son and his fiancee are always begging me to come with them when they go out, but I seldom feel up to it. I've never been

strong, you know. Between ourselves, I shall be relieved when he's married and in a home of his own. I shall be left to my own devices at last."

Barry Fenix was a tall, soldierly-looking man with thick

white hair and a small mustache. Every inch the colonel of the regiment was how Irene saw him, though he had told her in a burst of confidence that while doing his National Service he had never

risen above the rank of lance-corporal. Another thing he told her was that he had a unique collection on DVD of films about the Indian Army and the Northwest Frontier. "You should think about going," he said, speaking to her over the garden wall. "You

ought to get out more, a fine-looking woman like you. This could be your opportunity. Your son's wedding, I mean. Seize the day, Irene, seize the day."

"Do you mean, go out with them or go out—well—with

other people? You seem a bit confused." She smiled encouragingly, 93

sure he was going to invite her out. For a drink, wasn't that what they said? Or maybe to watch his DVDs. "Now which is it?"

"I was only trying to be helpful." He went back into the house. Andrew was back. His mobile was on all the time, and he was taking Ismay out in the evenings and spending the nights with her.

Perhaps it was his imagination, Edmund thought, that he was less ardent, less fixed on Ismay than formerly. It must be imagination,

it must be an illusion created in his mind by what he had seen that evening in Lancashire Court. And the girl in the fur with the

golden heels? Someone from Andrew's past, a former girlfriend, a cousin, or even a one-off evening's companion, picked up somewhere

in a moment of madness, of aberration.... Anyone could

see he was in love with Ismay—or did he mean that anyone used to be able to see?

When he had first met Andrew, Edmund fancied that he had complained less. Now it seemed that he was always grumbling and mostly that the flat was overcrowded. Without quite coming out with it and saying Edmund wasn't welcome there overnight, he constantly harped on the nuisance of having only one bathroom between four people, of one couple being obliged to go out in the evening so as to leave the other alone, of what he called the "chaos" of breakfast eaten standing up or sharing the tiny kitchen table. Edmund discussed it with Heather, even suggesting most unwillingly that he should cut his overnight stays down to twice a week.

Or, tired of waiting for the seemingly interminable chain to show its last links, rent a flat somewhere.

Prudent Heather didn't encourage this. She had paid her rent

up to the end of April and couldn't ask Ismay to reimburse her. Her suggestion was that they share his room in his mother's house. 94

"It will only be for a few months." "It will be hell," he said.

She said in a very serious tone, "We can get married first if you like."

"Of course I like. But I know her. I know how she can be. I

don't want her breaking up my marriage when it's only just begun." Ismay was beginning to see that marriage as inevitable. She was tempted to take the easy option, to relax and let it happen. But what she had foreseen—that once she had made the tape she would cease to think about its contents—hadn't happened. She dwelled on it nearly as much. And now she began asking herself if she could be quite sure, positive, certain beyond a doubt, that Heather had killed Guy. There was of course the evidence of the

wet dress as she came downstairs when they arrived home. The very fact of her coming downstairs counted against her. So did her agreeing with Ismay and her mother when they said she had been out, buying her school uniform, with them. An innocent person would surely have denied that. Ismay had expected her to deny it and had felt sure of her guilt when she didn't.

But there was—just—an alternative. There was the inquest's version. Enfeebled Guy, taking a bath in water which was too hot, had lost consciousness. Fainted, she supposed you would call it. His head had sunk below the surface of the water and in his weak state he had been unable to struggle out. So the coroner had said. Or there was the fact that, however inaccessible it seemed to be, the door to the balcony had been open. It would have been hard to get into the garden but not impossible. As for climbing up a ladder to get to it, a neighbor seeing that would have assumed it was the window cleaner.

95

These solutions dwindled into thin theories against the evidence of the wet patch on Heathers dress or the lie Ismay and her mother had told and Heather confirmed, the lie that gave her

an alibi. Would she have needed an alibi if she had been innocent? Of course, it might be that she had let Beatrix lie for her because it saved trouble. Seeing how it looked, the wet dress, the wet shoes, her dislike of Guy, she might only have been relieved

that her mother intended to protect her from police questioning. It was a strange answer to the dilemma of Heather, but it was a possible one.

Everyone accepted the coroner's verdict. Pamela had never questioned it. Nor had their mother's brother nor any friend or neighbor. She wouldn't have questioned it—except that she had been there and seen Heather and heard what she said. Perhaps

what she should try to do now was attempt to see that verdict as true and right, the way others saw it. The trouble was that, looking back, she saw that she and her mother had modeled their subsequent lives on the assumption that Heather had done it. They

lived the way they lived, Beatrix in madness, Ismay watching over Heather, because they had been convinced Heather had murdered her stepfather. Could they undo the structure of that after all these years?

96

Chapter Eight

The man in Crouch End who was selling Edmund his flat insisted he wasn't backing out of the deal. He couldn't help it if his vendor wanted a further month's delay on signing the contract for the sale of his house. Edmund couldn't expect him to sign the contract on the sale of his own until he was sure of somewhere to go when he moved out. Edmund, of course, agreed. The alternative was to start again with another property. He and Heather loved the Crouch End flat, already thought of it as their future home, and

hated the idea of trying to find somewhere else.

Meanwhile, a row had taken place with Andrew one Saturday morning. He found himself alone with him while the girls were out shopping. Edmund had no idea what Andrew wanted to say when he asked if he could have a word, but he soon found out. "Are you and Heather any closer to moving into this place you're buying?"

"The vendor keeps delaying. It's not likely to be much before 97

May." Edmund hadn't particularly liked Andrews adversarial tone. "Why do you ask?"

"Well, frankly, because there isn't room for four in this flat." "I think that's down to Ismay and Heather, don't you?"

"Not entirely, no, I don't. It's a matter of priorities. I was here

first. From what Ismay tells me you have a home in West Hampstead that is a considerable size. What stops you taking Heather

there until this elusive purchase of yours is available—if it ever is?" "That house belongs to my mother. My mother lives there." Edmund wasn't about to go into reasons why Heather and his mother wouldn't get on. Now, he decided, was the time to clear

the air, though air clearing was seldom what a row achieved. "I don't see what this has to do with you. Two sisters are the tenants of this flat, and you and I are here as in my case the fiance of one of them and in yours as the boyfriend of the other. On equal terms, in fact." Because he was growing angry and remembered the scene in Lancashire Court, he said, "I at least am going to marry Heather."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"That you," said Edmund, again seeing the girl with the

golden heels, "are not going to marry Ismay. You're seeing someone else, aren't you?"

Andrew, who had been walking up and down like a lawyer in an American courtroom, stopped and stood very still. "Who told you that?"

Almost an admission, Edmund thought. He hadn't intended things to go as far as this, but now he thought he had better come out with what he had seen. "I saw you getting out of a cab in Brook Street with a girl."

"You mean that in your philosophy sharing a taxi with some98

one who's not Ismay amounts to infidelity? If that's so, God help you.

"The way you and she were together amounts to it in anyone's view."

"Have you said anything to Ismay?"

"No, and I shan't. I haven't even said anything to Heather."

The sudden change in Andrew was shocking. He came over

to Edmund and stood over him, pointing one long finger in his face. "You stupid, lower-class, puritanical bastard!" he shouted.

"You, you paramedic, you male nurse. A so-called man who lives in his mother's house till he's thirty-five, a queer, a pansy, who takes up with the ugliest girl he's met because that's all he can get. You make me puke, you fucking mummy's boy!"

Edmund got to his feet, pushed the quivering finger away

with his right hand, and thought of hitting him. It would make matters worse. He turned and walked away into Heather's room, closing the door behind him and sitting on the bed until he heard Andrew bang out of the flat. When Heather came back she came alone, Ismay having gone to her yoga class. Edmund told her what had happened, leaving out his accusation of infidelity and Andrew's unjust and untrue description of her.

"Why did he get so angry, Ed?"

"I suppose because I—well, I suggested that while I wanted to marry you he'd no intention of marrying Ismay."

Heather laughed, then looked grave. "Well, what shall we do now:

"It's pretty clear I can't come here again. Not after the things

he said. It wouldn't be possible to be in the same room with him." "That means we may be apart for months."

"You'll have to let me rent somewhere, darling." 99

"Let me think about it. It's such a waste of money. I could come to you. I wouldn't mind about your mother. Or you could smuggle me in after dark. It might be fun."

Fun when you were sixteen, thought Edmund, on his way home to Chudleigh Hill. Not now. He wanted Heather, he

wanted to go on making love to her, but he wanted to eat his meals with her too and sit and talk to her, and listen to music with her and hold hands on the sofa in front of the television. He wanted to be able to sit in the same room with her, both of them reading but without awkwardness, in close companionable silence. She would sometimes raise her eyes and smile at him and he would sometimes raise his eyes and smile at her. Or she would get up and

come to him and nestle in his arms. Of all this he naturally said nothing when he got home and met Irene in the hallway. "Hello, stranger," she said.

If she had heard anyone else say it she would have called them common. Edmund nodded and smiled, though he didn't feel like smiling.

"I don't suppose you'll be staying." "Yes, I shall. For this weekend."

Irene put down the duster she was holding, approached him

in much the same manner as Andrew had done before his outburst, and said in the voice of a TV detective who has made the discovery that solves the case, "You've quarreled with her." Patience extends only so far, but Edmund still kept his. "No, Mother. Heather and I haven't quarreled. I shall see her this evening."

"Oh, Edmund, I know you so well. Your mother knows every

look on your face and the look I see there now tells me you've had a serious row, perhaps even an engagement-breaking row. Isn't that so?"

100

Perhaps he was catching it off Andrew, but his control broke. "For God's sake, Mother," he said. "Be quiet and mind your own business."

"Those two are going to be living here till midsummer," Andrew said. "Or beyond."

A cold note in his voice Ismay found disquieting. "May at the latest was what Edmund said."

"What that man says and the actuality are two very different things. I'm not sure how long I can put up with it, my darling. I'm used to your sister, but her paramour is rather beyond the pale."

Ismay looked at him in dismay. "I'll talk to them," she said. "I'll—oh, I don't know what I'll do, Andrew, but if you've quarreled with him, I'll ask Heather if she can't go to Edmund's place

and not bring him here."

"He has quarreled with me," said Andrew. "He has insulted me and drawn intolerable conclusions."

"What sort of conclusions?" "Never mind."

Ismay found she couldn't do as she had promised. She

couldn't speak to Heather and perhaps she wouldn't need to, for Edmund ceased to come to Clapham and her sister was out a great deal more than she had used to be. But her worry about Heathers part in their stepfather's death had receded. It is difficult to be worried about two things at once, and concern as to whether Andrew would be driven away had forced Heather's past into the deeper recesses of her mind. She had even ceased to be troubled about the tape—perhaps the putting of her worry into a box had worked—whether it was safe where it was or should she move it 101

somewhere more secure, even destroy it? Worry about Andrew was more important. It always was and always would be.

After that conversation they had had when he had complained about Edmund and Heather and she had promised to try

to alter the situation, she sensed that he had changed toward her. He was less—ardent. He came to the flat, spent nights with her, took her out for the occasional evening, but he often seemed absent-minded, and when he talked to her it was almost exclusively about the awkwardness of Edmund's and Heather's presence,

even though Edmund hadn't been there for the past week.

He seemed to have become fixated on it, as if he thought of nothing else, yet Ismay felt, strangely, that his obsession wasn't quite

real, was assumed, to cover some genuine preoccupation. "Edmund doesn't come here anymore," she protested when he accused her of doing nothing to change the situation.

"She does. I still have to put up with her silent presence and those eyes on me."

"But you said you were used to her."

"Please don't pick me up on every little thing, Ismay."

The more he seemed to grow away from her the more she felt she must be placatory. She wanted to say that he must know she wasn't willing to separate herself from Heather. Even if it was in her power to turn her out, she couldn't do it. A rift would open between the two sisters that nothing would heal. They would be apart forever.

"I don't actually see why you couldn't move her upstairs.

They've got a spare room, haven't they? He could be there with her if he can't control his lusts for five minutes. And it would only have to be endured until—when did you say? May?"

She said miserably that she would suggest it, but if she did, Pamela and perhaps even her mother would have to agree as well. 102

She even came close to the point of asking Pamela, but thought

she should mention it to Heather first. The prospect made her feel sick and she was relieved when Heather phoned to say she

wouldn't be home that night. Andrew asked her, of course, and she said she intended to speak to Heather. She was just waiting for the right time. Andrew phoned the next day as usual, but she noticed he didn't end their short conversation with "Love you" as he invariably did. Then, instead of daily, his phone calls became more widely spaced. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday went by without the sound of his voice, without a sight of him. She was distraught. Heather was always out—at Edmund's mother's? In a flat borrowed from a friend? Edmund had that friend who was a doctor

and Heather had Michelle at work and that Greta whose home she had intended to visit the day Guy died and whom she was still close to. Andrew says he's not here because of Heather, but he could be here now, she thought, with me and without Heather. When she tried to phone him his mobile was switched off. On the Thursday evening he arrived without warning. As might a husband who had been married for years, it seemed to her.

"It's wonderful to see you," she couldn't stop herself saying.

She got up, went to him, put her hands on his arms and looked up into his face. "Andrew? They're not here. They haven't been here for days."

"You haven't spoken to them, have you?" She shook her head.

"You haven't asked your mother to take her in upstairs and you haven't asked her to go upstairs?"

"No, but she hasn't been here. That's the point."

"The point seems to be that you prefer her company to mine.

Is there anything to eat? No? I suppose I'd better go out to a restaurant then. D'you want to come?"

103

She thought it a strange question and wondered why he hadn't said, "Shall we go out to eat?"

"What's wrong, Andrew?" She now knew what that expression meant, "her heart was in her mouth." "What is it?"

"Nothing."

"There is something. You've changed."

"Yes, I expect I have. Haven't you understood yet that I'm fucking fed up of having those two about the place? I thought I'd made it plain. Can't you see it's getting me down?"

"But they're not here," she said. "Heather says Edmund won't come back. Not after what you said to him. And she's out every evening with him."

"Oh, yes, and we know what that amounts to. A week or two

and they'll both be back." He sat down beside her, but he didn't touch her. "I have serious doubts about this flat he's supposed to be buying. Does it exist, one wonders?" He had been addressing the bookcase or perhaps the door to the hall, but now he turned and looked at her, stony-eyed. "You once told me I was the most important person in your life, yet you can't do this small thing for me. You haven't the spirit to tell your gorgon of a sister to remove herself upstairs."

Tears sprang to her eyes. "Andrew, tell me, I have to know, is

it really Edmund and Heather that's the trouble or is it something else? Because I can't bear it, the way it is now between us."

"I need a drink," he said. "I need my dinner," and he left, slamming the door behind him and then the front door.

Alone that night, she dreamed the dream. This time, however, Guy was alive, contemplating Andrew's drowned body floating in a glassy lake.

104

Chapter Nine

In a hotel room in Shepherd's Bush, a very small room containing

a double bed, wall hooks for clothes, an Ikea table with a mirror hanging above it, and a chair that was part of a 1930s dining suite, Heather and Edmund sat up in the bed, drinking tea out of a thermos flask. It was eight o'clock in the morning.

"You've a home in your mother's house," she was saying to

him, "and it's a big house. I'll come to you there. We can do it, Edmund. It will just be hard at first. I'll be nice to your mother, I'll help her in the house if she'll let me."

"You know I've found this so-called studio flat."

"And from what you say I'll hate it. I'll especially hate it because it's three hundred pounds a week. We need every penny we've got for our own place when we get it."

"We can't go on staying in these ghastly hotels like adulterous couples in the fifties." He hesitated, then said grudgingly, "I suppose we could try Chudleigh Hill."

105

"I love you," she said, "and I know we ought to be together. A

lot of people would say that the worst thing we could do would be to live with your mother, that it would separate us, but I think it would keep us together. I think it would make us a united front, while spending two thirds of what I earn on that studio and the other third on Ismay's flat would—would divide us. Don't forget I'd have to go on paying my share of Ismay's rent up until the end of April."

"I'm afraid my mother will set out to make trouble between us," Edmund said.

"Yes, maybe, but Andrew set out to make trouble between us

and he hasn't. Don't you see she can't succeed if we know it beforehand? If we're determined? You say you're afraid, but I'm afraid

too. Not of that, never of that. I don't think I'm superstitious, but what I'm afraid of is something I don't understand, something out there that will—well, strike us and part us forever and there'll be no going back."

"I've never heard you talk like this before."

"Maybe not. But I've had feelings like this before. When I was—well, younger."

He took her in his arms and held her close to him. "I think

we ought to get married," he said. "I know we're going to get married, but I think we should do it now, as soon as we can. It takes

three weeks, doesn't it?"

Alone at home, Ismay waited for Andrew to phone. He had said he would phone "around six" and now it was nearly seven. She had brought work home with her, but writing her ideas for a new

client presentation was beyond her. She could settle to nothing and had slipped into the fraught and impotent mind-set of those 106

who only stand and wait. Only she wasn't standing but trailing about from room to room, looking out of windows into the winter darkness. At the Victorian double-fronted houses opposite, the houses she had been looking at almost all her life, the shallow roofs and unused chimneys, the carved stonework around window frames, the lights between open curtains behind glass, the leafless trees with peeling trunks. Why did the bark peel off plane trees and not off other trees? Like skin off diseased people, but the trees weren't diseased.

Cars lined the pavement edges; wind-blown litter left behind

by people who ate in the street was tossed about in the gutters. A vandal had stuck an empty Coke can on a garden wall and a graffitist had painted a swastika and a Maltese cross in red on a white gatepost. Scaffolding and builders' materials were stacked outside

at least four houses and the part of the street that was being dug up was encircled by cones, some of them on their sides. It often seemed that the whole of London was gradually being dug up or rebuilt. She turned away and went to look out of a rear window at the garden, the darkness that lightened and grew gray if she stared at it long enough, lights in windows which were just lights, but which always made wistful watchers think that inside were happy

people partying and enjoying each other's company. She carried the phone with her in case it rang and she couldn't reach it before it went on to message, though ten rings had to sound before

that happened.

A glass of wine, which at first, at six, had seemed unwise, at seven was indispensable. She must have something to quiet her, to calm the beating of her heart, release her held breath, slacken her tense muscles, even take away that feeling that eating would never again be possible. While she was opening the bottle of wine with shaking hands, the phone rang. She picked it up, said a

107

breathless "Hello?" only to hear her Pamela's voice. Immediately she thought, suppose he phones now and the line's busy? She heard herself making all sorts of promises to Pamela. Beatrix had been restless, had been wandering about, shouting the more extravagant effusions of Saint John the Divine. Pamela didn't care

to go out and leave her.... Yes, she said breathlessly, yes, she'd sit

in with her mother anytime Pamela wanted, tomorrow, Thursday, whatever, making wild excuses for ending the conversation. When at last it was over, she poured herself a large glass of wine, drank half of it, and felt warmth flood through her. Not comforting warmth, though. She knew she would worry now half the night, perhaps all night, that he had phoned while she was talking to Pamela. Things would be marginally better if Heather were here. But that was what he wanted, wasn't it? That Heather shouldn't be here and Edmund shouldn't, but together in a place of their own? Or anywhere so long as it wasn't here. If he phoned she could tell him. She could tell him they had gone off to Edmund's mother's house, the very thing he wanted. It was "if" he phoned now, not "when." She thought, he is punishing me, that's the way he is. He will punish me for a few days and then he will phone. And I'll tell him they're gone. I've done what he wanted. Maybe I'll tell him a lie and say I did speak to Heather and asked her to go. It will please him to know I've obeyed him.

A momentary qualm visited her. Was this to be her life,

abject obedience to a man in order to keep him? She would once have called herself a feminist. She was behaving like a masochist, relishing subservience. But how can I do otherwise, she asked herself, when I love him so much? When I long for him? She marveled

that a week ago the thing which worried her was what

Heather had done to Guy. Or might have done. Or very possibly had done twelve years ago. It wasn't her responsibility. Who said it 108

was someone's job to be a guardian to her able-bodied, strong, healthy, capable sister? Now Ismay could hardly understand why her mother and she had undergone such stress, such pain and so many struggles over what Heather might have done. Stress and pain over such a thing seemed nothing compared to her present agony. Draining the glass of wine, she said aloud, "He doesn't care

about me anymore. I know he doesn't. And I can't live without him."

The worst thing was that she would have to live. Alone here, carrying on, putting a brave face on it. But wait a minute ... there must have been a thousand reasons why he hadn't phoned. Well, two or three. As she poured another glass of wine, she tried to think of reasons but couldn't find one. He always had his mobile with him. Once, she thought, even if he was expecting a brief or a client, even if he was due in court in a minutes time, he would have phoned her. Just to hear the sound of her voice. Those days were over. Could this be solely due to his dislike of Heather and Edmund? There was something else. She began to shiver in the

warm room. Something else was always only one thing....

Dropping in on Mr. Hussein, Marion found him entertaining a lady in a red-and-gold shalwar-kameez with glasses of mint tea and a plateful of sticky sweetmeats.

"May I introduce Mrs. Iqbal," said Mr. Hussein. "This is Miss Melville. She won't be staying."

Had she ever heard anything so rude, Marion later said to Irene Litton. As if she were a child or a servant.

"Well, I suppose you are a servant," said Irene. "Maybe, but not his."

"Did he give you anything to eat?" 109

"It would have choked me. That woman he had there was a

great big fat thing with black hair and bright red lipstick and loaded with jewels. Goodness knows how she got those diamonds. Mind you, I can guess."

Irene wasn't interested. Edmund had phoned a few minutes earlier, she now told Marion. "He's bringing that girl back here." "You don't mean for the night."

"I do. Would you like a glass of Bristol Cream?"

They were drinking sherry when Edmund and Heather arrived. Edmund came into the living room alone. He frowned when he saw Marion.

"Well, where is she?" said Irene. "Not shy, I hope." Edmund fetched Heather, who said, "Hello, Mrs. Litton. How are you?"

"Much the same as always. I'm never very well. This is my

dear friend Marion Melville. You've heard me mention Edmund's friend Heather, Marion."

"Heather is my fiancee," said Edmund.

"When I was a girl," said Irene, "I was always told that was a very vulgar word. Only common people used it. One said"when she reflected that what one said involved such expressions as "going to marry" and "engaged to," she cut herself short"something more decorous."

"Right," said Edmund. "Heather is my betrothed, my promised spouse, my affianced bride. We're going to take her things upstairs and then we'll eat." He looked around him. "We'll go out

to eat."

"Yes, you'll have to. I haven't felt well enough to cook anything."

"You do look rather peaky, as white as a sheet." Smiling Marion was in sycophantic mode. When Edmund and Heather 110

had gone she said in a voice not much above a whisper, "I can't say I admire his choice. You'll have to put your foot down about her sharing his room."

Support from Marion was one thing, advice quite another. "I think I can manage my own son, thank you very much. And now, if you've finished your sherry, I'd really like to be on my own. I've got a splitting headache."

Dismissed twice in the same day, Marion went home, running through the backstreets to Lithos Road. Fowler had been in

the flat in her absence. She could smell him. He had left a glass in the sink and she saw that the gin level had gone down alarmingly.

Time to get the lock changed and new keys cut.... It was coming

up to eight and she was due back in Pinner by eight-thirty. The idea of the long tube journey made her yawn in anticipation. She would have preferred to trot and run and dance all the way except that it would take hours.

The drugs Beatrix had been prescribed were highly effective, and under their influence she was docile and compliant. Silent, adhering to her radio as if it were an extra limb, she retreated into some

secret space. No one knew what was in there, whether it was turbulent and demon-ridden or empty where thought was absent.

But she had contrived cunning ways of not taking the drugs, hiding the capsule under her tongue or sticking it to the piece of gum

she incessantly chewed. Then her wildness returned and if she could escape, she roved the streets declaiming the texts she had once mysteriously learned.

When she could be sure her sister had taken the drugs prescribed for her, Pamela could go out without fear. In the evenings, though, she worried and never stayed out long. Mostly, 111

when she intended to be out late, one of her nieces would "keep an eye" on their mother, sometimes sitting with her. Beatrix was never left alone overnight.

Neither Ismay nor Heather ever referred to Pamela's habit of dating men to whom she had introduced herself by means of a newspaper or through the Internet, unless she did so first. This was tact on their part, and it occurred to neither of them that their silence on the subject made Pamela feel awkward.

Pamela never advertised her own attractions. An essentially

modest woman, she wouldn't have known how to describe herself. She was fifty-six and a size sixteen, and though her face wasn't too bad, her neck was wrinkled and her hair thinning. Looking dolefully into the mirror, she saw these defects but never her advantages:

her large blue eyes, clear smooth skin, and excellent teeth.

One of the men she met on a date told her she had "American teeth," which she knew was a great compliment. In spite of that, he didn't want to see her again.

She was getting tired of going to a rendezvous with a man

who had described himself, for instance, as tall, dark, sexy, and young-looking, and meeting a sexagenarian of five feet six with gray hair and appearing every year of his age. She was tired of men looking her up and down as if she were a cow in a cattle market. So tonight she was set for an adventure in speed dating. Not that Pamela approached the Kensington hotel where the function was held in an adventurous spirit. She was more nervous even than she had been the first time she met an unknown man. Getting off the bus, she told herself as she had often done before, that she only did this because without it her existence would be a pathetic apology for a life. Without it, tasteless as it often was, she would spend her days sorting out other people's money and as companion to a woman who was only bearable when stunned with drugs.

112

The speed-dating session was held in a rather cavernous place called the "small ballroom." It made Pamela wonder what the large ballroom was like.

She had paid quite a lot for her ticket so was glad to see a number of tables laden with canapes and, even better, bottles of wine. Before she arrived, she had imagined the setup might be like a dance hall of her youth, the girls all giggling at one end and the young men eyeing them at the other before one dared make a move and ask a girl to dance.

Here the room was more luxurious than any provincial dance

hall, the floor being carpeted and the windows festooned. There were numerous gilt tables and chairs as well. As for the hopefuls who stood about, the men were on the whole congregated at the end where a

dais stood, and the women were grouped nearest the food and drink.

No one was young and, as far as Pamela could see, no one was beautiful. Music was soft and sweet, the numbers one heard in every hotel

lounge the world over: "Never on Sunday," "Un Homme et une Femme," "La Vie en Rose." The idea was to approach someone of the opposite sex and enter into a conversation. Five minutes was allowed and then you had to move on. Pamela spotted a man in a dinner jacket who appeared to be some sort of master of ceremonies. She was so afraid that this person, who looked to her like a Latin star of thirties movies, might come up to her, take her by the hand, and lead her to the man of his choice, that she took the plunge herself.

The old formula that he couldn't kill her came to her aid and

she boldly marched up to a man of about fifty who looked quiet and shy. In spite of his downcast eyes, she said, "Hello. I'm Pam." She had never called herself that before, though others did, and she cringed a little as she said it. "This is my first time here. What's your name?" 113

When the entry phone bell rang, of course she thought it was Andrew forgetting or losing his key. No, she didn't really think it was. She hoped, that was all. Breathless, she opened the door. Heather and Edmund stood there.

"Now I'm not living here I didn't like to use my key. We've come for more of my clothes.You look awful. What's wrong?" "You must both come in," Ismay said. "I was supposed to be mother-sitting for Pamela but Mum's taken her tablet so she's okay. I couldn't face it." She hesitated. "Andrew won't be here. I haven't seen or heard from him for ten days."

"Where is he? What's happened?"

"Nothing's happened to him, if that's what you mean. It's not something that's happened to him that's stopping him. I've

phoned his chambers. Lots of times. I was desperate. They just say he's in a meeting. That's what they always say."

"Oh, Issy. Oh, darling." Heather put her arms around Ismay and held her close. "I'm so sorry. What can we do? We'll do anything."

"Of course we will," Edmund said.

"There isn't anything." She had been dry-eyed, but now she sobbed and the tears poured down her face. "I love him so much. I've never been in love with anyone before."

"D'you want me to stay here with you? We could both stay here with you."

Edmund read it all in Ismay's anguished face. It was the two of them, in her estimation, or more likely him, who had driven Andrew away. Suppose he reappeared tonight and they were back again?

"Or just me," said Heather, intuiting the same thing. "Better not." Ismay scrubbed at her eyes with tissues. "I'm better alone. I'll have to get used to being alone, won't I?" 114

"I'll phone you tomorrow."

"I suppose he's with his new woman now." "You don't know that, Issy."

"It's either that or that he's dumped me because he didn't like having you two around. Is that likely? Would he do that if he loved me?"

Carrying the two suitcases into which Heather had packed

her clothes, Edmund and she walked back toward the tube station. "We don't seem to be anyone's favorite people," Edmund

said. "Your sister doesn't want us and my mother doesn't. We are like orphans of the storm or babes in the wood."

"We want each other," said Heather, "and that's what matters."

"Do you know, I used to see couples kissing in the street and

I thought, how wonderful to do that, how I'd like to do that, and now I can." He suited the action to the word. She clung to him, kissing him with passion. "In two weeks we'll be married. Tomorrow we'll go and buy a wedding ring."

She stepped away from him and smiled. "I shall like that. I

like the things they say when they know we're soon to be married, the jokes and all that. I want to hear them call me Mrs. Litton." He laughed. "You're an old-fashioned girl."

"D'you think it's true Andrew's found another woman?" That was when he made up his mind to tell her. "I know he has."

The house in Chudleigh Hill was in deep darkness, though it was only just after nine. It had been that way every evening since Heather had come to stay there with Edmund. Irene had taken to going to bed very early and when she went to bed she turned off all 115

the lights. Edmund asked her why and she said she couldn't bear to see him go up to his room "with that girl." And he should remember she'd be an invalid by now if she hadn't struggled against it. After that, Heather stayed upstairs almost all the time she was there. If they went out—and they mostly did—they went straight upstairs when they returned.

Because he had always done this and long before he met

Heather, Edmund put on the hall light, which he turned off from the top of the stairs. His mother was never asleep and always called out, "Is that you, Edmund?" as if a burglar would let himself in with a key, put a light on, and walk upstairs talking in whispers to his female companion. Edmund invariably called out, "Good

night, Mother," as he switched off the light. Irene never called out, "Is that you, Heather?" So far she had never called Heather by her Christian name or spoken a word to her on the rare occasions she and Edmund were downstairs together.

They went into Edmund's room, which by now was taking

on the look of a bedsitter. It was large and comfortable, with a big bed and built-in cupboards and its own bathroom. Edmund had added two armchairs and a table and a desk, a bookcase, and a standard lamp. Neat, methodical Heather would normally have emptied her suitcases and put the contents away. Instead she sat down in one of the armchairs and said, "But you don't actually know Andrew's seeing this girl?"

"Do you think anyone could see us together and not know we're lovers? It's in the look. He was looking at her like that." "Maybe she was a one-night stand."

"Then why hasn't he come back to Ismay, all contrite and telling her of his undying love?"

"I'm sure you're right," Heather said. "I just don't want you to be. When I shared the flat with Issy I used to see them together 116

and think they were the perfect lovers, the way a couple ought to be, the way I thought I'd love to be—and never would."

"Why not?" Edmund sat on the arm of her chair and put his arm around her. "Why on earth not?"

"I don't know. Well, I do. I just thought a happy life with

someone I loved wouldn't ever be possible for me. It sounds silly, I know. But never mind me. What can we do for Issy, Ed?" "Nothing. No one can do anything. Two hundred years ago I could have called him out and had a duel with him on Primrose Hill, and a hundred years ago I could have horsewhipped him. If I did something like that now I'd spend five years in jail."

"Yes," said Heather thoughtfully. "Yes, you would." She smiled up at him. "We're the perfect lovers now, aren't we? The way a couple ought to be. Let's go to bed."

"Yes, please," said Edmund. 117

Chapter Ten

There was a place in the Strand he regularly went to for his lunch. Not always but at least twice a week. If I go there every day at lunchtime, Ismay thought, he'll come in one day. With a friend perhaps or with several people. It will be humiliating and horrible, embarrassing for him and worse for me, but he will have to speak

to me, he will have to tell me. Terrible though it will be, can anything be worse than now? Won't anything be better than what I

suffer now? And is there any other way I can find him?

She had phoned him at work until it was pointless to try anymore. Seb Miller, the man he shared a flat with, had told her at

first, repeatedly, that Andrew wasn't there; then, when she persevered, that he "seemed to have moved out." Seb was kind and reassuring but she hadn't believed him. He had moved out only in the

way a man sometimes does; because he is spending nights elsewhere and with a new woman. His flat was in Fulham, the area

estate agents call "Chelsea borders," picturesque but unsafe after 118

dark, the lawless precinct of muggers and car thieves and hunters whose prey was mobile phones. It was a long way from Clapham and her job in Regent Street. She had been there only two or three times and always with Andrew. She went there, searching for him, before she tried Brief Lives.

It hadn't occurred to her that she would be so frightened. She

had thought her longing for him, her anguish at his absence,

would overcome all other emotion, just as it had overcome her dilemma over Heather, Guy, and the tape. It was early evening when she got there, nearly six, the time he would reach home if he were coming home. She waited, walking up and down because keeping still adds to the stress of someone in her situation. The street was shabby, shaded by the same peeling planes, the trees of London, terraces of Victorian houses of grayish stucco with turnings off which looked much the same, the lights dim, without

shops or bus stops or people at this hour. No stranger to London would have believed how high the rents were. She walked up and down, around the block or half around it so that by looking over her shoulder she could keep the house in view. No one was about except the occasional resident who came out and got quickly into

a car. A solitary man on foot spoke to her.

"What are you playing at? I've been watching you. Can't keep still, can you?" She didn't answer but began to walk back the way she had come. "I'm talking to you," he said.

Then she was frightened. The only sanctuary was a phone

box. She went inside it. The door wouldn't close. The phone itself was unusable, the broken receiver hanging by a shredded cable. She stayed there, breathing in short gasps, until she saw the man pass the box and head for the Fulham Road, talking to himself and laughing. After that she resumed her pacing. At nine, when Andrew hadn't come, she went up to the front door and rang his 119

bell. It took immense nerve to do this. As soon as she had done it she was praying no one would answer. A sort of hiss came out of the entry phone and Seb Miller's voice said, "Yes?"

"It's Ismay."

"Oh," he said. "Oh, yes." There was a pause. "He's not here, Ismay."

She felt like a creature people trod underfoot. Something

whose natural habitation is subterranean. "Yes," she said. "I see." "Are you all right?"

"No," she said and walked away to get a bus home.

A point must be reached, she thought, when I shan't care

about humiliation anymore. I shall be so low I can get no lower. That's when I'll wait here all night. Men will come and rob me of my bag and beat me and probably rape me. I'll think I deserve it because I'm so low. He's with that girl now and if I think about that I'll scream out loud.

Next day she tried Brief Lives.

The way to do it was just to go there. Turn up in the clothes

she normally wore for work, a plain black or navy suit, her long black coat over it. She couldn't do it. He had once said he liked a clinging blue knitted dress she had, he liked her best in that. She wore it to go to this grimmest of rendezvous, over it a blond fauxfur jacket. Her haggard face, overly made up, contrasted badly

with the soft pale colors.

Breaking her rule of not drinking at lunchtime, she asked for

a glass of the house wine. She had eaten so little in the past days that it went to her head, increasing the beating of her heart. But still she had another. One o'clock went by, half past, ten to two. He wouldn't come now and she had to go back to work. Dressed the same, she returned to Brief Lives next day. And the next. He never came.

120

She thought, Seb has warned him. Whether he still shared

the flat with him or really had moved out, Seb would have alerted him. And he would have deliberately avoided old haunts, especially those to which in the past he had taken her. If she went to

Fulham, he would get Seb to watch for her, phone him when he

spotted her outside, warn him off. How did he get people to lie for him? Charm, she supposed, the barrister's persuasive tongue. That heart-stopping smile, that authoritative voice. She wasn't the only one tied to him by invisible, unbreakable cords.

Avice Conroy had gone to a Scarlatti recital with Joyce Crosbie, leaving Marion to guard the rabbits. Guard them from what, Marion asked herself. Figaro and Susanna, brother and sister, were

large but lean, Abyssinian cat colors, one of them chocolate, the other pale blond, their coats like thick soft plush. Avice got angry when people called them bunnies. Both had mild brown eyes and little in the way of personality. They hopped about, sometimes leaving currant-like droppings in spite of what their owner said, and sometimes lolloping through the rabbit flap into a large hutch with a window and an exit door, which like a conservatory extended six feet or so into the garden.

Apart from sucking up the currants with a hand-held

dustette, Marion had absolutely nothing to do and this suited her fine. Money for old chicken feed, it was, or rabbit food. In case Avice got wise to the fact that no rabbit-sitter was really needed, she thought she should perhaps invent some hazard or alarming incident she could say had occurred during the rabbits' owner's absence. A firework going off nearby would do—such explosions were no longer confined to Guy Fawkes Day—or even a German shepherd barking next door. Meanwhile she explored the house. 121

Marion brought all the enthusiasm and precision of a

scholarly researcher to investigating other people's desks, drawers, and other private places of concealment, leaving no scrap of paper or even used envelope unturned. Looking for Avice's will, she finally found a copy in, of all unexpected places, a drawer in one of the kitchen cabinets where she kept the brochures of instructions for using the oven, fridge, microwave, hair dryer, and alarm clock radio. The large brown envelope contained not one will but four, each invalidating its predecessor. There were approximately two years between them and the most recent had been made some twenty months earlier. Of course Marions name appeared in none of them. She would have been astonished if it had, considering the shortness of their acquaintance. But it was apparently time, or soon would be, for Avice to make a new one.

The contents of a will shed a good deal of light on the testatrix's circumstances. Who, for instance, would have supposed

Avice to own not only this place but a terrace of houses in Manchester? Or so many Tesco shares? No wonder she could afford to

part with twenty pounds for the unnecessary services of a rabbitminder. The beneficiaries were the Small Mammals' Protection League—Marion, a realist, knew she couldn't shake that

a nephew with an address in Berwickshire and a woman, not apparently a relative, in the Isle of Man. Avice, who was given to making her testamentary dispositions in elaborate language, had left the Isle of Man woman fifty thousand pounds "in fond memory

of our happy schooldays when we first learned of friendship's joys and consolations."

If she'd been at school with Avice, thought Marion, she was

no chicken. Might drop off her perch at any minute. All this required a good deal of careful consideration. She put the will back 122

exactly where she had found it and when Avice came back half an hour later told her she had caught—and killed—a flea which she had found on Figaro's back.

"Oh, dear, how dreadful," said Avice. "I'll have to take him

and his sister to the vet. I didn't actually know rabbits had fleas. But it's half a mile away and taxi drivers won't take them, you know. Afraid they'll spend a penny, which they very seldom do." "I could take them. Well, separately of course. If you'd like to make the appointments. I wouldn't at all mind carrying one of them in a basket half a mile. They're so sweet, it would be a pleasure."

"Would it?" Avice beamed. "I really do need more help with

them than I have. Well, I don't have any. And they deserve the best attention, don't you think?"

"I absolutely do. And by the way, a fox came into the garden

and came quite close up to the windows. I don't think Figaro or Susanna saw it but I couldn't help thinking what might have happened if one of them had been outside. If I was here on a more or less regular basis I could see to things like that."

"Dogs and cats have owners, Marion," said Avice with a friendly laugh, "but rabbits need staff."

Arrangements were made to their mutual satisfaction. Marion was to have a regular job with Avice as rabbit manager but to include a little shopping, limited cooking, and occasionally staying overnight. Giving up her job at the South End Green estate

agents came as a relief. Of course the sum Avice had named was pitifully small, well below the minimum wage, but no worse than what Mrs. Pringle had provided and look what the result of that had been. Marion was never worried by illegality and had reasoned that the perks would almost make up the shortfall.

123

For instance, she would be doing the household shopping and could manage to make Avice's weekly budget include all her own eatables. There were, too, a great many nice things lying about the house, silver ornaments, porcelain and glass, not to mention jewelry. Avice, whose sight was fast deteriorating, would hardly miss them. In a burst of confidence she had told Marion she had diamond rings, which had been her mothers, she could no longer squeeze over her arthritic knuckles. A plan of gradual abstraction must be made.

"It's quite pathetic the way my poor old dad looks forward to

my visits," Marion said in a suitably lugubrious voice. "I really do need to see him three times a week."

Avice had just heard from her managing agent that she would

be permitted to raise the rent of her houses in Manchester, so was in a gracious mood. "So you go. Of course you must see your dear father."

At home, where she now went only to sleep, Marion picked

up the Daily Telegraph, a stained and battered copy which could only have found its way there by means of Fowler. It had plainly been used to wrap a baby's disposable diaper and it was enough to make her decide to have the locks changed forthwith. Just the

same, she glanced at it before going to bed, turning first to the births, marriages, and deaths, as she usually did with newspapers. Halfway down the deaths column was announced the demise of Bernice Maureen Reinhardt in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. Eighty-seven years old, beloved mamma and grandmamma,

greatly mourned by her devoted Morris, Emmanuel, Hephzibah, David, Lewis, and Rachel. Marion had had no idea Mrs. Reinhardt had so many descendants. She had kept them very dark. Surely one of them might have let her know, a great friend like she was left to find out from a newspaper rescued from a waste bin.

124

She put the paper down and went to examine the bottle of morphine sulfate. No use for Mrs. Reinhardt now. Still, the world was full of old ladies and Marion was slow to accept defeat. It was essential to find out if the morphine was tasteless or if it had the kind of taste that would blend unnoticeably with Avice's favorites: tiramisu and tarte tatin. Unlike most women, Marion only felt truly secure when alone in her own flat after dark. There was no possibility then of her doings—seldom entirely above-boardbeing witnessed.

She took the bottle, labeled NOT TO BE TAKEN INTERNALLY,

out of the bathroom cabinet. She was rather frightened of it but she had to find out. Unscrewing the cap broke the seal and she took it off. It was probably colorless but she couldn't tell because the bottle was of brown glass and she had forgotten what it looked like. If she dipped her little finger in and just touched the tip of it on her tongue, would that be dangerous? Could she get hooked? Marion was very reluctant to try. She remembered the hallucinations that had resulted from her mother's regular dosage, troops of white-robed people trailing through the room, haggard faces looming out of mist and receding again. Or would she develop a craving for the stuff, like Fowler for drink and various narcotics?

Gingerly she placed the tip of her finger on the surface of

the liquid and quickly withdrew it. A tiny globule adhered to the skin. She dotted it lightly onto her tongue. It was faintly sweetish, slightly metallic. So might a coin taste if dipped in icing sugar, thought Marion, fancifully for her. It would, she supposed, scarcely affect the flavor of a tiramisu.

She waited rather nervously for an hallucination but after

an hour had passed and none came she reflected that this was far

too soon to think about taking any action in this area yet. The 125

land must be spied out, Avice's financial affairs investigated, what relatives and friends she had and, most significant of all, the situation with those two most precious of Avice's possessions, her

rabbits.

There were things Ismay thought she would never do. At all costs some measure of dignity had to be maintained. Better suffer in silence, be like that girl in the play who never told her love but let concealment like a worm in the bud feed on her damask cheek. Bear the agony but never show it. That was what she thought when there was no suffering and no agony. Now she told herself, if I don't find him, if I don't speak to him and ask him, I may miss the only chance I have of getting him back. It may be that he is only waiting for me to come to him and say I'm sorry, I should never have let Edmund come here, I should never have shared

with my sister. Was she to humiliate herself like that? What would she care for humiliation if Andrew was back with her?

Try the wine bar in the evening. He sometimes went there after

his day's work was done. On two evenings in succession she went down to Brief Lives and waited for him just inside a passage that led into one of the Inns of Court. It was a narrow winding passage such as might have figured in a novel of Dickens but lit at intervals by modern lamps attached to its walls. She stood between two of these lamps, away from direct light, and waited for him to come.

Apart from a man who passed her very close by and said "What're you doing later, sweetheart?" she was undisturbed. He didn't appear and she went home after two hours, disconsolate. Had he not only deserted her but all his old haunts as well? She was no longer on the edge of hysteria, her heart pounding, her mouth dry, but empty now, cold, despairing. The next night she 126

was in the alley a little earlier. It was April but very cold and she huddled inside the sheepskin coat which had been Andrew's present at Christmas the year before.

It was just after six when he came, but not alone. He was one

of a crowd of young men, all laughing and making wisecracks,

who went into the bar together. She had thought that simply

seeing him would cause her to cry out, even fling herself upon

him, but the reality was different. She shrank against the cold

brick wall of the passage. He was a very long time in there. They served food, she remembered him saying. Perhaps he had stayed to eat his dinner there. People came out of Brief Lives and fewer and fewer went in. The City died at night. The West End might throb with noisy life, be filled with loitering crowds who made fast walking impossible, but here there would soon be solitude and silence.

Then, when she felt she had spent her whole life in this Dickensian passage, when she was frozen with numb hands and feet,

when it was almost nine, he came out. Alone. He began to walk

rapidly in the direction of Waterloo Bridge.

She followed him. The sight of him, even the back of him,

had a curious effect on her. Few people were about, but it was as if there were none, that he and she were the only living creatures in the world, that he would walk and she would follow him, at this same distance apart, forever. He would never turn, she would never call out, she would never see his face again, hear his voice. They would be like that pair of lovers she remembered reading about at university—were they called Paolo and Francesca?doomed to drift forever in the void, blown by the winds. But they had been together, eternally embraced. Ismay thought she

wouldnt mind the wild winds and the darkness and loneliness if she were with Andrew, in his arms, for always.

The idea was so wonderful and so painful that, as he crossed 127

the street into the Aldwych and she followed him, she could no longer resist and called out to him on a passionate anguished note, "Andrew!"

He either didn't hear or didn't want to, though she thought

she detected a sudden stiffening of his shoulders, a momentary faltering of his step. She called again, "Andrew!"

On the pavement outside the doors to a restaurant he turned

and looked at her, unsmiling. He stood staring like someone who

knows immediate escape is impossible. Here, not very far from Brief Lives, the streets were no longer unfrequented. People were everywhere, waiting at traffic lights to cross the road, entering bars and

spilling out of them, and two couples, hand-in-hand and arminarm, passed between him and her. For a moment he was invisible

and she thought, he will go, he will get away from me.... But when

the couples had gone into the restaurant he was still there, standing

with his head bent and his arms hanging relaxed, the picture of exasperated patience, as if he had given up the struggle. She approached

him, no longer afraid, no longer trembling, only aware that she had caught him, she had him in her net. He stepped back under an awning, his back against a plate-glass window. She went close up to him, said on a thin high strangled voice, "What has happened to us?" And then when he didn't answer, "What have I done?"

He had such a beautiful speaking voice. After this man's voice all other men's voices were harsh or high-pitched or cockney or provincial or vulgar. He said, "It's not what you've done, Ismay. I've told you often enough, but you took no notice."

"I don't understand."

"I think you do. You brought those people into our home and though I told you repeatedly that I couldn't stand it, you absolutely refused to tell them to go."

128

"But my own sister..." she stammered, almost unable to believe what she heard.

"I don't really see that it makes a difference whether it was

your sister or somebody else. That male nurse wasn't your sister. I'm afraid, Ismay, that the plain truth is that I got tired of waiting for you to do something about it. Let's say I knew you never would. No doubt you cared for them more than for me. That's reasonable, I understand that. So I—made myself scarce."

She didn't know why the scream of horror just inside her

head failed to make its way out into the shiny dark and bright of the Aldwych. It was a calm voice she spoke in. "Have you got someone else?"

It was at that moment that the girl appeared. She came out of

the taxi that had stopped just behind where Ismay stood and which Andrew had been staring at while he spoke. Not perhaps as tall as

she seemed to be owing to the height of her heels, she was recognizably Ismay's own type, but an exaggeration of that type, slimmer,

fairer, whiter, more attenuated, her features those of an elfin creature in a fairy-tale illustration. A fur stole wrapped around her, she came up to Andrew, laid a hand on his arm, and put her face close to his. Always able to rise to the occasion, he said, "Eva, may I introduce Ismay Sealand? Ismay, this is Eva Simber."

"Hello," said Eva Simber.

"Is she your girlfriend?" Ismay wouldn't look at her.

"I suppose that describes our relationship," said Andrew.

"Yes, that's about it." The girl gave a nervous giggle. "And now, if you'll excuse us, we're about to eat."

Ismay was past dignity, past face-saving. "And that is to be it? We part like that? After two years together?"

"Better than making a scene, isn't it?" 129

She would have made a scene. The crowds wouldn't have mattered. The girl and what she thought would have mattered not at

all. But at that moment a group of people, close together, talking at the tops of their voices, pushed their way between them, leaving Andrew and the girl on one side, Ismay on the other. When they had passed she was alone and the other two were inside the restaurant. She stumbled away, afraid she would fall, but clinging now to

an upright, a bus stop or parking notice. A woman on her own said to her, "Are you all right?"

Ismay nodded, unable to speak. She summoned up enough

voice to ask a taxi driver to take her home to Clapham and, huddled on the backseat, gave way to tears and then to bitter sobbing. Though making it a principle not to use the key to Ismay's flat but always to ring the bell, Edmund had tried the bell push, tried it repeatedly, and on the doorstep, tried calling her on his mobile before letting himself in. He had come back for the remaining possessions Heather had left behind. She herself was spending the evening with his mother as part of their campaign to make Irene like her prospective daughter-in-law.

Always neat and methodical, Heather had left the things she wanted in three tidy stacks on the bed in her old bedroom. Edmund was packing them into the suitcase he had brought when

he heard a key in the lock and Ismay come in.

He remembered how she usually danced in, threw her things down, bounced into a chair to relax. The sounds he could hear were those of a very old woman, returning home with heavy bags from a shopping trip. She didn't fall but he thought he heard her drop down onto the floor. He went quickly out of the room, call130

ing out so that she shouldn't be frightened, "Ismay, it's me, it's Edmund."

She was prone on the floor, her face turned away from him. He knelt down beside her. "What is it?"

Instead of answering, she said in a muffled voice crying had made hoarse, "I want to die."

"Andrew? What has he said to you? Ismay, turn over, please. Look at me."

"Leave me alone. I want to die."

"You can't stay there," he said, and more firmly, the nurse taking charge, "Get up. Tell me what's happened. Come on, get up." She did, turning to him a face that frightened him, it was so ugly with grief and pain and terror. He had never found her attractive—she was too fey, too slight and delicate, her features too childlike for his taste—but he could tell many men would.

Hers was the fashion-model type, impossibly slender with thistledown hair and bush-baby eyes. All that was gone. As she staggered

to her feet, fell onto the sofa, he saw that she was skeletal,

her face that old woman's whose stumbling he had heard. She had become her own mother. He sat down beside her and took her in his arms.

For a few moments she let him hold her. Then she moved

away, put her head in her hands, her fingertips pressed deeply into the skin. When she took them away and shook back her hair, she seemed a little restored. Without waiting to be asked again, she told him about the evening she had spent.

"He said it was my fault, Edmund. That he'd gone, I mean.

He said I preferred having you and Heather here to him. And then this girl came."

Edmund resisted the impulse to ask if she was thin and fair 131

and wearing very high heels. Why let Ismay know her story wasn't a surprise to him?

"I don't think she knew about me. It doesn't matter anyway. She's called Eva something. I don't know. It's a name you give to lions."

"Sheba?" hazarded Edmund.

"Simba, I think. That doesn't matter either. What am I going to do? What can I do? I can't live without him."

Six months earlier, Edmund would have thought this declared intention, common to discarded lovers, an absurd exaggeration which in fact amounted to very little. But now, about to be married,

he asked himself if he could live without Heather and thought

that if it wouldn't be utterly impossible it would be dreadful and its extent perhaps not imaginable. The very heart of loneliness, the depths of despair.

"She came up to him," Ismay said, crying again. "She touched him. On the arm. I thought I'd die. I wish I had. Oh, I wish I had."

"You can't be alone here. Not the state you're in. I'll call Heather. We'll both stay here with you."

Unhappy at the prospect of spending hours alone with her prospective daughter-in-law, Irene had summoned Marion to "join us for supper." She arrived early, bearing her usual gifts she had made herself, in this case chocolate fudge. Calling on Mr. Hussein an hour earlier, in the belief than an elderly Moslem gentleman would be at a loose end at six in the evening, she had found him having a patriarchal orange juice with three younger

men around the ebony table. One of them let her in. He was enormous, a good foot taller than Marion, with luxuriant black hair

132

and beard. She had never liked very tall men. They intimidated her. The other two were smaller but not much. The three of them with Mr. Hussein filled up the little room and there was nowhere for Marion to sit.

"May I introduce my sons?" Mr. Hussein indicated one after another with a wave of the hand. "Khwaja, Mir, and Zafar. This is Miss Melrose."

"Melville," said Marion, who for some reason had supposed him childless.

Accustomed to women standing about while they sat, none

of the Hussein men got up to give her a seat. Marion didn't care. She eyed them and while she was wondering if one of them might be single or between marriages, their father began telling the tale of how she had given him ham for Christmas, including the detail of how he carried it to the kitchen on the end of a kebab skewer. This was the first Marion knew that in doing so she had committed a solecism. Khwaja, Mir, and Zafar all laughed uproariously

and Mir (who had also shuddered) slapped Mr. Hussein on the back.

"My dad's a real comedian," he said, not looking at Marion. "He ought to be on the telly."

"I have had my offers," said Mr. Hussein mysteriously, and then to Marion, "You can see yourself out, can't you?"

She would never go there again, Marion was thinking as she

sipped Irene's Bristol Cream. There was someone she wouldn't

waste her morphine on. What would be the use when he was so palsy-walsy with those sons of his? Heather came down at twentyfive to eight.

"I think you've met," Irene said.

"Briefly," said Marion, and Heather said, "Hello, Marion. How are you?"

133

"People who make that inquiry," Irene said in a conversational tone, "don't expect a truthful answer, do they? They should,

of course. Otherwise there's no point in asking. But no, they expect to be told that you're fine even if you're at death's door." When Heather could find nothing to say, Marion remarked

that true though this was, Irene must never forget that not everyone was as clever as she was. Irene favored her with a smile and a deprecating shake of the head.

"I do actually try to answer that inquiry truthfully. I believe

in speaking the truth, you see. When I'm asked how I am—and

I'm usually unwell—I see no point in lying about it." To Heather she said, "I won't offer you sherry. I know you young people haven't any time for it." Ignoring Marion's affronted look at being thus excluded from youthfulness, she told an anecdote to illustrate her point. "Imagine, my sister and her husband went to a restaurant the other evening, and when they asked for sherry, the staff

not much more than teenagers actually—had never heard of it." "Perhaps I could have a glass of wine," said Heather, having noticed an opened bottle of Sauvignon.

Her expression that of a woman who has never before been

asked for drink or food by a guest, Irene said, "Oh, of course. Help yourself. You're practically one of the family now, aren't you? Well, in a way," she added.

Marion giggled, rather in the manner of the Hussein

brothers. "I suppose you're a sort of common-law wife. Can you describe yourself like that if you're filling in a form?"

"There's no such thing as a common-law wife." Heather had picked up this piece of information from Andrew. "You're either a wife or you're not."

"And you're not?"

"Not until next Saturday," said Heather. 134

"You're getting married?"

"I thought Irene might have told you."

This was the first time she had called her future mother-in-law

by her Christian name and the first time the marriage had been discussed, though Edmund had told his mother a week earlier. Irene

looked displeased at the familiarity but realized she could hardly protest. In silence she served their first course, carrot and coriander soup. The bread was Poilane at five pounds for half a loaf, as Irene told her guests. Heather was prevented from praising it by the ringing—or playing of a well-known phrase of Vivaldi—of a mobile. Heather fished the phone out of her bag and was about to answer it when Irene said, "Oh, really, not when we're eating, please? Thus Edmund was treated to the well-known tones of his

mother saying penetratingly, "It's quite appalling the way some people can't be separated from a phone for five minutes."

"Are you all right?" he said.

Heather said to Irene and Marion, "Excuse me. I won't be long," and carried the mobile into a corner of the room. "I'm fine.What's wrong?"

He told her.

"Of course we must both stay with her."

"She won't have it," Edmund says. "She—I don't want to say

it over the phone. I'm on the bus. She's got sleeping pills and she's taken one. No, it's okay, I've taken the rest away. She'll just sleep all night. I'll be home in—well, half an hour."

Irene had put their main course on the table. "I suppose that was my son?"

"He's at my sister's. He went to fetch the rest of my clothes." "If he had to phone, why on earth couldn't he phone here on my phone?"

Tired of parrying Irene's questions, Heather said, "I don't 135

know. He just didn't." She fell back on what she thought must be a sure-fire mollifier. "This is very good."

It was hard to tell if Irene was pleased or not. "Praise from

that quarter," she said to Marion, "is praise indeed. She's a professional cook, you know. Well, in a hospital, not a restaurant."

"She'll put us all to shame, then."

Marion's remark went down badly. Irene frowned at Heather

as if she had made it. They had pears in red wine. Heather ate in silence, was offered no more wine, while Irene and Marion talked about Avice Conroy and Marion's job.

"You are an amanuensis," Irene was saying when Edmund's key was heard in the lock.

He came into the room, said, "Hello, Mother," and to

Heather in the sort of tone that is warmer than an endearment, "Hello." To Marion he nodded. Irene immediately asked him if he had had any dinner.

"It doesn't matter," he said.

"But of course it matters. You mustn't miss meals because

of..." Because of what wasn't specified, but it was plain she meant this omission was Heather's fault. "I'll get you something at once. Chicken? Soup first? Or some of Marion's delicious fudge?" "I don't want anything, thank you, Mother. If you've finished, Heather, shall we go upstairs?"

"She hasn't had coffee," said Irene. "I was going to offer her a glass of dessert wine. I know how fond of wine she is." Heather got up, said, "Thank you for having me," like a

guest at a children's party. They went upstairs. In their bedroom she sat down on the bed, her hands clutched together in her lap. "What's the matter? You're not letting her get to you, are you?" Heather made no answer. "Have you ever read less of the d'Urbervilles?"

136

"I saw the film. I'm not much of a reader. Nor are you,

though. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, I don't know." She did know, he thought, but didn't want to say. "I had to read it when I was at school. Not for O levels, it was before that. I was nearly fourteen."

Puzzled, Edmund said, "Did you enjoy it?"

"When you don't read much, things you do read stick in your mind. But it doesn't matter. I'm going to bed. Are you coming?" For the first time since he had met her he sensed in her an absence of trust. It seemed to him that perfect confidence had existed between them but did so no longer. She hadn't lied, but she had hidden the truth, and for a little while—only a very little while, he hoped, only this evening—she had separated herself from him.

137

Chapter Eleven

The man who had talked to her at speed dating had so humiliated her that she considered giving the whole thing up. He was the

third one she had spoken to. He attracted her not at all, but he was there, standing alone with a glass in his hand, and she approached him because all the others had paired off. Once more she introduced herself as Pam and he said his name was Keith. The tone he

used when he said it was dry and condescending as if she hardly had a right to ask him.

"Have you ever been to speed dating before?" It had been her opening gambit at the two previous encounters.

He didn't reply. He looked her up and down. "Bit over the

hill for this sort of thing, aren't you? What makes someone like you want to come here?"

She felt herself blush shamefully. "I'm fifty-six. How old are you?"

"It's different for men, isn't it?" he said. "A man of fifty-six 138

isn't old. He's in the prime of life. Whereas a woman ... " He left the sentence unfinished, looked about him. "Time to move on to the next lucky lady," he said and walked off.

She hadn't moved on to the next lucky man but had gone

home. Beatrix was sitting where she had left her, lightly and slowly wringing her hands. Pamela poured herself a triple gin with a very small amount of tonic in it. The words the man called Keith had used to her rang in her ears. It was as if an actual voice were inside her head repeating what he had said.

She would have to give up the whole business. After all, she'd

been doing it for three years now, off and on, there'd been monthlong gaps, but she'd always gone back to it. Yet she'd never met

anyone who remotely set her pulse racing or lifted up her heart or made her say, "Oh, yes, yes." There had never been anyone who seemed to think in the way she did or want to do the same things as she did or read the same books or like the same kind of music. On the other hand, none of them had been rude to her or insulted

her until now. With most of them things had never reached the point of lovemaking. Of those who had, she totted up the sorry total of four who had been impotent—two of whom said their impotence was her fault—three who had behaved while making love in such a brief rough way as to make ludicrous that decorous term, and one who had wanted to chain her to an exercise bicycle and paint her body with tomato soup.

She had often told herself what she wanted. A man of about

her own age (her advanced age), not especially handsome but attractive to her, a good conversationalist, funny, clever, fond of the theater, someone who would take her out and spend the night with her, occasionally take her away for a weekend, be a best friend. Oh, and that phrase she was embarrassed to use even to herself: "a good lover." Was that impossible to ask? Apparently. So 139

she might as well give up and look ahead to the barren desert of real old age.

Until she read about "romance walking" in the evening paper.

You signed up for romance walking first by filling in a form on the Internet. Pamela studied it with foreboding. You were asked for your date of birth, eye color, hair color, and if not exactly your weight, whether you were slim, well-built, or overweight. Surely no one would admit, publicly, on a website, to being fat. If she were fat as against being a bit overweight she would stop now and give up the struggle as she had thought of doing so many times before.

The romance walkers met in a pub. The group Pamela was scheduled to join were to meet at the Eagle and Child in a village

near Epping, accessible only by car or by taxi from Blake Hall station. Not many Central Line tube trains went to Blake Hall and

she had to wait more than half an hour for one to take her there.

The Eagle and Child was just about within walking distance but

not really when you would be walking the romance itinerary for several hours. She had to wait again for a taxi, most being out already, taking romance walkers to the pub. She sat outside the station worrying about her sister whom she had left on her own, having watched her carefully to see she took her pill. Either Ismay or Heather would have sat with Beatrix or at least looked in on her several times but Pamela felt she couldn't ask them. Not with Heather's wedding the next day.

A thin drizzle had begun to fall. If she had any sense, Pamela thought, she would use her return ticket now and go back to London. But the taxi came, the driver showing no surprise at being asked to drive her to the Eagle and Child. A group of ten people, five men and five women, were inside eating sandwiches and drinking lager and Diet Coke. For a moment Pamela wondered why five of each and then realized one of the women must

140

be the guide or organizer. The one pointedly looking at her watch before she smiled and introduced Pamela to the others.

They were all, Pamela thought, between fifty and sixty years

old. All looked fit and energetic. In a kind of embarrassed panic she hoped didn't show, she thought she was by far the heaviest of the women. All were wearing jeans or fashionably cut trousers, she alone a skirt. She felt far from hungry. She felt a little sick but still she had a sandwich and drank some water.

"Time to pair you up," the organizer said. "Now, Marilyn,

you've been chatting to Bill here, so I think that means you enjoy each other's company. Off you go then. Got your maps? Remember you have to be back here by four sharp."

A very thin woman and the shortest and fattest man set off

rather sheepishly. Their departure left two nondescript men; a tall, thin, bent man; and an equally tall dark man with a beard. Easily the most attractive, Pamela thought. The remaining women seemed older, one completely white-haired, another heavily made up, the third with very obvious false teeth she flashed a lot. She was paired off in brisk fashion with the tall bent man and neither looked very pleased about it.

The organizer cast her eyes over the remaining six. Pamela

was sure she disliked her for being a little late and not apologizing. She expected the nondescript balding man to be allotted to her and waited with a sinking heart.

"Now Pamela or Pam as I expect you prefer to be called, I've seen your eye on Ivan here, so why don't you two get together." No doubt there had been times when Pamela had suffered

worse embarrassment, but she couldn't remember any. She got to her feet, the blush burning her face.

"Got your maps? Back here by four, please."

Pamela thought, if only he would smile. Show he doesn't 141

hate the idea of spending two hours with me. But perhaps he does, perhaps ...

"Come on," he said, and then, "Cheer up."

He stood back to let her pass ahead of him through the doorway. The rain had stopped. Green countryside and woodland stretched before them. "I was hoping it would be you, Pam," he said as they took a footpath skirting a meadow and a hedge. "The others were such a bunch of dogs. I couldn't believe it."

In the excitement of being preferred, she forgot she didn't like men who called women dogs or being called Pam. In a moment he'd ask her to tell him about herself.

"Let me tell you about myself, Pam," he said.

They were married, quietly and quickly, Heather not daring even

to glance at her sister until it was over. But Ismay remained dryeyed, though she didn't smile much. A hire car was there to take

them all to the restaurant in Marylebone High Street Irene had insisted on. Arriving, Edmund expected to find his mother there

and perhaps Heather's aunt Pamela. Both were there, uneasily eyeing each other, but so were Joyce and Duncan Crosbie, Barry

Fenix from next door in Chudleigh Hill, and Avice Conroy. Marion

Melville would no doubt have been there too, Edmund

remarked afterward to Heather, if she hadn't been looking after Avice's rabbits. He was white with anger, but there was nothing to be done but take their seats and be pleasant. Congratulations were bellowed or murmured by all the guests, who indicated the wedding presents they had brought and stacked on a separate table thoughtfully provided by the management.

Edmund didn't kiss his mother. He managed to smile at her and thank her for the bulkiest-looking present, as yet unopened, 142

and the very ugly string ofjet beads she had made for Heather. Under the table he took Heather's hand and squeezed it so tightly she gave a little whimper. He whispered, "Sorry," and she whispered back, "I love you," which made everything all right, even

having this bunch at his wedding. Champagne was served. He had to admit his mother had done them proud. Joyce asked him if he and Heather were any nearer getting into their flat and he had to say, not really.

"At the rate we're going it could be late summer." "They're very happy being with me," said Irene in her

loud, commanding tones. "The rooms they have are practically an apartment in themselves. In fact, now they are married I see no reason why they shouldn't stay where they are. Give up this elusive flat. I can always let them have an extra room if they need it." And then Heather surprised—and delighted—him. In her

quiet, measured way she said, "It's kind of you, Irene, to offer us a home with you, but we'll be moving out. We're going to rent a studio flat until we get our own."

It was what he had wanted all along. "Just as soon as I can find somewhere to suit us," he said.

"When you get back from your honeymoon, is that it?" Barry Fenix, in a white Nehru jacket and rather tight trousers, uttered these words in an arch and rather lubricious way, as if there were essentially something naughty about such a vacation.

"We shan't be having a honeymoon," Edmund said. "Not

yet. Not when we're not sure where we'll be living." He smiled at Heather, looking into her eyes. "As soon as we're settled we'll go somewhere wonderful. Somewhere on the other side of the world," he added as if he'd have liked to be in this paradise at present.

"India," said Barry. "That's the place. Kerala or Goa." 143

"The Seychelles." "Or Tahiti."

"Patagonia is the new place," said Avice, who had never been west of Cornwall or east of Innsbruck.

"We'll see," said Edmund and, announcing that there would

be no speeches, with Heather's hand covering his own, proceeded to cut the cake a waiter had carried in to strains of the Wedding

March from Lohengrin.

Ismay, who had eaten very little, nibbled at her slice of cake.

She was thinking, inevitably, of Andrew, if roles could be reversed and she Heather and Andrew Edmund. This was quite a nice restaurant. They might have had their reception (or whatever you called it) here. But realistically he would probably want somewhere like Le Gavroche. Now he would be there with Eva Simber. Tears welled up in her eyes and, excusing herself, she got up to go to the ladies'. There she was, weeping quietly into the embossed and scented tissues the restaurant provided, when Heather found her. "Oh, Issy, what is it? No, I know. It's still Andrew, isn't it?"

"Not 'still.' It's always. It's always going to be Andrew. Imagine if you were me and it were Edmund who'd left you."

A shadow seemed to pass across Heather's face, but she said nothing and hugged Ismay. After a while they went back to the party. Everyone could see Ismay had been crying. Her eyes were red and her makeup was smeared and blotchy, causing Avice to remark to Joyce on the way home that she thought Heather's sister was supposed to be so good-looking. The people around the table pretended nothing had happened except for Irene, who asked in an old-fashioned ward-sister's kind of voice, "Is something wrong?" No one answered. Heather turned to her and said, "Edmund

and I want to thank you for doing this for us. It's been lovely. And now we'd like to open our presents."

144

Their taxi stuffed full of bed linen, a breakfast set, an electric mixer, an espresso coffee maker, and Irene's gift of a microwave, Heather and Edmund were driven home to Chudleigh Hill.

"We ought to have brought your mother with us," Heather said. "There's room in the taxi."

"Creep," said Edmund, kissing her. "It's better than being enemies, isn't it?"

"Oh, much. Did you mean that about moving out?"

"Of course. We'll start looking tomorrow—if you still want to." When they heard Irene go out, taken to the cinema and a meal by Joyce and Duncan, they came cautiously downstairs as if they were children entering a forbidden room. "Or as if we think she hasn't really gone out," said Edmund, "or got Duncan to drop her off by the back entrance."

In the hall Heather stood still and looked up at him as if she had a very daring question to ask. "Could we not go out, Ed? Could we eat something here? Would you mind?"

"I wouldn't mind a bit, but I insist on the champagne. Back upstairs then?"

"I'd like to stay here for a few minutes. Well, half an hour. As long as it takes."

Heather walked into Irene's living room and took off her

coat. She kept it over her arm as if she were afraid that to drape it over a chair would leave some trace of it behind for her mother-inlaw to discover.

"Here, give me that," Edmund said and took the coat out into the hall.

When he came back Heather was standing in front of the bookcase. "I can't find it," she said. "I suppose she hasn't got it." 145

"What are you looking for?"

"That book I told you about, less of the d'Urbervilles." "Why? Do you want to read it again?"

She didn't answer. "Sit down," she said. "Sit opposite me." "I'll sit beside you."

"No. Sit opposite me. You see, you might sit next to me and

then move away. And that would be the worst thing in the world." "Heather," he said, "what is this? What's going on? D'you

think we could go upstairs again and have our champagne? This is our wedding day."

She nodded slowly, her lips pursed, as if she were thinking of something that must be done and done now, this evening, something she would love to put off but could no longer avoid. "This

book," she said, "less of the d'Urbervilles, it's about a poor girl who's had an affair with a rich man who seduced her. Well, he raped her, really. And she falls in love with man called Angel Clare—can you imagine a man called Angel?—and they get married. And on the night after their wedding—like ours tonight

he confesses to her about some lover he's had, and she thinks it's all right for her to confess about her past to him, but it's not. He

won't forgive her and he leaves her. That night." Edmund didn't laugh, but he felt like laughing. "Darling

Heather," he said, "when was this? A hundred and fifty years ago? What do people care about that sort of thing now? They're proud of it. That nurse at the hospice, what's her name, Rebecca, was going about the other day doing a sort of survey as to which of the girls had slept with the most men. Besides," he added, "we've already told each other about our lovers—and we wouldn't make a very good showing on Rebecca's list."

"That's not what I want to tell you about," Heather said, her face more serious than he had ever seen it. "You see, Angel says 146

whatever it is she has to tell him it will be all right. It doesn't matter. But when she does tell him it matters. Do you see what I'm

getting at?"

"Whatever it is," said Edmund, leaning toward her and taking her hand, "it will be all right."

"Will it? Will it?" Suddenly she jumped up, keeping hold of

his hand, pulling him up with her. "It's not worth telling you. It's too stupid. Let's go out after all. Can we?"

"You can do what you like on your wedding day." 147

Chapter Twelve

The woman next door, whose name was Sharon, was walking around the garden with her sister, holding her arm, nodding and murmuring "Yes" and "If you say so," while Beatrix moaned that nations shall see their dead bodies three days and shall not suffer them to be put into graves. Beatrix shouted when she saw Pamela and asked her if she had eaten up the little book she had seen in the angel's hand and was it sweet in her mouth but bitter in her belly? Sharon looked very disgruntled. Pamela tried to explain that Beatrix had swallowed her pill that morning the way she had been for the past week and that this was an unexpected departure.

"I don't know about that," Sharon said. "I found her wandering in the street shouting all that rubbish about dead bodies and whatever."

Later, reaching under a chest of drawers for Ivan Roiter's

card, which she had dropped on the floor, Pamela felt, glued to the underside of the bottom shelf, a series of uneven lumps. She

148

crouched down and peered. There were ten of them and they were chewing gum, each one containing a whitish capsule. All the lumps were rock hard except one which was still spongy. There was no mystery now about the street wandering and the declaiming.

Now she would have to decide whether, without cruelty, she could ban chewing gum altogether. Wouldn't Beatrix just find some other way to avoid swallowing her capsule? She was quiet now. The spongy lump of gum must have been yesterday's, not todays, for Pamela had stood over her, watching the movement of her throat as the capsule and the water went down. But still she dared not leave her.

Would she be able to do so for long enough to go out with

Ivan Roiter ever again? One day. Maybe next week when she had

got Beatrix back into her ideal regimen of taking a pill every day.

She looked at the card. On it, under his name, was the single word "Actuary." That meant they should have something in common, though on their walk they hadn't discussed any aspects of accountancy or the solving of monetary problems. It was a good address

printed on the lower right-hand corner of the card, a flat in a street in Putney. The insurance company he worked for was in the City in Fetter Lane.

She hadn't a card with her to give him but he had written

down her phone number. They had walked along one of the rides on the outer rim of Epping Forest and he had bought her a cup of tea. Having had to hurry with her lunch, she would have liked at least a biscuit, but when the waitress came Ivan said, "Nothing to eat, thanks," in the sort of tone that seems to imply that eating between meals is unwise. He was straight-backed and thin, which she found attractive, as she did his strong features, white teeth, and intensely blue eyes. Whether he was attracted to her was hard 149

to tell, though if he wasn't she hardly supposed he would have asked for her phone number.

He talked about himself a lot and she noticed, she couldn't

help noticing, that whenever she said "I think" or "I feel" or "I like" he smiled politely and quickly brought the conversation back to himself. It was rather as if he allowed her a requisite time to speak of her own concerns—say one minute—and then returned to his. And he did complain a great deal. Not about her of course. Of her he only said he'd like to see her again. It was the state of society he grumbled about, the incidence of petty crime, rudeness and lack of respect, asylum seekers, and beneficiaries of income support.

But I do find him attractive, she said to herself wistfully, and

he seems to like me. After all, I'm not going to marry him. I only want someone to be with sometimes.

The contents of the kitchen drawer (among the oven and freezer operating instructions) having already been explored and the relevant parts of Avice's last will committed to memory, Marion now

turned her attention to other possible hiding places. Avice had gone out at eleven and would hardly be back before four even if Joyce and Duncan Crosbie brought her home. With that excitement which is almost sexual, dizzying, palpitating, Marion set

about searching desks, cabinets, and drawers.

Figaro and Susanna were left behind. They had never learned

how to climb stairs. Their presence in the room, lolloping aimlessly, was strangely disquieting. It seemed to her that they

watched her at her clandestine tasks. Though they understood nothing, they were aware of what she was doing. Their mild brown eyes rested blankly on her when she took letters out of 150

envelopes, glanced at invoices, examined forms. Avice, whose anthropomorphism was excessive, often remarked that if her pets could talk they would have some amazing tales to tell.

Her search yielded only one useful piece of information. After leaving no drawer unopened and no cupboard door untouched,

she had found just one letter of interest. The postcard from one of the will beneficiaries and the letter from the other told her merely that the weather in the Isle of Man had been "horrendous" and the nephew's wife was expecting a baby in July. Marion was interested only in the letter from Mr. Karkashvili, Avice's solicitor. In it he accepted her invitation to lunch followed by will altering at a date in May. Nothing in the short letter mentioned the details of any new provisions Avice might be making, only that she would be doing so. Marion restored it to its envelope, idly wondering, as she often did in this situation, if paper took fingerprints.

Downstairs, the rabbits having lost interest and disappeared through their flap, Marion made herself lunch with a gin and tonic to precede it and a glass of wine as accompaniment. The result was that she fell asleep, but she was a light sleeper, as such people often are, and was roused to full wakefulness by the sound

of Duncan Crosbie's car. It wouldn't have been in Marion's nature to be found reclining on a sofa, bleary-eyed, so when Avice walked in she was prancing about plumping up cushions, putting rabbit pellets and greenery into dishes, and running to refill water bowls. "How did the wedding go?"

"Well, of course, we weren't actually at the wedding. It was a nice lunch, but it might have been just any lunch, if you know what I mean. Edmund wouldn't have any speeches. How are Figaro and Susanna?"

"Out having a lovely time in the sunshine," said Marion fondly.

151

While she was dozing a wonderful idea had come to her. Not

only was it brilliant, but it was practical too and foolproof. She was so pleased with it that she longed to put it to Avice straightaway but she stopped herself. This must be subdy handled. She would wait for Avice to raise the subject first. Not Marion's plan, of course, that would be too much of a coincidence, but the general matter of her will, perhaps by mentioning Mr Karkashvili's projected visit. Getting to speak to Andrew, which had been so difficult for Ismay, Heather found easy. She left a message on his land line and, to her surprise, he called her back. But she wasn't desperate, she wasn't in love with him. He didn't use her Christian name. No one could be

as icy as Andrew, his tone more distant than if he had been talking to a stranger.

"What can I do for you?"

Go back to my sister. "I wanted to tell you that—well, Issy's very unhappy. I thought that if you felt bad about her, but you felt—well, that she wouldn't have you back, if you felt awkward about it, I want you to know that she would. She loves you. She would have you back."

She had never before spoken to him at such length. A nearsilence had always been observed between them and now he was

silent. For so long that she thought he had replaced the receiver and was on the point of putting hers down when he said, "I can't do that. It's over."

In a small sad voice Heather said, "Are you with Eva now?" "That's not your business, but if you mean is she with me at

this moment, no. If on the other hand you mean is she my girlfriend, yes. Absolutely. Considering you and your swain were the

cause of my leaving, I think this is a piece of impertinence." 152

"That's not true!" Heather spoke so loudly that Edmund heard her before he came into the room. She shouted, "It had nothing to do with us and you know it!"

She put down the receiver and turned to him a flushed face. "Don't tell me not to get in a state. Don't tell me he isn't worth it." "I wasn't going to," said Edmund, laughing. "But you could forget him and let me know what you think of the flat."

Heather took several deep breaths. After a moment she said,

"It's a much classier area than we had in mind. I mean, it's practically Belgravia."

"It's Victoria, it's over a shop and it's very small."

"Five hundred pounds a month, Ed. That's quite a lot of money."

"With luck we won't be there long."

"With luck," said Heather. "You say there's a park near to it?" "Well, it's near the park, St. James's Park, no less."

"It means we'll have to put off our honeymoon even longer." "I know. We'll have to have our honeymoon in Victoria Station."

His mother remained very still when he told her. She looked

like a character in a myth or fairy story in which people are turned to stone, petrified where they sit. Irene had been threading beads

onto a string and now she sat with her needle poised between forefinger and thumb, the half-completed necklace held in the other

hand an inch or two from her lap. Gradually she turned on him her Hecuba face, desolate from the loss of husband, children, and power.

He said, though she hadn't spoken, "I'm only going to live a couple of miles away."

"It isn't the distance," she said, speaking slowly and deliberately. "It's the callous indifference to my feelings. After I offered

153

you the chance to live here for good. I suppose she put you up to it."

"On the contrary, it was originally my idea."

"At your wedding," Irene said as if he hadn't spoken, "I said

to you to give up the flat, to stay here. I made you a distinct and, most people would say, very generous offer. And this is how you treat it. I'm not proud, Edmund, and I am forgiving. I'll go further. I'll have half this house converted into a self-contained home

for you and—your wife." Her temporary surge of affection for Heather had already died. "Even though she isn't the woman I would have chosen for you, I'll do it. Whatever anyone could accuse me of, it isn't selfishness."

"No, Mother, no one's accusing you of anything. I'm to

blame. I've decided to go and I'm going." Remembering that the woman his mother would have chosen for him was Marion Melville, he added, "It will be fine. You must be our first guest." Her hands started to move as she thrust the needle through

the hole in the next bead. She looked at the work, not at him. "You seem to forget that I'm not strong. You always have. I don't know how many times I've told you that it's only because I don't

give in to it, I don't let it take me over, that I'm not totally incapacitated. But the fact remains that I couldn't possibly make it to

Victoria. That is out of the question."

"We will come and see you here. We'll come regularly. We aren't deserting you."

Depressed, Edmund was learning that when you have been

afraid of someone for years, under her thumb, and deceiving yourself that you give in to her only for a quiet life, once you begin to

assert yourself it's a start, not a constant. From time to time you go right back to where you began. You get tired, you yield, and you shrink. You never really get over it, for you have been formed and 154

molded into this shape over the long years. A few months, a single year, of showing strength and asserting himself wasn't enough to rise above the subservience of years. He would just have to keep on struggling.

Heather now said to him, "I know you don't want to talk

about it, but if I can't get anywhere with Andrew, why shouldn't I try Eva herself?"

Fowler had done his best to be law abiding. He had sat on Marion's doorstep for four hours, waiting for her to come home, and had only moved into the back when a woman from farther down Lithos Road told him that if he stayed there she was calling the police. The back regions next door were neat and pretty, but these were squalid, a yard of broken concrete slabs, a garden in which weeds had grown up through the piles of builders' junk left there a dozen years earlier. Fowler, settling himself on the steps that led down to a long-disused privy, thought he had never seen such gigantic weeds, some of them surely ten feet tall and with the leaves you see on exotic house plants, the kind of thing you expected in a rain forest but not in London NW6.

Marion had had her locks changed. Fowler was genuinely

upset to find his sister would go to such lengths to keep him out. A tear or two had trickled down his cheeks when he discovered that the key he had had cut no longer fitted. But he had waited long enough. Where was she? Was it possible she had found a boyfriend and wouldn't return all night? This was a novel idea Fowler rather liked. The boyfriend would have a home of his own, Marion

might move in and his long-held dream of living here be realized. Meanwhile, he was very hungry. What money he had he had spent on skunk and not very good skunk at that. Its effects had 155

worn off even before he reached Lithos Road. He longed for a drink or two or three. The sun had set long since and it was starting to get dark. She was his last hope. Next to a water butt in

which the larvae of mosquitoes cavorted on the scummy surface, a short flight of steps led down to the basement area. Fowler went down and took stock of available means of ingress. The back door had four panes of glass in it. It also had bolts top and bottom. Regretfully he turned to the only window down here, the one in Marion's bedroom. Breaking it would let the cold in. It might be May but the nights were very chilly, not even frost free. Still, she should have thought of that before she changed the locks. Needs must when the devil drives. Fowler unwound the scarf he wore,

very long and of red wool never washed in its twenty years of existence, wrapped it several times around his right hand and arm,

and gave the window a hard punch. He was in Marion's bedroom, cut and scratched but not seriously, five minutes later.

The bed looked as if it hadn't been slept in for a week. Fowler couldn't have said how he could tell but he was sure of it. He went upstairs, found to his satisfaction that she had acquired a new bottle of gin, not Bombay Sapphire but nearly as good, and poured himself a liberal measure. That was better. On his last visit the fridge had been half full. This time there was nothing in it and the door was left open for it to defrost.

He addressed himself as he often did: "What are we going to do about that, Fowler?"

Some inner adviser told him to look in cupboards and sure enough there was plenty of food in cans. He made himself a supper of a tinned steak pie, which he heated in the microwave, artichoke hearts, bean sprouts, and reconstituted dried potato. It was ten o'clock. He put his dishes in the sink and went back downstairs with his third gin and there, feeling virtuous, he swept 156

up the broken glass into a dustpan. The temperature had fallen about fifteen degrees and the room was icy. If he was going to sleep in there he had better do something about the window. He

patched it with sheets of newspaper, which he secured with tape, and after watching a television program about a lot of fat people going on holiday to Miami, went to bed in Marion's clean sheets. After the best night's sleep he had had for years—he seldom slept in so comfortable a bed—he got up at midday. It took him ages to find keys to the new lock, but he did in the end, five of them on a plastic keyholder hidden in a drawer where Marion

kept her jewelry. Fowler thought it base to steal a woman's jewelry, so he left it where it was and took just one of the keys. The chances were she wouldn't remember whether there had been five or

only four.

An occasionally sentimental man, he mused for a while, as he

ate eggs and baked beans, on his childhood with Marion, how loving she had been, how fond of him. One particular incident came

back to him when he remembered her saying to a lady their mother knew, "This is my little brother. I do love him lots." A tear fell onto the glistening surface of one of the fried eggs. In case she came back before he returned tonight he ought to leave her something to make up for breaking that window.

Fowler fished about in the ancient drawstring bag he had

found on a skip a few weeks earlier, and came out with a pedometer discarded in a bin in South Molton Street and a flagon of

cologne. The cologne had been used up but its container was very pretty, an ornament in itself. Marion didn't care too much for ornaments, she said they were just more things that needed dusting. Why waste this one on her? Fowler had found a bottle in the

back of her bathroom cabinet with a label on it that immediately

put out inviting signals. He decanted the contents into the 157

cologne flagon, having first taken a sip. Just what no doctor would order. Now to fetch his backpack and see if he had something with which to effect a substitution.

The first time Marion stayed in her house overnight, Avice went nervously to bed, disliking the idea of someone who was almost a stranger sleeping in the next room. In all the forty years she had lived there only her friend Deirdre, domiciled in the Isle of Man, had slept there and then not often. There must have been something unacceptable to rabbits about Deirdre, for Figaro and

Susanna had stayed in the garden all the time she was there. They accepted Marion. Only too well, as she noticed next day when Marion told her they let her stroke them and fondle their long

ears. Avice felt a spasm ofjealousy. How could they, after all she'd done for them? But it proved Marion was a suitable person to look after them and, by extension, a suitable person to occupy that spare room. Moreover, she got up at six, opened the rabbit flap, and swept up any scattering of little black droppings that might have accumulated during the night. By the time Avice came down, Figaro and Susanna had been fed and their water bowls filled.

For the next two nights Marion went back to her own home, returning with presents, two fleecy paw-printed towels and a bag of salad leaves from the farmers' market in the Finchley Road. Rarely given to demonstrations of affection, Avice kissed her on the cheek and listened with unusual patience to Marion's tale of how her flat had been broken into and her bed slept in while she was away. Marion knew very well that Fowler was the culprit and that it was Fowlers blood all over her clean sheets. No doubt he had cut himself while breaking her window, but she wasn't going to tell Avice all that, only that a break-in had taken place. She 158

didn't want her new employer thinking she came from a family of criminals, but she liked her to believe her rabbit carer suffered her own misfortunes.

She stayed that night and the next, angry with Fowler and

not at all sure he might not be back in Lithos Road even now. In spite of having an unusually good memory, she couldn't remember if, when she changed the locks, she had been given five new keys or six. In a decimal system five seemed the more likely number, one for her to keep in her bag and four extras in the drawer. But six was half a dozen and an even number and somehow more the kind of number a locksmith would prefer. She just didn't know. Four remained in the drawer and she had one in her handbag. But had there been five in the drawer and had Fowler taken one? Or only four in the drawer all along? It was no good, she couldn't remember. She could phone the locksmith and ask, but explaining would

be too embarrassing. She could have the locks changed again. But no, not again.

Marion couldn't get to sleep. No matter how often she

wielded the dustette, the currants reappeared. If her brilliant idea worked, they needn't think she'd observe the condition. Those two would be off to a fur farm within days. And on the subject of her will, why hadn't Avice said anything about Mr. Karkashvili's visit? Perhaps she, Marion, would have to start the ball rolling.

The trouble with Avice was that she wasn't—well—communicative. She talked a lot about rabbits, the many she had kept in

her long life, but very little about her past, any friends she might have had or her family. Marion had known Mrs. Pringle for only a year but by the time she left she knew all about her children and

the late Mr. Pringle, all the houses she had lived in, Mr. Pringle's business dealings, the cars he had possessed, and the various holidays they had been on together. Avice had television, but she

U9

didn't watch it much. She listened to the radio and she read paperback novels, which she brought back to the house in batches of six

or eight from West End bookshops. When she was reading with rabbits hopping about around her feet, she didn't like being talked to. She appeared extremely fond of silence.

Marion began to list in her mind the kind of openings Avice

could make which would give the ball its initial push. Any reference to her declining health, for instance (if it was declining), to

her advanced age, to wills, to intestacy, to funerals (other people's of course, not her own), to rabbits' longevity, to Fur and Feather magazine, to inheritance tax or to those exempt from it, and to solicitors. Marion waited. She pranced off home, scuttled back, shopped for Avice, fed the rabbits and swept up after them, sat watching them while Avice went in the tube to Hatchards to buy books and Waitrose to buy fish, and nothing was said by Avice about any of the subjects on the list. And then, one day in

the middle of May, a letter came for her with an Isle of Man postmark.

Reading it, Avice broke her silence to speak on the only subject that would have loosened her tongue at that hour of the morning. "My old friend Deirdre has died. This is from her cousin. Imagine—isn't that sad?—she's left behind her lovely cat and the cousin doesn't want it. Have you ever heard anything so callous?"

The leap of something in her chest, that breathless jumping, followed by brief lightheadedness, which always came to Marion

at times of excitement, made her momentarily dizzy. These symptoms also raised her voice a few decibels. Squeaking a little, she

said, "Couldn't you take the cat?"

"Oh, no. Good heavens, no. Poor sweet thing, but how would it react to Figaro and Susanna?"

160

Eat them, thought Marion. Her voice restored to normal,

Marion said, "Was your friend—er, well off? I mean, was she comfortable?"

"Fairly, I suppose," said Avice with the condescension of someone who owns a street of houses in Manchester. "She had her savings. Why?"

Marion drew a deep breath. "What your friend really ought

to have done," she said, "was leave some of her money to—well, to someone on condition they took care of the cat after she passed away."

Avice raised her eyebrows. She hardly seemed as gripped by the suggestion as Marion had hoped. But give her time. The idea had been planted and needed a while to germinate.

"If Deirdre had intended to do such a thing, who would this 'someone' have been? Not me. I wouldn't have been interested. And obviously not the cousin."

Bugger Deirdre, thought Marion. Let's talk about you. "No

doubt there'd be difficulties, but nothing that couldn't be got over." "This 'someone' might renege on her undertaking and turn

the poor cat out or even, unthinkable as it is, have him or her put to sleep."

Marion felt herself blushing. This had been exactly her own thought when she broached the subject. "Oh, well, it was just an idea," she said.

Still, Avice would think about it now, Marion thought.

She wouldn't be able to help herself. And she'd know she must make up her mind in the next two weeks before Mr. Karkashvili came. Ismay had almost forgotten the existence of the tape. She had ceased to care what had happened that day in August when Guy 161

drowned. If she thought about it, it was to wonder why she had so involved herself in that whole business. It was nothing to do with her. She had been living in a dream world, a fantasy place where she imagined she could have told a man his girlfriend had killed someone. Reality was now, this cold unhappy region where she was alone, a solitary forsaken woman.

Looking along the shelf for an old Emmylou Harris tape, she

found Rainy Season Ragas and put it in her handbag. Next time she went out she would throw it away. She would dispose of it—out

of her life and out of danger of falling into the wrong hands, any hands. Most evenings now she spent upstairs with Pamela and Beatrix. Occasionally she went over to see Edmund and Heather, but, although they made her welcome, she always felt she was intruding on their private bliss and that if they could be completely honest about it—of course they couldn't—they would prefer

her not to come. After all, what was she but the specter at the feast, the mourner at the wedding party?

Pamela always seemed pleased to have her company, doleful though it was. As for Beatrix, she was either glued to her radio or making her biblical comments about man-faced horses with women's hair and stings in their tails in a quiet wavering voice. Ismay sat down beside her mother and picked up the Evening StandardVamehi had been out to fetch. The lead story was about a

man who had been attacking young girls in west London. Solely for the sake of the alliteration, it seemed, he had been given the absurd name of the West End Werewolf. So far, though an attempt had been made to strangle one of them, no girl had been seriously harmed. Ismay wasn't much interested. She turned the page, then another and another, and saw Andrew's face.

"And they had a king over them," said Beatrix gently and

with a knowing smile, "which is the angel of the bottomless pit." 162

He was in what looked like a club and next to him was Eva Simber. Both were smiling, but at each other, not the camera. Rather than simply happy, they looked involved with each other, as if they shared a secret no one but the two of them would ever know. Andrew held a cigarette in his left hand. The other rested against Eva's long slender neck and seemed to be caressing it. Ismay found she could read no more than the first words of the caption, "Socialite Eva Simber" ... The print blurred and became a jumble, an obscure foreign language.

"Are you all right?" asked Pamela.

She couldn't bear the thought of discussing that picture. Pamela would be sympathetic, indignant, kind, but still she couldn't bear it. "I'm fine," she said.

Pamela began talking about the romance walking. "I've met this man. His name is Ivan Roiter and he reminds me a bit of Michael."

"Is that a good thing?" Ismay made herself recall that Michael Fenster was the man Pamela was living with, was engaged to, at the time of Guy's death. "Do you want to be reminded of him?" Pamela flushed deeply. "I loved him, you know. Perhaps I'm

only saying that Michael was my type and so is Ivan. But, there. He hasn't asked me out yet. I may never hear from him again. If he does I must admit I don't look forward to telling him about Beatrix. About me living with her, I mean." Pamela thought, but not

aloud, of the two or three men who had been put off from the start by what one of them had called "your crazy sister." "I always find it hard to believe she went this way just because Guy died."

"Yes, well, I suppose she was in love with him." More than

that Ismay wasn't going to explain. She didn't care. She cared about nothing but Andrew, Andrew's absence from her life and presence in Eva Simber's. She said it again: "She was in love with 163

him," and the simple utterance of that phrase, words which inevitably carry a charge of emotion, brought the tears rushing to her eyes almost without warning, rush and spill over on a sob. She turned her face into the chair cushion and wept.

"Oh, darling," Pamela cried. "I'm so sorry, so very very sorry. Was it something I said?"

"Oh, no, oh, no. I'm always—always on the edge of tears.

The least little thing. I didn't want you to see.... Have you

looked at the paper yet?"

Pamela took it and looked at the photograph of Andrew with

Eva Simber. She put her arm around Ismay and held her niece's wet face against her shoulder. "Darling, darling ... "

Helping herself in a slow methodical way from a box of chocolates, her ear pressed to the radio, Beatrix took absolutely no notice of her daughter's tears. As far as she was concerned, there might have been no tears, no words spoken, no pain. After a while she shut the lid of the box, pushed the radio away, and closed her eyes. The handbag slid off her lap onto the floor.

164

Chapter Thirteen

The previous day's Evening Standard had described her as a socialite. Eva knew what the word meant—she was a frequent reader of Hello! and OK! magazines—but she would have preferred to have been described simply as "lovely" or "captivating." She dropped the paper on the floor and got ready for

her run.

The term "jogging" was unacceptable to Eva. It sounded like

a heavy-footed animal, a hippo perhaps, or just a big person with thick ankles and a stomach. Others might jog; she ran—on light feet in Ruco Line silver sneakers and very short shorts and a T-shirt as white as snow. Eva had a number of white and pale-colored T-shirts which, instead of washing, she had dry-cleaned and which she threw away after the third wearing. Around St. James's Park she ran each morning except Thursdays. On Thursdays she went swimming in the morning and to yoga in the afternoon.

Eva had never had a job or earned anything. She had no need 165

to. When she came home from her Swiss finishing school her

father handed over to her a portfolio of reliable but fairly adventurous stock and bought her the flat, which was the ground and

first floors of a house in a street that ran parallel with the Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was very kind of Daddy, of course, but a pity it was in Pimlico. The only place to live really was Mayfair or, just possibly, Notting Hill, the Kensington end and well away from the route of the Carnival.

The diaphanous scraps she wore, see-through shifts, transparent drapery with hemlines to the middle of her slender white

thighs, revealed the shape of the body beneath, milk-white as a marble statue. Eva's hair was no darker than barley stems, reaching to the middle of her narrow straight back, and she was as attenuated as a twelve-year-old, with tiny breasts and a stalk for a waist.

She might have been a child star playing Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. When she went running she braided her hair, not into two but six plaits so that afterward, when she undid them, her hair was crinkled from crown to tip like a Spanish infanta's. It framed her small flying-fox face in a pale golden mist.

Running around St. James's Park, she followed the same

route each day. If she had diverged from this itinerary she would have been afraid of getting lost. Although she lived in London and considered nowhere else in the British Isles a possible place to live, she knew only Bond Street and a few streets in Knightsbridge.

When she ran, a bottle of pure spring water was all she carried. She paid no attention to the trees or flowers, scarcely noticed Buckingham Palace ahead of her; and if anyone had asked her if you could

see the London Eye from the bridge or if there were really pelicans, she couldn't have answered. The contents of her mind occupied her, whether she would have time for a pedicure as well as a facial later in the day, how little she could manage to eat when she had 166

lunch with Mummy at Fortnum's, and why they wouldn't let her have True, her Labrador, with her in London.

It was nearly nine when she returned to her car, the smart

Mercedes Daddy had given her for Christmas, which she had left

in Birdcage Walk. A parking ticket was on the windscreen. Daddy had said he would pay her parking fines, but he had been difficult about it lately, she had so many. Still, she soon forgot it. After all, it was only a ticket. She never took parking offenses seriously unless her tire was actually clamped.

She was back in the flat, unweaving the braids, when the

phone rang. Andrew, probably. She let it ring twelve times. Keeping men in suspense was her policy. Eva always answered it with

her name, which she thought distinguished. "Eva Simber."

The voice was a woman's. Strange because the only woman

who rang on the land line was Mummy. "My name is Heather Litton. You won't have heard of me. You don't know me."

"No, I don't," said Eva. "Look, I've just come in from my run and I need a shower. What do you want?"

"My sister is called Ismay. Ismay Sealand. You'll have heard of her."

Cautious now, Eva said in a way the Swiss finishing school would have deplored, "So what?"

"You're going out with Andrew Campbell-Sedge, aren't you?

No, I know you are. He was Ismay's boyfriend. They were practically engaged."

When she paused, Eva said, "So?" "Are you in love with him?"

"Am I what?"

"I can't do this on the phone," said Heather Litton. "Could we meet? I'd really like to talk to you."

167

"Talk about what? I don't know you. I don't know what you want."

"I want you to give him up."

"You're mad," said Eva. "I'm going to put the phone down. Good-bye."

Not as sophisticated and detached as she liked people to

think, Eva felt rather shaken. When Andrew phoned should she tell him? Should she even break her rule and phone him? Pinning her newly crinkled hair on top of her head, she stepped into the

shower. She had long ago mastered the art of so twisting and contorting her body as to stand under the very hot cascade without

wetting her head. You looked so ghastly in a shower cap even when there was no one to see you.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to phone Andrew and tell

him or perhaps it would be better not to. Or should she tell

Daddy? Daddy would tell her simply to forget it. He would treat this development the way he treated all her concerns and those of her mother and her sister. "Women's nonsense," he called them.

Or "a storm in a vodka breezer," which he thought very funny. He wanted her to marry Andrew. It would be what he, in his incredibly outdated way, would call a "good match." Money should ally itself with money, in his view, and Andrew was the sort of person who would one day be on the Queen's Bench. Some other fine day, because he was made of the right material, he might become Lord Chancellor or, if this office no longer existed, Attorney General. Eva didn't care. She didn't want to marry anyone but just have a good time with a lot of men and get her picture in the papers.

She dialed one-four-seven-one, proud of herself for remembering it; she was told that she had been called at nine thirty-one

that morning and was given the caller's number. She wrote it down, more to convince herself that she really was grown-up and 168

efficient than for any use it would be. The last person she wanted to speak to was that woman.

Arranging their portable possessions in the two rooms over the shop in Rochester Row, Heather and Edmund had it all done by eight. They sat down side by side with mugs of tea on the table in front of them and Heather told him about the phone call she had made. "I'm determined to get to speak to her, Ed. I thought I

could do some running myself. We really ought to take some exercise, you know, you and I. We don't have any. I thought I could

run around St. James's Park. She'd just come in from her run when I phoned, so I think she goes out at seven-thirty, and where she lives it's bound to be St. James's Park."

"What are you going to say to her?"

"Don't look like that. I'm going to be nice. I thought I could

find out how serious she is about Andrew and if she's not, if it's just a bit of fun, I'm going to get her to give him up."

"Why should she?"

"I don't know why, Ed, but I think I would if someone asked me the way I asked her and if I didn't love the man. Nothing would have made me give you up. Anyway, no one asked me. I wouldn't have if they had. But that's because I love you." After Edmund had finished kissing her and whispering that

they ought to go to bed now, she said, "I'm going to appeal to her

better nature. I'm going to tell her she's very beautiful—her picture's in the Evening Standard and she is—I'm going to say, you could have anyone, so please give him up for my sister's sake." "You've no guarantee he'd go back to Ismay or she'd take

him back."

"She would," said Heather. 169

"I'm doing my run," Eva said in the indignant tone someone might use to say she had an appointment with the Queen. "I can't just stop in the middle."

"Five minutes," the woman said. "We could sit on this seat for five minutes."

"You're the one who called me!"

"That's right. You wouldn't talk on the phone so I came to find you here. Please sit down for a minute."

Eva, who was dressed in a pink satin jumpsuit, sat down reluctantly, first brushing fastidiously at the seat. This interruption of her morning workout she considered a great nuisance. The woman beside her belonged in a category she deeply disapproved

of. It puzzled her that any girl in her twenties could set foot outdoors without eye makeup. And to have short fingernails that had

never had the attention of a manicurist! She noticed the wedding ring on the left hand. Someone must have married her, but surely no one Eva would have looked at twice. Only the very uncharitable would have called her overweight but she'd never get into a

size ten again, if she ever had. Nice hair or it would be if she had it properly cut. Having summed up Heather Litton, Eva let her eyes come to rest on the woman's knees in what were probably Gap jeans and said, "Well? What is it?"

Instead of an answer she got a question. "Did you tell Andrew about my phone call?"

"What's that to you?"

"I'd just like to know if you told him."

Eva shrugged. "No. No, I didn't. I thought it was all too stupid. I mean, asking me to give up my boyfriend just because of someone else he's got tired of. Why tell him?"

170

"It doesn't matter. Do you love him?" "That's not your business."

"Okay, it's not. None of it's exactly my business. It's yours and

my sister's and Andrew's. I'm interfering, I know, but I think I've got good reason." Heather was looking at her with deep earnestness and Eva recognized sincerity in her blue eyes. "But if you love him," she went on, "if you mean to stay with him and maybe marry him—well, I'd understand. I love my husband and no one could make me give him up. He's the great love of my life. But if it's just a fun thing, if you fancy him and it's sex and whatever and nothing more, couldn't you give him up and find someone else?"

"Quite a speech," said Eva.

Heather went on as if Eva hadn't spoken. "He was with my

sister for two years and I think they'd have stayed together, maybe for always, if you hadn't come along. You met him at that Christmas party at his parents', didn't you?"

"What if I did?"

"I know you did. That's when he started—leaving Ismay.

That was the beginning of it. It's not a very long time. You could give him up now and it wouldn't be much of a split. You've known him less than six months." Heather looked into her face and Eva

was very conscious of her superiority in looks over the other

woman. "I'm pleading with you, Eva. He doesn't mean all that to you, does he? He means the world to my sister. Her heart is breaking. When he went he took away everything that made life worth

living for her. He'd go back to her if you weren't there."

Eva got to her feet, shaking her head vigorously. "I won't give

him up. I don't want to." She was aware she sounded like a petulant child but she didn't care. "If he knew he'd think I was mad.

No one does that sort of thing. No one gives up a man because someone she doesn't know asks her to. It's crazy."

171

"You could be the first."

Eva began to run. She called back over her shoulder, "Don't

follow me. I don't want to see you again." Inspired to utter the worst insult she could think of, she added, "You're such a bore."

If Ismay could have heard Heather's words she would have agreed with them entirely. Of course she would take Andrew back. She loved him. Nothing could change that. Eva Simber couldn't love him, not yet. She had only known him six months, if that. Ismay forgot that she had fallen in love with Andrew at first sight, the

first moment she saw him across that crowded room—like in the song. As Heather had done, she found Eva's address in the phone book and looked up Sark Street, SW1, in her London atlas. Unlike Heather, she had no clear idea of what she would say to Eva Simber or even if she would go so far as to speak to her at all. Perhaps

she would simply note where she lived, walk about a bit to catch a glimpse of her if she came home or went out. It was also possible, she thought miserably, that she might see Andrew. That would be terrible, but it would be glorious as well.

Once her idea had taken shape she was unable to rest until she had put it into practice.

Now her ally, Pamela was the only person she discussed this with and she advised her strongly against it. "What good will it do? You'll only make yourself more unhappy."

"I couldn't be more unhappy."

"Then better stay the way you are. If she sees you she'll despise you and if he does he'll just be exasperated. People don't like being chased. It doesn't take much for them to call it harassment."

"You know something, Pam? I don't care. I just don't care." The next evening she had a reception she was organizing for a 172

client. It was in Westminster and it ended at eight-thirty. The

night was fine, still light at nine, and she decided to walk, to take

the Horseferry Road and cross Vincent Square. The place was

quiet and there was little traffic, Maunsel Street a garden of spring flowers and the grass in the square as green as a parakeet. Tears gathered behind her eyes and flowed silently down her cheeks. She had nothing to wipe them away with but the backs of her hands. I shall be "all tears," she thought, I shall turn to stone like that

woman whose children all died. The woman was in classical mythology, but she couldn't remember her name or what had happened to her.

Emerging into the Vauxhall Bridge Road, tales of the West

End Werewolf came into her mind. The girl he had tried to

strangle had described him: young, not very tall, brown hair, clean-shaven. Thousands of men fitted that description. Anyway, he attacked at night and, though after nine, it was still light. The only people about were a couple of middle-aged Asian men, a young girl on her own walking fast, and a woman with a child in a buggy. She crossed the road and found Sark Street around the back of Pimlico tube station.

Eva's flat was the top of a narrow white-brick terraced house

with steps and pillars. Lights were on in every window upstairs. Ismay marched daringly up the steps to the two bells and read Eva's name. She thought, I could ring the bell and fetch her down and talk to her. I could show her my tears. She held her forefinger, quivering with fear, an inch from the bell and then she lost her nerve and retreated down the steps. Eva wouldn't be at home, anyway. Girls like Eva never were at home in the evenings, seldom before three in the morning. The lights meant nothing.

Ismay went back to the Vauxhall Bridge Road, found a small humble cafe, occupied by two couples, two men, and a solitary girl 173

like herself, and bought herself a filter coffee. She sat over her coffee for a long time while it grew dark outside. Brightly lit red double-deckers went past. A fire engine roared and howled on its way to the Embankment. She had had nothing to eat at the reception and quite a lot to drink. She bought herself a stale Danish

pastry and a chocolate bar. Then she walked back to Sark Street where not a soul was about and Eva's lights were still on, unchanged from when she had last seen them.

There was no point in staying. There had never been any

point in coming. Torturing herself, she imagined Andrew dancing with Eva in some dimly lit place where the music was soft. Andrew was a good dancer, especially at the tango. She walked back to Pimlico station and got into a tube to Brixton.

It was far more crowded than she had expected and she had

no hope of a seat. She got out at Stockwell and found the Northern Line platform densely packed. It was a crush to get onto it at

all. That always meant only one thing: that no Northern Line

train had stopped here for maybe twenty minutes and meanwhile passengers had poured onto the platform from the street and, like her, from the Victoria Line. The public address system emitted its usual incomprehensible announcements, the accent Chinese, the interference with transmission an ear-splitting crackle. Whatever the voice had been saying, a train appeared, clearing perhaps a third of the people who waited. Within a minute or two a mob surged through the entrance, most of them young men, drunk and noisy. Another train came and this time she got on. She was carried on, pushed from behind and jostled on either side, shoved

and pulled, buffeted to stand up against the opposite doors, clinging on for dear life on to one of the uprights.

The train started with a lurch. She reached for her handbag to adjust the strap on to her shoulder. It was gone.

174

Chapter Fourteen

Edmund heard Heather put the receiver down. He was in the living room of their flat, hanging the few paintings he had brought from Chudleigh Hill, polishing the glass and renewing the picture cords, and Heather was in the tiny hallway.

"I could hear you," he said when she came in. "You sounded quite friendly."