A Woman of Our Times
BY ROSIE THOMAS

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the United Kingdom in 1990 by Michael Joseph

Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1990

Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © APR 2014 ISBN: 9780007560646

Version: 2017-07-10

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

One
London, 1985

Harriet looked at her watch.

In less than an hour, the car would come to take her to Heathrow. In a little more than twelve hours she would be in Los Angeles, with Caspar.

For a moment, she let herself think about him. She didn’t expect that he would be waiting for her in the crowd at the barrier. Of course he would not. But there would be another car, and then a suite or an apartment somewhere with a view of the ocean, or the blue on blue geometry of a pool. Caspar would be there, wearing a white shirt, with the beginnings of a tan. He would say something, nothing significant, ‘Baby, are you dead from the flight? Come here to me,’ and the resonance of his voice would make it important. He would put his arms around her.

The television reporter, sitting across the desk with her list of questions ready, saw how Harriet’s face softened and brightened. The electrician noticed it too, and glanced at his lights.

Then Harriet checked her watch again. She was used to apportioning her time and care, and the technicians’ business with lighting and sound levels was taking too much of it.

‘Are you going to need very much longer?’ she asked. ‘The car is coming for me at three.’ The producer’s assistant gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Nearly ready for you now.’

While she waited, Harriet looked at the wide expanse of her office. The producer of documentaries and his PA murmured together on one of the pair of low sofas, while the sound man and the electrician hovered over their metal boxes. The cameraman waited too, behind the cold eye of his lens. It was a bright day outside, but the brighter television lights dimmed the glow of it. They created, within their circle, an artificial atmosphere of intimacy.

The PA stretched her long legs in dark stockings, stood up and came across to the desk. She produced a hand-mirror and gave it to Harriet.

‘Do you want to make a quick check before we begin?’ At the same moment the reporter cleared her throat, sat upright in her chair. Harriet looked dispassionately at her own reflection. Her face, unremarkable, looked the same as always, except that it wore more make-up than usual. She handed back the mirror.

‘That’s fine, if it’s all right for you,’ she said politely.

‘Ready to go,’ the sound man announced with one finger pressed to his headphones. The producer sat forward and his PA held her clipboard like a breastplate.

In the moment before the producer murmured ‘Two, three, and go’ Harriet looked down at her hands, loosely clasped in her lap. The big square diamond in its Thirties platinum setting glittered on her right hand. Harriet wondered fleetingly if she ought to have taken it off for the interview. But then she thought, Rewards. I bought it, I earned it. Why not? She had not taken down the Emma Sergeant portrait of herself from the end wall, nor had she removed the Chinese silk rug from the floor.

Harriet lifted her hands and rested them on the desk. A few inches from her fingertips, on the pale polished wood, lay a cracked and splintered fragment of packing case. It looked like a piece of driftwood that had been battered by the sea before being cast up on a silver beach.

The reporter had been looking at it too. Now the two women lifted their heads and their eyes met. Harriet’s ring shone in the full glare of the lights.

‘… three, two, one …’ counted down the production assistant.

There would be a preamble, of course. Alison Shaw, the reporter, would write it, and record it as a voice-over. To go with her commentary there would be establishing shots of the game, in its resplendent boxes, piled to suitable heights in some suitable store. Perhaps this same crew would film a cash-till in the same store, with a close-up shot of hands passing over money in exchange for Harriet’s box. Then there would be one more establishing shot of the huge peacock’s fantail that was the company logo, on the wall of the reception area outside her office, before the cut to Harriet herself. Harriet, sitting behind her big desk in her Jasper Conran suit, her anxiety about missing her flight to Los Angeles and Caspar entirely masked.

Now the viewer would know that she was a one-woman success story, a girl who had seen an idea and had run with it, taking her own company from a table-top in a borrowed flat to a stock market launch, and winning business and export awards on the way. The programme was one in a series called Success Story. Harriet Peacock, newly declared Entrepreneur of the Year, had been an obvious choice for it.

‘Looking in from the outside, the Peacocks’ success story seems to have an almost fairy-tale quality,’ Alison Shaw began. ‘A game, quite a simple if ingenious game, is launched on an already overcrowded market in the face of cautionary advice and financial problems. It catches the imagination of the public overnight, and becomes a bestseller. Within a year it has sold in hundreds of thousands, within two years its parent company is beginning to diversify into other games, with apparent success, and within three it is thriving, publicly quoted, and one of the darlings of the investors and the financial press. Harriet Peacock, how has all this been achieved?’

Harriet laughed, warmly and quite naturally. She answered, ‘Less easily than you make it sound.’

At the beginning, when she was just starting out and the sharp-nosed reporters had come with their questions, she had been a less confident interviewee. She had been hungry for any crumb of publicity – anything that would help Peacocks, her company, her baby. But she had also been defensive, and defensiveness made her awkward. Now she was on familiar ground. She had fielded all the questions before, in different interviews, and she was ready for them.

‘The first, the only really important thing, was that I knew the game was good. I felt it, I felt the hairs rise at the nape of my neck whenever I looked at it. Because I believed so strongly in it I was ready to risk everything for it. Any entrepreneur will tell you that is the spark that lights the fuse. Belief, and more than belief. Certainty.’

Out of shot, Alison Shaw was nodding, making little rolling gestures with her hand. More, tell us some more. Fully practised, Harriet swept on.

‘I also believe that you can regard life as a game of chance. You can play it like that, letting the currents carry you, or you can wait for the right current and then paddle furiously with it, as I did when I recognised the potential of the game. Someone said you can reach the same conclusion in life by more or less circuitous paths, by going straight for what you want or by hoping to be swept there. There’s a direct route and an indirect route, and the game itself is a metaphor for that.’

It was Simon who had said it, a long time ago. Harriet’s direct gaze wavered.

The hand-waving had continued, now it stopped. If they were good programme-makers, Harriet thought to distract herself, they would cut away from her to the game board, and the coloured balls rolling.

Taking the straight path, or going the long way round.

Alison Shaw said, ‘Could you define “paddling furiously”? What exactly did you do, after the prickle at the nape of the neck?’

Harriet was on firm ground again. She had described the steps she had taken in setting up her business often enough in other interviews. She went through them fluently, counting them off like beads on a string.

Alison nodded, letting her talk, occasionally prompting her, working through the questions on her list. Harriet had discussed some of them with the programme’s researcher, others were unexpected. Alison was a good interviewer, it went smoothly.

The producer began to make tentative wind-up signals. Harriet was pleased. A useful job had been done for Peacocks, she would easily make her flight.

The last question came.

‘There’s a poignant story behind this particular success story. Harriet, you didn’t devise the game yourself, that’s fairly widely known. As a postscript, could you tell us something of its history?’

Harriet caught her breath. She became suddenly acutely aware of the radio mike clipped to her lapel, of the faces of the technicians watching her, of spools of tape that would be imprinted with the sound of her own voice. Out of shot, Alison looked at her watch. Harriet knew they could only want another two or three minutes from her. It would not be the first time she had talked about Simon. She thought, if only it could have been.

‘The game was devised by a British army officer who was a prisoner of the Japanese, in Hong Kong, during the Second World War. He built it from scraps of rubbish. He kept it with him for four years, and when he was liberated it was the only thing he owned.’

Harriet’s right hand, with the big ring, reached out to touch the broken wood that lay on her smooth desktop. The cameraman moved to bring it into shot. Harriet remembered the story, much longer and much more painful to recall, that Simon Archer had told her in his cold, comfortless house in the gloomiest quarter of a featureless Midlands town. She could clearly hear his words. She could remember the exact phrases he had used.

She listened to them now, within her head.

When she looked up again, she found it hard to believe that only a second or two had ticked by while the camera’s greedy eye lingered on Simon’s packing case. Evidently Alison had either no wish or no time to probe deeper. The success story had been told, and she was ready to wrap up one more programme.

‘A remarkable testament to one man’s will to survive. As, in a different way, the success of Peacocks is a testament to Harriet Peacock’s skill and determination.’

‘And to that of my staff and suppliers,’ Harriet insisted. She was briefly amused, thinking of the acceptance speech full of the same sentiments that Caspar must make if he won his Oscar. Alison smiled back at her.

‘And now, in true executive style, you’re going direct from here to Heathrow to take a flight to Los Angeles. Is this a business trip, or will you have time to go to the Academy Awards?’

Harriet’s expression changed. Her response was chilly. ‘My trip to Los Angeles is a holiday. It was agreed at the outset, wasn’t it, that there would be no questions about my private life?’

Alison made an acquiescent gesture that said, worth a try. They would edit the exchange out, of course.

There were a few more concluding remarks, mutual thanks, and the interview was over. The technicians stuck their thumbs up. ‘Super,’ the producer said.

Harriet looked at her watch once more. The car would arrive in a little under fifteen minutes.

‘If we could just keep you with us a couple of minutes longer, Harriet, while we check we’ve got everything? Noddys now, Alison, OK love?’

The camera would focus on Alison now, for the footage that would be used as cutaways. Harriet waited. Across the room she saw the door silently open and her assistant’s head appear. She mimed, telephone. Harriet shook her head. As far as the rest of the world need know, she was already on her way to Heathrow. But Karen refused to go away. Urgent, she signalled.

Harriet sighed. ‘Excuse me. I have to take a telephone call.’ She circled around her own desk, and went out to Karen’s office. Karen held the receiver out to her.

‘Hello? Harriet Peacock speaking.’

It was Charlie Thimbell. Harriet knew him well. His wife was one of her closest friends.

‘Charlie, is everything OK? Is Jenny all right?’

‘Yeah, nothing like that. Listen, Harriet, I heard a rumour. I thought you’d better know about it.’ Charlie Thimbell was a financial journalist, the City Editor of one of the national dailies.

‘What rumour?’

‘More than a rumour, then. A tip-off. Are you watching your back, Harriet?’

‘You’re talking about a raid, are you? We were at two twenty-five this morning. Steady.’

Charlie said nothing for a moment. Then, very quietly, ‘Are you overstretched?’

Harriet laughed. ‘If we are or if we aren’t, I wouldn’t tell you, Charlie. Which would you put first, me or a good story?’

‘Difficult one, that. Well, I just thought I’d let you know. You might want to think again about making your trip.’

‘I’m going. Caspar’s up for an Oscar, and he deserves to win it. I want to be there when he does.’

‘You’ll be a long way from home.’

Karen had taken another call. She told Harriet, ‘Car’s waiting downstairs.’

Harriet was impatient. The television crew had finished, they were carrying their gear out of her office. ‘Charlie, I’m not going up the Amazon, I’m going to LA. They have telephones there. I can be back here in twelve hours, if I’m needed.’

‘Sure thing. Well, enjoy yourself. Tell the old tosspot I’m rooting for him.’

Charlie had never met Caspar Jensen, but he made a joke of pretending familiarity with the man and his habits.

‘Thanks, Charlie. Thanks for ringing. Give my love to Jen.’

‘Come back soon.’

Charlie rang off. Karen was looking up at Harriet. ‘Problem?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Harriet said. She would not have admitted anxiety to Charlie. The anxiety, in any case, was well within bounds. She could live with it. She wanted to see Caspar more than she wanted anything else. Her luggage, two small neat suitcases, was waiting for her by the door. If she didn’t go now, she would miss her flight.

‘Shall I ask the driver to come up for your suitcases?’

Harriet picked them up. ‘No, I can manage. Travelling light.’ One Bruce Oldfield evening dress for the big night, not much else.

Alison Shaw came out of Harriet’s office. She was wearing a full skirt that bunched over her hips, and a loose jacket. An unnecessary Burberry was folded over her arm.

‘Thanks for the interview,’ she said.

‘I enjoyed it,’ Harriet lied. They looked at each other for a moment. ‘I must go.’

‘Have a good trip,’ Alison and Karen said together.

In the car, as it turned into the westbound traffic, Harriet was thinking again about Simon. Her thoughts embarked on a predictable circuit and, with a touch of weariness, she let them follow the familiar groove. She sat hunched forward in her seat, containing the discomfort that they gave her. Looking out of the car window, from the little height of the Westway, she saw the cold sparkle of the city. A moment later, her spirits lifted. The groove had led her, as it sometimes did, to her mother. Harriet imagined Kath at home, in her kitchen, at Sunderland Avenue. The big, modern house would be humming with Radio One, and with the sound of vacuum cleaning or the buzz of the electric blender. They were the sounds of Harriet’s adolescence, but not her childhood. Harriet loved her mother. She thought that they were alike, for all the differences in their two lives.

Unusually, Kath had not telephoned her to wish her bon voyage, and Harriet had not found the time to call today. If there was no time to do it from the airport, she would ring as soon as she reached Los Angeles.

On the left of the car, a 747 dipped towards its destination. Harriet watched it as it slid through the sky, and wondered if the sun was shining on the West Coast.

She wouldn’t think about what Charlie had said. When she came home, she would find out where the rumour had sprung from.

Two
London, 1981

It was half past five.

The street outside Harriet’s shop was crowded with office workers flooding towards the tube station.

Harriet finished checking the till, and left a float for Karen who was on the staff rota to open the shop in the morning. She bagged the rest of the day’s takings, ready to be dropped into the night safe on her way past the bank. Then she went through the shop turning off the lights, so that the dazzling mirror-walls became blank, dark curtains. She locked the inner doors and set the alarm, then stepped out into the street. The shop was secure for the night. She paused to look up at the façade. It was pristine white, with the shop’s name, Stepping, in black, identical to the other shops in the chain.

All the Stepping shops sold dance- and exercise-wear, and ranges of associated products. Most of them, as Harriet’s was, were owned by franchises. Franchise-holders ordered from a central range of products, but they chose from the range to suit their own shops. Harriet knew her customers, and had the knack of offering them what they wanted to buy. The shop was in a good location, almost prime, and it was turning over well. Harriet was proud of it, and of her foresight in predicting the dance and exercise boom. She knew that she was doing all the business she could hope to do. If I was in Covent Garden, Harriet thought. But she wasn’t, and she wouldn’t be, not with Stepping.

She had been running her business for nearly five years. She had found the shop when she was twenty-five, and her stepfather had bought the lease for her. She was paying back the principal now. She was grateful to Ken for his generosity, but she was aware that it had been a sound investment for him.

She was less sure, now, whether she was satisfied with it herself. She knew that it would never make her rich, but more importantly it no longer gave her the charge of excitement that it once had.

Harriet turned away from the shop, and dropped the keys into her handbag. She checked to make sure that the envelope containing the cinema tickets was there too. It was Leo who wanted to see the film, and she had booked the tickets to surprise him. Afterwards she planned to treat them both to dinner at the new Thai restaurant.

Harriet forgot about the business. She began to walk briskly, looking forward to the evening with her husband. She reached the bank, with the bag of the day’s takings hugged to her chest. She opened the polished slit of the night safe and slid the bag into its mouth. She heard it bumping softly as it passed into the entrails of the bank, and the home-going crowds flowed reassuringly past her. Harriet went on with them, towards the tube station.

A few moments later she reached the street where Leo had his studio. Leo was a photographer, quite a successful one. His studio was on the first floor of a small warehouse building, with a garment manufacturer below him and a design company above. Harriet looked up at his windows. It was an automatic gesture, there was nothing to see, not even a light. It was a summer’s evening, there was no need for lights. She could see a drawing board angled at the window above.

Harriet would have pressed Leo’s entry-phone but the front door opened just as she reached it. Two smiling machinists in saris came out, and held it for her. Harriet slipped inside the building, and ran up the stone stairs to the first floor. She was cheerful with the idea of her surprise, picturing Leo at the light table, his back to her, examining transparencies. It was dark at the top of the stairs, there were no windows here.

Click. Harriet pressed the button of the timed switch beside the door and light washed over her.

She had the impression, in that fleeting second, that the click had sounded a warning. There was a scuffle on the other side of the door.

Harriet was holding the key to the door in her hand. She had hardly ever used her studio key; Leo must have forgotten that she had it. She fitted it deftly into the lock, and the door swung inwards.

Harriet looked straight ahead of her.

Across the studio and through another open door there was a black leather and chrome sofa. Harriet had helped Leo to choose it, from an Italian furniture catalogue. In front of the sofa was Leo, a lock of his dark hair falling boyishly over his eyes as he tried to pull up his 501s. They were too tight and he hopped, off balance and then – ludicrously – snatched up his shirt and held it in front of his collapsing erection. Clearly the girl was more used to exposing her body. She made no coy attempt to cover herself with her hands, and her composure made Leo look even more ridiculous. She simply stood, gracefully, her body composed of dark angles and smooth, colourless planes. She was taller and thinner than Harriet. Perhaps she was one of Leo’s models.

After the first current of shock, Harriet’s reaction was incredulous laughter. Leo saw it, and his embarrassment lit up into fury.

He dropped the shirt, took two strides and slammed the connecting door.

For a moment or two Harriet stood looking numbly at it. Leo would open the door again, of course, and he would be dressed and there would be no model and he would thank her for buying the cinema tickets, and they would go off for their evening together.

She waited, but there was only silence and the closed door. It was impossible to imagine what Leo and the tall, thin girl were doing on the other side of it.

Slowly, silently, Harriet closed the outer door too and stood in darkness again on the wrong side of it. She didn’t bother to press the switch for its premonitory click. She went quietly back down the stairs, with her hand pressed flat against the cold, shiny curve of the wall to guide her.

Harriet didn’t remember, afterwards, how she got home. She supposed that she must have followed the route mechanically, borne along by the homegoing tide.

When she reached the flat she found herself walking through the rooms, touching things, picking up vases and books and ornaments as if she had never seen them before. She went to each window and pressed her forehead against the glass, looking out at the familiar vistas. She found it hard to believe that she had lived in this place for four years, ever since her marriage. It seemed unfamiliar now, the house of strangers. She didn’t know what to do with herself in these rooms. There was no food to cook; usually one of them shopped on the way home. Tonight, there would have been the Thai dinner.

At last, she sat down in a Victorian chair that she had recovered herself. She ran the tips of her fingers over the smooth heads of the upholstery tacks, looked out of the window at the changing light. The day was ending and the sky was thinly clouded, suffused with pink.

Harriet felt the fingers of shock beginning to loosen their hold on her. She began to think, effortfully at first, as if she had forgotten how to do it. The flat was silent, even the road outside seemed unusually still.

She thought about her marriage to Leo. She wondered how long it was exactly since they had stopped making each other happy, and then found that she couldn’t recall the precise dimensions of happiness at all. She knew, in the same way that she knew the multiplication tables or the words of certain songs, that they must have been happy together once. Leo was Jewish and his prosperous parents had been opposed to their only son marrying out. Their opposition had only strengthened Harriet’s and Leo’s determination to marry at once. They had been happy then, in their blithe certainty. And afterwards? She could remember certain times, a holiday when it had rained and it hadn’t mattered at all, a long drive that they had made together, little domestic events that she could no longer recall, only the joy that went with them. That had gone. She wished she could at least remember when. They lived together now, but that was only living, the plain mechanics of it.

Harriet wondered how long her husband had had other women. How many, and how often? The memory of the tall girl with her planes of light and shadow came back to her.

Harriet thought about Leo himself. Leo was handsome, stubborn, amusing. Women were always drawn to him, as she had been herself. He was a man like others she had known, who found it difficult to put his feelings into words. Or perhaps not even difficult, but unnecessary.

The light was fading fast. Harriet had the sense of ordinary life fading with it, the edges of reality softly crumbling and falling away into fine dust. It made her feel sad, the more sad because it was irrevocable.

It was dark when she heard Leo’s key in the lock. She had sat on in the darkness without moving and now she felt stiff and cold. He came in, clicking the light on at the door so that she blinked in the blaze of it.

They looked at each other, trying to gauge the precise gradations of mutual hostility. Harriet knew Leo well enough not to have expected contrition. Like a small boy, Leo would cover his guilt with defiance. But now she couldn’t read him at all; his face was flat and cold. She heard the smallest noise, the ground around them softly crumbling into dust.

‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Leo said stiffly. ‘You should have telephoned, or rung the bell.’

There was no tentative bridge in the words, if that was what she had hoped for. She knew, in any case, that there were no foundations for a bridge. Harriet said the first thing that came into her head.

‘You looked ridiculous.’

He stared at her. ‘You’re such a bitch, Harriet, do you know that? You’re cold-hearted and self-righteous. You operate like a machine.’

Probably he was right, Harriet thought. She didn’t believe that she was any of those things, but she was willing to accept that they might know each other better than they knew themselves.

‘Have there been other times, Leo? Before tonight? Could you tell me the truth, please?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, you’ll tell me the truth, or yes, there have been other girls?’

‘There have been other girls.’

‘How many? How long have you been doing this?’

‘Three or four. Eighteen months. Perhaps two years.’

‘Don’t you even know for sure?’

‘Does it bloody well matter?’

Harriet stood up abruptly. She went to the window and looked out. The streetlights had come on, but there was still a child skateboarding on the pavement. She watched him weaving in and out of the lamp-posts. She wanted to close the curtains, but she didn’t want to shut herself in here, in this flat. Behind her she heard Leo go into the kitchen and take a beer out of the fridge. He came back into the room, dropping the ring-pull into the nearest ashtray with a tiny clink. Harriet turned to face him. Her legs and back ached with sitting motionless for so long.

‘So what do you want to do?’ she asked him.

She felt the ground dropping away, faster and faster, in ragged chunks now. Chasms had opened up everywhere, and there was nowhere to put her feet.

‘Do? I don’t know. What is there to do?’

Harriet’s lips felt stiff. In their quarrels before now she had made similar suggestions but it had been to test him, even to test her own aversion to the idea. But this time, when she said, ‘Call it a day, Leo. Agree to separate,’ she spoke the words flatly because she knew what would happen was irrevocable. Tonight they had passed the last possible turning-point.

Leo’s bounce, the cocksureness that had been a part of him for as long as she had known him, seemed to have drained out of his body. He sat down heavily in the Victorian chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees.

‘If you want to. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.’

‘Are you unhappy?’

‘Yes, I’m unhappy.’

‘So am I,’ Harriet whispered.

But there was no path left that they could safely tread to reach one another. In the silence that followed Harriet went into the kitchen and began mechanically to tidy up where no tidying-up needed to be done. After a moment or two, the telephone rang. She glanced at the digital clock above the door of the oven. It was ten past eleven. Late, for a social call. She lifted the receiver from its wall socket, leaned back against the counter-top.

‘Harriet, I’m sorry, were you asleep?’

‘Charlie?’

It was Charlie Thimbell, husband of her old friend Jenny. Charlie was a friend, too.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘It’s late, I know it’s late.’

Harriet gripped the receiver tightly. ‘Charlie, what’s happened?’

‘It’s Jenny. She started to bleed.’

Jenny was thirty-two weeks pregnant. Harriet had begun to count the days with her.

‘When?’

‘Tonight. Seven o’clock. The ambulance came, rushed her in.’ Harriet could tell that Charlie was shaking. Even his voice shook. Harriet was aware of Leo appearing in the kitchen doorway, his eyes fixing on her face. ‘They did an emergency Caesarean. The placenta had just come away. I’ve never seen so much blood.’

‘Charlie. Oh, Christ. Is Jenny …? Will Jenny be all right?’

‘They didn’t know. Not for a long time. I’ve just seen the doctor. He says they’ll pull her round. She lost a lot of blood, you see.’

‘Charlie, listen to me, I’m coming. I’ll be there in — in half an hour.’ She was looking into Leo’s face. He had gone pale, his eyes were wide and dark.

‘No. No, don’t do that. There’s nothing you can do. They’ve told me to go home, and they’ll call me. I just wanted to talk, to tell someone.’

Harriet knew that Charlie’s parents were dead. Jenny’s elderly mother lived in the north of England somewhere. ‘Have you told Jenny’s mother?’

Charlie said very quietly, ‘I … I thought I’d leave it until the morning. Now that they say she’ll be all right.’

Full of fear, Harriet said, ‘What about the baby?’

‘It’s still alive. It went, it went without oxygen for quite a long time, they don’t know exactly how long. It’s in their intensive care unit. It’s a little boy. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know if they’ll let me. They let me take a quick look at Jenny. She opened her eyes and saw me.’

‘Charlie, please let me come. Or let Jane come. I’ll ring her now. I don’t want you to be on your own.’

He sounded exhausted when he answered, ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll go home and sleep, if they won’t let me stay here with Jenny and the baby.’

Harriet nodded. Leo came round the counter and stood in front of her, trying to decipher what had happened.

‘Call me first thing in the morning. Or as soon as you hear anything, it doesn’t matter what time it is. Will you, Charlie?’

‘Yes. Harriet?’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. Just, thanks. Jenny’ll be glad to know you’re … there.’

‘Don’t worry. She’ll be all right.’ Harriet groped for words of proper reassurance, but found none. ‘Everything will be all right.’

Charlie rang off. Leo put his hand on Harriet’s shoulder, but she felt the distance between them. She told him what had happened, and saw tears come into his eyes.

‘Christ,’ Leo whispered. ‘Oh God, that’s terrible. Poor Jenny. The poor little baby.’

Harriet was practical. Her concern had all been for what could be done, for what Charlie or Jenny might need. But Leo was different. She knew his grief was genuine, there was softness buried under his swagger, a deep streak of something vulnerable that was almost sentimentality. Tonight this underside of Leo irritated her, and she turned away in order not to witness it.

She put the kettle on and made coffee, performing each step in the sequence with careful attention. She was thinking that it seemed a long time, much more than the few hours of reality, since she had hurried towards Leo’s studio with the cinema tickets folded in her bag.

Harriet poured the coffee into two cups, and gave one to Leo. They sat facing each other across the kitchen table, in the positions they always sat in.

‘Will the baby survive?’ Leo had sniffed and cleared his throat, then lit a cigarette. His face had regained some colour.

‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose they do, either. Oxygen deprivation is critical, isn’t it? I imagine if he does live, he may be badly damaged.’ She tried to imagine the small addition to humanity, suspended under lights and wired to machines, but she could not. Her feelings were all for Jenny.

Leo and Harriet talked for a few moments about the possibility of the baby’s survival, the significance for Jenny and Charlie if he should be handicapped.

‘Perhaps it would be best in the long run if he didn’t live.’

Harriet shook her head. It felt very heavy. ‘I think they will just want him to be alive. However bad the reality is, they’ll still want him to survive.’

They were doling the words out to one another, aware of the diminishment of their own unhappiness by comparison, but all the same unable to forget it, or to hope of overcoming it.

Harriet drank her coffee. When she looked back at Leo she saw that he held his head in his hands, and that he was crying again.

‘Leo …’

His head jerked up. ‘If we had had a baby, Harriet.’

Harriet thought, had had. As far in words as it was possible to get from will have, or even might have. That distance made her understand more clearly than the longest explanatory speech could have done that their marriage was finally over.

‘If we’d had a baby,’ Leo shouted this time. Anger licked up in him. Harriet saw how he seized on his own anger almost with gratitude, as though giving vent to it eased his pain. ‘I would have loved a child, but you wouldn’t consider it, would you? That’s what marriages are for. They’re about creating families. Not about all this, shit.’ His arm swept sideways. Her eyes followed the movement of it. He meant the tiled floor and the ceramic hob and the dishwasher, the Spanish plates hung on the wall, the wedding presents on the shelves and the painting and decorating they had done together.

‘I wanted a whole tribe of kids. I’d have been a good father, a great dad. Like my parents were to me.’

Harriet thought briefly of Harold Gold, a blandly bonhomous man fond of delivering advice on how to succeed in business, and Averil, her mother-in-law, to whom Leo was a religion with its own commandments, most of them to do with food.

‘But there was never any chance of that, was there? Your own concerns came first, your fucking career, your little business. You’re a chilly bitch, Harriet. It’s like living with a robot, living with you. You do what’s expected of you because you don’t like criticism, but it’s all an exercise, isn’t it?’

Harriet stopped listening. He went on, with his familiar mixture of selfishness and arrogance and childish disappointment. He wasn’t wrong, Harriet knew that. He could make every complaint against her with justification, but she no longer wished to change herself for him.

This is what you feel when you stop loving someone, Harriet thought. You see them quite plainly, in all their dimensions, with no blurring into hopes or expectations. It was the absence of hope that made it final.

She stood up and went to the coffee-pot for a refill. Too much coffee would keep her awake, but she wasn’t optimistic about sleep in any case.

Leo was right to protest that she had refused him a baby, too. They had talked about it, although not often. Leo had always been interested in other people’s offspring, much more than she had ever been, except for Jenny’s. She had watched the progress of her friend’s pregnancy with interest, but without envy. Jane, the third member of their trio of old friends, had been envious. Harriet shied away from the possibility for herself. She felt too precarious to contemplate it, believing that stability, such as Jenny Thimbell had possessed, was as much a prerequisite for motherhood as a womb.

It came to her that she had simply felt precarious with Leo. She wondered why she had never reached the obvious conclusion before.

She had felt, too, that there was still time. She was not yet thirty, and there were other things to be accomplished first. If pressed she might have admitted that she meant business achievements, although she would not have been able to say what kind of achievements. Something more than Stepping, she would have said, with uncharacteristic vagueness.

Leo’s spurt of anger had died away. Her silence had denied it its necessary fuel. He sat and stared dully at the table-top.

Harriet found that she could imagine Jenny’s baby now. She could see his tiny, folded limbs and his birdlike chest heaving as he took painful breaths.

Live, baby. Live, she commanded silently. She wondered if he was living at this moment, or dying.

She picked up her own coffee-cup and Leo’s, and rinsed them in the sink. She left them on the draining board, turned off some switches.

‘I’m going to bed.’ There was no answer, but she had not expected any.

In their bedroom she undressed and lay down under the double quilt. After a moment she sat up again, took the telephone extension off the table on Leo’s side of the bed and brought it round to her own. She lay down once more and closed her eyes. She wondered if Leo would come to bed. They couldn’t both stay here after tonight. Then she remembered that Leo was going away for three days from tomorrow, on an assignment. Before he came back, she would have to find somewhere to go. She didn’t mind very much that she would be the one who would have to leave. The idea of staying here, alone in this house of strangers, was less appealing still.

She was awake when Leo came to bed. They lay back to back, without speaking. Later Harriet fell into a heavy unrefreshing sleep.

In the morning, very early, Charlie rang to say that Jenny had woken up properly. She was in pain, but she was only concerned for her baby. The baby’s condition was stable. The next few days would be critical, and if he survived them his long-term chances would be good. They would not be able to tell for some time yet how severely his brain had been damaged, if it had been damaged at all.

‘That’s good,’ Harriet said warmly. ‘That’s better than it seemed, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so,’ Charlie said. He was normally an ebullient man, but there was none of it in his voice that morning.

‘Can I come in and see her?’

‘Tomorrow, Harriet, perhaps.’

‘All right. Give her all my love.’

Harriet dialled Jane’s number. Jane was a teacher, at a huge comprehensive school in east London. It was impossible to reach her during the day, and it was still early enough to catch her before she left.

‘Jane? Have you heard what’s happened?’

‘Charlie just rang.’

‘What do you think?’

‘It doesn’t sound very promising.’

They murmured their concern together. Jane was a forthright, single woman, a feminist and espouser of causes. Sometimes she exasperated Harriet, but she also loved her for her warmth and honesty.’

‘I wish I could go over there and just hold her,’ Jane said.

‘I’m sure Charlie will do that.’

‘Hm.’ Jane took a less positive view of the relationships between men and women, never having achieved a satisfactory one herself.

‘We’ll go tomorrow.’

‘Yes. God, I wish this hadn’t happened. If anyone deserves a normal healthy baby Jenny does. I can’t think of anyone who would make a better mother. How are you this morning, Harriet?’

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow, when I see you,’ Harriet said, without emphasis. ‘Bye, now.’

While they talked Leo had been putting shirts and socks into a canvas grip. Now he tossed a sponge bag and a camera body in on top and zipped up the bag.

‘I’d better go. I’ve got a couple of things to organise at the studio before I leave for the airport.’

‘Yes. Well, you wouldn’t have had time for that last night, what with everything else, would you?’

He straightened up, with his bag in his hand. ‘I’ve said I was sorry, Harriet.’

‘No you haven’t, actually. You said you were sorry I had to see what I did. That’s something quite different, isn’t it?’

Leo hesitated, somewhere between contrition and petulance. Then he sighed. ‘There just isn’t time for another bloody great row this morning. I’m going to Amsterdam, and that’s it. I’ll be back on Sunday. We’ll talk then.’

Harriet lifted her face to him. ‘It’s too late.’

He stared at her. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he repeated. Harriet knew that inside himself, within all the layers of bullishness and sentimentality, Leo also knew that it was too late.

He went, closing the door between them, without saying anything more.

Harriet went to work, came home again, and spent the evening alone. The news from the hospital was that Jenny was recovering well, and the baby continued to hold his own. Charlie seemed encouraged by the doctors’ predictions.

The next day Harriet left the shop early, to go and see Jenny. She stopped on the way to try to buy her something, but every magazine she picked up seemed to have a picture of a rosy baby on the cover, and every book the word mother or child in the title. In the end she settled for flowers, late-summer blooms that seemed touched with weariness.

As she walked up the street towards the dull, red-brick bulk of the hospital she saw Jane hurrying in the same direction ahead of her. She was easily recognisable by her everyday ensemble of loose trousers with numerous pockets and flaps, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her pale hair pulled into a thick plait down her back. ‘Combat gear,’ Jane called it, saying, ‘I need it in that place.’ Harriet had never visited the school, but she had heard the stories about it.

She had asked Jane more than once, ‘If it’s so bad, why don’t you leave? Get a job teaching nice, bright, motivated children in a private school somewhere?’

And Jane had looked at her from under her thick, blonde eyelashes. ‘One, you know that I am not a supporter of private education. Two, to leave the school would be to diminish it further. Don’t you think I should stay and continue to do my best for it?’

Harriet could only answer, ‘If you say so,’ knowing that it would be useless to embark on an argument about it.

She smiled, now, at the sight of her and ran to catch her up. Jane turned in response to Harriet’s shout. In one hand she was carrying an old-fashioned battered leather briefcase, probably stuffed with sixth-form essays on Wuthering Heights, and in the other a bunch of flowers more or less identical to Harriet’s. The two women hugged each other, awkward with their separate armsful.

‘What else can one bring?’ Jane said wryly, nodding at the flowers. ‘Everything I thought of seemed too celebratory or too funereal.’

‘I know. Jenny won’t care, anyway.’

They went into the hospital, following signs, and climbed some stairs. At the end of a long corridor they came to the maternity ward. There was the sound of new-born crying and a glimpse of cots at the ends of beds. Harriet and Jane looked at each other, but said nothing. They found Jenny alone in a sideward. She was propped up against pillows, with arms outstretched, palms up, on the smoothed covers. She looked as if she might have been dozing, but she opened her eyes when they came in.

‘I’m so glad to see you,’ she said, which was Jenny’s familiar greeting. It was a facet of her appeal that she made it invariably convincing, but today Harriet thought she might have preferred to be left alone. Her smooth Madonna-face was white and drawn, and there were shadows like bruises under her eyes.

‘We won’t stay for long,’ Harriet promised. ‘Only a minute or two.’

‘I’m tired because my mother’s been here most of the afternoon. She needs more looking after than I do. She’s gone now to do some shopping and some tidying-up at home for Charlie. I told her he didn’t need shopping for or tidying-up after, but she wouldn’t have it.’ She put her hand out to touch the flowers. ‘Thank you for these. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’

‘This is all right,’ Jane said, looking round the little room.

‘Tactful,’ Jenny said. Her mouth gave an uncharacteristic twist. She had been put in here away from all the perfect babies in their cots in the big ward, of course. They all knew it, there was a strong enough bond between them for anxiety and sympathy to be unspoken. Harriet and Jane sat down on either side of the bed, their hands touching Jenny’s.

‘How is he?’

Jenny didn’t answer at first. Then, with a smile that contradicted the rest of her face, she said, ‘We’ve called him James Jonathan. The hospital padre baptised him, you know. Charlie and I were there, the nurses let us hold him for a minute. It was, oh, I didn’t mean to cry on you, it was very moving, that’s all.’ Her face collapsed, disfigured with pain. Jane bent forward silently until her forehead touched Jenny’s bare forearm. Harriet sat motionless, aware of how much she loved them both. By contrast with the enduring, unemphatic resonance of friendship her concluded marriage seemed over-coloured and dissonant. She saw that Jenny’s face was shiny with tears. Gently she released her hand, took a handkerchief and dried it for her.

‘The news sounded all right this morning,’ she ventured.

‘It was, to begin with. I’d started to make plans. You know, in a month, taking him home. Not expecting too much, just finding out what he could or couldn’t do. Then they came to tell me that there was a problem with his breathing. They’re ventilating him because his lungs don’t want to work. Then they said there was something wrong with his kidneys. There’s a blockage in his intestine. They’re watching him now, to see if they can operate to clear it.’

‘It all happened as quickly as that?’

‘He’s very small. They can … they can deteriorate very quickly. But he’s much bigger than some of the babies in there. If he can survive the operation, and it’s successful, he may still be all right.’

They saw the equal and opposite currents of hope and fear in her, and understood some of the tension that made her arms and fingers seem stiff.

‘The doctor said not, not to be too hopeful yet. One day, even one hour is critical.’

Harriet and Jane said what they could, making little more than small, soothing sounds. They sat quietly for a moment or two when they had come to the end even of that, listening to the hospital noises. There was the metallic rattle of big trolleys, and a smell of boiled vegetables. Early institutional supper was on its way.

‘Do you want us to go, Jenny?’ Harriet asked gently.

‘Stay just for five more minutes.’ Jenny wearily closed her eyes.

‘Where’s Charlie?’ Jane half-mouthed, half-whispered to Harriet.

But Jenny answered, ‘His editor wanted him to go and do some story. I told him to go, there’s nothing for him to do here. I wish I could do something, other than just lie here. If I could do anything, anything in the world to make him live, I’d do it.’

They waited, holding on to one another, saying nothing.

Harriet didn’t know how long it was before a doctor came in in his white coat. All three of them stared frozenly at him.

‘Mrs Thimbell, if I could just have a quick word?’

Harriet and Jane bundled themselves into the corridor. They leaned against the green-painted wall, listening to the sound of babies crying. The doctor came out again, his hands in the pocket of his coat. He nodded encouragingly at them and swept away.

Jenny’s arms stuck out even more stiffly. She told them, ‘They’re going to operate to clear the blockage this evening. They can’t tell me anything else until it’s been done. Will you wait until Charlie comes? He said he’d be here at seven.’

They sat down again on either side of the bed. They tried to talk, but the words tailed off into silence again, and Jenny seemed to prefer that. Jane spoke once, in a low, ferocious voice. ‘Come on, James Jonathan. Come on.’

Charlie came.

He was normally a noisy, red-faced man who was fond of beer and gossip. He used the saloon-bar manner as a cover for his sharp intelligence. But there was no noise tonight.

He sat down and put his arms around his wife, resting his head against her pillows. After a moment, Jane and Harriet crept away.

In the street outside Jane said, ‘Let’s go and have a drink. I really do need to have a drink. Poor Jenny, the poor love.’

There was a wine bar on the corner, one of the green paint, wicker furniture and weeping greenery variety. They ordered wine without deliberation, and sat down at one of the wicker tables.

There seemed little to say that would not be a pointless reiteration of anxiety. Harriet watched people arriving, greeting each other. They all seemed to make tidy couples.

‘What’s up?’ Jane demanded. ‘It’s not just this, is it?’

Harriet shook her head. ‘But this makes it seem not particularly tragic. Not even particularly significant. I was thinking that, when we were sitting in there with Jenny.’

‘What, Harriet?’

‘Leo.’

Harriet described what had happened. Jane’s thick, fair eyebrows drew together sharply. She had never been particularly fond of Leo, but she was always scrupulously fair.

Fairness made her ask, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure? I suppose he might have been doing some calendar shots, and I suppose he might have taken his own clothes off to keep the model company. But then he would have needed a camera, wouldn’t he, and a couple of lights? No, it’s not funny, I know. He admitted it, anyway. It wasn’t the first time, or even the first girl. It’s been going on for quite a long time.’ Harriet paused for a moment and then added, ‘If I was being honest, I suppose I’d have to say that I half-knew. Only I didn’t want to know, so I closed it off.’

Jane took a mouthful of wine. ‘So what happens?’

‘I’m going to leave him.’

‘Isn’t that a bit precipitate? You’ve been together for a long time. You’re Leo-and-Harriet, aren’t you? Can’t you work it out, build on what you’ve got, or whatever it is the advice columns tell you to do?’

Harriet had been thinking about Jenny and Charlie, and wondering how their marriage would survive a handicapped baby, or the death of James Jonathan. A little absently she answered, ‘I don’t think any of us can see into each other’s marriages.’

‘No. Especially if you’re not married at all, like me.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

Jane’s expression softened. ‘I know you didn’t. Don’t be stupid. I just wanted to say something obvious like, Don’t be proud and hasty, or Give each other another chance.’

Deliberately Harriet told her, ‘No. There isn’t anything to work out or build on, you see. I’m quite sure it’s over, and it would only be weakness to try to hang on. Leo’s kind of weakness, what’s more. There would be more mess, and subterfuge, and undermining one another. I would rather be hard about it now, and then start to get over it.’

‘Yes. That’s you.’

‘Don’t you agree with me?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what people promise when they marry each other. I do imagine promises aren’t so easily undone.’

But they are, Harriet thought miserably. They are undone, and without love or affection there is no reason for them anyway. It would be different if we had children. Had had. She didn’t say that, remembering where they had just been, and remembering that Jane wanted a baby, and could never find anyone to father it for her. She took refuge in asperity.

‘I don’t know why you’re defending Leo’s sordid behaviour.’

‘I’m not. You know what I think about Leo. I’m just trying to see both sides.’

‘And that’s you.’

That made them both laugh, a little bubble of welcome laughter that grew out of tension. They leaned together so that their shoulders touched.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘He’s away until the day after tomorrow. I think I’ll go home, for a little while. I’d like to tell Kath, as gently as I can. She thinks Leo’s as perfect as Averil does. Well, no, not quite as perfect. That would be impossible.’

They laughed again. Jane knew Harriet’s mother-in-law.

‘Then I’ll look around for somewhere to rent. I suppose, in the end, I’ll get half the proceeds of our flat. I haven’t thought about it very clearly yet. I’m only sure that we can’t be Leo-and-Harriet any more. It will be a relief just to be Harriet.’

Jane looked soberly at her. ‘All right. You know you can come and stay with me for as long as you want, don’t you?’

Jane had her own tiny house in Hackney, a welcoming place that was often full of people.

‘Thank you,’ Harriet said, meaning it.

Jane sat back in her chair. ‘I wonder what’s happening across there.’

‘Helplessness makes it worse. Think how it must be for Jenny and Charlie.’

They stayed at their table in the wine bar, finishing their bottle of wine without relish, and talking sombrely. It was hard to think for long about anything except the baby and what his tiny body must have to undergo.

At last they paid their bill and went out into the warm night. Neither of them felt that they could eat anything; Harriet was reluctant to go back to the new strangeness of her home, but she knew that she must begin to be on her own so that it could become familiar. She had no choice.

They walked a little way together, then paused at the point where they had met earlier.

‘Are you sure you won’t come back with me to Hackney?’ Jane asked.

‘No, but thank you. I’ll take you up on your offer another time.’

‘Good-night, then.’ They held on to each other for a minute. Jane’s cheek was very warm, and soft.

‘Talk to you tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow.’

Harriet went back to the flat that wasn’t home any longer. She walked through the rooms once again, touching possessions that had been Leo-and-Harriet’s, thinking.

At five minutes to midnight the telephone rang, only once because she snatched it up.

Charlie told her that James Jonathan had survived the operation, and had been returned to the special care unit, but then his heart had stopped beating. The paediatricians and the nurses had restarted it once, but the rhythm had slowed, and grown irregular, and last it had faded away.

‘Jenny was holding him when it stopped.’

Charlie was crying. Harriet’s tears rolled down her face.

‘I’m sorry, Charlie, I’m so sorry.’

James Jonathan’s life had lasted just a little more than two days.

Harriet went into her bedroom, lay down in the darkness, and cried for him.

Three

When she set out for Sunderland Avenue, for her mother’s house, Harriet didn’t take her car. It was parked outside the flat and the keys were in her bag, but she didn’t even glance at its shiny curves as she passed. She walked to the end of the road, turned right and went on, away from the river and towards the tube station.

In the early days of her independence, before the onset of Leo and the flat and the car. Harriet had always gone home by tube to see Kath. Her mother and stepfather lived on the southern fringe of London, where the narrow streets of terraced houses gave way to the broader, suburban avenues and closes. It was an awkward, boring journey, involving two changes and then a bus ride from the tube station, but it seemed fitting to do it this way, today.

Harriet smiled faintly as she negotiated the local street market, skirting the stalls piled up with cauliflowers and Indian cotton shirts and cheap cassettes.

Going home to mother? she taunted herself, experimentally.

But it wasn’t that. She was close to Kath, and she felt the need to explain to her what had happened. She was going home to do that, as if to a friend.

Harriet came out at the other side of the market and saw the tube station ahead on the corner. The pavement outside the entrance was smeared with the pulp of rotten oranges, and littered with vegetable stalks and hamburger cartons. A handful of post-punks and market traders’ boys were lounging against some railings. They inspected her as she passed. Harriet had begun to think of herself as too old and too married to be a target for street-corner whistles, but now she reminded herself that she was not quite thirty, and that she was no longer quite married.

She caught the eye of one of the market boys. He stuck out his lower jaw and whistled through his teeth.

‘Ullo, darlin’! Can I come wiv yer?’

It wasn’t much of a tribute, but it heartened her. She smiled, more warmly than was necessary, and shook her head.

‘Aw right, I’ll wait for yer!’ he shouted after her.

Harriet went on through the shiny mouth of the ticket hall and the dense, fuggy tube smell closed around her. She pressed her money into the ticket machine and moved through the barrier in a sea of Saturday morning shoppers. The escalator swept her downwards, making her one of an unending ribbon of descending heads like intricate skittles. The train was crowded. Harriet squeezed in with a press of bodies, and reached up to a pendant knob. A newspaper was folded in her bag, but she could not twist around to reach it, let alone open it to read. Instead she studied the passengers around her.

A young black couple sat immediately beneath her elbow, with a small girl perched on her father’s lap. The child’s hair was twisted into springy pigtails and she wore a spotless white ruched dress. The child beamed up at Harriet and Harriet smiled back at her. The young parents nodded, conscious and proud.

The smile lingered on Harriet’s face as she looked beyond. Standing next to her were three teenage girls, going up west to spend their week’s wages on clothes. Beyond them was a fat man in overalls, two boys with headsets clamped over their ears were hunched next to him. There were old ladies, tourists in raincoats, foreign students, wax-faced middle-aged men, all wedged together, patiently perspiring.

Harriet didn’t mind being a part of this pungent mass, even felt affection for it. She thought of it as a slice of the city itself, pushed underground, with herself as a crumb of it.

When she changed trains the crowd thinned. She was travelling against the tide of Saturday shoppers and there were plenty of empty seats. Still Harriet didn’t unfold her newspaper. She stared through the window opposite at the unending runs of pipework, thinking.

At the end of the line she was almost the only passenger left on the train. She ran up the littered steps, through the various layers of station smells, and boarded a bus outside. Harriet climbed to the top deck. She had always ridden upstairs with Kath, when Lisa was a baby, enjoying the vistas and the glimpses into lives behind first-floor windows.

It was a short ride to Sunderland Avenue. Harriet had long ago decided that somewhere in the course of it came the dividing line between London, proper London, and its dimmer, politer suburbs. Shopping streets gave way to long rows of houses fanning away from the main road. There were steep hills, lending the impression that woods and green fields might be glimpsed, in the distance, from the top of the bus. Harriet knew quite well that there never was anything to be seen, even on the clearest day, but the spread of more streets, winding up and down the hills.

The bus stopped at the end of Sunderland Avenue, and there was a steep climb from there to her mother’s house. Harriet walked briskly under the avenue trees, past front gardens full of asters and dahlias and late roses. They were big, detached houses built in the Thirties, and their owner-occupiers took pride in them. It was a neighbourhood of conservatory extensions and new tile roofs and house names on slate plaques or slices of rustic log or spelt out in twisted metal.

The house belonging to Kath and her husband, facing Harriet on a bend at the hilltop, had the look of being even better-tended than the rest. The original windows had been replaced by bigger, steel-framed ones. There was a glassed-in room that Ken called a storm lobby enclosing the front door, a rockery beside the front path and new garden walls of yellowish reconstituted stone. A big pair of wrought-iron gates across the short driveway were painted baby-blue.

Ken owned a small engineering company, with a sub-division specialising in domestic central heating. ‘My house is as much an advert for my business as my offices, I always say,’ Ken was fond of remarking.

‘You do always say,’ Harriet would agree, earning a sharp look from Kath and a titter from Lisa. But Ken would only ever nod with satisfaction, as if she had simply agreed with him. He was a kind man and fond of his stepdaughter.

Before Harriet even reached the glass door of the porch, Kath appeared amongst her begonias that sheltered there from any storms that might sweep across south London.

‘Harriet! You never said that you’d be coming.’

‘I took a chance that you’d be in.’ Equally, she had taken a chance that her half-sister would be out and that Ken would be working.

‘Well, if only you’d rung. Lisa’s at Karen’s, and Ken’s on a job.’

‘Never mind.’ Harriet kissed her mother, then took her arm. ‘We can have an hour to ourselves.’ Thinking of what she would have to say in the hour she added, too brightly, ‘The garden’s looking lovely.’

Kath peered over her shoulder. ‘But where’s your car, love?’

‘I left it at … home. Came on the tube.’

Kath looked horrified. ‘It’s not broken down already, is it?’ Harriet knew that her mother was proud of her in her smart hatchback, proud of the shop and of Leo whose name appeared alongside photographs in glossy magazines.

‘I just wanted to come the old way.’

‘Well, what a nuisance for you,’ Kath commiserated, as if conceiving such an odd notion could only be an inconvenience.

They went into the house together, passed through to the kitchen at the back. It was a big room looking through sliding doors on to a terrace and the garden beyond. There were quarry tiles and expanses of pine units with white laminate work-tops, rows of flowered cereal and biscuit jars, a radio playing morning music. Kath spooned coffee powder into floral mugs, flicked the switch of the kettle, and embarked on a piece of news about Lisa’s latest boyfriend. Harriet stood by the patio doors, half-turned to the garden, looking up the slope of the lawn to the spreading tree of heaven at the end. She listened carefully to the story, putting in the right responses, but Kath broke off midway.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. ‘There’s something, isn’t there?’

Sometimes she surprised Harriet with her shrewdness. Harriet supposed that she didn’t give her mother’s insight sufficient reckoning.

‘Jenny lost her baby. He lived for two days, he died last night.’

She was ashamed of her means of prevarication, putting Jenny’s tragedy to Kath at one remove, instead of admitting to her own.

Kath’s face reflected her feelings. She knew Jenny only slightly, but her concern was genuine.

‘The poor thing. Poor little thing.’

Harriet told her what had happened. They drank their coffee, leaning soberly against the pine cupboards.

‘Perhaps it was for the best,’ Kath said at length. ‘Better than him being handicapped for ever. They can start again, when they’ve put this behind them.’

‘Maybe,’ Harriet said sadly.

Kath faced her. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

Harriet thought briefly that it would be much easier to talk to someone else, anyone at all, rather than her mother in her dream kitchen.

‘Harriet?’ Kath was anxious now.

There was no point in choosing mollifying words. Turning her back on the tree of heaven Harriet said, ‘Leo and I are going to separate.’

As soon as it was said she wished that she had wrapped it up a little. Kath went red, banged down her coffee mug, didn’t even notice the little pool of spilled liquid that collected on the white worktop.

‘No you don’t, my girl. You’re a married woman. You don’t come back here and say you’re giving up after your first quarrel. You have to work at marriages, don’t you know that? You’ll work it out between you, whatever it is. You’ll be all the stronger together after it’s all blown over.’

Harriet saw that Kath was already smoothing over the damage, making it orderly again in her mind, as if her daughter’s life was her own kitchen.

‘Don’t talk like an agony aunt,’ Harriet said. ‘We’ve been married for four years and had a thousand quarrels. I’m not leaving him because of the quarrels. The truth is that we don’t make each other happy. It’s time we admitted to the truth. It’s quite clear-cut, really.’

She hadn’t expected that Kath would be so upset. Her mother cried easily, but she looked too shocked even for tears to come.

‘How can you say that? You make a perfect couple. You always did, at the wedding, ever since.’

The wedding, Harriet thought. I should never have let myself be put through all that. It had been a big white one, of course, mostly paid for by kind-hearted Ken. Harriet herself in a tight-waisted long dress with a sweeping train and a veil; her half-sister, then fifteen, trying to hide her puppy fat inside folds of corn-gold satin, two other small bridesmaids in cream silk. A hired grey Rolls with white ribbons, and a lavish reception following the carefully ecumenical service. Leo’s parents had decided to make the best of the inevitable. Harriet could have spoken their reasoning for them; Leo’s girlfriend was presentable and was no fool. She had her own little business and was making a go of it. His family had turned out to the wedding in force and had sent absurdly generous presents.

Now Harriet imagined Averil Gold shaking her well-groomed silvery head and murmuring, ‘These mixed marriages often come to grief.’ Before adding, adoringly, ‘But Leo always was a naughty, headstrong boy.’

She looked across the expanse of pine and tile at her mother. ‘We’re not even a couple. We never were, probably. It’s a difficult notion, for people as selfish as we are.’

‘You’re not selfish,’ Kath insisted. ‘And Leo’s a good husband. He looks after you.’

Harriet’s forbearance deserted her. ‘He’s a filthy bloody husband,’ she snapped. ‘Do you know what I found him doing? Can you guess? No, don’t try to guess. I found him in his studio, screwing a model.’

‘Are you sure?’

Jane had asked the same question. The realisation made Harriet laugh, a gasp of real laughter that made her eyes water.

‘Sure? What else might they have been up to?’

‘How can you laugh about it?’

Yet Kath seemed more shocked by her daughter’s flippancy than by the news itself. It occurred to Harriet that even her mother might have guessed at what she had taken so long to discover for herself. Anger strengthened her determination.

‘I’m not going back to the flat. It can be sold, we’ll each take fifty per cent. I’ll use my share to buy a smaller place.’

‘You’re very cool about it.’

‘Am I? I want to know my own mind, that’s all.’

Kath was recovering herself. She mopped up the spilt coffee, took her mug over to the sink and dried the bottom of it.

‘You always did. Always, from a tiny thing.’

Kath remembered how Harriet had been, long ago, when there were only the two of them. Single-minded and possessed of her own unshakeable certainties. She shook her head now, sighing. Kath wanted to see her daughter happy and believed she deserved it. But for all her other capabilities, Harriet was always restless rather than contented.

‘I think you should give him another chance. Probably he’ll never do it again.’

‘No,’ Harriet said, leaving no margin for contradiction. ‘He will do it again, because he’s done it before.’

She laughed once more. ‘Do you know, I think it might have been different if he hadn’t tried to cover himself up with his shirt?’ The absurdity of it made her want to laugh harder. ‘As if he had something mysterious down there, that I shouldn’t see.’

Then she caught sight of her mother’s face, and the laughter subsided. She went to Kath and put her arms around her. ‘I’m sorry if you’re disappointed. I’m sorry for Leo and me, too.’

‘Is that all?’ Kath demanded.

Harriet thought. It seemed so little, after so much.

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘It appears to be.’

She dropped her arm from her mother’s shoulder, walked back to the garden doors and looked out at the big tree again. Its leaves were beginning to show autumnal colours. The tree of heaven drops its leaves every winter, Harriet told herself bracingly. It would be a sentimental mistake to regard it as an emblem.

‘May I stay here for a day or two? Until I can rent a place? I can go to Jane’s, if it’s a nuisance.’

Her childhood bedroom was across the landing from Lisa’s, kept nowadays for visitors.

‘How could it be a nuisance? Of course you can stay. What shall we tell Ken and Lisa?’

‘The truth, of course.’

As Harriet had guessed, Kath’s anticipation of their shock and outrage was much greater than the reality.

‘He’s a stupid bugger,’ Ken pronounced. ‘You do whatever’ll make you happy, love. Or I can go round there and thump him for you, if you want.’

‘Well no, thanks,’ Harriet murmured.

Lisa came back only just in time to change for a date with her latest love. Harriet sat on the corner of the bed and watched her half-sister diving between the wardrobe and the dressing table.

There were too many years separating the two of them, and too many differences, for them ever to achieve friendship. As children they had fought bitterly, too different even to enjoy the satisfaction of being in the same competition. It was to Kath’s, and especially to Ken’s, credit that the girls had always been treated even-handedly. But still, even in adulthood, the two of them didn’t fully trust one another. They existed in a state of uneasy truce, always aware that hostilities might break out again.

Kath’s younger daughter had her mother’s fair, curling hair and the same full, soft lower lip. Harriet’s features were thinner and stronger. Lisa was easy-going to the point of laziness, except when there was the faintest threat that she might not get her own way. She was like her mother, too, in that she would go to any length to avoid scenes, preferring that everything should be pleasant and comfortable. Harriet preferred clarity and justice.

‘I think Kath believes I’ll go back to him,’ Harriet said.

‘And will you?’ Even before she had finished speaking, Lisa’s attention returned to her mirror. She was busily painting her mouth with a fine brush. Harriet remembered that ten years ago she had been absorbed in similar preparations herself and Lisa had been a plump, complaining nine-year-old. She had no desire to go back to those days, with or without the help of hindsight.

‘Of course not.’

Lisa snapped the cap back on to her lipstick, rolled her lips inwards over her teeth and then pressed them forwards into a pout. ‘I can’t say I blame you. But it’s a big decision, isn’t it? Couldn’t you try to forgive and forget? Leo’s not bad, even though he’s usually the first to tell you so.’

Harriet accepted that for Lisa this was an unusually profound speech.

‘I don’t love him.’

Lisa shrugged. ‘Then that simplifies it. Are you afraid of being on your own?’

Harriet thought of her married home, with all its symbols and reminders, stuffed with domestic comforts, the possessions of strangers.

‘It would be a relief.’

Downstairs the doorbell delivered its double chime. Lisa sprang to her feet, no longer listening. ‘Have a good time,’ Harriet called after her, feeling her age.

Kath and Ken were watching television downstairs. Harriet read a book, an Agatha Christie belonging to Kath, and went to bed very early. She lay in the dark in her old bedroom. She could hear the drone of the television below her. It reminded her of being a little girl, despatched to bed so that adult life could go on in her absence. From those long wakeful evenings she knew the contours of this room and its predecessors, the patches on the ceiling and the exact, unseen position of the picture rail and wardrobe and armchair. The creak of furniture and the hissing of pipes behind the skirting boards was like a language spoken after a long silence.

The familiarity of the room, the very smell of it, should have been oppressive, but after she had been lying there for a few minutes Harriet began to experience a strange sensation. She felt light, lighter than air. She felt as if she might bob up off the mattress, if it were not for the weight of the covers over her. It was as if she had had a great deal to drink, but without the dizziness or the confusion of drunkenness. Her mind felt very clear, and she knew that sleep was a long way off.

It occurred to her after a little while that what she did feel was free. She was on her own again.

It was exhilarating and also frightening. With her fists clenched on the bedclothes, as an anchor, Harriet reflected on what she might do. Her responsibilities to Leo, to marriage itself, seemed leaden in retrospect. The future possibilities, by contrast, shimmered around her. They were limitless, and there for the taking. She was afraid, but her fear was of failing to recognise the opportunities when they came. The thought of missing more of her chances than had already slipped past her, while her horizons were obscured by Leo, made her heart thump and panicky gasps rise in her chest. She made herself breathe slowly, in and out, to calm herself again.

The visions of freedom that came to Harriet, lying in the darkness of her old bedroom in Sunderland Avenue, were all of what she might achieve. She was briefly, thrillingly convinced that she could direct herself whichever way she wanted to go. She could reach out and pick off success for herself, as if it grew on the tree of heaven outside her window. She felt the power of it in her fingers.

The images of success and fame and happiness drifted in front of her. None of the visions had anything to do with love. She had had Love, and it had turned out to be Leo.

Everything that Harriet saw for herself was clear and vivid, but it was like a hallucination. When she tried afterwards to recapture the splendour of it all, or even to remember the simple steps that had carried her to such glory, she could come up with nothing at all. It had gone as conclusively as a dream.

She didn’t know how long the sensation lasted. After a while she felt her limbs growing heavy once more. She closed her eyes and was immediately too tired to open them again. A moment before she had felt that sleep was impossible, now it was catching up with her. She made no effort to resist it. Harriet gave a deep sigh of contentment and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Harriet and Kath were talking. At Harriet’s suggestion, because the pine bastion of the kitchen oppressed her, they went out into the garden and sat on folding chairs in the shade of the tree of heaven. It was a warm day for late September and the garden was suffused with yellow light. The buzz of Sunday afternoon lawnmowers drifted over the fence.

Harriet saw the neat suburban tableau with extra clarity, as if layers of dust had been washed out of the air by a thunderstorm. The memory of her waking dream had stayed with her, through a night’s sleep, through a family Sunday morning spent with Kath and Ken and Lisa. She knew that the dream had been profoundly significant, although she had no specific recall of the alluring images that had danced before her in the darkness.

She moved carefully with her sharpened awareness, as if there was a physically tender spot inside her that must be protected. As she looked at familiar things her clear sight seemed to give different, surprising perspectives.

Kath was wearing summer sandals on high cork heels, her toenails were painted with a dark, jammy red varnish.

Looking at her mother’s feet Harriet said musingly, ‘You used to have a pair of sandals like that when I was small.’

She remembered a blue skirt, too, and a small sandpit, perhaps in a playground. Kath in her blue skirt bent down to her with a cigarette curling blue smoke between her fingers.

‘Cork wedgies, that’s right. What a memory you’ve got,’ Kath said. ‘You can’t have been more than four or five.’

‘I can remember all kinds of things,’ Harriet answered. There was something else about today that reminded her of long ago. Perhaps it was the light, oblique and golden, the standard illumination of memory.

Kath looked at her with curiosity. ‘Can you? What things?’

‘Places where we lived, before Ken came. The one up a lot of stairs, where you could look down on the railway lines.’

‘That was a horrible place. I wish you’d forget it, I certainly have.’ Kath’s voice was sharp. They rarely talked about the time before Ken, before the advent of comfort and respectability.

‘It was all right, wasn’t it? I remember playing on the stairs. There was a fat woman who used to take me into her room and let me touch some china animals. Where were you?’

‘Working. Sybil used to mind you while I was out.’

‘Those days can’t have been easy for you.’ Harriet often wondered how she had managed, Kath who liked things nice and who hated rows or scenes, or even passion, any demonstration of naked feeling. Yet she had supported herself and an illegitimate daughter, in a series of menial jobs, until Ken Trott had come along to rescue them both. Except that Harriet hadn’t wanted to be rescued.

‘I had you, love. I wanted to look after you. I wasn’t going to let anything come between us, whatever else I had to do.’

Except Ken and Lisa, Harriet thought, and then almost laughed aloud at the tired old resentment that still came creeping up to assault her. Harriet was eight years old when Ken took Kath and her daughter into the first house and embarked on the processes of refurbishment, bathroom after bathroom and kitchen after kitchen, that had reached their high point here in Sunderland Avenue. Lisa was born when Harriet was ten. Adult Harriet knew that she had hated them both, stepfather and half-sister, until late into her teens. Young Harriet did not know what the feeling was, only that it cut her off. She dealt with it, and with other emotions that did not seem to fit in with being a Trott, by suppressing them. She played up the aspects of herself that were approved of, or at the least tolerated, and so she became Harriet the clever one, the determined one, the self-reliant one. Harriet with the wild temper, if you provoked her. Lisa was the pretty one, the one who was the image of her mother, the good little girl. The very memory made Harriet want to grind her teeth. She knew that she must have been a difficult child.

‘Poor you,’ she commiserated with her mother.

Kath was shocked. ‘I don’t know why you should say that. I’ve been very lucky. I could have ended up anywhere, considering the way I began.’

Harriet knew that the euphemism meant considering I was pregnant at eighteen, not married. She understood her mother’s fear of it, even now. It was serious, getting into trouble in the English provinces in 1952. Kath hardly ever talked about it.

Suddenly, in the sunny garden, Harriet’s consciousness of her dream suffered a dizzying change of focus. From feeling light and free, she felt sickeningly cut adrift. Her marriage was over. She was grown up, twenty-nine years old, without dependants, without a centre to her life. Kath had her centre, here with Ken, and Harriet felt ashamed of her adolescent, submerged resentment of it. For herself she had a job, perhaps a dozen real friends. It seemed little to show for thirty years of existence. Thinking of her mother’s much more frightening isolation at eighteen, Harriet was possessed by a longing to link herself with that vanished girl.

‘Tell me about it. You never have, not really.’

‘It’s all too long ago, love. Ken’s your Dad, isn’t he?’

‘Please.’ Harriet hadn’t speculated for years about the existence, somewhere, of a real father. Even in her most intensely separate years she had barely imagined him, and she was not asking about him now. It was Kath she wanted to hear about. She was afraid for herself and drifting. Kath’s story would expose the roots that went back before Ken’s time. The roots were buried deep; she could hold on by them.

‘Tell me,’ she begged. ‘Tell me about what you were like then.’

Kath was touched by her eagerness. She sat for a few seconds looking down the garden to the open patio doors that led into the quiet house, seeing beyond them. Then, surprising Harriet, she tapped her hands on the metal arms of her chair and began to laugh.

‘I was a bright spark in those days. I thought everything I wanted was just there for the taking.’

‘How strange,’ Harriet said softly. ‘I thought that too, last night. I had a peculiar dream about it, except that I wasn’t asleep.’ She wondered if their visions of everything were the same, linking them across thirty years. Kath was busy with her own memories, not listening.

‘I was very pretty, and I knew it.’ She turned to Harriet and pushed out her soft lower lip in a flirtatious pout that her daughter had never seen before. They both laughed.

‘I had plenty of boyfriends. There’d be the cinema on Friday nights, dancing on Saturdays. One or two of them even had cars. On Sundays we’d go for a drive, right out into the country, to a pub.’

‘What were they like, the boyfriends?’

‘I can’t remember. Brylcreemed hair, they all had. Jackets and ties.’

One of them, Harriet thought, had been her father. Which of them didn’t have any significance at all. She tried to imagine him, with his Brylcreemed hair, undoing the knot of his tie before unbuttoning Kath’s cotton shirtwaister. The picture would only come to her in black and white, like a still from a Fifties movie. She wondered if she had been conceived after the cinema, the dance or the country pub. There seemed no point in asking, ‘What was he like?’

‘I do remember someone from those days. Very vividly. I still think of him, sometimes.’

Harriet lifted her head. ‘Who is he?’

‘Oh, he was much older than me. He was the neighbour of your grandparents. We lived on one corner of the street and he lived on the opposite corner. Only his house was different, it was turned sideways so it looked in a different direction, and you couldn’t see into it from where we were, across the road. He kept to himself, and we hardly ever saw him. It was funny, the way we got to be friends.’

‘What happened?’

But Kath was simply absorbed in the recollection. She went on, when she was ready, without needing Harriet’s prompting.

‘I used to ride an old bike. I was doing a typing job for a shoe company and I’d cycle to work when the weather was good to save the bus fare. The day I properly met Mr Archer I think I must have been talking to a boy around the corner, where your gran couldn’t see me. After I said goodbye to him I got on the bike and swung round the corner on it, on the pavement. I ran straight into a lamp-post. Blinded by love, I suppose.’

Kath produced the pout again and Harriet laughed once more, although she was impatient for the story to continue.

‘I fell off, with the bike on top of me and the bike playing a tune because the wheel was buckled and some spokes had come loose. Mr Archer was coming up the road the other way, and he helped me up. I was half in tears, with the shock and with feeling a fool, and seeing my bike all bent.’

It came back to Kath as if it had happened a week ago. More than thirty years, she told herself, unwilling to believe it. Simon Archer had lifted the bike off her and held out his hand. She had taken it, and with her other hand she had pulled her skirt down to cover her knees. She had struggled to her feet, with his arm round her waist to support her, and the tinny tune wound down as the bicycle wheel stopped spinning.

‘The bike will mend,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

Kath had never said more than a good-morning to him before. She noticed that he spoke in a smart voice, like an announcer on the radio. She looked up at him and smiled, although her shin was smarting under a fierce graze and her hip and thigh throbbed from where she had hit the pavement.

‘I’m all right.’

‘Shall I fetch your mother?’

Kath made an imploring face. ‘No, please, unless you want to see me get a telling-off.’

‘You’d better come in with me, then. That leg needs a dressing.’

He wheeled her crippled bicycle into his garden and propped it behind the tall hedge. Kath had hobbled after him, up the path to the front door.

Inside, the house was bare and not very comfortable, but quite clean. Her rescuer made her sit on a wooden chair in the cream-painted kitchen, with her leg up on a low stool.

‘Dear me,’ he murmured. ‘Now then, first aid kit.’

Kath looked around, trying to focus on something other than the stinging cut. There was an old stone sink in the corner with a single dripping tap, a blue-and-grey enamelled oven on bowlegs, an old-fashioned wooden dresser with a few plain plates and cups, and a table in the middle of the room covered with an oilcloth.

It was shabbier than the kitchen at home and different from it not so much in its furnishing as in its feeling. Her mother’s kitchen was warm, busy, and scented with cooking. This room was cold, and Kath guessed there wouldn’t be much food stored behind the zinc grille of the meatsafe. She wondered about Mr Archer as she watched him filling a small metal bowl with hot water from his kettle. She knew that he was a widower, because she had heard her mother mention it, and she also knew that he did small electrical and mechanical repair jobs for people. That was all. She couldn’t even remember when he had come to live in the corner house, although he hadn’t been there for ever, the way her own parents had.

When he carried the bowl over and knelt down in front of her, she studied him carefully. She guessed that he was almost, but not quite, as old as her father. He had fair, rather thin hair, with a high parting, and a tall forehead. He was rather handsome, she thought, in a Prince Philip way, except that his face was lined and greyish. He glanced up at her and she saw that he had pale blue eyes.

‘You’d better take your stocking off, before I bathe your leg. I’m afraid it’s ruined, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t mend a huge hole like that.’ As if he was a doctor, Kath drew up her skirt and unhooked her suspenders. There was a tiny bulge of white flesh above the brown mesh stocking top, and she knew that they both saw it. She rolled the stocking deftly down until she reached the graze, and then she winced. ‘It hurts.’

‘Here.’ He slipped his thumbs inside the nylon tube and eased the torn edges away from the oozing graze, then twitched the stocking over her toes. ‘Done.’

Kath noticed that he had small, precise hands. He washed the wound, dabbing away the fragments of grit, and then lifted a piece of antiseptic gauze from its tin of thick, yellow grease and laid it in place. He finished off the job with a roll of bandage and then sat back on his heels to admire his handiwork.

‘Thank you,’ Kath said. ‘That feels much better.’ She wondered if they ought to shake hands, now that the emergency was past and they were looking at each other in an ordinary, social way. But he had taken off her stocking: it had created an intimacy between them that couldn’t be handshaken off.

‘I don’t know your name,’ he said, as if he had been thinking the same things.

‘It’s Kath. Katharine, really.’

‘Katharine’s pretty.’

‘I’m always called Kath,’ she said firmly, shaking her head to flick the hair back from her face. It had come loose in the fall.

‘Simon,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Kath?’

She still felt shaken, and it was comfortable, sitting with her leg up on the stool.

‘Yes, please, I would.’

While he boiled the kettle and set out two cups and saucers, Simon talked to her. She liked the sound of his voice.

‘Are you still at school? I haven’t seen you in your uniform lately, so I suppose not.’

So Mr Archer watched her coming and going. Kath was surprised to find that she was pleased with the idea. She pretended to be offended by the question, but went on smiling at him.

‘I’m seventeen. I work in an office, typing invoices, mostly. Not very interesting.’

‘And what else do you do?’

‘As much as I can.’

That was how they talked. Kath would tell him about herself and laugh, and he would ask more questions. He was friendly, but there was a hesitancy about him, as if he didn’t enjoy many conversations.

That first time, she remembered, he had told her that he would repair her bicycle. She had promised to come back a few days later.

When it was time to go she glanced down at her legs, and saw one glossy and smooth and the other bare and bandaged.

‘Better take the other one off too,’ she had said. She had peeled off the other stocking and then dropped the two of them, one perfect and one shredded, into her pocket. Simon made no attempt to look away, nor did she try to be coy. He didn’t leer, as most men she knew would have done. He simply watched her, with an openness that she found flattering.

‘I’ll be back, then,’ she had said.

‘That’s good.’ He had held the door open for her to walk through.

They had become friends. He mended the bicycle and came out to see her ride away on it. She called on him again and sewed the hem of a pair of curtains in his living room, where before they had hung down in neglected loops. After the third time she visited him without pretext. It was understood between them that she came when she felt like it and that it wasn’t necessary for him to visit her at her own house in return.

Kath’s mother referred to him as ‘Kath’s friend’, with a touch of pride. Mr Archer was gentlemanly, he had been an officer in the war, and had lost his wife tragically young. She didn’t, as she often protested, have any idea why he put up with listening to Kath’s nonsense. But he seemed to enjoy it, and it would do Kath no harm to talk to someone with a bit more sense than the boys she was endlessly running off to the pictures with.

That was how it was. Kath’s friendship with Simon Archer lasted for less than a year. Towards the end of that time Kath’s full skirts were no longer concealing the bulge underneath them, and her pretty face had taken on a pinched, defiant look.

Kath stopped talking. Busy with the threads of recollection, she didn’t see that Harriet was sitting stiffly upright in her chair. Kath was remembering one winter afternoon, early on, when she had knocked on Simon’s door after walking back from shopping. She had been wearing a scarlet wool scarf, and a matching knitted hat. She had followed him into the kitchen, laughing about something, and had dropped her hat and gloves on the oilcloth. She had taken off her coat too, because she was warm after her walk. Simon had turned from the sink where he had been filling the kettle, and seen her. She knew that her cheeks must be rosy from the wind, because she felt the heat glowing in them.

Simon put the kettle carefully down on the stove. He came to her and put one hand on her waist. It rested very lightly, curving with the hollow. He lifted his other hand and touched her cheek, brushing it with tiny movements of the fingers, as if he wanted to feel the texture of her skin.

Startled, she jerked her head back to look into his face. She was still smiling, from what she had been saying before, but the smile didn’t widen or fade. It seemed to stiffen on her mouth. They had stood quite still, just like that, for one or two seconds. And then Simon had nodded, as if he was sure now of something that he had only suspected before. He had let her go, only he hadn’t really been holding her. He had gone back to the stove and she had chatted on, but watching the back of his head because she wanted him to look round at her like that again.

When he did turn, after quite a long time, she wondered if whatever it was had ever really happened at all. There was nothing in his face to show it, and she didn’t know how to tell him that she understood.

‘Where is he now? Is he still alive?’

Harriet’s voice startled Kath. She had forgotten that she was there.

‘What did you say?’

‘I asked, is he still alive?’

Harriet was sitting on the edge of her chair, with her knees drawn up against her chest. Her face had turned pale and her eyes shone. They were fixed on Kath.

‘Simon? I don’t know, love. I left home before you were born, because your grandparents wouldn’t hear of me staying. I came down to London, you know all this, and lived with my cousins until after I had you.’

Very quietly, Harriet asked, ‘Didn’t Simon look after you?’

She saw the light that had softened Kath’s face begin to fade. There were lines in the loose flesh around her eyes and beside her mouth; her hair was permed in greying ridges. Her mother wasn’t a girl of eighteen at all, although for a moment Harriet had glimpsed that girl. She wanted to hold on to her, denying the years.

‘Why should he have done?’ Kath answered. ‘It was my own problem. You were. I wanted it that way, once I knew I couldn’t marry the father. They’d have had me back, at home, if I’d let you go for adoption. But I wouldn’t let you go, so I never went up there again.’

Harriet knew about that. Kath had told her, often, it was part of her childhood creed, I wouldn’t let you go. Kath’s possessiveness had made her both father and mother. There was no need to speculate about him. He was faceless and nameless, an ejaculation. A physical spasm, like a yawn or a shiver. The father, Kath called him, not yours. Harriet couldn’t remember her ever having said even that much before.

But today she had seen something different in her mother. She had seen youth, but she had also seen sex, with its face scrubbed bare, clean and wholesome. She had caught sight of Kath as a girl, and that girl had emitted a powerful signal. Now, at once, Harriet wanted to know about the man who had intercepted and returned that signal. She felt the crackle of its electricity, even over the remove of years. She was hungry because she had never experienced that charge herself, jolting through her bones, not with Leo nor with anyone else.

She would have to find the man, because he belonged to her. It was important to know him as part of her own history’. Harriet felt herself both set free and dangerously adrift, and she needed a new anchorage before she could set a fresh course. Names, places, even the smallest details, if she was too late for anything more, would help her to fix herself.

She left her chair and went to kneel beside her mother, resting her head against Kath’s knees.

‘Harriet? Are you all right?’

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

Ever since she had been old enough to understand her own story, her father had had no name and no face, because that was how Kath had wished it. Harriet had felt no need for anything more, because her mother gave her all she wanted. The fierce exclusivity of their love had only been disrupted by Ken, and later by Lisa. But now, Harriet was certain that he had both a name and a face, and she understood what a chasm there was to be filled.

She was certain, without needing to ask, without changing the rule of years between Kath and herself, that Simon Archer was her father. Leo had gone, and it was both ironic and apposite that his disappearance should expose a deeper bond waiting to be uncovered.

In a light, clear voice Harriet had said, ‘I’d like to go and see where you grew up. Perhaps he … your friend is still there.’

‘He probably wouldn’t remember me, even if he was. It’s a very long time ago.’

Of course, all my lifetime.

‘I’d still like to go.’

‘But there’s no family left up there.’

There had been a reconciliation, naturally. From the age of five or six onwards, Harriet remembered visits to her grandparents. But by then they had moved away from the Midlands town, and then they moved on again. Now they lived in a retirement bungalow on the coast, with photographs of their two Trott granddaughters displayed on the mantelpiece.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Harriet said. ‘Even if there’s nothing there at all. It’s where I began, after all. I can just walk along the streets and look at it.’

She stretched up and kissed her mother, then scrambled to her feet. Looking down at her she hesitated, and then asked, ‘Why did you tell me all this today?’

Kath answered dreamily, ‘You just made me remember it.’

Of course. Beginnings and endings, one separation and another coming together.

Harriet picked up the tea-tray from between their chairs and walked away down the garden, in through the patio doors.

She was going to look for her father. And when she had found him, from that point she could start again.

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