The Water's Lovely Ruth Rendell

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The Water’s Lovely

by Ruth Rendell

Chapter One

1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First U.S. Edition

Weeks went by when I may never thought of it at all. Then something would bring it back or it would return in a dream. The

dream began in the same way. She and her mother would be climbing the stairs, following Heather's lead through the bedroom to what was on the other side, not a bathroom in the dream but a chamber floored and walled in marble. In the middle of it was a glassy lake. The white thing in the water floated toward her, its face submerged, and her mother said, absurdly, "Don't look!" Because the dead thing was a man and was naked and she was a girl of fifteen. But she had looked and in the dreams she looked again, but at Guy's drowned face. She had looked at the dead face and though she would forget from time to time what she had seen, it always came back, the fear still there in the dead eyes, the nostrils dilated to inhale water, not air.

Heather showed no fear, no emotion of any kind. She stood

with her arms hanging by her sides. Her dress was wet, clinging to

her breasts. No one spoke then, neither in the reality nor in the

dreams, neither of them said a word until their mother fell on her knees and began crying and laughing and babbling nonsense. When she came home the house was a different place. She had known, of course, that it would be two self-contained flats, the upper one for her mother and Pamela, the lower one for her and Heather, two pairs of sisters, two generations represented. In her last term at university, four hundred miles away in Scodand, what she hadn't understood was that part of the house would disappear. It was Pamelas idea, though Pamela didn't know why. She

knew no more of what had happened than the rest of the world knew. In innocence and well-meaning, she had planned and carried out these drastic changes. She showed Ismay the ground-floor

flat and then she took her upstairs.

"I'm not sure how much Beatrix understands," she said,

opening the door to what had been the principal bedroom, the room they had walked through to find the drowned man. "I can't tell how much she remembers. God knows if she even realizes it's the same room."

I can hardly realize, thought Ismay. The shock of it silenced

her. She looked around her almost fearfully. It was one room now. The door to the bathroom had been—where? The French

windows to the balcony were gone, replaced by a single glass door. The whole place looked larger, nearer to the dream room, yet less spacious.

"It's better this way, isn't it, Issy?"

"Oh, yes, yes. It's just that it was a shock." Perhaps it would have been better to sell the house and move. But how else would she and Heather afford a flat to share? "Has Heather seen it?"

"She loves all the changes. I don't know when I've seen her so enthusiastic about anything." Pamela showed her the two bedrooms that had once been hers and Heather's, the new kitchen, the

new bathroom. At the top of the stairs she paused, holding on to the newel post and turning her eyes on Ismay almost pleadingly. "It's ten years ago, Issy, or is it eleven?"

"Ten. Coming up to eleven."

"I thought changing things like this would help you finally to put it behind you. We couldn't go on keeping that room shut up. How long is it since anyone went in there? All those ten years, I suppose."

"I don't think about it much anymore," she lied. "Sometimes I think Heather's forgotten it."

"Perhaps I can forget it now," said Ismay and she went downstairs to find her mother, who was in the garden with Heather.

Forgetting isn't an act of will. She hadn't forgotten, but that conversation with Pamela, that tour of her old home made new, was a watershed for her. Though she dreamed of drowned Guy that

night, gradually her mind-set changed and she felt the load she carried ease. She stopped asking herself what had happened on that hot August afternoon. Where had Heather been? What exactly had

Heather done—if anything? Was it possible anyone else had been in the house? Probing, wondering, speculating had been with her for

ten years and at last she asked herself why. Suppose she found out, what could she do with the truth she had discovered? She wasn't

going to share with Heather, live with Heather, to protect her from anything, still less "save" her. It was just convenient. They were sisters and close. She loved Heather and Heather certainly loved her.

She and Heather downstairs, her mother and Pamela on the

top floor. The first time Ismay saw her mother in the new living room, in the corner she had made for herself with her radio, her

footstool, the handbag she carried everywhere, she watched her to see if her vague dazed glance wandered to the end of the room that was most radically changed. It never did. It really was as if Beatrix failed to understand this was the same room. Heather went up there with her when Pamela invited the two of them for drinks,

and it was as Pamela said. She behaved as if she had forgotten, even going up to the new glass door and opening it to check if it

was raining. She closed it and came back, pausing to look at a picture Pamela had newly hung on the wall where the towel rail used

to be and Beatrix's bowl of colored soaps had stood. Ironically, the only thing to remind you it had once been a bathroom was that picture, a Bonnard print of a nude drying herself after a bath.

If they could forget or dismiss it or accept it, whichever it

was, she must too. She had. She was almost proud of herself for doing what people said you had to do: move on. The next time she was up there with her mother, sitting with her while Pamela was out, she got up and walked across the polished floor, stepped over the two rugs, stood in front of the table where the shower cabinet used to be, and picked up a glass paperweight patterned with roses. Holding it up to the light, she felt her heart beating faster.

The beat steadied, became rhythmic and slow, and, with deliberation, she turned to look at the place where Guy had died.

Beatrix had turned on her radio, had contorted her body as

she always did, leaning to the left, so that she was almost resting her head on the shelf where the radio was, her ear pressed against it. If she noticed where Ismay was she gave no sign of it, managing a distracted smile when her daughter smiled at her.

Not long after that she found her job in public relations and Heather hers in catering. They got on well, they always had.

Besides, long ago and almost unconsciously, Ismay had appointed herself, not Heather's guardian, never that, but her companion. Not exactly to watch over her, not in the commonplace phrase to "keep an eye on her," but just to be there and to see. Each time she came home, each time they met during those four years apart, she had watched and inquired and listened to what Heather had to

say. She never thought much about the future, the inevitable separation which must come one day—must come or be avoided at a

terrible cost to both of them.

Living together, they never discussed the changes to the

house, still less what had happened on that August day when she was fifteen and Heather was two years younger. If they had, Ismay would have had to ask the question she had never asked. Each of them paid her share of the rent to Beatrix. It was what she lived on. A year went by and half another. Ismay fell in love. To Pam,

who listened, and to her mother, who never seemed to care or even hear, she described it as falling fathoms deep in love. There had never been a passion like her passion for Andrew Campbell-Sedge. Heather also listened but had nothing to tell her in return.

Heather's love affairs, if she had any, must have been brief, superficial, and lukewarm. In Andrews presence she hardly spoke and

Ismay knew why. She was silent with the people she disliked, but there was more to it than that.

Andrew looked like Guy. He belonged to the same type. He

might have been Guy's younger brother. Was that why she loved him and Heather didn't love him? The night she understood that, Ismay had the dream again but it was Andrew's face she saw under the clear, pale-green water.

Chapter Two

Marion was there when Edmund came home from work. That was the second time this week. His mother said, "Marion kindly did my shopping for me, so I asked her to stay and eat with us. I knew you'd be pleased."

Did she? Why did she? As far as he could remember he had never expressed an opinion of Marion, apart from saying some months past that it was a mystery to him why women dyed their hair that unnatural shade of dark crimson. She smiled at him and sat at the table, starting to chat in her lively way about all the old people she visited and loved to help—"We'll all be old one day, won't we?"—the National Health Service and her late mother's deferred hip operation, sedatives and analgesics and alternative medicine. She thought it was his "field," she aimed to please him. Later on he would have to walk her to the station. It was only at the bottom of the hill, but he couldn't let her go alone through the

dark streets. She would chat all the way about how marvelous his mother was in spite of her health problems.

His mother had produced avocado with shrimp, followed by spaghetti carbonara. "Absolutely delicious, Irene," said Marion, no mean cook herself in her own estimation. She had brought a Bakewell tart with her as a gift. "If I shut my eyes I might be in Bologna."

I wish you were, thought Edmund. So it was "Irene" now.

Last time she was here they had still been on "Mrs. Litton" terms. Marion's hair was redder and darker than it had been at the beginning of the week and her little marmoset face more brightly

painted. He had never known a woman to be such a fidget. She couldn't sit still for five minutes but was up and down, bouncing about on her little stick legs and her kitten heels.

"You mustn't think you have to come with me," she said to him when she had served and cleared away the coffee. Another first time.

"It's no trouble," said his mother as if she were doing it herself. "Suppose something happened. He'd never forgive himself."

She smiled. She made a conspiratorial face at Marion, a sort

of can't-you-see-he's-longing-to-go-with-you face. And then he knew. Marion was intended for him. His mother's chosen present for him. Not from the first probably, not from when they first

knew each other a year or two years back, but for perhaps six months. Like a fool he hadn't seen it coming. He saw it now. She was older than he but maybe by no more than five or six years. She was to be his girlfriend, then his fiancee, in a year or two his wife, a wife who would happily share a house with his mother.

Desperate situations call for desperate measures. He walked Marion down the hill, listening with only half an ear to her prattle

about his mother's arthritis and her courage (as if Irene were

ninety instead of sixty-two), then the latest doings of old Mr. Hussein and old Mrs. Reinhardt. All the while he was thinking what

steps to take. Outside the station, as she thanked him for his escort, she lifted her face quite close to his. Did she expect a kiss? He stepped back, said good night, and left her.

"Such a sweet woman," said his mother. "Girl, I should say." She paused to let this sink in. "We've got a new neighbor. I saw

him move in today. A Mr. Fenix. Marion says he paid over a million for that house and she should know."

Next day, at the hospice, he reviewed his fellow nurses. The

women were all married or living with a boyfriend. At his midmorning break he went downstairs to the catering department, for a

slice of gingerbread or a piece of strudel to go with his coffee. The Jean Langholm Hospice was known for the high standard of its food. As Michelle, one of the cooks, said, "Let's face it, folks come here to die. The least you can do is make their last meals cordon bleu."

She was helping Diane prepare vegetables, cleaning broccoli

and scrubbing carrots. Heather, the chef, was making wafer-thin pancakes for lunch. Edmund went up to Heather, as he sometimes did, to ask her how she was and tell her about Mr. Warriner, a cancer patient on his ward in whom she had shown an interest. She simply smiled at the first inquiry and nodded at the news of Mr. Warriner. She was a quiet girl and plain-faced, calm and reposeful, sturdy and full-bodied without being fat. She always looked as if she had just had a bath and washed her hair. Her eyes were the blue of willow-pattern china, and her beautiful thick fair hair was cut in a short bob with bangs. She asked him if he had come for his cake and could she offer him an almond slice or a piece of Battenberg. Edmund chose the Battenberg cake, then he

said, "Would you like to come out for a drink one evening?"

She was surprised to be asked. He could see that. "All right," she said.

"Well, this evening?"

She didn't have to think. She stared at him. "If you like." "What time do you finish here?"

Six.

"I'll come down for you at six."

It would mean hanging about upstairs for an hour, but

never mind. He could have a chat with Mr. Warriner about his son and his dog and his once-splendid stamp collection. However awful the evening might be, however many long silences

and glum stares, it wouldn't be Marion and her blather. It wouldn't be a step into the trap his mother and Marion were setting

for him.

"What do you think," said Ismay. "Heather has a boyfriend." Andrew, pouring wine, was so astonished that he let the glass overflow. Ismay ran and fetched a towel from the bathroom. He laughed and kissed her. "Who is this hero?"

"Oh, Andrew, that's not kind. She is my sister. I love her if you don't."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. I suppose I judge the way she's likely

to treat other guys by the way she treats me. She's a mistress of the persistent silence. It would matter less if she didn't live with you." Andrew handed her a glass, sat down beside her, and lit a cigarette. Ismay disapproved of everyone's smoking except Andrew. He smoked, she thought, with the elegance of an actor in a Hollywood film of the thirties. "D'you know," he said, "I think I deserve

some credit for actually sticking around once I'd learned that little gorgon I found ensconced on this sofa was your sister and your

flatmate. All right, don't be hurt, you know I love you. Who is he? Tell me about him."

He's a nurse.

"You're joking. You mean a male nurse?"

"Of course he's a male nurse if he's a man, Andrew. He's a nurse in the Jean Langholm Hospice where Heather works." "That figures. Have you met him?"

"Not yet. He's called Edmund Litton and apparently he's got about as many nursing qualifications as you can get. He lives in West Hampstead and he's thirty-three."

"Just how do you manage to get all this info out of a brick wall?

I can barely get a word out of her. Quite a contrast to how you prattle on. Frankly, I sometimes wonder if she really is your sister. Maybe she's a changeling. You're so lovely and she's no oil painting, is she?" "No what?"

"Something my grandmama says. I rather like it. It's so graphic. There's just one more thing I want to know: Will he

marry her? Will this courageous paramedic marry her and take her away from here so that you and I can move in together as I've been trying to do this past year?"

"Oh, Andrew, I shouldn't think so," said Ismay. "He lives with his mother."

It was quite a big house, of mid-thirties vintage. Irene Litton would never have expected her son to live with her in a flat or a small place. Or so she told herself. But surely, when you had a four-bedroom house at your disposal, it was simply imprudent not to occupy itwell, prudently. Edmund might have all those certificates and diplomas but he didn't earn very much. Now if he had been a doctor, as

his father and she had wanted... As things were, it would have 10

been simply foolish for him to take out a mortgage on a flat on his salary. Of course, ignoring how much she loved the house in Chudleigh Hill, how it had been her home for thirty-six years, her home she had come to as a bride, she could have sold it and divided the proceeds with Edmund. He would never have allowed that. He had too much respect for her feelings and her memories.

Besides, she wouldn't live long. She wouldn't make old bones.

She had always known that from the time Edmund was born and she had had such a dreadful time, thirty-eight hours in labor. They had gone to her husband and asked him whom they should save, his wife or his unborn child. Of course he had said his wife. As it turned out, after a nightmare of agony, when she thought she was dying, the child was born and she was still alive. But from that moment she had known her constitution wasn't strong. It couldn't be when she had so many things the matter with her: migraines that laid her low for days on end, a bad back Edmund said was neither arthritis nor scoliosis—but he wasn't a doctor—M.E. that made her perpetually tired, acid indigestion, a numbness in her hands and feet she knew was the start of Parkinson's, and lately, panic attacks that frightened her nearly to death.

She hadn t expected to live to fifty. By a miracle she had and past that, but it couldn't go on much longer. When she died, in two or three years' time, the house and everything in it would be Edmund's. Marion's too, she had hoped, but that was not to be. Well, young people had to make their own choices. And their own mistakes. She hoped, for his sake, Edmund hadn't made a mistake in picking this Heather. He had brought her home to Chudleigh Hill. She couldn't exactly say he had brought her home to meet his mother. No doubt

he was shy of doing that, the girl was gauche, to say the least, and with a disconcerting stare out of over-bright blue eyes. You could say she had rude eyes, thought Irene, pleased with the phrase. Irene had met

the pair of them coming downstairs. It was the middle of a Saturday afternoon, so there was no question of their having been upstairs doing anything they shouldn't have been. Edmund wouldn't do that. Not before he was married. Or not perhaps, Irene thought bravely,

moving with the times, before he was engaged. "This is Heather, Mother," Edmund said. "How do you do?"

The girl said "Hello, Mrs. Litton" in the sort of tone too casual for Irene's liking.

Nice hair, thought Irene, but otherwise nothing much to look at. "Can I get you some tea?"

"We're going to the cinema," the girl said. "How nice. What are you going to see?" "The Manchurian Candidate."

"Oh, I'd love to see that," said Irene. "Nicole Kidman's in it, isn't she?"

"I don't think so." Heather turned from Edmund to face her with a smile. "Will you excuse us, Mrs. Litton? We have to go. Come on, Ed, or we'll be late."

Ed! No one had ever called him that. She couldn't help

thinking how different Marion would have been. For one thing, Marion would certainly have asked her to join them when she had said she would like to see the film. It was only polite. Come to that, Edmund might have asked. A twinge gripped her in the region of her waist and she tasted hot bile in her throat. She wondered if she could possibly have gallstones. When Edmund came home she would ask him and he would know, even though he wasn't a doctor. Waking in the night after Andrew had gone and unable to go back to sleep, Ismay lay alone in the dark thinking about her sister. Was 12

there a chance this man might marry Heather? She hadn't even considered the possibility until Andrew suggested it. Edmund and Heather had been going out together for less than a month. But Heather seemed to like him, to be always out somewhere with him. Ismay had never known her to be absent from the flat so much since they had come to live here. And though Heather had had a boyfriend or two while at catering college, nothing, as far as Ismay knew, had been remotely serious.

She got up to go to the bathroom. Dawn had come and with

it the gray light that is the precursor of sunrise. Heather had left her door open and Ismay stopped to look into the room at her sister lying fast asleep. Her beautiful hair lay on the pillow like a gold silk cushion, her strong and capable right hand spread out beside it. It was early days to think about Edmund marrying her, but on the other hand, there had never before been a situation like this. Ismay admitted to herself that she had somehow taken it for granted that Heather would never have a serious relationship, let alone marry. When she asked herself why, she came up with an unsatisfactory answer. Because she was Heather, because she's not like other girls, because she's not attractive to men. Yet she must be attractive to Edmund.

Of course, she had never committed herself to staying with Heather, the two of them sharing forever. There would have been no point in that. Heather was an independent person, quite

capable of looking after herself, living alone or, she supposed, being a wife. She shouldn't even be thinking about her the way Andrew did, as someone vaguely incapacitated. She could separate herself from Heather and they could be like any other normal sisters who

loved each other, of course, but weren't bound together....

It was the night, that was what it was, five o'clock in the morning, a mad sad time. She went back to bed and lay there, her 13

eyes open in the pale-gray light and seeing at last that this was nothing to do with the time of day or wanting to live with Andrew or Heather's temperament. It was to do with what Heather had done twelve years ago. Must have done, surely beyond a doubt had done.

No one knew but the three of them—herself, her mother,

and Heather. The knowledge had driven her mother over the edge into the shadow world of schizophrenia. They had discussed Heather's involvement, Heather's guilt, she and her mother, but between themselves, never with Heather. Guy might still be alive, be on the other side of the world, lost or vanished, for all Heather ever spoke of him or his death or even, it seemed, remembered

him. But he was dead, and that was due to Heather. Sometimes Ismay felt she knew it as if she had witnessed the act and sometimes that she knew it because there was no other possibility.

If Heather married Edmund Litton, should he be told? That

was the great question. Could she let this apparently nice, good, intelligent man—or, come to that, any man at all—take on Heather without knowing what she had done? But if he knew, would he take her on? I love my sister, she whispered to herself in the dark. Whatever Andrew says, she is lovable. I can't bear to hurt her, deprive her of happiness, cut her off from life, like they used to shut girls up in convents, just because ... But, wait a minute, because she drowned someone?

She heard Heather get up and move very softly into the

kitchen. Should she hand over her stewardship of Heather, halfhearted though it had been, to Edmund? It's early days, she told

herself; but she couldn't get back to sleep. 14

Chapter Three

Unless you are very young, it is difficult to have sex if you haven't a home of your own or the money to provide a temporary refuge. Edmund had had no sex for five years now. The last time had been with an agency nurse at the hospice Christmas party in a room full of washbasins known as the "sluice." And that had been a one-off. Since going out with Heather he had looked back on his largely sex-free twenties with shame and incredulity. Those were the best years of a man's life as far as desire and potency were concerned, and he had let them pass by because he balked at telling his

mother he was bringing back a girl for the night. Regret was pointless. It wasn't too late and he intended, this evening, to tell his

mother he would be going away for the weekend—and why. For some time now he had been standing up to her. Long

before he met Heather he went home for a meal with his friend, the hospice palliative care doctor, Ian Dell, and saw Ian with his own mother. He had never imagined that his strong-minded

decisive friend could be so enfeebled and conciliatory, and under the rule of a parent, as Ian was. Mrs. Dell was a little old crone (as Edmund put it unkindly to himself) quite unlike Irene Litton, but their dictatorial manner was similar. It seemed to him that Ian yielded in almost everything to Mrs. Dell, even apologizing to Edmund afterward for having refused—very gently—to take a day off from the hospice the next day to drive her to see her sister in Rickmansworth.

"I expect you think I should have taken her," he said. "I do

have time off owing to me and we aren't that busy at the moment, are we? But I suppose I felt, rather selfishly, that it might be the thin end of the wedge. I'll make it up to her. I'll take her for a day out somewhere at the weekend."

In Ian, Edmund had seen himself mirrored. He must change.

If he failed to take a stand now when he was only a little over thirty, it would be too late. Although he and Heather had never discussed his mother, somehow it was Heather's presence in his life that helped him. Gave him confidence and cheered his heart. So when Irene told him—told, not asked him—to come with her to

his aunt and uncle in Ealing on the first free Saturday he'd had for a month, he took a deep breath and said no, he'd be busy. The ensuing argument became acrimonious and culminated in his mother having a panic attack. But it is the first step that counts, as Edmund kept telling himself, and after that things gradually got easier. He would be able to tell her about the planned weekend and its purpose and, he thought, screwing up his nerve, she would just have to get on with it.

When he first asked Heather out for a drink with him he had hardly thought of their relationship as coming to much. A few weeks, he gave it, and no sex because there never was. Besides, Heather hadn't really had much attraction for him. She was a 16

better prospect than white-faced, skinny, crimson-haired Marion, but almost anyone would have been. Now, though, they had been out for drinks, three meals, two cinemas, and one theater, and to a food-through-the-ages exhibition she had been keen on, and he looked at her with new eyes.

One evening she said to him, "I'm a silent person. I talk to my sister but not much to others. I can talk to you."

He was enormously touched. "I'm glad."

"It's easy with you because you don't say stupid things,'s nice.

He saw her home to Clapham. When he didn't leave her at Embankment but came the whole way, she said, "You're so kind to

me. I don't much like walking home from the station on my own." "Of course I'm coming with you," he said and when they

began to walk along the edge of the Common, he took her hand. It was a warm hand with a strong clasp. He looked into her

face under the lamplight and saw her eyes fixed on him, large blue eyes, opaque and cloudy as the glaze on pottery. Then there were the other markers, more obvious to any man, her full breasts and rounded hips, her plump lips and that hair, that glossy, dense, radiant hair whose color varied from flaxen through cornfield to eighteen-carat gold. She never wasted words but when she did speak her voice was soft and low, and her rare smiles lit her face and made her pretty.

The house where she lived was much bigger than he had expected, a detached house in a row of others like it but the only one with a glazed-in walkway from the gates to the steps and with stone pineapples on the gateposts. Lights were on upstairs and down.

"My sister, Ismay, and I have the ground floor, and my

mother and her sister the top." She stopped at the foot of the steps, 17

keeping hold of his hand. "Ismay and her boyfriend," she said softly, "will be away next weekend."

"Can I take you out on Friday?"

She lifted her face and in the gleaming half dark he thought

he had never seen anyone look so trusting. He brought his mouth

to hers and kissed her the way he'd been kissing her these past few weeks, but something new in her response made him ardent, passionate, breathless when their faces parted. She held him tightly.

"Heather," he said. "Darling Heather." "Come for the weekend."

He nodded. "I'll look forward to it so much."

Edmund said to his mother, "I shall be away for the weekend, back on Sunday."

They had just sat down to eat. Irene lifted her first forkful, set it down again. "You never go away for the weekend."

"No, it's time I started." "Where are you going?" "To Clapham."

"You don't have to go away to go to Clapham. Clapham's in London. Whatever you're doing in Clapham you can do it in the daytime and come back here to sleep."

Strength came to him from somewhere. From Heather? "I am going to spend the weekend in Heather's flat."

Edmund continued to eat. His mother had stopped. She shook her head infinitesimally from side to side, said, "Oh, Edmund, Edmund, I didn't think you were that sort of man." He was still wary of her, but he contrasted how he now was

and how he had been. There was a world of difference. His efforts had paid off and there was no doubt that now he sometimes got 18

amusement out of their confrontations. "What sort of man, Mother?"

"Don't pretend you don't know what I mean."

"I am going away for the weekend with my girlfriend,

Mother. I don't suppose you want me to go into details." It was the first time he had referred to Heather as his girlfriend. Doing so now seemed to bring him closer to her. "And now I'd like to finish my dinner."

"I'm afraid I can't eat any more," Irene said, leaning back in

her chair and taking deep breaths. "I feel rather unwell. It is probably the start of a migraine."

Edmund wanted to say something on the lines of, "You

always do feel ill when I say anything to cross you," or even, "It couldn't be psychosomatic, could it?" But he stayed silent, unwilling to argue further with her or defend himself (God forbid). Of

course she would revert to the matter again—and again.

She did so at the moment he laid his knife and fork diagonally across his empty plate. "I shall be all alone in this house." "Unless you can get Marion to stay."

"It's hard when you're my age and not strong."

"Mother," he said, "you have a good neighbor in Mr. Fenix

next door and good neighbors opposite. You have a land line and a mobile phone. You are only sixty-two and there is nothing wrong with you." Even six months ago he couldn't have summoned the strength to say that.

"Nothing wrong with me!" The words were repeated on a

note of ironic laughter. "It is extraordinary how one's good little children can grow up so callous. When you were first put into my arms, a tiny child, after all I went through to give you life, I never dreamed you would repay my suffering with this kind of treatment, never."

"I'll get Marion on the phone for you, shall I, and you can ask her?"

"Oh, no, no. I can't become dependent on strangers. I shall have to bear it alone. Please God I won't be ill."

In the event, Edmund left for Clapham on Friday but only

after more battles. Irene "went down" with a cold the evening before. It was a real cold. Unlike acid indigestion, which needs only one's word for it, sneezes and a running nose cannot be faked. Irene pointed out that it was only three weeks since she had had her last cold. It was a well-known fact that "cold upon cold" was the precursor of pneumonia. She had had it as a child as the result of a series of colds, double pneumonia.

"You aren't going to get pneumonia, Mother," said Edmund, the nurse.

Discouraging whiskey toddies, he made her a honey-andlemon drink and advised aspirin every four hours. "You're not

a doctor," she said, as she so often did. "I ought to be having

antibiotics."

"A cold is a virus and antibiotics don't work against viruses." "It will be a virus all right when I get viral pneumonia." Irene Litton was a tall, well-built woman, having much the

same sort of figure as Heather Sealand. Edmund had noticed this and refused to draw the psychologists conclusion, that he was attracted by women who looked like his mother. In any case, the resemblance ended there, for Irene's hair was dark, barely yet touched with gray, and though English through and through, she

had much the same features as Maria Callas: large, aquiline, striking. She was aware of this herself and had been heard to say that

she might have had the same operatic success if she had only been able to have her voice trained. She dressed in draped or trailing clothes in strong jewel colors—garnet-red, sapphire, deep green, 20

or amethyst—mostly with fringes, hung with strings of beads she made herself, and she moved slowly, straight-backed, head held high. Her usual good health suited her type and she was at her worst when red-nosed and sniffing.

Marion noticed at once and poured out sympathy. She had arrived just before Edmund left for the weekend—timed her arrival, he thought, for he was sure that his mother had invited her, in spite of her avowals that she had not. That she knew where he was going and with whom he was also pretty sure, for while they were alone together in the hall, before she danced in to see Irene, she gave him a look of deep reproach, half smiling, yet sad. "I brought some of my homemade fairy cakes," she said. "Fairy cakes have come right back into fashion, you know. They're such comforting food and she'll need comfort."

When he had walked down the path and let himself out of

the garden gate, he looked back to see them both watching him from the bay window. Those women were sure to make himthoughtless, immoral, unfilial, callous, and not a doctor—the principal subject of their conversation. His ears ought to be burning all the evening. He was determined not to let thinking of it

blight his weekend, and it didn't.

Letting fall the beige damask curtain and returning to the fireside—a realistic-looking gas fire of smoldering yet everlasting coals and logs with flickering flames—Marion bustled about, feeling Irene's forehead, refilling her water carafe, fetching echinacea

drops and cough lozenges, and finally thrusting a thermometer into her mouth.

"You'd have thought Edmund would have done all this," said Marion.

"Hmm-mm-hmm-hmm." "After all, he is a nurse." 21

"Mm-hmm-hmm," more vehemently. The thermometer reading was normal.

"It can't be!"

"Maybe there's something wrong with it. I'll try again later,

shall I? Or shall I run out and see if I can get another one from the all-night pharmacist? Or I could run home and fetch mine." "Would you, Marion? You're so good to me. I'm beginning to think of you as my daughter, you know. Or—dare I say it?—my might-have-been daughter-in-law."

Marion ran to the station, changed her mind, and ran home

through the winding streets to the Finchley Road. She ran everywhere, just as she talked all the time. Though she had made an

attempt at courting him, Edmund's defection hadn't troubled her as much as Irene believed. What she wanted was not a young man's desire but the devotion and admiration of elderly people with money. As well as Irene, she had old Mr. Hussein and old Mrs. Reinhardt, her sights on a couple of others, and she had had old Mrs. Pringle, only old Mrs. Pringle had died the previous year. True, she hadn't bequeathed her enormous house in Fitzjohn's Avenue to Marion, but she had left her a large sum of money and some very nice jewelry. This had enabled Marion to buy the ground floor and basement flat of the house in Lithos Road she now entered to find a thermometer. Since she was obsessively neat—a place for everything and everything in its place—she found it at once in the bathroom cabinet on the shelf next to the brown bottle of morphine sulfate, and she skipped back to get

the tube this time, one stop to West Hampstead and Irene. Heather would be shy and perhaps nervous, Edmund had believed. She might even be a virgin. As he made his way by 22

Jubilee Line and Northern Line to Clapham, the joyful anticipation he had felt earlier in the week began to fade and he wondered

if she was so inexperienced that he would have to—no, surely not, teach her. The idea was enough to chill him in highly undesirable

ways. For one thing, he was sure he was incapable of educating a woman in the art of love and for another, suppose she was unresponsive and frightened. He told himself, as the train came in to

Clapham South, that he wasn't in love with her—maybe it would be easier if he were—and that if this split them up rather than consolidating their relationship, it wouldn't be the end of the world. There were other women to be found. Marion wasn't the only alternative.

But as he climbed the steps under the glass canopy he remembered the kiss she had given him and that look of utter trust when she had taken his hand. Here at the top the lower doorbell said, I. AND H. SEALAND, the upper one, SEALAND AND VINER. He pressed the bell and as he waited found quite suddenly that he was longing to see her, that when she answered the door he would take her in his arms.

Things were very different from what he had expected while

in the train. Once he was over his amazement, he found himself with a passionate partner, enthusiastic and uninhibited. Not silent

and calm as she was when they were out together or she was busy in the kitchens of the hospice, but yielding yet active, sweetly tireless and delightfully greedy, promising an inventiveness to come.

If education were needful, she was the teacher, not he.

"The first time is never good," she said at some satiated moment. "Or that's what they say. But ours was, very good." From thinking of her as the "blocking tackle" that defended him from Marion, a girl with a good figure and not much to say for herself, he had come to be enchanted by her. Leaving her on 23

Sunday afternoon with passionate embraces—he had no wish to meet the sister and her boyfriend—he found himself making a date for the Monday evening and the Tuesday. Both made faces in mock despair over having nowhere to go, then laughed at their own absurdity.

"Issy has Andrew here for the night," Heather said. "You could come here."

"Could I?" he said. "I'd love to."

He couldn't tell her of the scene with his mother he must

face. A thirty-three-year-old man under his mother's thumb is a comic figure, emphatically not the dashing lover. But he wasn't really under his mother's thumb anymore, was he? He still had a way to go, he could see that, and he must persevere. Remembering his two nights with Heather brought him such luxurious delight that he seemed to gain strength, and when he let himself into the house in Chudleigh Hill he was determined to speak out at once. Unfortunately, Marion was there. The minute he walked into

the living room she ran out of it to return very rapidly with a tray on which was a hot drink for his mother, a fairy cake on a plate, two aspirins on a saucer, a bottle of inhalant with dropper, a tin of Fisherman's Friend lozenges, and tissues in a box as glittery and brightly colored as a Christmas decoration.

"Aren't you rather gilding the lily?"

He could see that his mother was far better than she had

been on Friday. She said nothing but looked at him with raised eyebrows.

Marion managed an uncertain smile at his waspishness and began administering her remedies, chattering away. "Have you had a lovely time, Edmund? What did you do?"

What a question! Made love, he thought. Fell in love. Had

two days and two nights of bliss....

"Its been so frightfully cold, hasn't it? I met Mr. Hussein

while I was out this morning and I said to him, this cold must be worse for you than for the rest of us, I said, coming from such a hot place. And do you know what he said? He said, I come from the north, from Ladakh—I think it was Ladakh, though it might have been Lahore, some name like that—and it's far colder there than it ever gets here, he said. I was amazed. You think of India

being hot all the time, don't you? Well, I know I do. Its going to get milder tomorrow, no frost at any rate."

When she paused to draw breath, he rushed in with his announcement, afraid that if he left it till Marion was gone he would never make it. "I shall be away overnight on Tuesday too." On Monday, he had decided, he would go to the flat in Clapham but leave before midnight. His courage increasing with every word, "I am taking Heather out to dinner and I shall be spending the night with her."

Isee.

His mother's words dropped like pebbles into still water. Even Marion was silenced.

Irene had flushed a deep red. "Do you think it's very nice,"

she said, "to speak about a young woman in those terms? Personally, I doubt if ever in the history of the world it has been acceptable

for a man to talk about a respectable girl like that. Spending the night with her, indeed. Now I've heard everything." Marion giggled. She stood, screwing back the cap on the

inhaler bottle. "Yes, I must say it rather took my breath away," she said in a conversational tone. "I couldn't help thinking to myself, how would I feel if my—well, my sweetheart, I suppose—talked about me like that. I wouldn't like it. I'd feel so embarrassed.

I think these things call for a certain amount of discretion, don't you?"

"Since you ask," said Edmund, made strong and brave by the delights of a full sex life, "I don't give a stuff what you think. You should mind your own business."

A little shriek from Marion and a loud "Heavens above!"

from his mother drove Edmund from the room. He went upstairs, furiously angry but doing his best to stay calm. From downstairs he could hear Marions feet tap-tapping swiftly about. God knew what she could be doing. He unpacked his bag, thinking about Heather, her eyes sleepy with satisfied love, her rounded white arms resting softly around his neck. The front door was lightly closed, the kitten heels clack-clacked down the path to the gate, then up Chudleigh Hill. All sorts of frightfulness awaited him downstairs but he went down; first to the dining room, where the drink was kept. Instead of pouring himself a vodka and tonic (at five in the afternoon) he resisted that bracing elixir and strolled into the living room. His mother was lying on the sofa with her eyes shut. Without opening them, she said, "After being so grossly abused, I doubt if Marion will ever come near me again."

"Oh, yes, she will," he said. "A pack of pitbulls couldn't keep her away."

Chapter Four

If only it were possible to tell how serious it was. With any of Ismay's girlfriends it would have been quite a different matter.

They would have talked about the affair in every possible aspect, how good he was in bed, but how attentive he was too, how generous, how well-mannered, how funny, how laid-back, how faithful

he was likely to be. With Heather this was impossible. To inquiries she would respond with a "yes" or a "no" or more likely a "don't know," and if Ismay became persistent, with "I don't want to talk about it, Issy. You don't mind, do you?"

Had she always been like this? Before she did what she did, or probably did what she did, was what Ismay meant. Before she came down these stairs in her wet shoes and her wet dress. She had never been very talkative as a child, but withdrawal came later, along with coolness and control. It was impossible to say—Ismay thought that even a psychiatrist couldn't say—whether Guy had

caused this or if it had come about because of what Heather herself had done.

She was upstairs now with Pamela and her mother. "Bea's

very quiet," Pamela said. "She's taken against the telly and she's listening to the radio all the time. Shall we have coffee or a drink or

something? I was prepared to force her to take her tablet this morning, but I didn't have to. She was as quiet as a lamb."

She let Ismay into the hall, which had been a first-floor

landing in the old house. "Why is it that people who've got what poor Mum's got always go to such lengths not to take their medication?"

"Apparently, they're afraid it will change their consciousness." "But that's the point, isn't it? You'd think they'd want to

change their consciousness, seeing how miserable it makes them." Pamela shrugged. They went into the kitchen, which had

been Heather's bedroom before the conversion. Her head was so full of Heather and Edmund that for a moment Ismay almost forgot that Pamela knew nothing about Guy's death except that he

had drowned in the bath when weak from illness. She nearly said she was worried about leaving Edmund in ignorance, but she stopped herself in time.

While Pamela put on the coffee, Ismay put her head around

the door and said hello to her mother. Sitting in her usual chair, listening to the radio turned very low, the useless, unused handbag in her lap, Beatrix ignored her. Ismay sighed. She thought how good it would be if she could talk to someone about all this Heather business. Andrew was out of the question. He disliked Heather and had, as he said, "no time for her." Her mother was what Pamela called "away with the fairies." As for Pamela herself, now was too late to start telling her even if it wouldn't be an

unbelievably rash thing to do. This was something she had to keep to herself, argue out with herself, come to a decision alone.

All that should matter to her now was to assess how far Heather's relationship with Edmund had gone and how far it was

likely to go. She couldn't let the man marry Heather, perhaps not even let him become engaged to Heather, without telling him. But her heart quailed at the thought of coming out with it, all of it in its bare awfulness, not to mention the part she and her mother had played.

She and Pamela took their coffee into the living room where Beatrix sat. She leaned a little toward the radio, which stood on

the top shelf of a low bookcase, and inclined her head toward it, her ear pressed up against its gray laminated surface. Ismay knew it would be quite useless to suggest turning the radio on a little

louder or moving her chair closer. She went up to her mother and kissed the uplifted cheek. Beatrix took no notice of her. She seldom did, though she sometimes shouted out the more violent passages from the Book of Revelation at any of them indiscriminately.

None of them was religious and Ismay had never seen her mother read the Bible, but now, mysteriously, she was able to quote long passages from it.

When their father died, Heather had suffered intensely. They

had both missed him, but Ismay not half as much as Heather. Both were too young for the possibility of their mother remarrying to cross their minds. They would just be alone, the three of

them, with Pamela coming around to see them quite often or them all going to Pamela's. The only change that Ismay could remember was when Pamela met a man called Michael Fenster and Beatrix was always saying how nice he was and they were bound to be married.

But it wasn't Pamela who got married. It was Beatrix. Unsuitably, incomprehensibly, to the last man in the world anyone would have considered possible.

Ismay's mobile rang while she was there. Of course it was Andrew. He had already phoned her twice that day, but that wasn't unusual. Pamela smiled, but fondly, when she realized who it was and heard Ismay say, "In an hour then. Love you."

Beatrix, as usual, behaved as if there were no one in the room with her and no phone conversation had taken place. She moved her head away from the murmuring radio. "Before the throne," she said in a mild tone, "there was a sea of glass like unto crystal; and in the midst of the throne, and around about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind."

"Yes, Mum, I know." Ismay, who had heard that one before several times, used to wonder about those beasts, apparently with eyes in the back of their heads, but she accepted them now. "You don't need me here, do you?" she said to Pamela.

"Absolutely not. You know she's no trouble while she's like

this. I could go out and be gone for hours and she'd still be sitting there like that. Are you going to meet Andrew somewhere?"

"At a pub."

Pamela talked about her latest date, this time with a man she had met through an Internet chat room "for the more mature."

For the first time in years, Ismay thought, she mentioned Michael, only saying she wished she could meet someone like him. Ismay remembered how Michael had treated her, living with her and getting engaged to her and then walking out a week before they were

to be married. She kissed her mother's unresponsive cheek and, while Pamela talked, glanced toward the single glass door. She always did this, she couldn't help herself.

Where there was now polished floor with scattered rugs, a

small table and wing chair, the bath had once stood up against the wall. Where there was a circular table with painted surface had been the shower cabinet. Under the picture of Madame Bonnard drying herself, the basin had stood and the bronze curlicued towel rail. At the end of the bath a cane chair had stood ready for a bathrobe to be draped across its back. It wasn't always there but it

had been that afternoon....

Did the others think like this? Did they remember when they looked at this extension of the room that the conversion had been done to hide what had once been there? To make it utterly different, just as houses where murderers had lived and bodies been concealed were razed to the ground and gardens planted where they had been?

She hadn't heard a word Pamela had said, though she had

made replies, a "yes" and a "no" and a "why not?," had drunk her coffee, given Madame Bonnard another glance, and gone off to meet Andrew. It was a coincidence, she thought, that Pamela had mentioned Michael, whom she had been thinking about just half an hour before. He had been Guy's friend, she thought as she walked along the edge of the Common, or at any rate, he had

worked with Guy, and it had been he and Pamela who had introduced Guy to Beatrix. Ismay couldn't remember what Michael

had looked like. Dark, she thought, not very tall. Not as goodlooking as Guy. He never appeared in that recurring dream, the

one where Guy was dead under the water, or in other dreams peopled by her mother and Pamela and Heather, and once by the

older of the two policemen.

Six months after Pamela and Michael arranged that meeting, Beatrix married Guy. He was a few years younger than she, and 31

people thought weird, dowdy Beatrix lucky to get him. She was, and always had been, one of those women who look like witches, young fey witches with pointed features and wispy hair when they are young, and gray witches in trailing garments hung on their skinny frames when they are older. Heather disliked Guy from the first and he seemed to make no efforts to endear himself to her. With Ismay it was a different story. He said he regarded himself as her father, wanted her to call him Daddy but didn't try to force it when she was reluctant to do so. Ismay had often wondered since if he realized why calling him Daddy wasn't acceptable to her.

Perhaps he thought this usage would be painful to her since her real father had been dead so short a time. This was not, of course, the reason.

He showed her a lot of affection. For instance, he often took

her to sit on his knee. This, which would have been inappropriate for Heather, who was nearly as tall as he and with a womanly shape, seemed simply charming toward slight, dainty Ismay, though she was the elder. He kissed her good-bye when he went to work in the morning and kissed her in greeting when he came home. He called her his sweetheart and his angel.

"You can't like it when he does that," Heather said, referring to the kisses.

"I don't mind," said Ismay.

One day he told her something he said was a secret. She must never tell anyone. He had seen her long before he had met her mother. Both girls had been staying with Pamela, and he and Michael and several others were her guests for dinner. Ismay and Heather hadn't been able to sleep and had come down to say there was a wasp in their room. Did she remember? No, he knew she wouldn't. But he had seen her and never forgotten the little blond child who had come downstairs crying.

Even when she was nearly fifteen she could look very innocent

and younger than she was. Guy was thirty-four but could be

taken for ten years younger. He was attractive to women, a source ofjealous misery to Beatrix, his wife. Ismay sat on his knee and when they all went out together she held his hand. Sometimes he kissed her when no one else was present and then the kisses were different from those given and received under Beatrix's and Heather's eyes. Until one day Heather saw. She saw Guy kiss Ismay on the mouth, her face held in his hands in the dark hall, and

Ismay pull away, turn, and run. She was close to fifteen when that happened and Heather was thirteen, five feet seven inches tall with

a straight back, full breasts, muscular arms, and considerable physical strength. Ismay had run away because Heather had seen, not

because she disliked the kiss. She thought now, not for the first time, that Andrew was like Guy to look at. If you saw them together you might have taken them for brothers. But of course no one could ever see them together.

Ismay went into the pub, and Andrew was sitting on a bar

stool waiting for her. Other people were with him but he left them, came up to her, and took her in his arms. He smelled of smoke and some rather sophisticated herb. She had never told him anything about Guy. As he led her up to the others and bought her a glass of wine, she thought that of all the appalling things that could happen, the worst was that Andrew should ever know, ever find out, about Heather.

Influenced by Andrew's estimate of a male nurse as "a bit of a nerd if

not a closet queer," Ismay was pleasantly surprised to meet a goodlooking fair-haired man, well built and as tall as Andrew, a man with

plenty to say for himself and a considerable grasp of current events. 33

He had brought with him a bottle of champagne in a cooler. "This is to celebrate my meeting Heather," he said. "The best thing that's happened to me in years."

Heather wasn't the sort of girl to blush or demur at such an accolade. While Edmund opened the bottle of Lanson, she sat calmly, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips.

He raised his glass, said, "Heather!" Ismay and Andrew followed suit, Andrew with an undertone of amusement. They talked about a political scandal, which was the lead story in the Evening Standard, then about the uncontrollability of what Andrew called "the print media," and after that he and Ismay went off to the going-away party for a man in his chambers.

"Not what I'd expected, I must admit," he said in the taxi. "Not a nerd?"

"It would appear not. To be frank, I don't in the least care

what he's like so long as he likes her and she likes him. The burning question of the hour is, will they get together to the extent of moving in together or, better still, get married?"

"It's early days, Andrew."

"Ah, but they are exactly the sort of people who would fall madly in love, marry in haste, and repent at leisure." "Don't say that, please."

"I'm sorry, my darling, but I do want your sister out of there.

I don't frankly know why she has to be there in the first place and nothing you tell me seems to me an adequate explanation. You earn twice what she does. You don't need her share of the

rent....

"Oh, but, Andrew, I do. My mother does."

"Yes, but if I were there she'd have my share. Or suppose you were to leave and move in with me? She need not be alone. Finding someone to share with her would be easy as pie."

"It might be easy but it won't do."

"But it would do if it were this Edmund?"

Would it? He was very nice, Ismay thought, and he seemed sensible, mature. In some ways he reminded her of their father. Of course, he was a bit older than the rest of them. But was he mature enough, responsible enough, to take something like this on board, accept it, be sure his love was strong enough to encompass even this? Ismay felt very doubtful about Heather's ability to love—to be in love, that is. Of course Heather loved her, there was no doubt about that. Indeed, there was a grim certainty about it. But would she love Edmund and love him enough to overcome the inevitable cooling off or settling down which must come after a year or two of marriage? Or must come, according to what Ismay had read. For her part, she knew she could never cool off Andrew or settle with him into a humdrum existence. Her passion and her devotion

would endure until death. "Till death us do part" would have

real meaning for her when she came to say those words at the altar or before the registrar ... if only the saying of them might not be too long deferred.

The taxi drew up outside the Charlotte Street Hotel, where

the party was, and Ismay and Andrew walked in hand in hand. Christmas was a grim affair in Chudleigh Hill. It made little difference if Edmund managed to fix things so that he worked on

Christmas Day. In that case the celebrations would be postponed until Boxing Day. In the unlikely event of his succeeding in working Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and the following day, the Great Feast was put back to Christmas Eve. There was no escape. And should he manage to bring forward or defer the huge culinary excesses, the present giving, and the ecstatic watching of the

Queen's Speech (recorded on video), his mother's bad-tempered reproaches, prolonged for hours, made his efforts to rearrange his days off hardly worthwhile. It was in vain that he told her he cared very little whether he celebrated Christmas or not. She simply said, "You don't mean that. I can see how you love it—like a small boy again."

This year he was taking December 25 off. He had given in.

Over the preceding months he had stuck out so much for nights away with Heather, weekends with Heather, once a weekend in Paris with Heather, that giving in now seemed less wimpish than it otherwise would have. Besides, he was making plans. "Plotting," his mother would have called it. Having had little to spend his earnings on over the barren years, having inherited money when his father died, he had enough in the bank to put down a good deposit on a flat in a "nice part" of London, almost to buy a flat outright in a less nice part. Heather never talked about the future, never said things like "We could do that in a couple of years' time" or "One day we might go there."

But when he told her how much he liked being with her,

what a lot she was beginning to mean to him and even how he couldn't imagine life without her, she smiled at him, gave him a kiss, and said, "Me too, Edmund." So he was becoming sure that when he suggested the flat as a home for him and her together she would agree to that too. The difficulty was his mother.

He had lived with her too long. He had stayed here, with her,

too long. To have made a break ten years before when he was twenty-three and she was fifty-two, that would have been the time. When a son remains under his mother's roof for half the span of a lifetime, she thinks—she is almost entided to think—he means to stay forever. Irene was fit and strong, and physically young for her age. She made herself old and feeble artificially. He 36

knew that, but saying so outright wasn't easy. Wasn't kind; wasn't filial. And meanwhile, here was Christmas looming, in the shape

of endless visits to supermarkets, notably Marks and Spencer and Waitrose, but Safeway and Asda too. In the absence of a car, huge bags had to be carried (of course, all of them by him) into bus queues and onto buses or, occasionally, into taxis. When they got home he had to unload (because she was exhausted) quantities of food he mainly disliked, ingredients to be made into other things he disliked and as far as he could see, she didn't much like. But this was Christmas fare and the guests would like it. Woe betide them if they didn't, he thought.

He could see—had done for years, and his mother surely

could see—that the people she invited didn't want to come, would

go to considerable lengths to avoid coming but couldn't always achieve this. The ones who couldn't find an excuse came under duress. They were her sister, his aunt Joyce; Joyce's husband, Duncan Crosbie; an old relative called Avice Conroy; and Marion. Of

those four, only Marion really wanted to come. Probably had nowhere else to go, Edmund thought unkindly. After all, her other rich lame ducks wouldn't be celebrating the festive season. Old Mrs. Reinhardt would be having a spot of Hanukkah with her son in Edgware and Mr. Hussein was a Moslem. I wish I were, thought Edmund, not for the first time.

Cooking started on the twenty-second. With the exception,

that is, of the Christmas pudding and the mince pies. The former had to be made a year before—a January treat for him, that would be—and the latter three weeks before. So much brandy went into them that they would probably keep for a thousand years without benefit of cryogeny and be a future archaeologist's dream find.

It seemed to him that everyone was obliged to spend Christmas in the company of people they would rather not be 37

with, not just Aunt Joyce, Uncle Duncan, and Avice Conroy. Heather and Ismay would be with their mother and the sister she lived with, Andrew Campbell-Sedge with his parents in Shropshire, and Edmunds friend Ian Dell with his aged mother

and an even more aged uncle in Leeds. All these people, he supposed, would rather be with someone else, Heather with him as he

would have liked to be with her, Ismay surely with Andrew. Even Avice would have been happier at home with her rabbits. He knew from experience that she would fret about them all the time she was in the house in Chudleigh Hill.

Several years had passed since he stopped calling Joyce and Duncan "uncle" and "auntie," but his mother continued to tell

him it wasn't respectful to use unadorned Christian names to people so much older than himself. They must be offended even if they never said so. As for her, she winced each time she heard this solecism committed. He saw her recoil when they arrived on Christmas morning with Avice Conroy and he greeted them with a simulated heartiness.

"Hello, Joyce. Hello, Duncan. How are you?"

They appeared unoffended and were still talking about the

cost of the taxi they had been obliged to take in the absence of any public transport, all the way from Ealing, making a detour on the way to pick up Avice who lived in Pinner, when Marion arrived ten minutes later. Marion was oozing Christmas cheer, her arms full of Christmas presents, brilliantly wrapped and tied with silver and gold thread. One of them was a knuckle of bacon she had cooked herself to augment the dinner. Another, she announced, was not for giving away but a gift to herself from Mr. Hussein, on whom she had just called.

"He lives in a tiny little house in Hampstead. In Perrin's

Grove, as I'm sure you know." Her listeners smiled uneasily. Living 38

far away as they did, they had never heard of Mr. Hussein and had no idea what kind of house he lived in. "He's all alone, very isolated really. He needs someone to look after him. I sometimes

wonder how he manages."

"My next-door neighbors will make a terrific noise this afternoon," said Avice. "The crashing and banging and the music are

actually quite frightening. Susanna and Figaro huddle together in fear."

"Mr. Hussein is always so well-dressed and smart but I wonder if he's just putting a brave face on things."

"I ask myself if I'm right to leave them. Going out hardly seems worthwhile when I worry about them so much."

"Your pets are your jailers, Avice," said Joyce. "That's what I'd call not worthwhile, keeping those animals. Anyway, rabbits should be outdoors, in a hutch. Think of the droppings!"

"My rabbits are thoroughly house-trained, I'd have you know." "My friend Mrs. Reinhardt has a cat," said Marion. "She puts it in a cattery at holiday time. That way she's free as a bird with nothing to worry about. You won't mind if I open Mr. Hussein's present, will you?"

Edmund poured drinks and handed around plates of

sausages on sticks, mini-pizzas, mini-quiches, smoked salmon on bread squares, and salmon roe on biscuits. Marion talked, mostly about Mr. Hussein, but also about Mrs. Reinhardt and that elderly lady's irritable bowel syndrome, varicose veins, and impending knee replacement. She opened her present, but very slowly because the silver string had to be untied, not torn off, and wound around two of Marions fingers, "to come in useful at a later date." The scarlet, holly-leaf-strewn paper had to be meticulously folded edge to edge, and finally a British Home Stores gift box of soap, bath essence, and cologne was disclosed.

Affronted by the lack of sympathy she had received, Avice said, "That didn't cost him much."

Plainly disappointed, Marion said that Mr. Hussein hadn't much money to spend. It was all tied up in his house, which she knew for a fact was worth two million, small though it was. She

worked for an estate agent so could calculate exactly what everyone's house was worth. It was the thought that counted, anyway.

The poor old man must have been all the way to Oxford Street to buy that. She thought it very kind and she elaborated on the

themes of kindness, generosity, and present giving for several minutes. The scent of roasting turkey wafted through open doorways

from the kitchen. While Marion proceeded to talk, now on the curious coincidence of so many religions celebrating a feast around the end of December, Edmund poured more drinks. He had made up his mind in advance that when someone said it was the thought that counted, he would leave them and phone Heather.

In the kitchen Irene's temper was worsening. "I don't

know why she brought that ham. If ever there was a case of corn in Egypt!"

"Or coals to Newcasde," he said. "I'm going to phone Heather. Better not leave them alone."

"For heaven's sake, haven't I got my hands full?" "You invited them, Mother," said Edmund.

He went upstairs, phoned Heather at her mother's house, and wished her a happy Christmas.

Sometimes Ismay thought that Guy had only married Beatrix in order to have access to her elder daughter. Hadn't he said himself that he had seen her at Pamela's house long before he ever saw 40

Beatrix? Beatrix might have been attractive when their father had married her, but by the time he was dead and more years had

passed she was already growing strange, a disheveled creature with wild eyes, long uncombed hair, and an apparent inability ever to

make herself neat or smart or elegant. But handsome Guy had

married her, against all likelihood. To live in the same house with Ismay, see Ismay every day, assume with Ismay the rights and privileges of a father?

After he was dead and they made their plans, she and their mother, plans to save Heather and protect her, Beatrix had grown

even more strange. It was as if the decision they took and the consequent acting out of parts, of ignorance, grief, helplessness, was

too much for her. Something fragile in her mind cracked. Something gave way and she began to justify what they had done

(because of what Heather had done) by casting Heather as an avenging angel and herself as a kind of holy mother, one destined to bear this special child. Schizophrenia was diagnosed and as a result no one believed her when she said her younger daughter was a good spirit, appointed to stand with flaming sword between her sister and harm. When she failed to take her medication and could escape from Pamela's guardianship, she wandered the streets of Clapham, declaiming, "And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain."

Heather was sometimes the fifth angel and sometimes the

second, the one "who poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man." There was no doubt Beatrix was mad, but Ismay thought the author of Revelation was mad too, and probably in a worse state than her mother. Fortunately, Pamela usually managed to get Beatrix's pills down her and, apart from the occasional foray into Saint John the Divine, she was

quiet and dull and staring. The dosage had been carefully administered on Christmas morning well before Ismay and Heather came

upstairs with bags full of presents and food, for Beatrix hadn't cooked anything for years and Pamela called herself an expert in microwaving ready meals.

They had only been there five minutes when Edmund

phoned. Ismay, unloading everything in the kitchen, a large glass

of Sauvignon already beside her, heard Heather whispering, then laughing, then saying, "Me too." This obvious response to a declaration of love was quite unlike her sister, or unlike how she used to

be. Ismay knew she ought to be pleased for Heather and she was in one way. As far as she knew, her sister had never before had a happy love affair, one which wasn't a case of one loving and the other permitting the loving, but mutual pleasure and happiness. It was developing in just the way these things did when they were going to lead to engagement and marriage. And then ... ?

In the living room Beatrix sat under the influence of a calming drug, a drowsy skeleton with shoulder-length gray hair and staring pale eyes, dressed in the kind of robes worn by Diirer's Melancholia. She never drank alcohol, never seemed to want to, which was a blessing as it might have reacted with the drug. She was a prey to obsessions, the present one being gum chewing. Pamela fought a losing battle with the dropped and squashed

gum circles on the floor, scraping away from time to time with a blunt knife. She looked the way Beatrix might have looked if Heather hadn't gone into the bathroom that day or perhaps if she had never married Guy in the first place. Pamela was an upright, well-built woman with a young face and white hair discreetly tinted blond, and alone since Michael's departure, she made no secret of the fact that she wanted a lover. "I don't mean a partner," she said to her nieces. "That wouldn't be possible, not with Beatrix 42

the way she is." And, seeing Ismay's stricken look, "I'm perfectly happy living here with Beatrix. It's fine. I don't think I want

to live with a man on a permanent basis but I—well, I would like someone."

An industrious accountant, she had enough clients for her

needs, and modern technology had made it possible for her to work from home. An aunt to her nieces when they were children, she had become a friend almost as if she were their contemporary. She got down on her knees and began scraping blackened gum off the floor. "It's as bad as the pavement in Bedford Hill down here,"

she said and laughed. Beatrix's only sign that she had heard was a shirting of the handbag on her lap.

Heather came back into the room, looking pleased and

happy. "I told him to ring off," she said. "I thought Andrew might be trying to get you."

Pamela, who knew nothing about what had happened twelve

years before, asked Heather whom she had been talking to. Always calm and self-possessed, Heather said, "A friend."

"A boyfriend?"

"Well, yes. There's a difference, isn't there?" "A big difference," said Pamela. "I envy you."

The meal eaten on December 25, whether at one p.m. or two

or four, is always called dinner and never lunch. The turkey was precooked by Heather, the potatoes ready peeled by Heather, and the Brussels sprouts cleaned and washed. The bread sauce she had made at home the night before. Pamela, after going through the Spectators dating columns, drank a bottle of wine entirely to herself. Beatrix picked at her food, remarked that an angel had told

her not to eat sprouts because, though they were like unto an emerald, they came from the lake which burnetii with fire and brimstone.

The Queen's broadcast was listened to at Beatrix's insistence,

not watched, the washing up done by Ismay and Heather. Pamela fell asleep and Beatrix chewed gum. Ismay watched Heather to see if her eyes strayed to the French windows and the Bonnard, but they seemed not to. She even went into what had been the bathroom to place an open box of chocolates on the table there. When

it got to five and Andrew hadn't phoned, Ismay began to think whether she should phone him, but she didn't much like the idea of one of his parents answering the phone. They had tea with Waitrose mince pies because Heather hadn't had time to make any, and at seven she and Ismay went downstairs.

Ismay fretted rather. It wasn't the first Christmas Andrew had failed to phone. Last year she had been seriously worried because he hadn't been in touch for a week around that time, though he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for why not. That wasn't going to be repeated, was it? She lay awake a long time, thinking he still might call at midnight. When the phone rang at nine next morning she rushed to it, certain it was him. The voice was Edmund's for Heather. Andrew finally phoned just after eleven. "What happened to you? I was worried."

"Really? Why ever? Such a crowd turned up, I didn't get the chance. There was this chap Charlie Simber my father was at school with and he brought his daughters, and my uncle turned

up with all his brood. Grandmama was her usual queenly self. Daddy wasn't very well, and Ma said I should play the host. My God, it was exhausting. Have you done what you said and thought about moving in with me?"

"Did I say that?"

"Indeed you did. You said you'd give some serious thought to leaving the flat to Heather and someone to share with her. Don't you remember, Ismay?"

"I must have done if you say so," said Ismay. "When am I going to see you?"

"Probably never if you go on dodging the issue like you do. Sorry, darling, I don't mean that, but do give it some serious thought and I'll see you tomorrow."

Love you.

"Love you too," said Andrew. 45

Chapter Five

Disliking the ornate and elaborate furnishings of his childhood and the Harrods stately home interiors that had been his late wife's taste, Tariq Hussein had sparsely furnished his cottage with Swedish blond wood and stainless steel. His marble floor was bare but for the occasional kilim. Slatted blinds hung at his windows. For flowers he might have a single lily or a single fern frond in

a tall black jar. A Giacometti nude sculpture stood alone in one corner.

"If this place was mine," Marion was saying, "I'd carpet these floors and have some velvet curtains." The little rugs seemed threadbare to her, and as for that rusty iron thing in the corner, it looked as if it came off a scrap heap. "Don't you feel this house needs some warmth?"

"It is warm enough for me."

"Backing up your heating with one of those big gas fires is not to be sneezed at."

"Atishoo, atishoo," said Mr. Hussein with heavy humor.

"I sneeze at it. I don't want it, my dear young lady. I won't do it. My house stays as it is."

Marion rather liked being called his dear young lady,

especially the "young" part. Tariq Hussein was old but not very old like Mrs. Reinhardt, no more than, say, seventy. He was small and thin with copious white hair and the profile of a handsome hawk. When she called to see him he produced a pot of very strong coffee and they drank it in the living room Marion called a lounge. She thanked him for his Christmas present and he smiled. Christmas meant little to him, but he kept the custom of the country.

"When in Rome," he said, incomprehensibly to Marion, "do as the Romans do."

He had made it a rule some years before never to spend more than five pounds on presents for those people who expected them—the cleaner, for instance, his driver, and the paper boy. But inflation had become so shocking that two years ago he had been obliged to raise that ceiling to ten pounds. He had no objection to

spending money, but he had his priorities. Apart from the value of the house, he had almost five million, appreciating fast, he had made from the bridal garment shops he had owned in Kilburn and Willesden until recently when his eldest son had taken them over. His eye on Marion, talking now about her friends the Littons and various other people he had never heard of, he wondered what she wanted of him. Was it possible she thought he was poor? Or could the reverse be true and she thought he was rich? Perhaps she hoped he would marry her. He looked no more than sixty or possibly fifty-five and she was forty if she was a day. Although he got a lot of amusement out of her visits, secretly laughing at her, he intended soon to terminate them. He owed it to his sons not to remarry. His money, his house, and his home in Derbyshire were 47

reserved for the three of them to share. But even if he had considered remarriage he wouldn't pick her. For one thing, she was as skinny as his Giacometti and far less valuable.

Absently pouring more coffee, Marion chatted away about someone called Joyce and a man called Edmund who had deceived her or betrayed her in some way. She had given these people and several others Christmas presents and all she had got in return was a scarf from Mrs. Litton. This reminded her that she had a gift for him. He was very thin, she was sure he didn't look after himself, so she had taken the liberty of bringing something to eat. She had cooked it herself. All he would have to do was slice it up and eat it with some Branston pickle. She had taken the same thing to the Littons and they were so grateful, it was quite touching.

In the middle of Marion's disquisition on a rabbit keeper who lived in Pinner, Mr. Hussein got up and said he must send her away now. "Mrs. Litton and Mrs. Reinhardt and Mrs. Pringle will be wondering where you are."

Marion wasn't clear what he meant by this. She had told him several times that Mrs. Pringle was dead. Perhaps he was losing it. Perhaps this was the start of Alzheimer's, though of course he was an Asian and it might be no more than that. When she had gone Tariq Hussein opened his present. Inside the red and gold wrapping, the clear plastic and the greaseproof paper, was a

knuckle of ham. Recognizably pig, he thought. A good mosqueattending Moslem, he recoiled and pushed it a little way away

across the ebony and silver table. He found a long kebab skewer and stabbed the ham, holding it at arm's length and carrying it into the kitchen, where he dropped it in the waste bin. He could see the funny side of it now and thought it would make a good story to tell his friends.

Then he called his driver and asked him to bring the Rolls

around at one. Elegantly dressed in a light-gray suit with lilac tie, he set off for the Ivy to take his mistress, Fozia Iqbal, out to lunch. It was done to protect her from Guy Rolland, to keep her safe.

Afterward Ismay told her mother many things, but there was one thing she didn't tell her: that she wouldn't have minded if Guy had made love to her, that she would have liked it. He was her mother's husband and it would have been wrong. Those were the considerations that held her back from overtly encouraging Guy, not that

she didn't want it, wasn't excited by him, didn't used to hope he would one night come to her bedroom. Heather knew nothing of this. All Heather saw was a man of thirty-four touching and kissing her beloved sister, a girl of fifteen, in an improper way. All Heather assumed was that her sister must dislike it because she herself would have disliked it.

Or that is what I believe happened, thought Ismay. I think it

was like that. She realized then that every time she dwelled on those events of twelve years ago, she always prefaced them with that sentence or something like it. That is what I believe. It had to be that

way. How else could it have been? She had disclosed it to no one. Only she and her mother knew, and it was hard now to tell how much of anything Beatrix knew anymore. For all Ismay could tell, the whole thing had passed utterly from her mother's mind. It had marked her mind, wounded it, mutilated it, and then slid away as a disease may do, leaving ineradicable scars behind.

Early in their relationship she had considered telling Andrew. She loved him now, would love him forever, but then her passion had been starry-eyed, it had been worship. She had been able to 49

find no fault in him and had seen him as a just judge, wise, forbearing, and kind. Knowing him better now, she told herself she must have been mad even to think of it, even to imagine she could reveal such a thing about Heather, who he already held in contempt. Anyway, it was basically nothing to do with Andrew and everything to do with Edmund.

But tell him that she was sure Heather had killed their stepfather? She couldn't see herself doing it. She couldn't see him and herself sitting opposite each other while she told him. Nor could she imagine what the result would be. Almost certainly to split him and Heather up. He seemed a good person, but was he good enough, magnanimous enough, saintly enough, to take Heather on in spite of what she told him? No man would. And once he knew, other possibilities would arise. Suppose he went to the police. He was a nurse, a part of the medical establishment; he might see it as his duty to tell the police what she had told him. A terrible urge took hold of her not to tell him. To say nothing and let things take their course.

What was she afraid of if she never told him and he married Heather? That Heather would do it again? Only perhaps if she, Ismay, were in danger as in Heathers eyes she had been then. If someone threatened her as Heather saw Guy as threatening her. But that wasn't going to happen. She was young and happy. She had Andrew, who loved her, as well as a good job and plenty of friends. Her mother was a perpetual worry, of course, but there

was no crisis over her home or her care or her carer. The present arrangement worked well and would do so while Pamela was willing to live with Beatrix and her nieces lived on the floor below.

Ismay asked herself if there was anyone else Heather loved

and would feel it her duty to protect or avenge but came up only with Edmund himself as the possibility. Was this what she had 50

been afraid of from the start of Heather's love affair? That she would marry Edmund and love him, devote herself to him, and when someone harmed him—this was bound to happen—take revenge on that person? It could be in connection with his job, some figure in authority failing to promote him or sacking him unjustly. Suppose someone brought an action in court against him for negligence. In the compensation culture this was happening all the time. And there would be children. Would Heather wreak vengeance on a child who bullied her child or fought him in the playground or a teacher who spoke harshly to him?

You're letting this get out of hand, she told herself, you're

going over the top. This is all conjecture. She's not a psychopath. There's no rule that someone who kills once is bound to kill again, is there?

But they say it happens. The first time is the enormity. The

next time would be easier.... If only, she thought, before I told

him, I could get Edmund to promise not to desert Heather. Even if he did undertake that (which no one would) he'd break his promise when he knew what she had done. She couldn't tell him. He must take his chance. And if Heather killed the man who had sacked him or the doctor who had failed to diagnose his illness or the driver of the car who hit his car or the little boy who teased their daughterwell, she would blame herself for the rest of her life.

"My son wants to buy a flat," said Irene. "I don't know why. I tell him that he already has a house. I regard this place as much his as mine."

This was said in the presence of both Edmund and Marion, Edmund and his mother having already thrashed the matter out to exhaustion point earlier in the day. Excited as another woman

might be by sexual desire or some great treat in prospect, Marion was stimulated by family rows, any sort of row and anyone's family. Her face had taken on youthful color, her cheeks red and her eyes gleaming. Irene, by contrast, looked pale, even wan. Stately in a long black tunic over a long black skirt, her hair piled up on top of her head and kept in place precariously by silver pins, she sat like Patience on a monument, wondering at the vagaries of men. In her lap lay the coral beads she had been stringing onto a length of thread.

"You'd think he had everything he wanted here," she said. "He doesn't have to lift a finger. Even though I say it who shouldn't, the food here is as good as anything cooked by that

Jamie Oliver." She turned to Marion. "You know who I mean." "Oh, yes," said Marion. "Frankly, I think your cooking

is better."

"Cleaning the house from top to bottom, too. Bed making,

the windows shining like—like diamonds—washing, ironing, all done for him."

For a moment Edmund thought his mother was going to compare herself with some television star who demonstrated the arts of the laundry on screen, but instead she said, "What do you

think, Marion, about this idea of leaving, of setting up home elsewhere? Have you ever heard anything so absurd?"

"I'd rather not discuss this in front of Marion," said Edmund. "Why on earth not?"

"Believe me, Edmund," said Marion, "I have nothing but

your interests at heart. Who knows? After all, I am practically an estate agent and I may be able to help."

"Marion, you force me to say I don't need your help. I don't need anyone's help. I shall move out of here the moment the purchase of my flat is completed and that's all there is to it." 32

Having already said more in front of Marion than he

intended, Edmund went upstairs where he phoned Heather and told her there had been a row but he intended to move just the same. He sat in his bedroom, thinking about how Heather had said of course she'd move in with him once he had possession of the flat in Crouch End, how easy it had been to find the flat and how smoothly things appeared to be going, and that he must assess the size of Heather's ring finger—and propose.

Downstairs, tactful Marion thought a change of subject

would be the most acceptable course to take and had begun chatting about Avice Conroy. Three times since Christmas she had called on her in her house in Pinner and once she had done a stint of rabbit-sitting while Avice had gone away for the night to a friend's funeral in Harrogate. Avice herself was very frail, Marion thought, though of course marvelous for an eighty-year-old. As for those rabbits—well, it took all sorts to make a world, didn't it? "She's eighty-four," said Irene in a doleful voice, and then,

"I suspect he's going to get engaged to that girl. I don't see why they can't live here. Not that I would allow it until they were married." "I wouldn't think much of a girl who lived with a man

without being married under his mother's roof." Realizing that she had got into a mess with that sentence, Marion amended it to,

"I mean, I wouldn't think much of an unmarried girl living with an unmarried man in his mother's house."

"Wouldn't you, Marion?" said Irene wistfully. She sighed. "I wish things could have been otherwise."

This was not a line Marion wanted the conversation to take, implying as it would that she had been left on the shelf. She reverted to her lame ducks and began talking about poor old Mr. Hussein, his few sticks of furniture, his single lily, and his childlessness. How

he had loved the knuckle of ham! Irene interrupted her. 53

"I'm making this necklace for you, Marion, though I wonder

if it's quite your color. Would malachite perhaps be better?" Having no idea what color malachite was, Marion said, "Anything you made would be delightful, I'm sure. May I look?" Irene held out the uncompleted necklace listlessly. "I'm sure I don't know when it will be finished. I can't work when I'm upset. You'd better run away now, Marion. I've got terrible heartburn or it may be the start of a hiatal hernia."

"Running away" was something Marion did all the time. It

wasn't in her nature to walk or stroll. She went home at breakneck speed, galloping down Chudleigh Hill and along Acol Road to Lithos Road. Though shabby, her flat was neat and pleasantly scented with floral air freshener.

Irene's saying she had heartburn reminded her that it was

time to check on the morphine. When her mother died a year earlier, a whole unopened bottle of morphine sulfate had remained

among the medicaments, as well as an already opened bottle containing about half the quantity. Like a good citizen, Marion had

handed the half-empty bottle and all the remaining vials and jars and packets to the nurse, but since no one asked for it, she kept the unopened bottle. At that time she had considered trying it on

Mrs. Pringle, convincing herself that "putting her to sleep" would be a merciful release, a natural peaceful exit. The idea would be for Marion to pour a little on her homemade rhum baba, for instance, or a slice of tarte Tatin. She was always taking such delicacies to the house in Fitzjohn's Avenue. But Mrs. Pringle forestalled her and in the course of nature achieved an even more merciful release than Marion had had in mind, leaving behind her that

thoughtful will.

On the principle of where do you hide a leaf but in a tree, she

first put the morphine in her bedside cabinet. But mistaking it for a 54

dyspepsia remedy about six months later, she was on the point of unsealing it and unscrewing the cap before she remembered. Goodness, she might have killed herself! She took the morphine out and

put it in the back of the bathroom cabinet along with items no one would consider consuming, a bottle of hand lotion and some vapor rub among other things. As soon as she got in she checked that it was still there. It was. Of course it was. Who would have moved it? Well, Fowler might have. He'd drink anything if he thought

it would intoxicate or stimulate him. Once, soon after Mrs.

Pringle died and she'd first moved in here, he made his way in while she was out and drank a whole can of silver polish and half a bottle of Lancome eau de toilette. It wouldn't be easy for him to get in now, not easy even for him since she had had the locks changed. Still, it would be wise to take precautions. She found an adhesive label, one of many neady stacked in the stationery

drawer, wrote POISON, NOT TO BE TAKEN on it, added INTERNALLY, and stuck the label on the morphine bottle.

"It may seem trivial to you," said Andrew, coming back into Ismay's bedroom after his shower, "but I don't actually much like sharing this place with those two. I don't like joining the queue for the bathroom. And most of all I don't like coming back here after being out with you somewhere and finding them sitting on the sofa, then having to get up after half an hour and say, 'Well, good night. Ismay and I are going to bed now.'"

"Oh, darling, you can't mean it embarrasses you."

"Not particularly. What I mean is I want to be allowed a bit

of spontaneity. To make love to you on the sofa, for instance. On the floor—why not? In the bath. I don't want to be treated like half of an old married couple stopping the night with friends."

"It's not like that, Andrew."

"It is just like that. Are you going to tell me you don't keep

quiet because they're there? You're not careful to stop the bed from creaking? If you have to go to the bathroom you're not conscious that one of them may be in it? Now that's embarrassing, if you like." Andrew was dressed by now, peering into the mirror to fix his tie. "And don't say it's as bad coming to me. You know Seb mostly stays in his room. Besides, I can't live in my place without his rent."

"I wasn't going to say anything." Getting up, Ismay wondered if the bathroom was free but knew that if she asked Andrew another storm of protests would begin. "Edmund's found a flat, and he's expecting to sign the contract soon. He and Heather are engaged, and as soon as he can move he will and she'll go with him."

"And how long is that going to be? In my experience it's only when people pay for property with ready cash that these deals get done fast. Someone I know in chambers waited a year from signing a contract on a house until completion." He turned around

and put out his arms, holding her naked body against him. "I love you. I love holding you like this whenever I want. I want to be alone with you and I don't want to wait a year."

"Of course it won't be a year, darling." Ismay took her dressing gown off the bed and wrapped it around her. "April is what Edmund's solicitor says."

"Look at you. You have to cover yourself up to go to the bathroom. In case your sister's boyfriend sees you. And in half an hour

we're all supposed to sit around the kitchen table having breakfast together like two married couples sharing a gite in the Dordogne. Oh, please. But I'm not doing that. Not this time. I'm going to leave now and call into Starbucks on my way."

But they were engaged, Edmund and Heather, she thought

when he had gone. They would marry as soon as they had somewhere

to live. Heather would go and Andrew could move in. It

wouldn't be long, a few months at most. This will all work out, she told herself. It will come right. And as she made her way to the bathroom and passed Heather's door, which was a little ajar, she caught a glimpse of Edmund and Heather standing as she and Andrew had stood a few moments earlier. Quickly she looked away, but not before she had seen that Heather was naked, Edmund's arms enclosing her. The difference was that they

were kissing.

Looking back, Ismay supposed she had been in love with Guy. He was her type, the prototype of her type really, the first one of a few that ended in Andrew: thin, tall, dark men with fine-drawn features and beautiful hands. When her mother first brought Guy

Rolland home, she and Heather had been antagonistic, loyal to their father's memory, absolutely unable to understand that Beatrix, at not quite thirty-nine, might not yet be past the age for love.

And that attitude had continued as far as Heather was concerned. She liked Guy as little as she was to like Andrew. In fact, when Ismay thought about it, she saw that her sister reacted to both men in the same way, had been similarly hostile—though rather less so—to those boyfriends who had come in between. Was it that they all looked a bit like Guy?

The first evening that Guy came into the house with Beatrix they had been to the theater and Guy brought her home. It was only their second date, the first being the dinner with Pamela and Michael. Guy was the marketing manager in the firm Pamela worked for at that time. There had been no matchmaking

intended, she said afterward, and it was hard to see how she could have seen Guy as a suitable husband for her sister. For one thing, he was five years her junior and, since her husband's death, Beatrix had looked older than her age. Perhaps Pamela, only just over

thirty at the time, had had her eye on him herself, Ismay had wondered, and considered he would be safe with Beatrix.

If that were so she couldn't have been more wrong. That first

date led to another and another, and very soon Guy and Beatrix were a couple, an item. And Ismay developed a "crush" on him. She kept it dark; she was ashamed of it. He was her mother's, and Ismay, young as she was, understood that her mother needed Guy, even deserved Guy, after the years of nursing their father and her long-drawn-out suffering after his death. Besides, she was only thirteen, a child in appearance. That was how Guy must see her, as a child. Heather, on the other hand, eleven years old, was already beginning to look like a woman. But she was childlike, innocent, even naive, Ismay thought. At school Heather worked hard. She worked earnestly, her eyes too close to the book she was reading, her handwriting slow, deliberate, and round. Far more than she and her mother did, Heather talked about their dead father. "Daddy" might not be still alive, but he was present with Heather, a rock to lean on, male perfection and the role model she would

look for in the men in her own life.

"Why did Daddy have to die?" was a question she still occasionally asked. She didn't expect an answer. She knew there wasn't one.

For weeks she wouldn't speak to Guy. To do him justice

and Ismay was very willing to do him justice—he tried doing what he called "drawing her out." He wasn't stupid. He didn't bring her presents or call her darling, as he soon did call Beatrix and Ismay, he didn't ask her how she was getting on at school or 58

ask her anything except her opinion, come to that. She was almost twelve but he talked to her as if she were ten years older, making it his business to find out what things she liked doing at school and after school, and trying to discuss these subjects with her. "Trying" was the word, Ismay thought. He never succeeded. Heather was learning Spanish and Ismay remembered—with pain now and a kind of fear—how Guy had talked to Heather about Spain and its history and language and the perils of the Spanish subjunctive,

about tennis and Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, and about cooking, which she was already good at. Heather didn't ignore him. She answered with a "yes" or a "no" or an "I don't know."

Ismay remembered the first time he had kissed her. He and her mother were engaged by then and due to be married a month later. When they got engaged Ismay expected Guy to move in. Every couple she knew or came across who were engaged, lived together. But Guy went on going out with Beatrix and bringing her home, and half an hour later kissing her good night. One evening he kissed Ismay too. She knew very well from films and television how men kissed women they were in love with and Guy's kiss wasn't like that. The way he kissed her mother wasn't like that either.

Ismay asked Heather why she thought he wanted to marry Beatrix. He didn't act as if he wanted to marry her. He just said he did and went along with all the arrangements.

"I expect he wants a house to live in," said twelve-year-old Heather.

"Oh, grow up," said Ismay. "You are such a baby. Men don't

marry women for a house to live in. He's got a flat. Pam said he earns good money. I heard her say that to Mum when he first came here." "Our house is nice and big. It's worth a lot. His flat is quite

small with just one bedroom. I heard him say so. I expect he's got a big mortgage. You don't even know what a mortgage is, do you?" 59

"Of course I do." Ismay was bored by the kind of practical things that interested Heather. "I do know," she said, though she didn't really. "If he likes this house so much why doesn't he come and live here? They're engaged. It's normal to live together when you're engaged."

Their grandmother was alive then. "Gran says he respects

Mum too much for that." Heather laughed. "I should think that if

you respected someone you'd want to live with them. Wont he respect her after they're married?"

"He doesn't love her," Ismay said. She had never put that into words before. Now she did she knew it was true.

"Perhaps he wont marry her then. I hope he won't. We were better without him, just you and me and Mum."

Ismay and Heather went to the wedding, but they weren't bridesmaids. Beatrix liked the idea but Heather refused even to think of it. She hated dressing up. Once Guy was in the house, living there as much as they did, Heather changed. As she entered her teens she became the archetypical teenager, moody, intractable, and isolated. She wanted no one's company but Ismay's and she clung to Ismay, associating herself with her in

every possible area of life. "I" almost disappeared from her vocabulary as "we" took over. It was "we don't want any breakfast" and

"we didn't sleep well last night" and sometimes even "we've got a cold." One day, when Guy was talking to Ismay about what sort of job she thought she would have when her education was finished and where she would like to live, Heather said, "We shall live together. We always will."

The first time Ismay sat on Guy's knee was when he offered

to help her with her homework. It was chemistry and she had to learn some of the periodic table. Guy, who had done chemistry to 60

A level, called her over for them to study the book together. "Come here," he said. "Sit on my knee."

Beatrix was there and so was Heather, a look of horror distorting her face. Ismay sat on Guy's knee and immediately remembered that she had never sat on her father's. Close beside him, yes,

his arm around her, in bed with him and her mother when she was little, on the arm of his chair, leaning against him, but never on his knee. If she had, would she have felt like she did sitting on Guy's? She thought not, she recoiled from the idea, because, with Guy's arm around her, his lean thighs under her slender delicate thighs, she felt—not something new, not quite that, but a sensation she had once or twice had when watching on television the kind of film put on after the nine o'clock watershed.

If she had told Heather about that feeling, about her sensation

of some indefinable excitement, would Guy be alive today? It

didn't bear thinking of. She had never told Heather and certainly never said a word to her mother. As far as Heather knew, she disliked Guy's putting his arm around her, kissing her, calling her his sweetheart and his angel. She didn't dislike it. Because she was so young, necessarily without experience, she thought she must be in love with Guy and only knew she hadn't been once he was dead.

He attracted her and she desired him, that was all.

It was interesting, she often thought later, how everyone had a type who they were drawn to above all others. She had guessed the type that attracted Heather would be a man who resembled their father or at least had his qualities. That was why, when she first

met Edmund, she almost committed the awful solecism of bursting out laughing with delight. He was the same height and build

as Bill Sealand and, though with quite different features and hair color, had the same sort of voice and manner. Because of all that, she knew he would be right for Heather, just as she knew Andrew was right for her.

From the first, she pitied Beatrix. Poor old thing, but she

hasn't a hope. Now she knew this was a typical adolescent girl's reaction to a mother's lover. What does he see in her? He can't be in love with her. She's old, she's a mess, she's let herself go. What wasn't typical, perhaps, was her thinking he must prefer me. Guy began kissing her when he left in the morning and when he came back in

the evening. Just a kiss on the cheek or on both cheeks. But subdy she felt the kisses change. If her mother was there the kiss would be like the one he gave Pam or her mother's friend next door, an air kiss really, which barely brushed the skin. But when he and she were alone his lips stayed for a few seconds and moved closer to her mouth. He always got home at about six and she began making a point of happening to be out in the hall around that time. She had tennis lessons on Thursday evenings and more and more she began missing them so as to be in the hall when Guy came home.

If her mother came out just as Guy's key turned in the lock, Ismay would feel a sharp, almost panicky disappointment, and resentment, too. Heather was often there, but Guy took no notice of her. That is, he would say, "Hi, Heather," and smile at her, but he wouldn't let it stop him giving Ismay those kisses that had moved to her mouth by then. Heather was too young to bother about, Ismay knew he thought. Heather couldn't understand. She sometimes wondered when it was too late, why Heather hadn't said something to her, something on the lines of, "You shouldn't let Guy kiss you that way." At the time she had felt the way

Guy felt: it doesn't matter about Heather being there, Heather doesn't count.

She never thought about what it would lead to, what might happen, though she began to imagine a step farther on, a mile farther on. Guy might come to her bedroom one night. If only Beatrix would go away somewhere, go away on holiday, for instance, on her own with Pam. Or with Jill and Dennis, the people next door. A scenario developed in which Beatrix and Guy were planning a holiday, and she and Heather were to stay with Pamela. At the last minute Guy couldn't go. He was too busy at work. But Beatrix could still go and she went alone or maybe she took Heather with her and her old school friend Rosemary. Guy would be working all day but he'd come home in the evening and

she'd be there and that first night Guy would....

That was a fantasy and didn't happen. But when they were alone (except sometimes with Heather) Guy's kisses became real

like in the kind of films she and Heather were still too young to see unaccompanied. His tongue exploring her mouth and his hands

on her breasts. The first time that happened Heather saw. She stood in a corner of the hall where the phone was on a table as if she meant to make a call. Ismay seemed to remember her starting to dial just after Guy had said "hi" to her, starting to dial and then putting the phone down quietly when Guy took Ismay in his arms. Staring and noting what happened, no doubt, only Ismay was too rapt and excited to see.

It happened that way three times, with Heather there the first

and second times but not the third. By then she was showing him she liked what he did, she responded to him, returning his kisses. After that Guy must have been busy at work because he started getting home later. Weeks went by without those kisses. And then he got the flu. Beatrix called it flu, though actually it was a virus, the kind that brings a high temperature, a headache, a sore throat, and congestion of the lungs. It was high summer, the time when 63

no one is supposed to be ill. The first day Guy went to work but

had to be brought home in a taxi. He almost collapsed in the hall. Ismay and Beatrix had to walk him upstairs between them, supporting him until they could get him onto the bed. Beatrix

thought the doctor wouldn't come. It might be July, but the virus was raging and half the patients in the practice had it. The doctor would tell him to take acetaminophen or aspirins, drink plenty, and keep warm. This last wasn't difficult because a heat wave had begun and the temperature outside was approaching Guy's. But the doctor did come and said she would come again. Guy might have to go to hospital if he didn't improve.

Ismay helped Beatrix nurse him. Heather wouldn't. Ismay

carried upstairs jugs of fresh water and glasses of orange juice. Because he soaked the sheets with sweat, Beatrix changed them every day while he sat shivering in a chair, wrapped in blankets. Ismay had another fantasy, that as he got better and his health and strength returned he would hold out his arms to her and as she sank into them, pull her into bed beside him. Her mother, of course, would be out shopping at the time.

Reflecting on this years later, she thought how little she must really have loved him, for she never worried about him. His illness lasted for a month and in all that time she slept as well as ever, she never thought about him except how he might make love to her. Thinking like that was when she realized she'd never had a real conversation with Guy. They never talked. Apart from Spain and Spanish, marketing (whatever that was), and watching sports on television, she had no idea what his tastes were. She never saw him read a book or listen to music. He had a degree in business studies, so he must know about them, but she didn't know what they were either. Something about keeping accounts, she supposed, or filing things. Making love with him was all she thought about, and even 64

then she didn't know what lovemaking was like or, come to thatthough the basic facts had been known to her since she was fivehow you went about it. If she had loved him, wouldn't the possibility have occurred to her that he might die? Wouldn't she have been so anxious that she couldn't eat or sleep or do any of the normal things she did?

He did die, of course. Bathwater, not the virus, killed him.

He drowned, his handsome face bleached by long immersion, his dark hair streaming and his long white hands floating just below the surface of the cooling water.

Chapter Six

Seeing Heather and Edmund's happiness, she wondered how she could ever have considered telling him. There was something else as well: how she could never be absolutely irrefutably cast-iron sure Heather was guilty of Guy's death. No one could be positive Heather had killed Guy. She couldn't and her mother couldn't. They had the evidence, of course. Heather coming downstairs with that look on her face and her dress and skirt all wet down the front, Heather never actually denying it, Heather falling in with their plans to say she hadn't been in the house but out with them. In court, if it had ever come to it, a clever lawyer could have demolished all that.

But if Heather hadn't done it, who had? Beatrix had put forward the theory of the mysterious intruder, in spite of the front

door being locked and the back door locked and no sign of any break-in. The door to the balcony was open, Beatrix had said. Or she had said it until Ismay pointed out that in order to come into 66

the bathroom through that door, the mysterious intruder would

have had to break down the locked side gate into the garden or traverse neighboring gardens and climb over a six-foot-high wall.

Then somehow climb up the sheer back of the house where there

were no drainpipes or creeper vines and haul himself onto the balcony. All this with no one seeing him? On a fine summer's day

when people were in their gardens?

But that was Beatrix's theory because she so much wanted it

to be true. Besides, who but Heather would kill Guy and for what? Nothing had been stolen from the house. Nothing had been disturbed. Perhaps Guy had drowned himself. It is extremely difficult,

Ismay had found out, to drown oneself in the bath, or

anywhere else, come to that. Then her mother had said Heather wouldn't have had the physical strength to do it. She was not yet fourteen. But Heather was as tall and strong as a grown woman. Momentarily closing her eyes, Ismay saw her sister coming down the stairs once more, her eyes staring and her pink dress wet, drops of water on her shoes.

Weak as he was from his illness, he had struggled. He must

have thrashed about in the water, for the bathroom was wet. Not wet as if water had come through the ceiling or a flood had come up through the floor, but wet enough. Heathers dress was wet down the front and the skirt was wet. She wasn't soaked. Could she have been in that bathroom and drowned a struggling man without getting soaked? If only she could remember twelve years later just how wet Heather's dress had been, how wet her shoes. But she couldn't. She couldn't remember if Heather had seemed frightened or shocked, but she retained an impression of Heather's calmness and of her steady voice.

The two choices before her seemed like two columns standing side by side in her mind. Written on one, like graffiti, were the 67

words, TELL HIM, and on the other, NEVER TELL HIM. She asked herself, how can I ever make up my mind? Perhaps there might be a halfway house, a middle course. She knew she could never ask to see Edmund alone, then sit opposite him and tell him these

things. There was no point in even considering this, ever thinking about it again. She couldn't do it. At the last minute, when they had met in some pub or hotel lounge or cafe, she would smile and kiss his cheek—they had begun these brotherly-sisterly kissesshe would come up with some completely different subject, where the wedding was to be, how to arrange some surprise for Heather. She would never tell him. So what could the middle course be? Write to him? Then she imagined seeing him later, after the letter had been read. It was as impossible as the meeting.

I could have this weighing on my mind for years, perhaps for

the rest of my life, she thought. How to get rid of it without telling him face-to-face or taking the passive course and saying nothing? There must be something she could do. An idea came to her. She could record what she had to say, she thought, put it on tape, not

give it to him but keep it. Get it off her mind, speak it aloud, then keep the tape until—what? There was always the chance—the curious, unlikely, but possible chance—that Heather herself

would tell. Or they might split up. They hadn't known each other long. But far from agreeing with Andrew's rather callous forecast that they would marry in haste and repent at leisure, Ismay saw

them as one of those rare monogamous couples who would never even consider straying from each other. They were like those creatures she had read about imprinted with the image of their mates.

If that mate died the other would be eternally inconsolable. Making a tape seemed her only choice. Not ideal, perhaps cowardly, perhaps never to find its destined recipient, but just the same the sole possible solution. She could make it and wait. She 68

admitted to herself that this was evading the issue, passing the buck. Of course, it was therapy for her. Perhaps that was all it would be. It would all be on tape and she wouldn't have to agonize about it anymore. Psychotherapists sometimes advised their

clients to take hold of unpleasant thoughts or beliefs or fears and put them away into boxes in their minds. You could put the person you didn't get on with at work away in a box. You could put away a worry like that or an old but persistent unhappiness. The tape would be her box and she could put it away.

When Ismay was fourteen—for her fourteenth birthday, in factGuy had given her a tape recorder. She had got everyone to talk

into it, Beatrix and Heather and Pamela as well as Guy himself. Michael Fenster fancied himself as the lead tenor in the local amateur operatic society and he had sung an aria. Poetry was Beatrix's

choice and she had read a long poem of Tennyson's. In time Ismay got tired of it. Almost the last thing she recorded was a long apology to her mother for having been rude to her. Rude to her in

what way she couldn't now remember, but she had said she was sorry at great length and said it on tape because she felt better about giving Beatrix the tape than saying the words to her. Tape recorders must be almost obsolete now. Only journalists used them. She hadn't used hers for years and she didn't know where it was, but it must be somewhere in the house and she could find it. She walked about the flat, searching for the tape recorder. It

was just as likely to be upstairs, more likely, seeing that Heather's and her bedrooms had been up there. It would be in a cupboard in one of those rooms. Pausing at her own bedroom window, she looked down into the street below and saw Pamela on her way out somewhere. Beatrix would be sitting with her ear to her radio,

chewing gum or eating chocolate. She would take no notice if Ismay went up there and hunted for the tape recorder. Maybe she wouldn't even see her; certainly she would show no curiosity as to what she might be doing. Ismay didn't much like using her key to get in, but it was only for once. She could ring and ring the bell and Beatrix would never answer the door. Beatrix wouldn't notice if someone broke the door down.

Ismay looked first in the rooms that had been Heather's and

her bedrooms. They were Beatrix's and Pamela's now. They had been painted but not otherwise altered. Ismay looked inside the built-in cupboards, which were full of the older women's clothes just as they had once been full of hers and Heather's. No sign of the tape recorder. She tried the kitchen, though it was an unlikely place. As soon as she set foot inside the living room she knew where that recorder was going to be. When the conversion was made, cupboards and shelves had been built into the walls around the area where the bathroom had been. Open one of those doors and there it would be.

Although Beatrix invariably ignored her, Ismay never liked to

be in her mother's presence without acknowledging her. It was as if she feared that if she did it once she would always do it and Beatrix would disappear, become worse than she was now, a nothing, a shadow, a ghost muttering madness. So she went up to her, kissed her cheek, and did something unusual with her. She took her

mother's hand and held it for a few seconds. The hand in hers seemed the limpest thing she had ever handled, cool but not cold, utterly relaxed and immobile, until suddenly it tensed shockingly and was snatched away.

The tape recorder was where she thought it would be, in that changed place, in the box it had originally come in. She said, 70

"Good-bye, Mum. See you later," and went downstairs, carrying the box.

In the bathroom was a shower cabinet in which Guy and Beatrix took their daily showers, but as he slowly recovered from his illness and no longer needed to be sponged down from a basin of water, Guy started taking an afternoon bath. It was more restful and relaxing. Standing up with hot water spraying him was still too much for him. The bath (or "tub" as Americans called it) wasn't free-standing but flush against the wall on the right-hand side.

The end nearest the doors was also against the wall but the other stood free, and between it and the interior wall was sometimes the space for the soiled-linen bin and sometimes, when Beatrix changed things around, for a chair or a dark-leaved ficus in a ceramic pot. The taps were in the middle of the long side of the bath. At the time of Guy's recovery from his illness the chair stood in the space between bath end and door so that a bath towel could be hung over its back within easy reach of Guy when he got out of the water.

Neither Ismay nor Heather ever went into that bathroom.

Having their own, which they shared and was between their bedrooms, they had no need. The last time Ismay had been in there

was after Bill Sealand died and Beatrix was so wretched and desperate that Ismay crept into bed with her for a few nights so that

she shouldn't be alone. Heather, as far as she knew, had never been in that bathroom. Of course she knew Guy was in the habit of taking a bath in the afternoons at about four. He had just begun coming downstairs afterward, wearing sandals and wrapped in a

toweling dressing gown. It was on one of these descents of the 71

stairs that he had kissed Ismay for the first time since the virus had struck.

She waited for him at the foot of the stairs. First of all she clock-watched. It was always between four-thirty and four-forty

that he came down. At about twenty past four she was in her bedroom and she heard the water begin to drain away down the plug

hole. She waited a bit longer and then she went downstairs, treading very softly, and slipped into the little room Guy and her

mother called their study. Beatrix was in the garden. She had been a keen gardener in those days.

Heather was nearby, though she hadn't known that at the

time. She was also just inside a door, the living-room door, waiting. Because she had seen what was about to happen, or something

like it, before? Perhaps. Ismay heard the bathroom door

open and close, Guy cross the floor on bare feet to his bedroom, then come out again wearing sandals. She emerged nonchalantly from the study. A vase of flowers stood on a little console table against the wall between the living room and study doors. A pink chrysanthemum had fallen from the arrangement onto the polished surface of the table. Since that day, Ismay had always disliked chrysanthemums.

She was replacing the flower when Guy began to descend the stairs. She turned toward him, holding it up to her face.

"Do you know how very charming you look?" he said in a voice she had never heard before, a voice that was no longer intense but light and gentle and charged with something she couldn't define.

"Do I?" she said like the child she was.

He took the flower from her, lifted her face on one hand, and kissed her. But the kiss was different, light and somehow remote, just missing her mouth. Behind them, Heather made a sound, an 72

intake of breath. Heather wasn't out in the hall but standing concealed by the living room door, which stood just ajar. Guy must

have known she was there, and that accounted for the kiss that was so different and so disappointing. Ismay broke away from him once she knew Heather had seen and later she understood how Heather must have interpreted this move: as dislike on her part of what was happening, as resisting Guy, perhaps as fear of him. Guy smiled, hugged her in a stepfatherly way, and gave back

the flower. "You should wear it in your hair," he said, "or behind one of your ears."

But she hadn't. She wanted to explain to Heather but didn't

know how to begin. Heather wouldn't understand. The fact was she didn't understand what was happening herself and now that twelve years had passed she knew that this was part of why child abuse was wrong. Because children didn't understand.

None of that excused Heather, though. If Heather had killed Guy—and she must have killed him—because she had seen him kiss her sister in a sexual way, she was wrong, wrong, wrong and perhaps Ismay and Beatrix had been wrong all along in shielding her.

Guy and she had gone into the living room after that. The

pink chrysanthemum was back in the flower arrangement. Beatrix had come in from the garden with a pair of pruning shears in her hand and gone to make tea. As for Heather, she was sitting on the sofa reading a set book for holiday homework. It must be finished by the time school started on September 5, and she scarcely glanced up when they walked in.

Three days later Guy was dead.

Ismay recorded nothing of that. It wasn't necessary. 73

After the first awful dawning fear that Heather had done this thing, after seeing her wet clothes and that look in her eyes, she

and her mother decided to test it themselves to see if it was possible. To see if a teenage girl could have done it. It was Beatrix's

idea, and at first Ismay said no. She wouldn't, she couldn't, it was too horrible.

"We must," Beatrix said. "We must be certain."

Even then, aged fifteen, Ismay knew they would never be certain, whatever they did, because they could never precisely repeat

the conditions of the drowning or reproduce the two people involved. All they could do they did. While Heather was out at a school friend's house—that same Greta she had been going to visit on the fateful afternoon—Beatrix said they must carry out their plan. She was adamant about not getting naked into the bath. She had been prudish in just the same way when she and Ismay found Guy drowned. Even then, in extremis. "Don't look," she had hissed at Ismay. "He's naked, don't look at him."

She got into her red one-piece swimming suit and a ridiculous rubber bathing cap with waves and curls embossed on it and fastened the strap under her chin. Ismay positioned herself at the

end of the bath behind the taps and waited. Beatrix finally got herself under the water, the hot steaming water that seemed to make

her shiver and cringe.

"Why are you wearing that?" Ismay had asked. "It's grotesque." "I'm not letting you see me naked."

"Oh, Mum, you're mad."

Afterward, she wished many times she had never uttered those words.

They didn't speak, or if they did Ismay had forgotten. Her mother's long thin white feet floated just under the taps. The toenails were painted red and the varnish had started to chip. 74

Hating what she was doing, the play-acting part of it and its macabre side, Ismay took hold of Beatrix's feet and in a strong fast movement lifted them up high above the surface of the water. Beatrix's head plummeted backward and plunged below the water, her arms and hands thrashing. She tried to pull her legs backward and as she did so bubbles rose in streams from her end of the bath. The beating arms and struggling feet sent cascades of water over Ismay's dress. Her mother was under there for no more than fifteen seconds before she let her go.

"I thought you were going to drown me, too," Beatrix said, coughing and spluttering.

Ismay was drenched, her blouse clinging to her chest. There

was water everywhere. The towel draped over the chair at the head of the bath was soaked, and the bath mat was sodden. "I'm three inches shorter than Heather," Ismay had said, "and I weigh about fourteen pounds less, but I could do it. It was easy." She began to cry, shivering in her wet clothes. She had thought then, my

mother was strong and well but Guy was weak; he'd been ill.

"What shall we do?"

Ismay, the tears running down her face, thought her mother shouldn't have asked her that. It was a question no woman of thirty-nine should ask a fifteen-year-old.

She need not tell Edmund that part. When he had heard the tape, he would ask her questions and she would tell him. If he didn't simply ignore it, pretend it didn't exist. Who knew? She sat down on the sofa, put the tape recorder on the coffee table, and switched it on. First she tested it, then she began.

"My stepfather was called Guy Rolland. He was thirty-three when he married my mother and she was thirty-eight." That was 75

the bit she played back. Her voice sounded clear and steady, better than she had dared hope. "My father had been dead for three

years. When Heather was thirteen and I was fifteen, Heather got it into her head that Guy was abusing me. Nothing had really happened apart from some kissing and a little—well, a very little

fondling, but Heather thought I was in danger from Guy. All I thought was that he was very fond of me, as I was of him." That wasn't completely true, but Edmund wouldn't want to know about her sexual feelings for Guy. Better to let him think she had none. It would look better for Heather. "What Heather did she did to protect me. Not from revenge, I don't think that, but to protect me from—rape, I suppose. This would never have happened, I'm sure of that, if Heather had told me what she was afraid of, but she never told me.

"When Guy and my mother had been married for about two

years, Guy got a very bad virus. He was ill for three weeks and there was some idea of taking him into the hospital because he wasn't responding to treatment. Just as our GP was talking of getting him a bed in the hospital, Guy started to get better. My

mother had barely left the house for a fortnight, she had been at home caring for him, but by that Thursday—it was the end of August—he seemed nearly well again, though without much strength. My mother wanted to take me out to buy a school uniform, some items of school uniform—a skirt and blazer, it was. It

was the summer holidays. We went out at about two in the afternoon, leaving Heather at home because she was going around to a

friends house. Apparently, soon after we went out, the friendGreta—phoned to say not to come because she had to go out with her parents, so Heather was alone in the house with Guy.

"They had never liked each other. Heather always had as

little to do with him as possible and although he tried to be nice to 76

her at first, he gave up on that. What happened in the house between the friend phoning and, say, four p.m. I don't know. I suppose Heather knows but no one else can. At about four Guy got up to have a bath. Since he'd been getting better he'd regularly had a bath at around that time, and then would put on his dressing

gown and come downstairs to sit with us and have a meal

before going back to bed. Sometimes he'd sit in the garden. It was hot weather. So on that Thursday he got up to have his bath in the en suite bathroom which opened off the bedroom he shared with my mother. There were French windows then from the bathroom onto a balcony, but of course it's all changed now.

"I don't know where Heather was, possibly in her own bedroom, adjacent to his. Probably she came out when she heard him

get out of bed. She would have heard him walk rather slowly into the bathroom and run the bath. When she was sure he was in the bath she went into the bathroom. Perhaps he didn't see her—she would have gone in very quietly—but when he did I expect he shouted out, asked her what the hell she was doing, told her to get out. She took hold of his feet in her hands and pulled them upward. I don't know if you know what happens when someone does that. Your head goes under. Guy's head went under and no doubt he struggled and thrashed about but he was weak from the flu. You'd try to get hold of the sides of the bath with your hands and pull your head out, but that takes strength and Guy was

very weak...."

Was a lot of that conjecture? How could she be sure of exactly what Heather had done? Perhaps only because there could be no other way. She stopped the tape recorder and went out of the flat into the hall. It was very different now from what it had been when the house was in single occupation. A wall had been put up to divide the hall into two, half leading directly to the stairs and 77

the upstairs flat. The other half was the lower flat's hallway. Their own front door was halfway along the wall, and both flats shared the common front door. She stood in this hall by the front door and looked up the stairs. They were unchanged. Here her mother and she had come in from shopping. A table stood there once, a console table, usually with a bowl of flowers on it. They had put their shopping bags down on the floor by this table and, hearing a footstep, had looked up the stairs and seen Heather.

Ismay went back inside and switched the tape recorder on again.

"Heather came downstairs. She was wearing a pink cotton

dress and the front of it was wet, the bodice and the skirt. Her shoes were wet. I don't remember what she said. Maybe she didn't say anything. My mother said, 'Why are you so wet, Heather? Where have you been?'

"Then Heather said, 'I've been in the bathroom. You'd better

come.' We went upstairs. My mother went first. She told me afterward she thought one of the pipes was leaking. We'd had trouble

with it before. We went into the bathroom. I don't remember if there was water everywhere. I suppose there must have been.The bath was full of water and Guy was in it. He was lying under the water and he was dead."

That was the first time she had ever seen a man's naked body.

Strange that the first one she had seen should be a dead man's. Dead, Guy looked very young, a boy. Beatrix screamed once, then fell on her knees and the crying and muttering began. She clapped both hands over her mouth. Ismay looked and then looked away, trembling, shaking all over. She stumbled back into her mother's bedroom and fell on the unmade bed. Beatrix came in and silent Heather with her. That was how it had been. Ismay returned to the tape recorder.

"My mother asked Heather what had happened and Heather

said she didn't know. Then she asked her what made her go into the bathroom. Neither of us ever went into that bathroom. The last thing Heather would have done was go in there where Guy would have been naked. But she had. It didn't occur to me for a while that Heather might have had something to do with that death. Heather said nothing in answer to my mother's question. Then my mother asked her if she'd been in her own bedroom when Guy got up. 'I went into the bathroom,' Heather said. 'I was in there a bit and he was dead. He was like he is now.' My mother screamed aloud when Heather said that, and she clutched at me. She said to me, 'Phone a doctor. No, phone for an ambulance. Dial nine-nine-nine.'

"I couldn't. I'd lost my voice. After a bit my mother phoned

Pam and Pam came. I think it was she who phoned for an ambulance. The police came eventually. I don't know who sent for

them. It was evening by then. There was a detective inspector and a detective constable, I think. The inspector had a name like a bird, Sparrow or Peacock but not one of those. I can't remember anything about the constable except that he was young.

"An ambulance came with two paramedics and they took

Guy's body away. Or it may not have been an ambulance. There

may have been a doctor. I don't remember. Before the police came Mum said to Heather, 'These people who are coming will ask. The police will have to come and they will ask.' Heather didn't say anything. I think she was terrified. Mum thought for a moment and

then she said, 'You were out with us. All three of us were shopping. You complained about Issy taking so long trying on clothes.' Heather gave her such a strange look. She looked like an old, old woman for a moment. 'Did I?' she said.

"It was like a game. I got into the spirit of it, me, aged fifteen.

I said, 'You were fed up because they hadn't got a blazer in your 79

size.' 'All right,' she said. Mum said, 'No, Heather, it wasn't like Issy says. You came with us but you didn't come into the shop. You waited outside while Issy tried things on.' Heather shrugged; she said, 'I was with you. It's simpler that way, isn't it?' And that was all. That was all she said and all she's ever said. The inspector with the bird name and the other one came and said there would be an inquest. They believed everything we said, the nice and sensible but distraught widow, her well-behaved teenage daughters. We

said what we'd rehearsed saying.

"My mother and I knew we should tell the police the truth

what we both thought, that is—but we couldn't. This was

Heather, her daughter, my sister. My mother had lost her husband, a man she'd loved, at any rate when they were first married

she'd loved him, but Heather was more important to her. Far more. We both understood by then why she had done it. My mother said she half knew, she guessed, about Guy and me. She had seen things. 'You should have told me,' she said and she sounded very angry. I said nothing. What could I have said to his wife? She had considered separating herself from Guy, but she hadn't yet said a word to him and now it was too late. If she'd left him—or turned him out; it was her house after all—if she'd done that he'd be alive and Heather not guilty of anything. We never told anyone. We agonized over it, separately and together. We wept together. If it's possible for grief and horror to turn someone's brain, and all those old dramas and operas and whatever said it was, this turned my mother's."

She stopped there. All this wasn't necessary. He only had to know, if it ever came to this, the basics of what Heather had done. No need to tell him about the inquest and the verdict of accidental death, the bruises on Guy's ankles dismissed as due to some other cause. No one but Guy, after all, had been in the house at the time. 80

Beatrix had been out shopping with her two daughters. They had all returned home together.

And Heather? How had she and her mother confronted

Heather? The answer was that they hadn't. Beatrix manifested signs of schizophrenia after a year had passed and slipped away into madness. Ismay never again mentioned the way Guy had died, already afraid that Heather might come out with it and tell her the truth. Much as she wanted to know, she was afraid of Heather telling her. She couldn't imagine a situation in which she asked Heather straight out and Heather said, yes, she had. Yes, she'd drowned Guy. To save Ismay from being raped by Guy. Not so much from dislike, hatred even, but to save her beloved sister from her stepfather.

And Heather seemed just the same afterward as she had been before—but perhaps not quite the same. Calmer, quieter, steadier, the kind of person you would tell your fears to and know they would be safe with her and stay hidden. Not a gorgon, as Andrew described her, but a quiet, reposeful woman who seemed older than her years, the woman Edmund loved so much.

Chapter Seven

The temporary hiding place Ismay found for the tape was in the bottom of a ceramic pot under the dry roots of a cactus. The cactus had vicious thorns instead of prickles and putting the tape in there made her fingers bleed. She scratched them again two

days later when she decided the hiding place wasn't safe, moved it out, and put it inside a case that had originally contained a cartridge of Indian classical music. It wasn't long sinnce she'd been

mad about the sitar and the tabla, but most of her collection was on CDs. This tape was Aashish Khan's Rainy Season Ragas, which no one in this flat was remotely likely to want to listen to. She put it on the shelf where all the other tapes were, between Mozart's Flute and Harp Concerto, and the Spice Girls.

Skipping home from work, Marion found Fowler in the flat. He was always losing things and moaned about the way everything just jumped out of his pockets.

"It's funny," she said crossly, "how you manage never to lose my key."

Fowler was a very thin man of forty, his hair the faded reddishgold hers had been before she started tinting it, his face like an old handbag, an amalgam of pockets and dents and bloated pores, his teeth brown as tree bark and the stubble on chin and cheeks as white as an old man's. That afternoon he was wearing the kind of clothes that are immediately recognizable as having previously belonged to someone else, each garment perhaps to several former owners. He was sitting in her living room, smoking a cigarette he must have scrounged from somewhere, his decaying sneakers smelling like Gorgonzola cheese.

He didn't greet her. He seldom did but went straight into whatever came into his head. "When you got the money from that old woman, I don't know why you didn't get a bigger flat. I mean, with two bedrooms. Then I could have stayed here properly and not had to doss down on the sofa."

"That's why," said Marion.

Fowler showed no resentment. Her reply was precisely what

he had anticipated. "I wish you'd get married. If you married someone with a bit of money you could move into his place and leave this for me. When we were little kids, or you were a big kid and I was a little one, you said something to me I've never forgotten. It was so touching, it was so nice. You said, 'I love you,

Fowler. I'll always take care of you.' You were about eight and I was four."

"You say things like that when you're eight," said Marion.

"Besides, you were a nice-looking little boy. You had curls, not exactly golden, but curls. You were sweet. You're not very sweet now." Fowler was silent, thinking of his misfortunes and how the

world always owed him a living. He couldn't remember when he 83

had ever had any money. Real money, that is. If he had even a small amount he usually managed to lose it. Only today he'd asked a woman for fifty pence to get himself a cup of tea and she'd given it to him. She'd actually given him fifty pence. But somewhere between Edgware Road tube station and the La Marquise cafe it

had fallen through a hole in his pocket. "Is there anything to eat?" he asked.

"Only sardines," said his sister, "and some Brussels sprouts,

but they're a week old. I haven't had time to go shopping. Some of us work, you know."

Fowler stared glumly into space, scratching his head. "People

like you don't seem to realize that begging is work. Very hard work. You're outdoors in all weathers, you can never relax, you never take a break. You've got to be polite all the time, you've got to be humble. If you speak your mind you're done for. And there's nothing of what you'd call job satisfaction. Even in Piccadilly or Bond Street you can stand about for three or four hours and those rich bitches'll walk past you on their way into jewelry shops. And then the Prime Minister has the nerve to tell people not to give to beggars. As if they needed telling. I think I'll make myself sardines on toast."

Marion followed him into the kitchen, not to help with the preparation of his meal but to stop him raiding her liquor supplies.

"Do you remember when we were kids you used to have to

open sardine tins with a key stuck through that ring thing? And the key always broke and you had to put something stronger into the ring. I used the poker. I bashed myself in the mouth and knocked one of my front teeth out. You must remember."

"You were always accident prone." 84

"Can I have a drink?" "No, you can't."

"Come on, Marion. Don't be like that. I tell you what. If I

can have a drink and a couple of aspirins—well, four, say—I'll have my sardines and a bit of that Christmas pudding I saw in the fridge, if I can have that I won't stay. I'll go straight after. Come on, be a sport. A gin—well, a double—and a few aspirins and I'll make myself scarce."

"All right," said Marion, relieved she wouldn't have him

sleeping on her sofa. Mystified as always by his choice of narcotics, she poured the gin herself, carefully calculating the amount in a measuring glass. She was more generous with the aspirins, dropping six strong ones into a saucer. She ate nothing herself, having

made an arrangement to rabbit-sit for Avice Conroy. She'd pop in again on Mr. Hussein before she went to Pinner. Avice was so grateful. As well as paying her, she always left her a Marks and Spencer ready meal and half a bottle of wine. Marion looked forward to it. While she was in her bedroom, changing into her coral tracksuit, Fowler spotted her handbag on top of the fridge. Go

easy, Fowler, he cautioned himself. If you don't take more than a tenner the chances are she won't notice. He took a ten-pound note and two pound coins, called out to her that he was leaving, and closed the front door gently behind him. Be careful not to lose those oncers, Fowler, like you did the fifty pence, he told himself.

In his inner monologue he always addressed himself as Fowler. He was proud of his given name. It had been his mother's before she married and, when he was feeling low, he reflected that it was the only distinguished thing about him.

The evening was mild and he was in no hurry. He strolled down the Finchley Road, disappointed because the gin and 85

aspirins had had little effect. The twelve pounds he had stolen

from his sister he had originally intended to spend on a slap-up greasy spoon meal, the sardines being inadequate, but the rival claims of lager or skunk competed, and of the two he could get more drink for his money. Three pubs later, with not quite his bus fare left, he set off unsteadily on foot for the dossers' hostel, known to its denizens as Jimbo's, in Queens Park. It closed its doors at eleven sharp. If you don't make it in time, Fowler, he said to himself, you'll find yourself sleeping in a doorway. It wouldn't be the

first time.

In spite of his dislike of the women who frequented it, Fowler was again in Bond Street three days later, loitering outside Lalique's doorway and wishing he had a dog or, better still, a baby. That was a brilliant idea. It was always women who begged with babies, but there seemed no reason why a man shouldn't do it. Could he borrow a baby? More feasibly, could Marion?

Rooting through the rubbish bins of Bond Street and Piccadilly was part of what he told Marion was his day's work. Not every day, of course, but three times a week. If, as occasionally happened, he saw someone else with his hand plunged up to the elbow in, for instance, the one in Piccadilly outside the Ritz,

he took it as a personal affront. If there were a dossers' union

and he were a shop steward, it was the kind of thing he'd bring the workforce out on strike over.

The sort of bins you found in the less salubrious suburbs contained too much perishable food waste, burger remains, curry containers, and chicken bones. Fowler wasn't fastidious but he disliked bad smells apart from his own, and the bins of Harlesden 86

were a bit much. Mayfair was something else. There was a bin in Piccadilly, outside the Royal Academy, in which he had once found a pink satin toilet bag full of freebie cosmetic samples he'd given to Marion for Christmas and on another occasion a watch that only needed a new battery. The bin outside the Ritz had yielded a jar of Fortnum's marmalade—why?—and an umbrella with a Mickey Mouse face on it, while another in Bond Street gave him two stalls tickets for Phantom of the Opera for that evening. The watch and umbrella he had sold in Church Street market, the tickets outside the theater; and he'd eaten the marmalade.

Fowler regarded the bins of Piccadilly, Jermyn Street, and Regent Street with Bond Street and its offshoots as his manor, his golden square mile. He particularly disliked seeing anyone else

investigating them and made himself unpleasant if there were confrontations. This evening he had caught a more than usually filthy

dosser at the Bond Street one in flagrante delicto, so to speak. It was

no wonder his own probings into that particular bin had been disappointing. The harvest he had gleaned was merely a single badly

bruised cigarette in an otherwise empty packet and a condom. To

be fair, it was an unused condom still in its pack but an article for which Fowler had no possible use. If he tried to sell it, potential buyers would think he'd stuck a pin through it first out of malice.

He had smoked the cigarette in Lalique's doorway, thought a bit more about the baby plan, and sat down with half a cardboard carton, once containing porridge oats, beside him on the marble step,

hoping for what he had once heard grandly called "eleemosynary alms."

It was there that Edmund passed him on his way to buy Heather a birthday present in the Burlington Arcade. Knowing Marion had a brother but never having seen him, he merely felt 87

that slight pang of guilt we all feel when passing a beggar. But on his way back, carrying the newly gift-wrapped pale-blue cashmere sweater, he saw the man still sitting there with an empty carton beside him and felt in his pocket for change. He had spent

so much already that another couple of quid would make no difference.

Fowler said, "Thank you very much, sir. You're a gent."

Ashamed of his warm feeling of righteousness, Edmund went

on up the hill and turned into Brook Street, heading for Bond

Street tube station. It was just after seven on a Thursday, late-night shopping evening, dark but brilliantly lit. Ahead of Edmund a taxi coming from the direction of Berkeley Square pulled up to the

curb and stopped. Two people got out and one of them was

Andrew. Edmund had ample time to make sure it was Andrew, watching him pay the taxi driver from the pavement. His companion, who he at first thought must be Ismay, was a different girl,

fairer than she, just as slender, wearing shoes with golden heels of an impossible height and a fur wrap. And apparently not much else, thought Edmund. They didn't see him, being too engrossed in each other, Andrew's arm around the girl's shoulders as they disappeared down the exquisitely cobbled entrance to Lancashire Court.

Sitting in the train, he thought about what he had seen.

There was no doubt about it. The girl couldn't have been Andrew's sister (if he had a sister) unless they were committing incest, which, when you came to think of it, also amounted to infidelity. What should he do, if anything? Nothing, of course. Telling Ismay wasn't to be considered. But tell Heather? He thought not. It would only upset her. He had long since perceived how close Heather and Ismay were, how deeply his fiancee loved her sister. 88

She would no more tell Ismay than he would, but she might make some sort of row with Andrew, have it out with him. It sometimes amused him to see how much she disliked Andrew. Better tell himself it wasn't his business and try to forget it. He was already learning that his future wife could be fierce and direct as well as calm.

He got to Clapham just before eight. The girls were having champagne to celebrate Heather's birthday. He handed over the sweater and it was rapturously received. It hardly seemed fair that Heather should cook her own birthday dinner, but she seemed to like doing it and she was, naturally, a very good cook.

"When we're married," Heather said, smiling at him,

"Edmund's going to do all the cooking forevermore because I'll be doing it at work."

He thought he saw a kind of shadow pass across Ismay's face

or perhaps it was more a stiffening, a setting, of the muscles into a fixed smile. He had experienced his own face doing that when something painful or embarrassing had been said (usually by his mother). It was accompanied, in his case, by an inward sensation that was close to nausea but not quite that. Was that how Ismay was feeling and why? Was it possible she knew about Andrew's defection?

Within a few moments it appeared not, for she was expecting him to phone her. She remarked on this omission with surprise. He wasn't coming around, she said. He had had to work late. But he had promised to phone. Just before Heather put their starter on the table, Ismay phoned him. Or tried to.

"His mobile's switched off," she said.

"He's probably in a meeting," said Edmund, wondering why

he seemed to be furthering that philanderer's deception. But it was 89

to protect Ismay, who would soon be his sister-in-law. After all, she might never need to know. It wasn't inevitable that she find out, and if she could be kept in ignorance for a while, Andrew might

get over this attraction and return to her. Strangely, for he had not found this other woman particularly fetching—too pale and childlike—he thought of her high golden heels and glistening

wrap before he turned his attention to his dinner.

Ismay, who normally had a healthy appetite, found she

couldn't eat much of Heather's avocado mousse with pears and arugula or her roast quails with sweet-sour orange sauce. She had only once before known Andrew to turn off his mobile, and that had been on Christmas Day when he was with his parents. If he was working late he should be in chambers, but when she called the number there was no reply. Pamela had given Heather the latest six DVDs of Sex and the City for a birthday present, and she

and Edmund put on the first one of them after they had finished eating. Ismay went into her bedroom and tried Andrew's mobile number again. It was still switched off.

She attempted to think of other things, but all that came to

mind was Heather's remark that began, "When we're married." It had brought her a faint feeling of sickness. Every mention of the coming marriage did that. The only one of "the other things" that came to mind was the tape. A plan to find out about safe deposit boxes had come to nothing. It seemed too grand a project and

there was a flavor of espionage about it. People like her didn't possess and conceal secret documents—for this was what the tape

amounted to. Anyway, she was beginning to think the whole idea

of the tape had been rather silly. She was a little ashamed of making it, of sitting there and talking into a recording device about her beloved sister. Especially when, though it was designed for that sister's future husband, she knew she never would give it to him.

She slept badly, waking every hour or two to ask herself why Andrew had turned off his mobile. The next morning, she tried it and got a message that he wasn't available. Strange how every time her glance took in the shelf where the tape was (and where the CDs and her iPod and Walkman radio also were), the first thing her eyes rested on was that tape. Rainy Season Ragas. It was quite safe where it was, she reminded herself. The eyes of others wouldn't see it or would not see it any more than they would see the Mozart or the dangling headset on her radio.

In the train she began once more worrying about Andrew.

He'd behaved like this at Christmas, true, but Christmas was an exceptional time when the usual rules hardly applied. There had been another occasion, the summer before, when he had seemed to disappear for a few days and she had been frantic with worry. He soon explained that his mother had been ill. He had been in

the hospital with her in some remote place in the Scottish Highlands where, for some reason, his mobile didn't work. She had

worried then. She always thought of an accident in that fast sports car of his father's he liked to borrow. If he was injured who would let her know? She wasn't Andrew's partner or his fiancee but only his girlfriend. His parents might not even know of her existence. It brought her a shaft of pain to think that might be true. Did he talk about her to other people? She didn't know but she was sure Edmund talked to his friends about Heather.

Now that Edmund was regularly absent from Chudleigh Hill

three nights a week, Irene had begun to understand he really did intend to get married. He really meant to move out and buy a flat five miles away. Her making it plain that she disapproved, disliked what she knew of Heather Sealand and believed that "anticipating 91

marriage" doomed any subsequent union to failure, had had no effect on his conduct.

She devoted a large proportion of her thoughts to plans for showing him what a grave mistake he was making. Mostly these schemes came to no more than telling him to wait a little longer, that she was not well enough to be left on her own and that he

couldn't afford to get married. She even asked him if he knew as much as a putative husband should about his future wife's background and antecedents, but this, as even she could see, had a fatal

effect and resulted in his changing his mind about inviting Heather for Sunday lunch. Heather had only twice been to the house in Chudleigh Hill, the first time when she had more or less told Irene outright that Edmund's mother wouldn't be welcome to join them at the cinema and the second when she and Edmund had come home together after work.

Edmund had phoned but only half an hour ahead of their

arrival. Naturally, she hadn't been very welcoming to Heatherhow could she be after the way the girl had snubbed her about the cinema?—but when she had said she couldn't possibly produce a meal at a few minutes' notice, Edmund had chosen to take it badly. He and Heather would go out to eat, he had said, and come back to see her later.

"I don't think so," she had said quite reasonably. "It's nearly eight now and by the time you get back I shall be thinking about bed." His shrug annoyed her. "You're here so seldom I expect you've forgotten I go to bed quite early."

Surprisingly, the girl had suddenly said, "Why don't you come with us?"

Edmund had probably told her off for her behavior over

going to see that film. That would be it. "Oh, no, my dear, that 92

wouldn't do. I don't suppose Edmund's told you but I'm not a very well person. This has been one of my bad days."

They had gone and not come back. Irene told Joyce, first on

the phone, then face-to-face. Joyce was unsympathetic, but that was only to be expected; they had never been close as sisters. "That's a game you can't win," she said. "The mother always loses. All you'll succeed in doing is alienating your son. He won't stay away three nights a week. He'll stay away every night. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't get an invite to the wedding."

"What do you know?" Irene said rudely "You've never had any children."

She painted a different picture for her new neighbor. "My

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