empty Fortis Green Lane for Finchley High Road. A taxi picked her up just before she reached it. "I don't usually ever feel nervous about anything, you know," she said to Tim. "I suppose anyone can get nervous if there's enough at stake. While I was sort of lurking in that garden I kept thinking how awful it would be if that man came out of his house. I mean, he might have chased me and Martin might have hit him, thinking he was my husband. I imagined the most fearful things." Tim laughed. "The most fearful thing about that would have been the outcome, the loss of our future home. Otherwise I can't imagine anything funnier than Livingstone having a punch-up with a complete stranger in the middle of the night in darkest Finchley." Francesca thought about it. Then she laughed too and helped herself to one of Tim's cigarettes. "What made you pick on that funny house, anyway? What made you pick on that man?" "Me? I didn't pick on him. I didn't pick on the house. That was your fiance. Remember? I didn't even know there was anyone called Brown living in Fortis Green Lane. The idea of writing that par for the Post was solely to give verisimilitude to your story. People say newspapers are full of lies, but they believe everything they read in newspapers just the same. Fortis Green Lane is a long road and Brown is a common name. There may be half a dozen Browns liv- ing there for all I know. Livingstone happened to find this one in the phone book." With a giggle Francesca said, "It would be most awfully unfair then if Martin had hit him." "You'll have to take good care he doesn't. He truly is that mysterious individual, the innocent bystander." There was a heavy frost that night and the roof tops were nearly as white as when they had been covered with snow. Francesca and Tim lay late in bed and Francesca brought Lindsay in with them. They talked about the flat in Swan Place while Lindsay sat on the pillow and braided Francesca's hair. Tim said they would probably have to sell the flat and buy one that wasn't in Highgate, it would be so awkward if they ever ran into Martin. That would be all right, Francesca said, she would quite like to live up near the Green Belt or out towards Epping Forest, she wasn't wedded to London. Nor to the distinguished author of The Iron Cocoon, said Tim, and they both laughed so much that Lindsay pinched their lips together. Tim drove her as near as he dared to Cromwell Court. Martin wanted to know what arrangements she had made for Monday. Had she booked a car? Was Lindsay going to the nursery that day or not? Could she manage all her clothes at one journey? And what about Russell? Had she told him there should be a fair division of their property and had he agreed? Francesca answered these questions as best she could while they were on their way to Swan Place to pick up the key from Mr Butler. She felt elated when the key was in her possession. A key gives such a secure feeling of rights and privacy and ownership. Mrs Butler took her round the flat once more, and Francesca could hardly contain her excitement. How different it was to view all this, to tread these soft, subtle-shaded carpets, finger stiff silky curtains, feel the warmth, turn on a tap, press a switch, in the knowledge it was going to be all her own! "Will you ask me to supper on Monday evening?" Martin said. "Tuesday. Give me just one day to settle in. Lindsay's bound to be difficult, you know." "Yes, I suppose so. Tuesday then." His face wore the hurt look that blurred his features and made it dog-like. "Adrian hopes to complete by mid-day on Monday, so you can come any time after. I expect the Butlers will still be moving out." Francesca didn't see much point in talking about it when she wasn't going to move in at all. She wished she had the nerve to ask Martin what was to be done with the deeds or lease or whatever it was. Deposited in his bank maybe. Not for long, she thought, not for long. Tim would deal with all that, she had done her part, she had almost done it. She held Martin's hand in the car, held it on her knee and said, "Let's not go out to dine, let's have a quiet evening at home on our own."

XVIII

Most of the time there was nobody in the house, but the man was there more often than the woman. This was a reversal, Finn thought, of the usual order of things. He had never seen them together, though he had been to Fortis Green Lane on five evenings now, each time parking in a different place. He had seen the woman twice and the man three times, and once he had seen the man with another woman. This didn't trouble him, nor was he perplexed about the relations of these people to each other or that of Martin Urban to them. Emotions, passion, jealousy, desire, even hatred, were beyond or outside his understanding. They bored him. He preferred magic. He longed now to be able to wield practical magic, to conjure his victim out of the house and into his trap. But he had lost that power even before the death of Queenie. Sitting in the van, watching, he thought of how, in Jack Straw's, he had concentrated on that reporter and made him get out and light a cigarette. Or had he? Such doubt is the enemy of faith, and it is faith that moves the mountains. Come out of the house, he said in his mind to the darkened windows, the closed front door, the indestructible stucco. He said it over and over again like the mantras he repeated for his meditation. He had no idea, and no means of knowing, if the house was empty or not. There might be a light on in the downstairs back room or in the kitchen. He had been there since five, since before the dark came down, but there had been no sign of life from the house and no flicker of light. It was a cold evening, the air already laying frost in a very thin silvery glitter on the tops of fences and the crosspieces of gates, on twigs and laurel leaves and on the oblique rear windows of parked cars. The sulphur light showed tiny early spring flowers in some gardens, pale or white or no-colour buds and bells. Finn didn't know the names of flowers. The frost wasn't heavy enough to whiten the grass much. Inside the van it was cold. Finn wore the yellow pullover and the grey woollen cap and the leather coat and sat reading Crowley's Confessions. Back in Lord Arthur Road he had left Lena and Mrs Gogarty indignant because Mr Beard, proposing to raise up for their edification Abremelin the Mage, meant to do so by indefencible methods. In fact, by the sacrifice of a pigeon, the emanation from whose blood would provide the material for the seer to build a body out of. Pigeons were commoner than flies in Brecknock Road, Mr Beard had said. Lena and Mrs Gogarty shuddered and twittered and sent Mr Beard to Coventry. Finn wished he was back there with them and the innocent pleasures of Planchette to which they had retreated, scared by Mr Beard's sophistication. A light had come on in 54 Fortis Green Lane, a not very strong light as from a sixty-watt bulb, in the hall. It showed through the slit of a window on the right-hand side of the door and through the small diamond-shaped pane of glass in the door itself. No one came out, no one went in. It was ten o'clock. Finn didn't think anything was going to happen tonight. Again it would have to be postponed. That he had taken Martin Urban's money and as yet done nothing to earn it vaguely oppressed him. But because it was a waste of time sitting there any longer, he drove down to Muswell Hill, to the Green Man, and drank two bottles of Britvic pineapple juice. Sitting alone at a table, he fixed his thought on a fat man I caret Every a checked sports jacket, willing him to get up and go outside to the gents. After about five minutes of this the fat man did get up and go outside, but a smaller thinner man sitting with him had gone out a moment or so before. Finn didn't know what to think. As he came out into the street he was visited by a premonition so intense as almost to blind him. He felt it like a pain in his head. Tonight was the time for it. If he would only seize his opportunity and go back to Fortis Green Lane now, all would be well. In his mind's eye, as on a screen, he saw the house quite clearly, the light shining through and alongside the front door, the front garden with its alternating turf and concrete. He stared into this vision and silently commanded Martin Urban's enemy to appear. At once this happened and Finn seemed to be staring into a pair of puzzled and dismayed eyes. He got into the van and drove back to Fortis Green Lane as fast as he could go. There was no need to watch and wait. As in his vision, Martin Urban's enemy was in the front garden, unlatching the white iron gate. But this time there was no meeting of eyes. Finn hadn't even switched off the engine. He watched the figure in the fur coat close the gate and turn immediately left into the side street. For what purpose would anyone go out alone at this time on a Saturday night? Finn knew it was no good judging by himself. He might go out to cornmune with the powers of darkness but others lacked that wisdom. They would be more likely to visit some friend, a nocturnal person who had no objection to late callers. He allowed his quarry two minutes' start and then he followed. Martin Urban's enemy was nowhere to be seen. The street was deserted. Coldfall Wood, grey and still under the indigo sky, lay ahead of him. He turned right along the edge of the wood and then he saw the figure in the fur coat ahead of him, a long way ahead, casting an attenuated black shadow as it passed under a lamp. There was scarcely * backslash knowledge k any other traffic; parked cars everywhere but only one that moved, a sports car that passed him, going towards Finchley. Finn lagged behind, stopped for a while. When he started again, driving slowly, it wasn't long before he came to a sign that indicated the nearness of the North Circular Road. The houses had stopped. Soon the parked cars had stopped. On either side of the road he had turned into stretched open land. Not woods, though, or heath or anything that remotely approximated to real countryside except that grass grew on it. It was a vast acreage of tips, of heaps of rubble, dismantled cars, rusty iron, stacks of wood that looked like collapsed huts, and the overgrown remains of abandoned allotments. The whole of this wilderness was weirdly but brilliantly lit by lamps on tall stems which coated the sky with a shimmering brownish fog and gave to the ground a look of total desolation. There was no dwelling of any kind in sight. Finn knew that most new approach roads to motorways or trunk roads look like this, that the* land only had this appearance of nightmare violation because heavy construction work had not long since taken place on it. Yet knowing this, he still had the feeling of having entered a different and uncanny world, a place where the ordinary usages of life were suspended and the occult reigned. In it he felt alone, he and the bobbing shadow in the distance ahead. He felt too that he might even be invisible, had perhaps discovered unwittingly the secret of invisibility which since the beginning of time magicians had sought for. A thrill of power ran through him. The clear brown sky seemed to be meshed all over with a dazzling veil of gold. But for a distant throb there was silence. Finn made the van glide slowly along. On the left-hand side, ahead of the moving figure, the pavement petered out. It would be necessary, inevitable, soon to cross that wide curving roadway, white and gold and glittering at close on midnight. caret Will The head above the fur collar turned to the right, to the left, to the right again. The black shadow dipped into the road. Finn was in second gear. He rammed his foot hard down on the accelerator, changed in one movement up into fourth, and shot towards the shining, moving pillar of fur. Now, at last, he saw the eyes, round, gleaming, dark with terror. He had to swerve in pursuit, to make sure. A shattering scream rang through the glittering empty air, arms were flung up in a desperate useless defence, and then, when it seemed as if the suddenly huge, screaming, animallike shape must flatten and paste itself against his windscreen, he felt it under the van, the wheels crunching flesh and bone. Finn reversed over the thing he had crushed and then drove over it once more in bottom gear. There was a lot of blood, dark and colourless as Anne Blake's had been, splashed blots of it on the white road. He made a U-turn and drove back the way he had come up. For a yard or so his tyres left their imprints in blood. He would clean those tyres when he changed the licence plates, before he went home to Lena. knowledge':,.

XIX

As yet the wood showed no sign of greening but it had grown sparkling brown and the beech trunks silver. Their myriad delicate fronds, for twigs was too solid a word, fanned against a mother-of-pearl sky. Martin was inescapably reminded of Tim. He had a feeling, utterly absurd and one to which he wouldn't have dreamt of yielding, that he should park the car here on the winding bit up to Highgate, and go on a pilgrimage through the wood to find the spot where he had met Tim. The dying day-not so different from a day just born-and the coming spring recalled to him the warmth of that encounter and that other curious feeling which he had felt for no one, not even for Francesca, either before or since. He drove on. The sky was deepening to lavender and the sunset had brushed it with pink and golden strokes. What had Tim been doing in the wood that morning? Strange that he had never asked himself that question before. While he had come in from Priory Gardens and was walking north, Tim seemed to have entered from the Muswell Hill Road as if he had come from the junction where the Woodman was. Martin was approaching this junction now and it occurred to him that he might go into Bloomers and buy Francesca some spring flowers. Of course he had promised not to see her today, but he would phone her when he got home and if she really didn't want to see him tonight, he would take the flowers to her on his way to work in the morning. Bloomers, however, was closed and its lights off, though the time was only twenty to six. Martin drove up Southwood Lane and down the High Street to Cromwell Court. No letters had come by the second post. He had written again to Mrs Cochrane on Friday but perhaps it was too soon yet to expect a reply. In the living room, part on a chair and part on the floor, were still stacked the saucepans, the frying pan, the apricot-and-brown-and-cream-patterned towels, the brown-and-white sheets and pillowcases, and the Denby ware dinner service. Francesca might be in need of those things. In the flat on Saturday afternoon he had noted the Butlers' phone number. He dialled it now and got the unobtainable signal. The Post Office presumably hadn't let her keep the old number when they came in today to reconnect the phone. Perhaps you always had to have a new number. Should he now phone Tim? It was three months, more than that, since he had last spoken to Tim. There was nothing really that he would like more tonight, since he couldn't be with Francesca, than to spend a couple of hours with Tim. They hadn't even quarrelled. They had parted because of his own absurd guilt over nothing. He had broken their friendship over that money. And it was nearly all gone now, would all be gone when he had settled with Mrs Finn and Mrs Cochrane. Tim wouldn't be home yet. Martin phoned Adrian Vowchurch and thanked him for getting completion so promptly. "Francesca move in all right, did she?" "Oh, yes," said Martin. "By the by, I had a message, heaven knows why, that there are two more keys with the agents. Okay?" Martin said it was okay and that he had wondered why there had only been one key. He kept Adrian talking for a while in the hope that he might invite him and Francesca round one evening, but Adrian didn't. He said he must fly because he and Julie were going out to dinner with the sen- *@ddii ior partner and his wife. Martin thought it likely that Francesca would phone once she had got Lindsay to bed and off to sleep. He drank some whisky, he made himself an omelette with four eggs and two rashers of bacon and a lot of mushrooms, and when he had eaten it and washed up it was half-past eight. The phone rang at nine. It was Norman Tremlett. Norman lived at home with his parents, and he wanted to know if Martin would bring Francesca to dinner on the evening of Saturday week. Martin didn't much want to dine with the Tremletts, but he felt excited at the idea of having the right to accept for himself and Francesca just as if they were already a married couple, so he said yes, they'd like to. Just as it had previously been too early, it now seemed too late to phone Tim, too late anyway for them to arrange to meet and go out anywhere that night. He would phone Tim tomorrow or the next day. For the first time since the autumn Martin unlocked the glass door and went out on to the balcony. The night was cool but the sky so unusually clear that you could see the stars, though so tiny and faint that it was as if the gloomy pall of London had pushed them even greater distances into space. Francesca wasn't going to phone tonight. He realised it with resignation, but it was silly to feel such intense disappointment. She would be tired after her long day, which had started perhaps with a final quarrel with Russell and ended with Lindsay's tantrums, and by now she might well be asleep. The post brought a letter, not from Mrs Cochrane, but from her brother-in-law. The tone was that of Mr Cochrane's notes, clipped and censorious. It began "Dear Martin," and the gist of it was that he and Mrs Cochrane would come to Cromwell Court that evening, eight o'clock if this was convenient. Martin looked in the phone book to see if Mr Cochrane was on the phone and found, to his surprise, that he was. But when he dialled the number there was no answer. He would have to try again later. This evening he was to dine with Francesca in Swan Place, so of course he couldn't see Mr and Mrs Cochrane. He drove to work via Shepherd's Hill, thus passing close by Stanhope Avenue, but Francesca's windows weren't visible. It was a nuisance having no phone number for her. He had an appointment with a client at eleven, which eventually lengthened over lunchtime, and it was half-past two before he got back. Francesca hadn't phoned. "Are you positive there haven't been any calls for me?" Caroline, with black-varnished fingernails today and red hair cropped to a crew cut, said that of course she was positive; he ought to know she didn't make mistakes like that. "Okay, well, would you like to get hold of directory enquiries and find if they've got a number for Brown of Flat 10, Swan Place, Stanhope Avenue, Highgate?" She came back after about five minutes. "No, they haven't, Martin, and I'm quite positive. He was a very nice man at directory enquiries, got a voice just like Terence Stamp." So the Post Office hadn't yet got around to fixing Francesca's phone. She was probably waiting in for them, which could be why she hadn't phoned him from a call box. It didn't matter particularly, he would just go straight there on his way from work. He left at five-thirty sharp. Swan Place was, if anything, more attractive than Cromwell Court. The block was newer and there were lifts and carpet on the stairs. Martin smiled to himself to think he had spent more on Francesca's home than he had on his own. He went up in the lift and rang the bell of number 10. No one came. He rang again. She was out. What on earth was she doing out now? Wasn't she expecting him? He wondered where she could have gone at this hour when nearly all the shops were closed. Perhaps to tea with some friend who had a child of Lindsay's age? Martin had never heard of any friend of Francesca's apart from Annabel. He hung about outside the door, wishing he had thought of calling in at the estate agents to collect those other keys. They would be shut now. He waited nearly half an hour for her. Then he wrote a note on the back of an envelope he found in his pocket and put it through the letter box. The note said to phone him as soon as she got in. It began to worry him thinking something might have happened to her. Suppose Russell had asked her to go back and have a talk with him and was preventing her from leaving again? He drank some whisky, not too much because he was sure to have to drive again that evening. There was nothing to eat in the flat apart from bread and cheese and things in tins. The phone didn't ring but at just before eight the doorbell did. Martin was sure it was Francesca who had thought that if she had to go out into the street to find a call box, she might as well get in a taxi and come straight to him. On the doorstep stood Mr Cochrane and a very small woman in a scarlet coat and black fur pixie hood. He had forgotten all about them. "Evening, Martin. This is Mrs Cochrane, Martin. Rita, this is Martin." Mr Cochrane was in casual gear, denim jeans, a fairisle pullover and a kind of anorak with fur trimmings. Martin felt bereft of ideas and almost of speech by the sight of them. But there was no help for it. Mr Cochrane hadn't waited to be invited in or asked to sit down. He had gone in, taken his sister-in-law's coat and hat, seated her on the sofa, hung up her coat and his own in the hall cupboard, and was now alternately rubbing his hands and warming them on a radiator. "Would you like a drink?" Martin said. "Whisky for me, Martin, and Mrs Cochrane will have a lemonade with a drop of port in it." Martin had neither port nor lemonade. Every bottle had to be removed from the drinks cupboard before Mr Cochrane could decide on a substitute. His sister-in-law hadn't opened her mouth. When she was at last given a wine glass containing a mixture of sweet red vermouth and soda she nodded her head very fast and on and on as if she had a spring where her neck should be. Her mouth had set into a pinched, tight, and intensely nervous smile. Mr Cochrane, now sitting on the radiator, launched into a speech. His attitude was one which Martin hadn't met before in his dealings with the objects of his charity. His sister-in-law was prepared to accept Martin's offer-here Mrs Cochrane, who hadn't ceased to smile, began nodding again-provided she was allowed absolute freedom of choice as to where she lived and what kind of dwelling she lived in. Also Martin must understand that one must move with the times, things had changed out of all knowledge in the past few years and you couldn't buy anything worth considering in the London area for less than fifteen thousand pounds. At this point the phone rang and Martin leapt for it. It was a wrong number. Mr Cochrane said that he supposed it was all right to help himself to more whisky, did so, and terminated his speech with words to the effect that now they understood each other and had cleared the air he would start house-hunting in the morning. Martin felt he only wanted to get rid of them. If it cost him his last five thousand did it so much matter? He realised that that was what it would do, it would all be gone. Deliberately and methodically he half-filled his glass with whisky and drank it at a gulp. "I'm glad to be of help," he said. "It's good we've been able to arrange things so easily." The phone rang. It was Norman Tremlett to ask if Martin and Francesca could make it Saturday fortnight instead of Saturday week. Martin said yes and he would call Norman back. Mr Cochrane had got himself into his anorak and his sister-in-law into her coat and pixie hood and was staring piercingly at the stack of saucepans and china and towels and bed linen. "If I don't see madam on Friday, Martin, you can tell her I mean to commence the spring cleaning. Subject to her approval, of course." Martin didn't know what to say to this. "Come along, Rita." Martin closed the door on them and finished his whisky. There was only about an inch left in the bottle so he had that too. After the phone had rung the second time he had made up his mind to drive round to Swan Place as soon as the Cochranes had gone. But he couldn't go now, he had drunk too much. He slept heavily and dreamlessly that night, awakening early with a headache. But a quarter to nine he was ringing Francesca's doorbell. He continued to ring it long after there was no point. Then it occurred to him that she might still be taking Lindsay to the nursery and he wrote her another note, on the back of the bill for the sheets and towels this time, asking her to phone him before lunch. When it got to twelve, to half-past, and she hadn't phoned he began to feel real anxiety for the first time. He excused himself to Gordon Tytherton with whom he had said he would have lunch, and went back to Swan Place. Francesca was still out. He simply didn't know what to do, and then he remembered the two spare keys. He drove up to Highgate Village and was given the keys without demur by the estate agent's receptionist. His notes were still on the doormat. That was the first thing he absorbed. The second-though this took some time fully to register-was that no one had occupied the place since the departure of the Butlers. There were the carpets on the floors and the curtains at the windows, the chairs and tables, the fridge and the cooker and an electric kettle, but there was no food in the kitchen, the fridge door still stood open after Mrs Butler's final defrosting, and in the bathroom there was no soap, no toothbrush. Martin went into both bedrooms to find that the beds hadn't been made up. The cupboard in the main bedroom was empty but for five wire coat hangers. For a while he was nonplussed. He sat down in the penthouse living room by the window that was even bigger than his own in Cromwell Court. But almost immediately he jumped up again. The first thing he must do, obviously, was phone her at home in Fortis Green Lane. For some reason, because she was ill or Lindsay was ill or Russell had intervened and used force, she had been prevented from leaving home on Monday. Rejecting the idea of phone boxes, which he had hardly ever in his life had occasion to use, he drove home to Cromk well Court. There, for the first time, he dialled the number the directory gave for H. R. Brown of 54 Fortis Green I Lane, N .10. The bell rang unanswered. She couldn't be at I home ill. He felt rather sick, with a hangover perhaps or BL hunger. He made himself a cheese sandwich but he couldn't Heat it. The idea of taking the afternoon off to look for HF-RANCESCA didn't cross his mind. He tried the phone again Hand then he went back to work, remembering a fear that Hhad come to him during the first days of their acquaintance H when she had told him nothing of her circumstances or his Have tory and had withheld from him her address. He had won Have dered what he would do if she left her job, for the flower H shop had been the only place where he could be sure of H finding her. H Bloomers was again closed and unlit when he drove past H it just before six. He went home and poured himself a stiff H brandy because all the whisky was gone. He thought incon bar sequentially how a week ago he could have afforded cases k m wfriend of whisky without thinking about it, but not now. He had no more money now than on the last occasion he sent in Tim's pools perm. No one was answering the phone at 54 Fortis Green Lane. He tried it four times between six and seven. Immediately after he put the phone back for the fourth time it rang. Norman Tremlett. Why hadn't he rung back last night as he had promised? Martin dealt with Norman as best he could, trying not to lose his temper at facetious questions about his "lovely betrothed" and when the "happy day" was to be. As soon as he could terminate the conversation he did. He grilled the steak he had brought in with him and ate it without enjoyment. The brandy bottle beckoned him, but he knew that if he drank any more he wouldn't dare drive up to Finchley. He could tell the house was empty before he even got out of the car. What now? Enquire of the neighbours as he had enquired for Annabel? After sitting in the car for an aeon of minutes, after some painful soul-searching, he tried number 52. A girl of about fifteen came to the door. He might have been speaking to her in Hausa or Aramaic for all her cornprehension. At last she said, "You what?" He realised he had asked questions which, in these lawless times, give rise to deep suspicion. The girl went away to fetch her mother. Martin rehearsed in his mind better ways of eliciting information, but they weren't much better. The woman appeared, drying her hands on a tea towel. "I'm sorry," Martin began, "I know you must think this very odd, but I only want to know if Mr and Mrs Brown next door are away. I'm"-it wasn't exactly true but what else could he say?-"a friend of theirs." It was as if he had demanded payment for goods she hadn't bought or even wanted. She gave a humourless, cynical laugh. "That's not true for a start. There is no Mrs Brown. He's a widower. He's been a widower for all of five years." Martin couldn't speak. Perhaps she sensed that he had had a shock. Her manner softened. "Look, you could be anybody, couldn't you, for all I know? Such a lot of funny things go on these days. He's not in, you can see that. I haven't seen him since Saturday, but that doesn't mean a thing. He keeps himself to himself." She had closed the door before Martin was half-way down the path. His hands shook when he got hold of the steering wheel. He flexed them and took deep breaths and tried to blank out his mind. When he tried again his hands were steady. It wasn't more than a couple of miles down to Highgate, though he was slowed up by the rain which had suddenly begun and now was lashing down. The phone was ringing as he walked into the flat. He thought that if it was Francesca he wouldn't know what to say, he would be able to find no words in which to speak to her, to ask, even to begin. What she had done to him he didn't know, only that it was terrible. He picked up the phone. There were pips, six of them. A voice said, "This is Finn speaking." fl Uttlto "Yes," Martin said, "yes?" He had forgotten who Finn was and the flat low voice meant nothing to him. "I thought I'd have heard from you by now." Heard from him? Oh, yes. Finn was Mrs Finn's son and Mrs Finn was... He was surprised to hear his own voice sounding so normal, so characteristic even. "You've been successful, have you?" A short toneless "Yes." Martin was getting used to ingratitude. He no longer cared. "I'll send the rest round like I did the first lot, okay?" "In cash again," said Finn and put the phone down. It was still only nine o'clock. Martin poured himself some more brandy but he couldn't drink it, the smell of it made him feel sick. Was it possible that the woman in the house next door had been lying? Why should she, except from madness or motiveless malevolence? Francesca didn't live there, had never lived there. But he had seen her go into the house ... No, he had never quite seen that. He remembered little things, that insistence on taxis, her refusal ever to invite him into the house. Where was she now? She must have a home somewhere. She hadn't come to him like some fairy woman out of the sea or from another world. Surely she had loved him... his There must be some motive for the lies she had told him, but that motive might not in itself be evil. He tried to think of reasons for it, sitting there in the chair by the window long into the night. At last he drank up the brandy and went to bed. London went on glittering down there as if nothing had happened. Next day the world had become a different place. The day was cold and wet, a high wind blowing. He awoke to some sense of indefinable misery. A moment later it was no longer indefinable but had settled into the knowledge that Francesca had deceived him. The wind was blustery and sharp. He saw it blow someone's umbrella inside out as he crossed the Archway Road. The lights weren't on in Bloomers but it wasn't yet ninethirty. Stuck up on the door, on the inside of the glass, was a notice that hadn't been there last week. Closed till Monday, March 5. He turned away. Kate Ross could be ill or just taking a holiday. He went back to his car and drove to work. Kate would be bound to have Francesca's true address. There were a dozen or so people in the phone book called K. Ross but none in Highgate where Kate lived. Or where Francesca had said she lived. Could he believe anything Francesca had told him? Her parents lived in Chiswick. Her maiden name had been Blanch. But was that true? There was an E. Blanch in a place called Petrarch Court, Barrowgate Gardens, Chiswick. She had said they lived in a flat, an old mansion block. She had said, she had said... He dialled the number, tried to resign himself to hearing a voice say she had no daughter, had never even been married. A man answered. He sounded elderly, as if he might be retired. "I'm trying to get in touch with your daughter, Francesca Brown." There was a dense silence. Then, "I might say I don't have a daughter." Martin didn't know what to say. He nearly put the receiver down. But the old voice, very dry now, said, "I haven't seen Francesca for five years." There came a crackling chuckle. "She was never very filial. A cold-hearted girl. I can give you her husband's phone number, though God knows when she left him. She leaves everybody." Martin said he would have the number. He wrote it down. "That's right," said Mr Blanch. "Russell Brown's his name, but he'll be out now. At work. She hasn't by any chance left you, has she?" The exchange was an East London one, Ilford or Stratford. Had Francesca given him the Fortis Green Lane address because she was ashamed of her real one? He seemed to hear the dry rasping voice again, "God knows when she left him. She leaves everybody." There had been a bitter cynical amusement underlying Mr Blanch's words. For the first time Martin felt the absurdity of his position, the humiliation. How was he going to explain to his parents, to Norman and Adrian, that he had bought Francesca a flat and she had left him without even living in it. "She leaves everybody..." He couldn't think of an excuse for getting out of dinner with his parents. His mother, drinking oloroso, said she had half-expected Francesca too, though she supposed that would have meant a baby-sitter for the little girl. Mr Urban leant against the mantelpiece with his amontillado. Martin had three glasses of Tio Pepe, wondering where Francesca was now and who Lindsay's father was and why she had lied to him so that it seemed almost everything she had said was a lie. "Do you think Francesca would like me to make her a patchwork skirt?" said Mrs Urban. Martin said he didn't know, which was the answer he would have been obliged to make to any question put to him about Francesca. "I don't care for them myself," said his mother, "but she looks the type to wear them." Martin left early, having taken from the bathroom cabinet one of the sleeping pills his mother had for when she went on holiday. He was home by half-past nine. What did he hope to learn, anyway, by phoning Russell Brown? According to her father, "God knows when" Francesca had left him, years ago perhaps; he couldn't be Lindsay's father. At last he did try the number that Mr Blanch had given him, but there was no answer. He took the Mogadon tablet and washed it down with brandy and went to bed. Mr Cochrane, arriving at eight-thirty in the morning, made no reference to the events of Tuesday evening. He had brought Martin's letters up with him, having encountered the postman on the way in. Martin didn't open them, didn't so much as glance at them. He was in no mood for bills or for querulousness from Miss Watson or the Gibsons which he felt those envelopes might contain. He carried the saucepans and the frying pan, the dinner service, the two lamps, the bed linen and towels into his bedroom and stuffed them into the bottom of the clothes cupboard. They would come in useful one day, he thought with dry anger, for other people's wedding presents. Mr Cochrane, in his ironmonger's coat, was emptying cupboards and shelves on to the kitchen floor, the first stage of his spring cleaning. On the table were the two piles of newspapers, the broadsheets and the tabloids. "Beats me what you want all this muck for, Martin," said Mr Cochrane. "Hoarding up rubbish like an old woman." Martin took no notice. He was looking through the Posts for the copy of December 8, the one that had contained the paragraph about Russell Brown. Surely it had been on the top because it was the last one he had ever received; after that he had stopped taking the Post. Then he remembered. He must have used it to wrap up Mrs Finn's money. Naturally he had used the paper that was on top of the pile. Mrs Finn. Some time today, he thought, he had better go to the bank and draw out the other five thousand, phone them first maybe as he had done last time... He had been at work ten minutes when Adrian Vow- church phoned. He said it was rather embarrassing (he didn't sound embarrassed), but he simply had to know whether his account for the conveyance was to go to Francesca or to Martin. Martin hadn't expected an account at all. It was true that Adrian had charged him for the conveyance of his own flat, but since then he, Martin, had put in a whole lot of hours sorting out some family trust muddle for Julie and he wouldn't have dreamt of expecting payment for that. He said shortly, "To me, of course. Who else?" "My dear old chap, I only asked. Ladies get very uptight these days if their equality isn't respected. Francesca is a property owner now and a ratepayer. It can go to their heads, you know, and you do rather..." "Adrian..." he interrupted but he couldn't finish. "What? I was merely going to say-if merely is the word comt you do rather talk as if her flat was sort of yours. You can't have it both ways, avoid your tax and keep a foot in the door." The flat was hers. Did she know that? He had never exactly explained this to her but she must know it, she was no fool. If she knew it was hers, surely she would come to it. He put his head round his father's door to say he was going out for an hour. Walter Urban was preoccupied with a client's letter. He looked up, irritability making him more than usually dog-faced. "Extraordinary chap," he said, tapping the letter. "Calls himself the chairman of a financial PR company and he doesn't know the first thing about finance. Here he is telling me he's given away-given, if you please-ten thousand pounds to his sister to start some sort of business and can he get tax relief on it? He won't find the government giving anything to him, he'll be giving it to them. Hasn't he ever heard of CTT?" "CTT?" repeated Martin, although he knew perfectly well what those initials stood for. "Capital Transfer Tax. Wake up, Martin. His sister's not a charity. Why didn't he consult me before he started throwing his money about?" Martin asked himself why he too hadn't consulted Walter or even consulted his own knowledge. Was it because he hadn't wanted to know and have his noble-hearted schemes spoiled? Just as he hadn't wanted to know of the true relations between Francesca and her husband? Now, in both cases, he was going to have to pay for wilfully shutting his eyes. Almost all his money was gone and he was presumably going to have to pay tax at least on what he had given Miss Watson and Mrs Cochrane, though perhaps not Mrs Finn since that was cash... Was he planning on being dishonest about it as well? He pushed all thought of money out of his mind-did he really care about it at this juncture? comand drove to Swan Place. The flat was just as it had been on Wednesday, empty, waiting, the fridge door open, the carpet marked with circular depressions where furniture legs had stood. He had wanted to tell Adrian about it but he hadn't been able to. Adrian's voice had been too cool, too mocking and urbane. He thought of those friends of his whose advice he could ask-Norman, the Tythertons. They couldn't help him any more than he could help himself, and behind his back, because they were deeply conservative and unshakeably conventional, they would laugh nervously. Back in the office, he reverted to that paragraph in the Post. He could remember perfectly what it had said. Russell Brown was thirty-five, was a teacher in a technical college who had written a book about the fourteenth century and the Black Death, wife, Francesca, daughter, Lindsay. Martin sighed and dialled the Ilford number Mr Blanch had given him. There was no answer. Could the Post have got it wrong? Could it have been Fortis Green Road or Fortis Green Avenue instead? That wouldn't explain how Francesca had seemedi to live, had repeatedly said she lived, in Fortis Green Lane. The Post must have some sort of clue to all this and he knew someone who worked on the Post... Tim Sage. Tim might not know the answer, but Tim would be able to help him. Journalists always knew how to go about finding elusive addresses and phone numbers, and elusive people, come to that. And it was foolish to think of himself and Tim as enemies. Why did he do that? There had been no quarrel except in his own mind and in his dreams. He dialled the Post's head office in Wood Green. No, Mr Sage wasn't there but he could try their Child's Hill office. Martin tried Child's Hill and was told Mr Sage hadn't been in all day. It was always hard to get hold of Tim. In the old days-he thought of pre-November as the old days-it was nearly always Tim who had phoned him. A feeling of desolation crept over him. He sat at his desk, unable to work for the first time in as long as he could remember. It was about an hour later that Caroline came in to say that an Indian family had arrived and were asking for Mr Urban. "A man and a woman and a little boy and an old man and an old woman who looks just like Mrs Gandhi." He stared at her. "What do they want?" "You," said Caroline. "They've just got back from India today, or some of them have, and they've been in Australia first and they want to see you and thank you for something. That's what they said." The Bhavnanis. For months he had hoped to see them, had longed, though never quite admitting it to himself, for some crumb of gratitude from someone. And now they had come he knew he couldn't face them. "Take them in to my father," he said. "He's called Mr Urban too." Although it was only four he walked out of the office and drove back to Swan Place where he sat by the window, waiting for Francesca to come, although he knew she wouldn't come. Samphire Road. Martin found it in the London Atlas he kept in the glove compartment of his car. It was Finsbury Park really, North Four. He didn't think he had ever been there or known anyone else who lived there. If Tim was out he would sit in the car and wait for him. He would wait till midnight if necessary, he had nothing else to do. But he probably wouldn't have to wait like that because the man Tim lived with would be there. Why had he ever worried about having to meet this man, about seeing him and Tim together? He couldn't have cared less now. It was getting on for six when Martin left Swan Place. If Tim had had an afternoon job he would be home by now, and if he had an evening job it was unlikely he would go out before seven. He and his friend might be eating their evening meal. Martin recalled the big red sofa he had dreamed about, red velvet, sponge-like yet dusty. It embarrassed him even to think of it. He drove up Crouch End Hill and down Hornsey Rise. The sky was like a thick grey veil which the sunset had torn open to show through the rents radiant flesh colours. He would tell Tim everything, he thought, and the prospect of being able to be open and candid with Tim at last filled him with a joy so intense that his hands actually trembled on the wheel. For a moment he forgot the loss of Francesca and the bitter, growing disillusionment. The secret he had kept from Tim for three months had weighed upon him-how heavily he was only now realising-and at last, within a few (minutes perhaps, he was about to unburden himself. That his purpose in coming here was to question Tim about the paragraph in the Post had receded and dimmed in the fierce light of the confession, the money and its source, Francesca, his long silence and coldness, he was going to make. He longed for it as the devout sinner longs for the confessional and the exhausted tormented prisoner for a chance to admit his guilt. He had entered a desolate wilderness where streets, walled in wooden barricades, traversed a grassless, treeless, and almost building-less waste. A few new houses, in strange colours of brick, lemon, pasty white, charcoal, rose here and there in straggling lines. The old streets of old brown houses clung to the perimeter like low cliffs surrounding a crater in a desert. Martin found Samphire Road quite easily, even though his map no longer gave a very clear idea of the lay-out. It was a gorge in the brown cliff with shabby houses which made Martin think of the living quarters in some aged and perhaps abandoned garrison. Compared to it, Fortis Green Lane was paradise. He walked up broken concrete steps to the liver-coloured front door and pressed the bell marked Sage. Nothing happened for a moment and then a light came on behind the green-and-yellow glass transom over the door. He was aware now that he could smell Gauloise smoke, as if Tim hadn't long come in. The door opened and Tim stood there. He wore jeans and an old grey, heavy, stringy sweater that made him look thinner than ever, gaunt almost. His face was very pale, his mouth as red as fresh blood. Had he always been so pale? He took the cigarette out of his mouth and said, "I thought you'd turn up. It was only a matter of time before you cottoned on." Martin stared at him. He didn't know what he meant. Then something so strange happened, so amazing really, that temporarily he forgot all about Tim. The door at the end of the passage opened and a child came running out and ttowards them. The child was, must be, but couldn't be, i Lindsay. I She came to an abrupt halt and looked at Martin. Her look was full of anger and dislike. She threw herself against Tim's legs, holding up her arms. Tim lifted her up and held her against his shoulder, black hair against black hair, sallow velvet skin touching sallow waxen skin. Four blue eyes looked at Martin. He felt the earth move under his feet, the walls tilt, the dark, frowsy, uncarpeted passage rock back and forth and steady itself. "You'd better come in," said Tim. Martin came in and felt the door closed behind him. He was unable to speak. He took a few steps down the passage, then turned, shaking, to contemplate again Lindsay and her undoubted father. But Francesca was her undoubted mother... "I don't understand," he began. "You and Francesca... bar Where's Francesca?" I Tim put the child down. He leant against the door, his backslash arms folded. "She's dead. You didn't know? No, I reckon- to well, how could you? She was killed last Saturday night, I run over, the car didn't stop." to Lindsay, clinging to his legs, began suddenly to cry.

XXI

Lindsay's screams seemed to express the grief of both men; Tim's sorrow, Martin's stunned, incredulous dismay. They were both silent, oblivious of the sobs and howls, the stamping feet, the fists beating at Tim's legs. They stared at each other, but Martin was the first to let his gaze drop and to turn away. Slowly Tim reached down and picked Lindsay up. She stopped screaming but continued to sob, her arms and legs clamped against him like a starfish. A door opened upstairs and a woman's voice called, "Everything okay, Tim? God, she was making a racket." Tim went to the foot of the stairs with Lindsay in his arms. "Could you have her for half an hour, Goldie?" "Sure, if you want. She'll have to watch telly, though, it's my serial on." "Lindsay wants Goldie!" The child scrambled down her father's body and up the stairs on all fours. "You'd better come in here and have a drink," said Tim. "We could both use a drink." He led Martin down the passage into the room from which Lindsay had emerged. It was a kitchen, modernised in skimpy patches round the sink area and unit of cupboards, but otherwise dismally old-fashioned with a defunct boiler in one corner and, in the wall facing them, a fireplace whose flue was blocked up with red crepe paper. The oven was on and so was a wall heater. On the table, which was littered with newspapers and Gauloise packets, were the remains of a meal and a half-empty bottle of Dominic's Military gin. Martin moved as if in a daze. Tim motioned him to one of the small shabby fireside chairs that flanked the wall heater, but Martin sat, or sank, into a bentwood chair at the table and put his head in his hands. "D'you want it neat or with water?" "Doesn't matter." Martin had never before drunk gin without tonic or martini or some other fancy mixer. He had never drunk it warm which this was. It tasted so disgusting that he gave a strong shudder, but the fiery stuff bolstered him. He turned to look at Tim with haggard eyes. Tim was watching him with something that might have been despair or just indifference. When he spoke it was in a cool detached voice, such as a sociologist might use, reporting on failure, misery, defeat. "I'll tell you what the police told me and fill in the gaps from my own knowledge. After you'd dropped her at that place in Finchley she went to look for a taxi to take her home. It wasn't the first time. It's not easy to find taxis up there. She walked a long way, nearly up to the North Circular." Tim paused, resuming in the same flat voice. "You can't see how anyone could have failed to see her crossing the road, it's so brightly lit. Maybe the guy was drunk or just not looking. Another motorist found her ten minutes afterwards-or that's what they think. She wasn't dead. She died in hospital on Sunday evening." Martin said softly, "She lived all that time...?" "She wasn't conscious. Have some more gin?" Tim refilled their glasses. He lit another cigarette. The only sign of emotion he gave was the way he drew on that cigarette, with nervous, greedy gasps. "Right," he said. "Question time." The gin was making Martin hot and dizzy and brave. "Were you married to Francesca?" Tim laughed, a sound that had nothing to do with amusement. "You know better than that. You're my ac- countant. Wouldn't I have had to tell you if I'd been married? Francesca was still married to a guy in Ilford. He's called Russell Brown, he really is." "But that piece in your paper..." "Pieces in the paper are of human origin. They're not messages from some infallible source of truth." Tim shrugged. "I made it up, bar the names. You found the house yourself. I didn't tell you she lived at 54 Fortis Green Lane and, incidentally, neither did she. You fabricated it. You made conjecture into truth just as you did when you saw those bruises on Francesca and thought Russell had put them there. In fact, she'd fallen over on the ice like several thousand other people did that day." Martin was silent. Then he said slowly, "Do you mean that it was all a conspiracy between you and Francesca? All of it?" The enormity of what had been done to him was now breaking over Martin in waves. He could feel a pulse drumming in his head. "You both of you set out to con me, to get"-he understood now-"a flat out of me? You were two-criminals who did that?" "At the beginning," said Tim, "Francesca set out only to get money or a piece of jewellery. I knew about your pools win, of course. I've known from the first. You must have forgotten that though I'm not much of a success at things I've got a spectacularly good memory." He took a gulp of gin and it made him shudder. "You aren't the soul of generosity, are you? I got nothing and she got nothing until you hit on your bright idea of a tax dodge-. By that time, as you accountants might say, she was in for a penny, in for a pound." Martin had got to his feet. He swayed and steadied himself. There was one thing still, one last thing. If she had been unfaithful to Russell Brown with Tim, she had been unfaithful to Tim with him. He looked into Tim's eyes and the voice which he meant to be defiant, spitting revelations, came out falteringly. "She slept with me! Did she ever tell you that?" Tim had half-risen, his mouth smiling, his eyes dead. He shrugged. "So? It was hard work. There was no question of mixing pleasure with business." Without thought or preparation, Martin hit him. He doubled his fist and swung and struck Tim on the jaw. Tim let out a grunt and fell back into the chair, but he was up again straightaway, leaping on Martin with both hands raised. Martin ducked and struck out again and fell across the table, knocking over the lamp which rolled on to the floor and went out. The room was dark but for the fierce red glow from the wall heater, so that redness lay on the air and on the furniture and on Tim, backed against the door, a demon, a fallen angel, painted with red light. He came at Martin again, punching to his face, but this time Martin seized him by the shoulders, by his thin hard rib cage. For a moment they remained upright, locked together, struggling, then they tumbled to the floor and rolled, clutching each other, into the deep dark shadows of the floor and across the thick, old, rumpled rug. Tim was trying to grab his shoulders so as to beat his head against the ground. Martin was stronger. He was bigger and heavier than Tim, and more powerful. He got hold of Tim's wrists and held them behind his back, wrapping him in his arms. With this success, this subduing of Tim, a tremendous excitement seized him. He was wrestling with Tim, he was doing what he had longed to do in those dreams. And in the pressure of Tim's hard flesh, the friction of his body writhing and turning so that they rolled this way and that, embraced so tightly that each body seemed to penetrate the other and fuse with it, he felt himself charged and stiff with desire. He felt a passion which made his relations with Francesca seem thin and cold. Whether Tim realised or not he didn't care. He was lost to all caution and all inhibiting restraint. He spoke Tim's name in a hoarse whisper and the struggling slackened. There was a moment in which Martin hardly seemed to breathe and then, because he couldn't help himself, he put his mouth over Tim's and gave him a long, enduring kiss. The release that came with that kiss seemed to take with it the repressive burdens of a lifetime. He rolled away from Tim and lay on his face. Tim got up first. He did what he would do on the gallows or at an H-bomb early warning. He lit a Gauloise. His mouth quirked up on one side at Martin and he gave a sort of half-wink. Martin was flooded with shame, the burdens of a lifetime were still there. He got to his feet and sat, hunched, in one of the fireside chairs. "Don't put the light on." "Okay, not if you don't want." "I'm sorry about that. Just now, I mean." Martin tried not to mumble. He tried to look at Tim through the red gloom, to meet his eyes and speak lucidly. It was nearly impossible. "I don't know why I did that." "It was the military gin. The fact is, it's meant for guardsmen and you know what guardsmen are." "I'm not queer, gay, whatever you call it." "It was the gin, love," said Tim. He had perched himself on the edge of the table. Martin managed to focus on him now, and if he was flushed it didn't show in that light. "Perhaps I am, though," he said in a low voice. "Perhaps I am really and I never knew it. Why have there been so many things I didn't know and couldn't see, Tim?" "Humanity treads ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses." I remember I said that to you before all this started. We've both fallen in with a crash, haven't we?" Martin nodded. He was embarrassed still and ashamed still, but a warmth that had nothing to do with the heater was slowly engulfing him. He loved Tim, he knew it now. Nothing that Tim had done to him mattered any more. He said, "That flat, the one Francesca was going to move into, you can have it. I want you to have it." "Is it yours to give, my dear?" "Well, I..." Technically, legally, it wasn't. It was the technical, the legal, aspect which mattered, though. "It'll be shared between four people, I should think. Francesca had a husband and a child and parents. Lindsay will get some of it and I suppose Russell Brown will get most of it." "Tim, I'll give you..." What? He had nothing left to give. "I want to do something. We've both lost'Francesca, that ought to bring us together, it ought to... what are you smiling at?" "Your naivety." "I can't see that it's naive to want to help someone because you feel you owe it to them. Look, I could sell my flat and buy a small house somewhere-well, not so nice, and you could bring Lindsay and come and live there with me and... We have to be friends, Tim." "Do we, my dear? I've injured you and we dislike those we've injured." Tim walked across the room and switched on the central light. It was bright, glaring, uncompromising. "I'm sorry for what I did now, I bitterly regret it, but being sorry doesn't make me like you any more. I wouldn't dream of sharing a house with you, and if you offered me money I should refuse it." He stubbed out his cigarette, coughing a little. "It's time you went home now. I have to fetch Lindsay and put her to bed." Martin got up. He felt as if he had been hit in the face with something cold and wet, a wet glove perhaps. "Is that all?" he stammered. "Have we said it all?" Tim didn't answer. They were out in the icy dank hallway now and from upstairs, distantly, came a wail, "Lindsay wants Daddy." Tim opened the front door. "The inquest was today. Accidental death. Cremation Monday, three o'clock, Golders Green. A hearty welcome will be extended to all husbands, real, imaginary, future, and common law." Martin walked down the steps and into the street without looking back. He heard the door close. His head was banging from bewilderment and incredulity and gin. It was a quarter past seven. He had been with Tim for less than an hour. In those forty-five or fifty minutes his whole life, the past as well as the present and the future, had been changed. It was as if the world had tilted and he been thrown sliding down the slope of it to hang there, breathless, by his hands. Or as if, as Tim said, the thin crust had given way. His head was hurting him now. He had drunk a lot of that gin, probably a tumblerful. But he didn't feel drunk, only sick and headachy and drained. He was tired as well, but he didn't think he would sleep; he felt as if he would never sleep again. For a long time he sat in the car in Samphire Road. He only drove away because he was afraid Tim might come out and find him still there, and even then he parked again almost immediately, in one of the streets that had been turned into a cul-de-sac by the crater of devastated land. It was quite dark now and the rubble-covered waste was totally unlighted. The edges of it only were visible, a horizon of black jagged roofs, punctured with points of light, against the crimson-suffused sky. Francesca had lived here, come from here every morning, returned here each night. It seemed to him infinitely strange, something he would never fully understand. She was dead and had been dead for nearly a week now. In her dying she had somehow come back to him-there had been no terrible betrayal. How could Tim know how she had felt? How could Tim tell that for all her early motives she hadn't, at the end, come to prefer the new man to the old? From taking a vicious pleasure in the fact of her deathhe had felt like that when he first began to understand-he found he could now think of her with a pitying tenderness. They would never have been happy together, or not for long, he could see that. He was getting to know himself at last, he thought. His head wasn't going to get any better just sitting here. If the place had been more attractive-less downright sinister, in fact-he would have gone for a walk, walked to clear his head, for it was a mild evening with that indefinable smell and charge in the air that heralds spring. But he couldn't walk here. He started the car and drove away into Hornsey Rise. Someone walked across a pedestrian crossing ahead of him. He braked and waited rather longer than usual. He thought of the manner of Francesca's death. Who could do such a thing? Knock someone down and drive away to leave her dying? She had taken a night and a day to die. He shivered uncontrollably. Whoever it was, the police would find him, the police would be relentless... Martin reflected that he shouldn't be driving at all, he had had far too much to drink, a lot over the permitted limit. Perhaps Francesca's killer had also been drinking, had sobered up in terror when he saw what he had done, and terror had made him flee. Martin drove home over the Archway, the road in its deep concrete gorge flowing northwards beneath him. He put the car on the hard-top parking in front of Cromwell Court, parking it between an orange-coloured Volvo and a small grey van. The Volvo belonged to a doctor at the Royal Free who lived on the ground floor. The grey van was probably some tradesman's, though Martin felt obscurely that he had seen it somewhere before, and recently, and in a context he couldn't at the moment recall. It " l caret more "Well..." Into the glass slopped more brandy. "Not in the sense that you've reminded me. I can get it for you sometime next week. Cash is difficult, you know, that sort of cash. I'll have to phone my bank first, I'll have to..." Finn took a step forward from the position he had taken up by the balcony door. "You can get it for me Monday morning," he said. "And I don't want it sent, not this time. Put it in your car on the front passenger seat and leave the car in the car park outside the palace." "The palace?" repeated Martin Urban, staring at him. "Alexandra Palace." Finn was getting impatient. "Have you got that? Put the money in a carrier on the front seat of your car and leave it there between one and two Monday, okay?" Martin Urban had flushed a dark crimson. His eyes had become very bright, his features blurred and thickened. He set down his glass and stood up. Very deliberately he said, "No, it is not okay. It is very much not okay." He passed a hand over his forehead, and when he took it down Finn saw that his face was working with fury. "Just who the hell d'you think you are, coming here, barging in here, telling me what I should do with my own money? You haven't got some sort of right to it, you know. You people, you're all the same, you think anyone with a bit more than you've got owes you a living. It's purely out of the kindness of my heart I'm making it possible for your mother to have a decent place to live in. But I'm damned if I'm going to break an important appointment on Monday morning to go to the bank for you or do without my car for an hour. Why should I? Why the hell should I?" Finn thought the man was going to fall. He watched him get hold of the back of a chair and hang on to it and draw a long breath and seem to get a grip on himself. Enough control, at any rate, to say coldly now, "You'd better go," and then, pushing past Finn to unlock the balcony door, "Excuse me, I must have some air." Martin Urban went out on to the balcony. Finn watched him standing there, looking down on London and then up at the clear, faintly starry, purplish sky. After a moment or two he came in again, appearing partially recovered, and stood staring with a curiously pained expression, like a hurt dog, at the big cactus which stood on the window sill, at its pink, waxen flowers. Without turning to Finn, he said, "I thought I told you to go." Finn didn't reply to this rhetorical question. He said, "I don't want the money sent. Is that understood? I don't want those delivery people knowing." "Knowing what, for God's sake?" Martin Urban turned round and said sharply, "I'm sick of this. I'm tired. I've had a bad day. If it wasn't that I promised and I don't like to break my word, I'd tell you you can forget the money. Right, so you can have a cheque or nothing." "Well, well," said Finn. "Now we know." "Indeed we do. And when that's over I think I'll have done quite a favour to you and your mother." He went to the writing desk, though none too steadily, and fumbled about inside it for a cheque-book. "Haven't I ever done anything for you?" said Finn. Without looking at him, Martin Urban said, "Like what? Like making a damned nuisance of yourself. What have you ever done for me?" He began to write the cheque. Finn went up to him, laid a heavy hand on his arm and took the pen away. Martin Urban jumped to his feet, shouted, "Take your hands off me!" Finn held him by the upper arms and looked searchingry into his face. The square, flushed, puffy face was resentful and indignant-and utterly bewildered. Finn could read faces-and minds too sometimes. "You don't know about it," he said flatly. "It wasn't in the papers. Well, it's done. Last Saturday." Martin Urban struggled to free himself and Finn let him *he. g. "How dare you touch me! And what the hell are you talking about?" It was a strange thing, but now that he had to do it Finn found it as hard to put the act into words as his clients had done. He looked around him, he cleared his throat. "Last Saturday," he said gruffly, "I did for the girl. Like you wanted." Martin Urban stood quite still. be caret, were "What did you say?" caret very, st?.; "You heard." be "Last Saturday you..." His , "I did for that girl, like you're paying me for. I've done it and now I want my money." The sound he made was a kind of ghastly groan, the like of which Finn had only previously heard from Lena, and he fell back on to the sofa, covering his face with his hands. Finn regarded him as he rocked backwards and forwards, pushing his fists into his eyes, beating them against his temples. Finn stepped away and sat down on an upright chair, understanding now that he had made a mistake. Things, details, fell gently into place like the silver balls in Lena's Chinese puzzle dropping into their slots. "Give me some more of that brandy." Finn poured some brandy and pushed the glass at Martin Urban's mouth. The brandy was drained and there was a shuddering and a kind of sob and the thick broken voice said, "You were-in the car-that-didn't-stop?" "I've said so." "What am I to do? My God, what am I going to do? You thought I'd paid you to do that? What sort of a monster are you?" He got up shakily and stood with his hands pressed to his head. "I loved her," he said. "She loved me. We were going to be married. And you..." He turned towards modern man's succour, lifeline, first aid-the phone. He took an uncertain step towards it. Finn calculated how to get there first, take him by surprise, wrench the wires out of the wall. And then? There was only one way to make certain no one was ever told what Martin Urban knew. Swaying, holding his head, he stood staring hypnotically at Finn. Finn began to get up. Sweat beads had started to prickle his face. Somehow he must get Martin Urban out of here, into a car, away from this place into some lonely place. In order to silence him he must put on an act, make promises, play along... He didn't know how to do these things, he was powerless, bereft of energy, as if a fuse had blown in him and there was no current to power his limbs. Martin Urban took down his hands and turned away from the phone. The attack he made on Finn was entirely unexpected. One moment he was standing there in the middle of the room, his fists clenched, his arms gradually falling to his sides, the next he had sprung upon Finn, flailing out, using his hands like hammers. Finn toppled backwards. It was the first time in his life he had ever been knocked down by another. He rolled over on to his front, pressed himself up with a violence that sent the other man staggering back, and leapt like a panther. Martin Urban ducked and stumbled out on to the balcony. London glittered out there like the window of a tourist souvenir shop. Finn stood poised in the doorway, his arms spread, his body quivering. And the man who had given him five thousand pounds from some quixotic altruism Finn couldn't even begin to understand, stood against the low parapet, convulsed, it seemed, with some kind of passionate need for revenge. He leapt forward again, deceived perhaps by Finn's white thinness. But Finn was there a split second before him, to smash with his right arm harder than he had ever smashed before. And a strange thing happened. Martin Urban raised his arms hugely above his head in some exaggerated defensive gesture. He staggered backwards in an almost comic, tip- toe slow motion, bathed in the shining night air, against the spangled backdrop, staggered, teetered until the parapet wall, that reached lower than the tops of his thighs, was just behind him. Finn could see what would happen and he jumped to catch the man before he fell. He jumped just too late. Martin Urban made contact with the wall, doubled over backwards, andwitha low cry, fell. Forty feet into a pit of blackness. There was a concrete well down there, an area that perhaps gave access to a porter's basement. Finn stood, looking down. No other windows opened, no one appeared, no one had been alerted by the groaning sound the man had made as he starfished to earth. Finn went in and closed and locked the balcony door. He turned off the lights and stood listening for movement in the corridor outside, for doors opening and footsteps. There was nothing. He had been a fool to lock that door. It must look like suicide. It must look as if Martin Urban had killed himself over the death of the woman he was to have married. Finn unlocked the door again. He didn't touch the brandy glass. A man might well drink brandy before he committed suicide. The irony of it struck Finn, though, as he moved towards the front door of the flat, the irony that now, at this moment, in this place, he was at greater risk through this man's accidental death than he had ever been when he had done murder. When he was satisfied that all was quiet and still he passed stealthily out of the flat and pulled the front door softly shut behind him. He went downstairs very fast, passing no one, hearing nothing. The van was waiting for him in a deserted car park. And deserted too Cromwell Court and its environs would have seemed but for the lights which shone with tranquillity in most of its broad rectangular windows. Still, it was only a matter of time, of short time, before that body would be found. He must get away, not linger, not yield to the temptation to steal softly around to the other side of the block and peer into that dark well, check what light must go on or which door open to reveal its occupant... He resisted. As he was driving down Dartmouth Park Hill, coming up to the traffic lights at Tufnell Park Station, he heard the wail of a siren. But there was nothing to say it was an ambulance summoned for Martin Urban, it could just as well have been a fire engine or a police car. He put the van away in the garage at the corner of Somerset Grove and walked home along the street where the sulphurous light laid a pinchbeck gleam. The house smelt of cannabis and wastebins. Finn went on up to the top, taking two stairs at a time with his great loping stride. He felt a surge of confidence and contentment. This time it really had been an accident, he could face Lena without dread. And there was no possibility now of anyone suspecting Martin Urban might not have been alone in the flat, not a soul who would know of any connection between himself and Martin Urban. He was sure no one had seen him or would know him if they had. Yet Martin Urban was out of harm's way, silenced, taking the secret of Finn's mistake with him into the dark spaces or losing it in oblivion as he began on a new cycle of life. The green bird began a shrill twittering when he came into the room. Mrs Gogarty, who had been making forecasts with the aid of the Tarot, got up and threw the shawl over its cage. "Well, well," said Finn, "we are cosy." He pulled off his gloves and put them in his pocket and took Lena's hand. She was as transparent as an insect tonight and dusty like a moth. Her dull leaden eyes met his silver eyes and she smiled. "The picture of devotion!" said Mrs Gogarty with admiring sighs. She studied the cards, laid out now for Finn. "There's a lot of death here ..." she began. Over Lena's head Finn gave her a warning look. "Ah!" She slid the cards together and the Death card, Scorpio's Death card-Death cloaked and riding a pale horse-came out on top. She covered it with the Queen of Wands. In her mechanical gypsy voice she said, "There's money here, my darling, a lot of money. But wait... no, it's not coming your way, you'll have a disappointment." The hand that held Lena's grew cold and limp. He bent down, he looked unseeing into the soothsayer's face. "What? What did you say?" "A disappointment over money... Why are you looking at me like that?" Finn saw, not the cards which Mrs Gogarty's hands now covered in fear, not Lena's face, apprehensive, growing stricken, but a cheque that lay on a writing desk, locked up in Martin Urban's flat. The date had been written-had his name? The women's eyes fearfully upon him, he stood upright yet trembling in that tiny room, listening to the distant sound of a siren crying through the dark, a herald of the one that must cry for him.

The End