LAVINIA GREENLAW

An Irresponsible Age

EPIGRAPH

‘Here,’ he thought, ‘is where we differ from women; they have no sense of romance.’

Ralph Denham in Virginia Woolf’s

Night and Day

He had stylised himself – life was easier that way.

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

EPIGRAPH

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

ONE

‘So of course there was nothing for it but to leave.’

Juliet Clough had been about to sit down at her desk but now felt that although this was her room, she had interrupted something and ought to wait. She remained in the doorway while the voice coming from the other side of the wall continued: ‘Yes … well, thank you … No, absolutely. Of course … She’s just so … All the time these days … I do try but it’s just … You’re absolutely right … If only she could see it like … It’s just that I … You know … You do understand … Thank you … thank you …’

Juliet crept to her chair and lowered herself into it. The conversation appeared to have finished but she sat for several minutes, concentrating on staying still. Whoever he was, he must not hear her listening.

A telephone rang. Juliet tensed and leant towards the wall, only this time the man did not pick it up. Her own telephone rang so rarely that it took her a moment to realise that it was hers and not his that was ringing now. If she answered it, he would hear her and then he would know that she had been listening. She grabbed the receiver and moved across the room as far as the cord would allow.

‘Hello. Yes, it is. The Shipping Office, yes.’ She was crouching on the floor. ‘No, I can’t speak up. The opening? She’ll be delighted. I’ll tell her. Yes, I know who you are. Yes, I can spell it. Goodbye.’

So as not to have to speak again, she went outside to have a cigarette. She slipped out through the firedoors at the back of the building and hurried along the path by the river, relieved that she had not had to encounter him.

She stretched over the broad stone wall, trying to see the mud whose smell oozed in under her office door at low tide, only she wasn’t tall enough to manage it. The roll-up she had cobbled together with cold fingers kept going out, but she needed to smoke and to shake off the effect of the man who had turned up on the other side of the wall. So of course there was nothing for it but to leave. The line was familiar. Had she read it? Heard it? Never said it, though. That sort of thing hadn’t come up.

It was nothing, just something she wasn’t used to. Tania had had an odd corner at the back of the gallery turned into a self-contained unit to be rented out. Juliet had forgotten about it and could not imagine who might want it. Most of the nearby offices were unoccupied still – spice warehouses hastily converted for lease as work spaces, as if all it took was a rearrangement of letters.

Some of these streets were lined with blind walls while others were overlooked by tall windows and jutting iron hoists, suggesting such a scale of effort and industry that Juliet imagined the spices had once arrived here by the ton, in great sacks and chests that had to be heaved up and in. What surprised her most was the romance of the air, always a little stormy, into which the walls leaked the scent of nutmeg, coriander and cloves after rain. She was too wary and proprietorial to tell anyone about that.

It was January 1990, the end of a pugnacious decade and the tail end of a particularly long century. The city experienced a loss of tension and with it, a loss of momentum. Much that had been started had been set aside, but London was not a place to abandon an idea just because it proved to be a bad one. Attention wandered until no one could remember who had begun what or why, but sooner or later things would fall into place, although this usually took longer and cost more than anyone had predicted.

This in-between area east of the Square Mile and south of the river was now a blank space in the A to Z marked ‘under development’. It was being reconstructed in an optimistic mirroring of the Docklands project which was transforming the river’s north bank. The sidestreets around the hopeful, isolated gallery in which Juliet worked had been built for barrows and carts and did not encourage traffic, and so the cars belonging to the few who lived there got stuck negotiating tight corners. Juliet never saw these people in the streets, where there was nothing for them. They drove away early and came back late to sit behind glass and gaze across the river at the homes they had really wanted.

Juliet didn’t notice what was happening on the river because it was all so routine. Police launches veered waspishly about while barges slunk up and down, so low-lying they might be about to go under. What lay beneath their tarpaulins? What was left for them to transport? Dingy sightseeing cruisers ploughed back and forth, the wind garbling their amplified commentaries: ‘HMS Belfast … battle of … Elizabeth … The Tower … Docklands … Boom …’ Someone always waved and someone on shore, though never Juliet, always waved back.

On the north bank, the tallest office block in Europe had just been built on a redundant wharf. The roads that would lead towards it were as yet unmade. To the west was Traitor’s Gate where water splashed against an iron grid. Juliet could imagine those who acted against the state being taken through on a boat, blindfolded, hands tied, gagged; terrorists, perhaps.

A city with so little space and so much history that it had become its own obstruction. Juliet had wanted to study in London because she believed herself to be solitary, unknowable and footloose, and that this was the place most likely to confirm that for her. She could not say that it had, but nor did she care. She looked down into a swirl of rotten timber, industrial froth and brick-pink stain. She couldn’t care less about her stupid job in this gallery where she had to put up with things like the man through the wall. She was going to America.

‘I had no idea you could be so boring.’

For a moment Juliet thought it was a different voice: it was as light as before but needle sharp.

‘Calm down. I know you’re not shouting, Bar, but you need to calm down. And do stop swearing all the time. It’s not terribly attractive … I know … We must … we will … of course, sweetie … try to understand … Buck up, why don’t you … That’s better. Good girl. Now you’ve got work to do, haven’t you? Good girl. I’ll drop by and see you tonight … No, it was a triumph. You were a triumph. What do you mean let you down? What on earth would you need me there for when you were surrounded by all your … I’m going to put the telephone down if you start. You really can be very stupid … The reason I got this place was to be able to …’

Juliet heard a click and a curt laugh. Buck up? She felt appalled on behalf of Bar, or whatever her name was, to whom this man was speaking like a lion-tamer, games teacher and dentist all at once. He must be driving her mad.

For the rest of the afternoon, Juliet typed lightly, opened her filing cabinet smoothly and held sheets of paper by their edges but her computer bleeped and clicked, the printer growled and everything she touched crackled, whispered and whirred. She coughed twice. The first time without thinking and the second time on purpose, just to see what she could provoke. She hadn’t heard him leave but couldn’t hear what he was doing, which meant that after all he probably could not hear her. Juliet relaxed a little.

Tania was at a board meeting and so the gallery was empty. Quiet rolled back from the two locked front doors, whose original designations, ‘Upstream’ and ‘Downstream’, were still visible, carved into the lintels. It rolled through the fresh white space with its stacks of wrapped and sealed exhibits, along the corridor and into her office; it stopped at the wall.

She knew by his tone that this time it wasn’t Bar.

‘Yes, this is Jacob Dart … yes … really? You’d like me to …? Well, gosh, I mean … me? No, I’d be …’ His voice ran on in these bubbling, unfinished phrases with such sincerity that Juliet regretted writing him off as a creep. She thought now that he was a boy, nervous and strange and perhaps not in charge of himself.

Juliet chose this moment to leave. She dropped the padlock and chain on the cobbles, but he did not react to the clatter. Jacob Dart. It had been like listening to three different men and she was annoyed to find that she was three times as interested.

She cycled along the embankment path to London Bridge, where she dragged her bike up the steps and rode north on the crowded pavement, tilting and jinking, braking and back-pedalling. With her mind elsewhere, she could size up the slightest gap and guess where a foot would fall. She might lean a little too far over and brush the sleeve of a man in a heavy coat who would jerk and swing out his arm, his briefcase almost catching in her rear wheel. She would hear him grunt and then mutter something that might be ‘How’ or ‘Cow’, perhaps even ‘Wow’, as he realised that she had swooped past him and that he had had no idea she was there. What if he had moved this way or that? He might want to shout after her, but she was long gone.

Juliet Clough was twenty-eight. She looked like an Italian boy and sounded like an English girl. She had grown up in a village where she refused to make friends and had passed through her childhood landscape as she passed through the city now, removed from the drama but affected by the backdrop. She was young and immune and fond of her family, none of which encouraged her to find out more about what was going on around her.

In any case Juliet conserved herself because there was a slight hitch in her body, which had so far manifested itself in the stiffening of her lower back and a tendency in conversation to run out of steam. You may notice that she does not reach as freely as she might and that her gestures are economical, but you might also assume, as did her three brothers, her sister, her parents and friends, that this was characteristic.

There were more straightforward routes home. At Blackfriars Bridge, Juliet rode back to the south side where the beginning of an official river walk was broad enough for her to skim past the clumps of tourists taking photographs of a skyline flushed with a polluted sunset. When she had begun to travel to work this way, she made detours or waited for the tourists to take their shot, but there were so many of them that now she just rode through. She supposed that sometimes she must have got caught in the frame and would appear as a blur like that of a finger in front of the lens, spoiling the view – a notion that pleased her.

As far as Lambeth Bridge there were white walls, swagged chains and cast-iron railings. Then the path gave way to four lanes of traffic edged by an intermittent yellow line which was supposed to designate a cycle path. Half a mile ahead, this line ended as the road crossed from a borough which supported cycle paths into one that did not. Here, Juliet concentrated on being predictable. The last stretch took her through the backroads around Battersea Park, past the mythical white chimneys of the condemned power station and the overloaded mansion blocks, and on across an estate where Juliet had worked out a route along water-logged walkways, ending with a bump down a stinking spiral staircase and out onto a road of sorts lined with corrugated-iron fencing behind which was wasteland.

This had once been a grid of terraced streets named after military victories. Some had been bombed and the rest, except for two rows of six houses, had been knocked down. Over the last ten years, the tower blocks of the estate had been supplemented first by maisonettes offering a sliver of balcony or garden, and then by what were almost terraced houses again, except that they looked like broken-off chunks of the flats. One row of the old houses belonged to the railway and had been leased to the housing co-op Juliet belonged to. She lived at the end of the road, on what used to be a corner, between the newest houses and the wasteland.

On the stairs, she met her brother Fred who asked, ‘Going to change out of your uniform?’

‘I have to look smart. It’s a gallery.’ Juliet wore either neat shirts and narrow trousers, or t-shirts and jeans, and had the kind of light, straight figure which inclined her to look disciplined or childlike accordingly. She considered Fred, whom she could not imagine in a pair of jeans: ‘Did you sleep in your shirt and tie?’

He nodded. ‘And my waistcoat.’

‘You used to do that when you were at school.’

‘Sleep in my uniform? It saved time.’

‘What for? You didn’t do anything then except sleep or work. Same now, really.’

Fred had a job in the City, something so new to his family that nobody understood what he did or asked him to explain. He dressed with elaborate formality so as to convince himself that he was in costume. To him, making money was a game; he enjoyed the rules but did not show much interest in the result. He understood money well enough to know that when it accumulated it insisted upon change, something Fred was not good at and resisted. He never spoke about how much he lost or made, just as he did not acknowledge that the house in Khyber Road was quite different to the flats his colleagues were buying near the common and the park.

Fred followed Juliet into her room where she turned on a small heater and began to select clothes from the neat stacks of black, white and grey on her metal shelves.

‘Shut the door if you’re staying,’ she said. ‘It’s freezing.’

Fred had been a child who acted the part of a grown-up. Now he was a grown-up acting the part of a grown-up. He was the same height as Juliet, but did not have her coherence. With his red-and-white looks, fizziness and wild hair, he might strike you as badly wired whereas Juliet was wire.

He hopped from side to side. ‘I meant to say, to tell you, to warn you, the thing is –’

‘Could you stop jiggling about while you speak? It’s very annoying.’ Juliet had taken off her trousers and jacket, and was climbing into woolly tights, jeans, a vest, flannel shirt and jersey.

‘The thing is Caroline, a girl from work, tonight.’

‘You invited someone here?’

‘Not as such. Someone’s birthday party. She asked me to be her escort. She’s picking me up at seven.’

‘If you’re her escort, you ought to be picking her up.’

‘Really?’ He flushed and looked so worried that Juliet assured him it didn’t matter, and they went downstairs to light a fire.

In winter, they moved around the house like this, in a huddle, rushing from one source of heat to the next. The house was volubly falling apart. The bare stairs sagged and creaked. Few of the windows opened and some didn’t shut; all rattled. Ill-fitting doors created odd drafts and pockets of mustiness. There was a spurting growth of mould in the bathroom and the walls had begun to shed their plaster.

‘So where is this birthday party?’ Juliet asked.

‘In a bar on Lavender Hill.’

‘And you’re going in your suit?’

‘It’s what I wear.’

‘Perhaps a t-shirt? Or at least not a tie. You ought to show that you can differentiate.’

There was a firm knock on the front door. Fred leapt up and rushed into the hall but then started backing away towards the stairs. ‘Please, I better, like you said, change, could you just …’ He was gone.

Juliet brought Caroline through to the living room and shut the door.

‘It’s a very interesting colour,’ the girl tried out, looking around. Her voice was airless and emphatic. She perched on the edge of the sofa, smiling and wincing and trying to avoid the broken springs asserting themselves beneath the worn cover.

‘The sofa? Our brother Carlo, he’s training to be a pathologist, says it’s the exact tone of an exsanguinated corpse. You can tell from the seams that it was once bright pink. In full health, so to speak. So yes, it is interesting.’

‘Exsanguinated?’

‘Bled to death.’

Caroline looked so sincerely horrified that Juliet briefly felt guilty. She watched the girl push back the padded velvet band that hovered over her flat hair. Her upholstered jacket creased across her stomach and rustled as she shifted from side to side. She’s like a badly wrapped present, thought Juliet, and leaned over to shovel more coal onto the fire.

‘I meant the room. This … brown.’ Caroline leant back, trying to relax, remembered the springs and lurched forward. Her skirt caught and there was a tear of perhaps half an inch on her left hip.

Juliet explained: ‘Allie, the speedfreak who lives in the attic, painted it this colour because he thought it would help him sleep. We hate it, but our lives are a lot easier.’

Caroline looked mildly thrilled. ‘In the attic?’

‘Not now. He’s in hospital.’

‘Oh dear, an overdose?’

‘No. Blood poisoning. He gashed his leg and then he encouraged it.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Don’t feel sorry for him; they have central heating in hospital.’

There was a pause before Caroline hit on a new subject. ‘I knew someone who knew someone who slept in a room with a coal fire. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning.’

‘That old wives’ tale? Well, just to make sure, we’ve nailed polythene over the windows to keep out the cold, so the place is absolutely airless,’ snapped Juliet. Where was Fred?

Caroline rose. ‘I’m sorry to have imposed myself on you like this. You must be wanting to get on with your evening. I could wait for Fred outside –’

Juliet stood up to stop her going. She had to admit that Caroline was rather impressive after all. ‘It’s nice to meet you, and very kind of you to come and collect the boy and hugely impressive that you found us. Khyber Road isn’t in the A to Z, so we’re entirely off the map.’

Caroline looked as if she could find anyone anywhere. ‘I live nearby, actually.’ Not in the tower blocks, nor on the estate, but on the other side of Clapham Junction.

‘I live with people from work – Jane and Graham. We’re married.’

‘You’re married?’

‘Me? No, no, did I say me? No, no, I’m not married, they are. Graham and Jane. No. Them. Graham and Jane.’

Caroline’s face was scarlet, as if the fire she was staring into had suddenly produced some actual heat. Juliet watched her fiddle with the tear in her skirt, and wondered.

Fred appeared, wearing some old trousers and an untucked shirt, and they set off awkwardly into the night. Juliet wished them well but she was not hopeful. It must take a lot to make someone like Caroline blush, she thought, and she was right. Later, after Fred had walked Caroline home and Jane had taken her sleeping pill, Graham would creep into the box room they rented to Caroline for most of their mortgage payment, and it would be his finger that would find the hole in the tartan taffeta, and enlarge it.

When Barbara came back with a bottle of wine and saw Jacob sitting on the sofa as he always did, half kneeling and almost curled, she had to stop herself saying, ‘You look as if you never left’, or ‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ What pleased Jacob was knowing silence, so Barbara looked briefly struck and then got on with pouring them both a drink. Even though two people could have sat between them, she felt the shock of being close to him again. It had been three weeks since he moved out, if it could be called that.

‘What is it like then, your room?’

‘It has all I need – a table, a bed.’

‘I know, Jakes. A table, a bed, a scrap of cashmere, a drop of cognac …’

‘Oh come on, don’t be so leaden.’ Jacob’s mouth tightened at the corners as if someone had turned two screws. No one else teased him or called him by anything other than his full name.

‘Where do you wash?’

‘In the sink.’

‘I hope Tania hasn’t made the mistake of laying on hot water.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘You must be in heaven.’ Barbara still found her husband so interesting that she leaned back in order to scrutinise him more thoroughly. She knew what he was made of, parts that did not belong together and which ought not to fit: a bulky, almost square forehead, a cleft chin, a mouth unbalanced by the comparative slightness of the lower lip, a long thin nose with flared nostrils, heavy brows, and wide pale eyes that scattered light. Although he looked still, even disengaged, Jacob was continuously in the throes of process and adjustment, at a chemical level barely discernible to the eye. From moment to moment, he was a different creature.

Now, without moving or speaking, Jacob stopped being a man laying claim to a home and became nervous and rigid, a boy. To stop herself feeling sorry for him, wanting to do something for him, Barbara got up and went to run a bath.

‘Come on, Jakes.’

He would not look at her but let her raise him to his feet and steer him into the bathroom. As she reached round him to close the door, he leant back against it, pulling her towards him. They were about the same height and their bodies were the same mixture of angles and curves.

With Jacob pinned to the door, Barbara caught sight of herself in the mirror that ran along one wall, floor to ceiling. She looked clumsy, aggressive and unwelcome. ‘Christ, I feel like a man,’ she said and took a step backwards.

Jacob caught her arms with his fingertips. He turned his head away and slumped a little. Poor Jacob. Barbara pressed a hand against his jeans and felt a flick of attention. She knelt down, unbuttoned his flies and took the whole of his soft cock into her mouth. For the few moments in which nothing happened, Barbara felt the purest and most generous tenderness. She would have taken his body into her mouth entire, if she could.

Jacob made the small sound he made when he came, undressed and slipped into the water. Barbara stood in the middle of the stone floor and hitched her skirt up to her thighs before deciding to announce that she needed to pee, only she chose to say ‘piss’, ‘I really must piss’, and did so noisily, keeping her eyes fixed on his as she talked: ‘I love the light in here, how it’s so sort of steely and marine. Do you remember what you said when we first had it done? How it was like being in a bathysphere.’ She stood up and took off her clothes, at first angrily and then coquettishly. She had been undressing in front of Jacob for twenty years and wanted him to realise what that meant, and to want still to watch.

Naked, she hesitated. ‘They were right about all those scatter spots giving it a salty atmosphere. Absolutely right. It’s my favourite room.’ Then she put one foot on the edge of the bath, her groin towards his face.

He made no space for her. ‘I know.’

‘It’s yours, too, isn’t it? Your favourite room,’ she continued, climbing in to crouch at his feet.

‘Don’t you think,’ Jacob was saying as he stood up so abruptly that the water rocked, collided with itself and washed over the side, ‘that you overdid it? Just a bit?’

He got dressed, still wet, and had his hand on the front door when she jumped out of the water and ran naked through the flat to stand behind him.

He waited, blank and tolerant, as she fought to control her voice: ‘You wanted it … as much as … I did … more … so … don’t … don’t … make me feel … all this is … just …’

Jacob had buttoned his shirt wrongly and left it half untucked, not because he was in a hurry but because this was what he did. About five years earlier, Barbara had stopped finding it charming but she had never done what she did now, which was to reach out and tidy him up.

‘You’re forty-three, not seventeen.’

In his smallest, most exhausted voice: ‘May I go now?’

Juliet wrapped herself up in an eiderdown, turned on the television and drank whisky from a teacup, as if that made it good for her. Nothing worked. The room did not become anything more than its four brown walls, its grey windows and warped door; it did nothing to hold her. Damp sat in the icy air and the air sat in her lungs so that what circulated in her body was a kind of slush, neither forming nor melting, grubby, soggy and chill. She wondered why a stranger’s voice could affect her so much.

The pain began, as it often did, when her thoughts ran out. The first twinge at the base of her spine repeated itself and then unfurled, pushed and gripped. I’m not in agony, she thought, it’s not like earache or toothache or being burned, but the pain travelled and accumulated until it possessed her. More than that, it occupied her so fully that she felt thrown out of herself.

She decided to prepare for bed and clutching the eiderdown around her shoulders, moved into the kitchen where she boiled the kettle and filled two hot-water bottles. These she carried upstairs. Then she fetched a can of paraffin and filled the two heaters that stood in the hallway upstairs, heaving one into her room and the other into the bathroom. After trimming and adjusting their wicks, she persuaded both to stay alight. Downstairs again, she coaxed the boiler into action, filled her cup with more whisky, and then went up and ran a bath.

She undressed in a cloud and lay back in water as hot as she could stand, knowing that it would soon cool and that the steam would condense and drip down the walls to feed the mildew, which she would then be able to see, like her poor pink body, far too clearly. The bitter paraffin fumes stung her eyes and mouth, but the smell was a sign that something beyond this bath was giving off heat.

Wrapped in a towel which would never quite dry, Juliet scuttled to her room and turned on a tiny fan heater. She had the largest bedroom, the one with two windows, at the front. It was painted matt duck-egg blue and she kept the navy slatted blinds down, preferring striated light to a view of towerblocks and corrugated iron. Her clothes were arranged on a rail and folded on shelves and in boxes. Her desk, chair and lamp were army surplus, metal-framed and painted grey. She allowed herself one postcard at a time. Her floor was painted dark green and covered in a rug that had belonged to her grandmother. Since childhood, she had loved its lack of traceable pattern.

She surrounded the rug with dullness in order to see it more clearly. She thought about things like this a lot and had impressed Tania at her interview with her ideas about framing space and the importance of absence in display. The truth had been that she liked the empty gallery so much that she knew she would never like anything brought into it. Her PhD, which she planned to finish the following year, was titled ‘Framed Departure: the Empty Metaphor in Post-Iconoclastic Netherlandish Art’.

She got dressed in vest, socks, pyjamas and jersey, and was in bed reading when Fred knocked on her door. Pleased to see him, she moved over and he climbed under the covers, claimed one of the hot-water bottles and lit a joint. Allie had grown cannabis in his attic room, punching holes in the roof above each plant to let in light. His crop had been so successful that the cupboard under the stairs was crammed with large plants hung upside-down to dry. No one had been sure when they would be ready but over the winter they had turned into something like dried seaweed and had a striking effect.

‘How was it?’ she asked.

Fred was too full of delight at his evening with Caroline to want to talk. He shrugged and shook his head, giggled and sighed and smiled so hard that Juliet laughed for the pleasure of something as absolute as his happiness. She was still laughing as she tried to get up, so at first Fred didn’t notice that she couldn’t straighten and when he did, he waited.

When she could speak again, Juliet said, ‘I keep meaning to see someone about this, but then it goes away. It’s as if someone’s turning a switch off and on. And it’s not just my back any more. There’s so much blood and it’s full of –’

‘No!’ Fred covered his ears.

Fred’s room was at the back of the house where he slept in the brass bed he had had since growing out of his cot. He had painted his walls red, thinking this would make the room warmer. His shirts, pounded in a bathful of suds and inadequately rinsed and ironed, were arranged on hangers suspended from picture hooks hammered badly into the wall. His two suits were squashed up on the back of the door while his shoes and ties, underwear and waistcoats were scattered about.

Juliet came to wake Fred at six-thirty. He had to be at his desk within the hour. She stroked his cheek. ‘Every time I come in here,’ she said, ‘I think you’ve just exploded.’

TWO

Juliet continued to listen through the office wall. Jacob Dart might have been sitting beside her, including her; she had no choice.

‘Hullo, Sally.’

Juliet had guessed by now that Sally was Jacob Dart’s sister. He talked to her in the kind of shorthand that siblings use, swore a lot and laughed more from his belly. She imagined him sliding down in his chair as if he were at home and it was just after dinner, and he and this sister (they also talked about a Monica – ‘Bloody Monica’, ‘You know what Monica’s like’) were drunk and up for a late night of banter.

‘Hullo, Sally.’

He said ‘Hullo’ in the old-fashioned way, with an audible ‘u’ rather than an ‘e’. Juliet tried it out when answering her own telephone: ‘Hullo. The opening? Yes, she’ll be delighted. You’re not sure? Fine. I don’t suppose she’ll notice whether you’re there or not. Yes, I can spell it.’

‘Right … right … right …’ with each repetition, the word grew smaller. ‘Which hospital? Are you there now? I’ll be, it’s alright, I’ll be right there. It’s OK Sally, I’m on my on my my way.’

Juliet realised that he was crying. He cried for a long time, as if letting go of something that once it began to unravel would go on and on. What came to mind was a story Fred had written as a child about a magician who was cursed and went to hell, where, ‘leaking small tears and tidy sobs’, he had to spend eternity pulling a scarf from his sleeve.

She couldn’t go and knock on his door. They had not yet met and what would she say? Then his door opened and shut. Juliet looked at her watch and saying loudly, ‘Time to go home!’, put on her coat and stepped outside.

As she cycled into the alley, she glimpsed a figure in a pale coat and a dark hat passing under a lamp, and hurried to catch up. She turned into the street so fast that she found herself overtaking him and had to keep going so that he wouldn’t suspect. Guessing that he was heading for the main road, Juliet sped on and hid round a corner. How could he not spot her immediately? He continued past with a loose stride that made him seem more like a farmer walking his fields than someone hurrying across a city to a hospital. She liked this walk; it made her think of him as a generous man.

The road was a one-way system which gathered up everything heading west and forced it east for a while, around the bend where Jacob vaulted over the railing and danced across four lanes. He hopped over a crash barrier and crossed through the traffic on the other side, where drivers accelerated, relieved to be once more heading the right way. Juliet cycled round and was just in time to see Jacob slip back onto the pavement through a gap where the railings had been wrenched out of place. He continued, half running now, lightly, lightly, disappearing as the road squeezed under the first of the railway bridges which fused here so thickly that they created long tunnels of blackened brickwork and squalid tiles, under-powered striplights and dummy speed cameras, encrusted girders, pallid chickweed, lush moss, pigeons and power cables, all faltering on and on.

‘Can I help you?’ The man patrolling the hospital forecourt was wearing a vaguely military uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie.

‘I’m visiting,’ Jacob whispered.

‘What’s that?’

Jacob shrugged and the man decided that the best way out of this was to pretend that he had heard.

‘Know the way?’

‘No,’ Jacob admitted, then turned and walked off.

‘Which ward then?’ the man called after Jacob, who loped up one of the ramps marked ‘Ambulance Only’ and then came down the other side.

‘Which ward then?’ the man repeated, more challengingly.

‘How should I know?’ Jacob murmured, heading for the steps that led to the even-numbered floors.

‘What you say, mate?’

Jacob came strolling back down the stairs and headed for the opposite set. The man bellowed after him: ‘Here!’

Jacob stopped and turned very slightly, and the man half sang, half spat: ‘Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that hat?’ He grinned, expecting Jacob to grin back only he didn’t but took the hat off his head and held it out: olive-coloured corduroy with the high cleft crown and a feminine, extravagant brim.

‘Have the fucking hat,’ he said evenly. The man coughed to disguise the red in his face, and put his hands in his pockets.

Level 3 looked like a section of multi-storey car park filled with signs that said ‘Do Not Park Here’. The patients who had come out to smoke, some in wheelchairs, others toting drips, huddled together on a strip of turf-like matting. They threw their dog-ends into flesh-coloured plastic barrels planted with dwarf conifers. The man in the floppy hat and coat hurried past. He jumped to peer through the dark glass façade, which was designed to be looked through the other way. At one point he even went up to the glass and pressed his hand against it. Eventually he stopped by the smokers, who indicated that the doors were right there, just behind them. He would have to go in now.

Jacob walked past the hospital map and along a corridor until he reached a lift. He walked back to the map and ran his eye down the list as far as ‘N’: Nye Bevan Ward. The name was in pink and so when Jacob set off again, he followed the line of pink tape on the linoleum floor only then he was following the blue, or the green. Where had the pink line gone?

‘There you are!’ Sally found him by the emergency staircase. He had got as far as the right floor and had not been able to go further. ‘You must have got lost. She’s through here.’

Jacob’s sister led him along a row of blue-curtained cubicles, so tightly packed that they billowed inwards under the pressure of neighbouring furniture and visitors. He sidled along the edge of the bed and squeezed himself into a chair just as a toddler visiting her grandmother rolled under the curtain’s hem. He edged the child back with his foot and leant over to kiss his mother.

‘Hullo there.’

‘Hello, love.’ She tried to raise a hand to greet her son.

‘You sound completely pissed. So you still know who I am, then?’

Monica smiled. The left corner of her mouth had been yanked down, making that side of her face sadder and younger.

Jacob ran a finger across her cheek as if testing a surface. ‘A half smile! You know how they say in novels “She half smiled”? I’ve never known what that meant before and here it is – a half smile.’

‘If I could lift this arm, my boy, I’d give you a clout.’

Jacob took her hand and stroked it.

She could see how tightly wound his mouth was and knew what that meant. ‘Don’t worry. Not much damage done. Good thing I was staying with Sally when it happened. They say London hospitals are the best.’

Sally leant in from the foot of the bed and patted her mother’s leg: ‘You’re to stay put. If we let you out, you’d only frighten the horses.’ She was speaking too loudly, Jacob too much. They would have liked a little distance from which to observe what had happened to their mother and she, too, would have appreciated more space than the cubicle allowed. Jacob and Sally veered and loomed in front of her as parents must appear to a newborn.

Jacob found a tissue and dabbed Monica’s lips. ‘You’re drooling. Must be the smell of that hospital dinner. Now let’s run a few checks!’ Jacob was going to be bluff and cajoling because this is what would make his mother feel comfortable. He could adapt perfectly when he chose.

‘Who’s Prime Minister?’

‘That bloody woman. She is a woman, isn’t she?’

‘Clement Atlee! Absolutely right. And who’s on the throne?’

‘That other bloody woman.’

‘Boudicca! Nothing wrong with you at all! And the year?’

‘Just another bloody year …’

Half an hour later, Jacob and Sally fled. When the lift doors closed, Sally asked, ‘Did you understand anything she said?’

Jacob shrugged. ‘Not a word, poor old cow. Still, at least something’s finally rid her of that dreadful west-country burr.’

Sally screeched, delighted. She did not notice that her brother was shaking.

Jacob walked down to the river and east along the difficult north bank, where he was forced into detours among churches, coffee houses and money houses on streets that jack-knifed or divided, or brought you into alleyways and newly inserted corners, as if to compel you to keep up some kind of attention and pace. He walked tirelessly and lightly, and believed that he could keep moving forever and leave no trace. He hated his mother. When his father died, fifteen-year-old Jacob had caught her looking at him in church in a way he could only describe as triumphant. He hated his father, too, for forcing her to be so small and for, in the end and despite everything, belonging to his wife and not to his son.

It was raining hard. Jacob walked on with his coat open and his hat in his hand. His hair grew wet and his face cold and still he walked, wanting to find the dark that ought to come. Further east he reached a certain street where he stopped and waited. Two hours later, Barbara came downstairs and found him. She ran him a bath, took off his wet clothes and left him.

‘You can stay if you like,’ she said when he re-emerged wearing things he had found in cupboards neither he nor Barbara had emptied. ‘In the study, though, not –’

‘Thank you.’

Jacob offered to make soup. He found potatoes and kale, chopped them roughly and cooked them briefly with a lot of garlic and chilli. He made Barbara watch him cook and told her when to sit at table. He watched her eat and jumped up to fetch whatever she might need – a napkin, a glass of wine, a tissue for her streaming eyes. She praised him energetically and he cleared everything away, and although Barbara knew that nothing would be properly clean or in its right place, she let him.

That night, they were gentle.

‘Will she be alright?’ Jacob asked.

Barbara had spoken to Sally, made some calls and done some research. ‘Not entirely, but within a month or so she ought to be able to go home, providing there’s some local care.’

Jacob had nothing left to do, so he sat down.

‘You must be exhausted,’ Barbara said. ‘What a shock.’

He shrugged, stretched and closed his eyes. ‘She’s a tough old boot.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she gave up on me years ago.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was it at Sally’s fortieth, in that nasty little restaurant?’

‘Suppose so.’

‘Not since then?’

‘What’s the point? She has no interest in me.’

Barbara could have pointed out how avidly Monica tried to follow her son’s career and that she only telephoned so rarely because Jacob made her nervous, but she also knew that this was what he did when he thought someone might leave him – insist they had left him already. As for when he wanted to leave …

‘Are you really here?’ Barbara asked. It was a serious question but one she knew she would have to answer for herself. ‘I don’t think I ever believed, in all those years, that you were really here. Or even that you were real. Because you don’t even feel real to yourself, do you? You haunted our life and you haunt yourself.’

‘It is,’ said Jacob, without opening his eyes, ‘a question of style.’

‘As serious as that?’ said Barbara, with more kindness than you might expect.

The next morning, Juliet woke up and blushed. ‘I was spying,’ she said to herself, and then to Fred as she hauled him out from under his blankets, ‘Do you think I’d make a good spy?’

‘No, too bad-tempered.’

‘Why can’t a spy be bad-tempered?’

‘Because people notice you. They notice your temper. But don’t worry, it’s your charm.’

‘Don’t you mean part of my charm?’

Fred considered this. ‘No.’

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