# The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia: A Black-Hearted Soap Opera

Sarah May

Do you know what your neighbours get up to behind closed doors? And more to the point, do you want to know? ‘The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia is a darkly comic portrayal of marriage, relationships, neighbours and suburbia.Welcome to Littlehaven, where serving pineapple with cottage cheese at a dinner party is the very height of glamorous sophistication; where sulky teenagers join CND and obsess as much about the threat of nuclear war as they do about their latest acne outbreak; and where missing a Green Goddess-led aerobics session is the true definition of disaster. ‘The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia’ follows the intertwined stories of the inhabitants of Pollards Close in love and out of love, in marriage and in flagrante, in health and in sickness, in work and out of work, in triumph and in tragedy.‘The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia’ is a black-hearted soap opera, a smart, sharp study of obsession, paranoia and class, set against an all-too-recognisable backdrop of the decade that taste forgot.

SARAH MAY

### The Rise and Fall of the Queen of Suburbia

A black-hearted soap opera


This book is dedicated to all parents who dream of bringing their children up in a better world, out of harm’s way … and to all children who dream of escaping and getting in harm’s way. Que Sera Sera.

My overwhelming thanks go to all the extraordinary women who made this book possible, in particular – Katie Espiner at HarperCollins, for her enthusiasm, commitment and understanding of the darker side of life; Clare Alexander at Gillon Aitken Associates for her beyond-the-call-of-duty support, demonic tenacity and unflinching ability to respond to e-mails written in the early hours of the morning, and last but not least … Jennifer Hutchinson and Sarah Weedon, for providing the sort of childcare you can’t pay for.

I would also like to thank my husband for keeping our marriage going during Linda Palmer’s reign of terror … there were more dark days and long nights than I’d ever want to have to account for.

## Contents

Title Page Dedication Prologue Electoral Roll Littlehaven District 9 December 1983 Eight Sixteen Eight Four Eight Four Eight 23 December 1983 Four Eight Fourteen Eight Four Eight Christmas Eve, 1983 Four Eight Fourteen Ten Four Eight Four Four Four Eight 28 February 1984 Eight Twelve Eight Four Eight Four Eight Four Eight Two Eight 1 March – 11 October 1984 Eight Four Eight Four Two Four Six Eight Ten Twelve Fourteen Sixteen About the Author By The Same Author Copyright About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

## ELECTORAL ROLL LITTLEHAVEN DISTRICT

POLLARDS CLOSE | 
 |  | Cont RH12 9NA
1260 1261 | YOUNG, SHEILA YOUNG, BRIAN | 02 02
1262 1263 1264 | SAUNDERS, MICK SAUNDERS, DOMINIQUE 25 Jan 84 SAUNDERS, DELTA | 04 04 04
1265 1266 | NASSAM, OSMAN NASSAM, SANDRA | 06 06
1267 1268 | PALMER, JOE PALMER, LINDA | 08 08
1269 1270 1271 | NAME REMOVED KLINE, VALERIE KLINE, BRENDAN | 10 10 10
1272 1273 1274 | NIEMAN, WINKE NIEMAN, DAPHNE NIEMAN, PAUL | 12 12 12
1275 | BROWNE, ANTHONY | 14
1276 | KLUSCZYNSKI, MARGO | 16

9 DECEMBER 1983

[8]

It had been snowing in Littlehaven for what seemed like forty days and forty nights, and everyone over four feet tall was tired of having to keep Christmas tree lights on all day long so that flickering neon could counteract a numb and unanimous sense of foreboding. The real world and snow didn’t go.

Then on 9 December, which was a Friday, it stopped.

Inside No. 8 Pollards Close the heating was pumping and the blinds in the master bedroom were still on tilt. Linda Palmer was naked, bent over the open drawer of her vanity unit. When she straightened up, a pair of clean bikini briefs in her hand, she was able to see not only herself, but the reflection of the TV screen and Selina Scott’s face just left of her hips, at pussy-level.

She put the bikinis on and turned the TV off. Since the show’s first airing in January she had done Diana Moran’s workout faithfully every morning, but now they were nearly at the end of the calendar year, her body had clocked up over eighty hours of workout since then and the Green Goddess just didn’t do it for her any more. The Green Goddess was for people who wanted to be like Linda Palmer, so what did she want with the Green Goddess when she already was Linda Palmer.

She turned back to the vanity unit, changed the Barry Manilow cassette in the stereo for a Bruce Springsteen compilation, then climbed onto the mail-order exercise bike she’d had long enough for the rubber stoppers on the legs to leave imprints in the carpet. With the switch on dead flat she started to pedal. If she didn’t do twenty minutes before the aerobics class, sweat formed on the back of her pink and grey striped leotard, and at the end of class Dominique Saunders would ask her if she was okay; tell her she looked tired.

A slow track came on, something about Vietnam, and she switched to gradient. She was just getting into the uphill rhythm when the phoned started to ring. After counting six rings, she flicked the switch from gradient to dead flat to off, and dismounted.

‘Is that you, Joe? Joe?’

‘Hello? Mrs Palmer?’

‘Joe – is that you?’

‘Mrs Palmer?’

The voice sounded foreign, and she didn’t feel like being spoken to by a foreign-sounding voice right then. ‘Who is this?’

‘Mrs Palmer, it’s Mrs Klusczynski.’

‘Who?’

‘Jessica’s advanced physics teacher.’

Linda backed away from the vanity unit, put the phone on the floor and jammed the receiver between her right ear and shoulder. The only word she caught the foreign voice saying was ‘advanced’. ‘Listen, if you’re trying to sell me anything …’

‘It’s Mrs Klusczynski, from Jessica’s school.’

‘… anything at all, I’m just not …’ she stopped herself. A long time ago, she had trained herself to keep the unfamiliar in the background, and this is what she did now. The foreign woman faded out and all she could hear was Bruce, still singing about Vietnam, and she couldn’t work out if he’d actually been or not or whether this even mattered. Maybe she was just missing the point. ‘It’s who?’

‘M-r-s K-l-u-s-c-z-y-n-s-k-i,’ the foreign woman yelled down the phone.

Linda held the receiver away for a moment as forty years of Poland in exile made its way through the barricade of redneck vocals on the stereo. She had a sudden image of a woman who wore cardigans and the sort of slip-on shoes that were more prescription than high-street, emerging from one of the two-bedroom terraces at the top of Pollards Close with her severely epileptic son. ‘Wait. Mrs Klusczynski, top-of-the-Close Mrs Klusczynski?’

‘That’s right. I’m also your daughter’s advanced physics teacher here at school.’

‘Her physics teacher. Right. I knew that. Sorry. I’m with you now.’

Looking at her alarm clock, she saw that there was less than an hour to go before class. The phone line fell in a coil between her breasts as she got back onto the bike. ‘I’m with you now,’ she said again, sideways through the receiver as she started to pedal.

‘Mrs Palmer, are you still there?’

‘I’m here.’ She flicked the switch to gradient, and breathed out hard.

‘I’m afraid there’s a problem with Jessica.’

‘A problem?’

‘It’s an interesting problem.’

Linda had never found problems interesting and didn’t like the fact that Mrs Klushwhatever was enjoying this conversation more than she was. ‘Yes?’ she said harshly, switching from gradient to gradient: steep.

‘She refuses to complete – no – even to look at the module on nuclear physics, which is a compulsory part of the A Level examination.’

‘What d’you mean “refuses”?’

‘I mean she walked out of my classroom just now on ethical grounds.’

Mrs Klusczynski paused. She sounded pleased and this confused Linda, who had begun to swing her head slightly in an attempt to regulate her breathing. ‘You’re sure?’ She couldn’t imagine Jessica walking out of class.

‘I’m sure. It’s never happened to me before.’

This was too intimate – more of a confession than a comment. Linda arched her back and tried to relax her shoulders.

‘But the school said to put her in for early-entry A Level Physics. They said she was a straight “A” – no doubt.’ Linda was having trouble finding enough oxygen to speak, think and cycle at the same time.

‘There is no doubt. All we have to do is get her to overcome her reaction to “nuclear” in the syllabus. I respect it. I respect Jessica and her decision,’ Mrs Klusczynski added, ‘but she doesn’t fully understand the physics of it. Once she understands the physics, or begins to understand, she will be able to see – or she will be a lot closer to seeing, anyway, that it’s not the physics that are corrupt.’

Linda became suddenly, acutely aware of her thigh muscles.

‘… She can’t study physics and turn a blind eye to the splitting of the atom. That’s not wanting to know the whole truth … that’s fanaticism –’ Mrs Klusczynski said, carried away, ‘– and ignorance.’ The art block was being refurbished and they were holding art classes in the science block this term. She reached out for the plastic cup full of mixing water that Miss West had been using during the last period and drank it like coffee. ‘I urge you and your husband to talk to her.’

‘We’ll talk,’ Linda said, with a hungry intake of breath.

‘Tell her – tell her not to throw her strength away on morality; that’s not the path for Jessica. Tell her –’

‘If she does the work she’s meant to do on this … this … module, she’ll still be in line for an ‘A’?’ Linda cut in, breathless, thinking about the number of times she’d told Dominique Saunders and others that Jessica was going to get an ‘A’ in A Level Physics – and Mathematics – at the age of fifteen. Trevor Jameson at the County Times was going to run a whole feature on her when she did – and here was some foreign woman whose garage wasn’t even an integral part of her house talking to her about nuclear bombs; about Jessica and nuclear bombs. Why was this all anyone ever talked about any more? She lunged forward as her lungs collapsed, her entire weight on the edge of the saddle … fuck the bomb.

‘Mrs Palmer? So … you’ll talk to Jessica, Mrs Palmer?’ Mrs Klusczynski no longer sounded convinced. ‘I had to give her a detention, I’m afraid. Whatever I think of what she did, I have to make it clear to the rest of the class that walking out in the middle of a lesson is unacceptable behaviour, and …’

‘You gave her a detention?’

‘Don’t worry, an hour’s supervision in the special needs room is all it really amounts to.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Tonight, yes, between four and five.’

‘But I’m having a dinner party tonight. The Niemans are coming to dinner, and … Jesus, that’s enough.’ She flicked the switch down and changed gear, at last finding some sort of karma between the balls of her feet and the pedals. ‘Jessica was meant to be helping with the canapés …’

[16]

Mrs Klusczynski put the phone down, pulling a tissue out of her cardigan sleeve and wiping her mouth, which was tingling. She had phoned Mrs Palmer to talk to her about her daughter, and Mrs Palmer was having sex. She was sure of it. She looked at her watch – it was ten a.m. – and carried on dabbing at her mouth. There had been music in the background as well. Mrs Palmer had taken a phone call concerning her only child while having sex to music. She stared at the tissue, which was stained black – why was that? – then through the windows in their chipped, cream-painted metal frames. Standing up on the rungs of the stool, she could see the entire school playing field. It had stopped snowing.

[8]

Linda pressed the phone against her chest and rested her chin on it as she recalled what it was she had been trying to remember about Mrs Klusczynski, who lived at No. 16. It had happened the summer they moved in. Mrs Klusczynski had been to meet the local-authority bus that used to drop off her son, who was prone to, on average, seven fits an hour, and Linda was watching mother and son walk back up the street, when it happened: Peter had one of his fits and collapsed onto tarmac that was melting in the heat. She remembered Joe, who was coming home early from work, leaving the car in the middle of the road and breaking into a run – she’d never seen Joe run before. He took off his suit jacket and put it under Peter Klusczynski’s head, and she watched from behind the blinds in the lounge as he carried the boy indoors, into their kitchen, sat him at the old dining-room table – the one they used to have before the glass-topped one – and gave him water to drink. Mrs Klusczynski hovered at the front door in a canary yellow sundress and Linda stayed in the lounge because she didn’t know what to say to her. At that moment she didn’t understand Joe bringing the boy into their house like that.

‘You all right?’ she heard Joe say.

‘Peter?’ Mrs Klusczynski’s voice came through the front door.

Afterwards Joe walked mother and son up the street. Linda saw him and the Polish woman talking together and the car still parked in the middle of the road with the door open. For a moment, the world felt as if it had suddenly emptied and she was the only one standing there, watching, only there was nothing left to watch, and someone somewhere was laughing at her.

[4]

By the end of the aerobics class, Dominique Saunders’ leotard was wet and the ‘D’ pendant on her necklace was stuck to her collarbone. She crouched down at the side of the hall where some orange plastic chairs were stacked, rocking back on the heels of her Reeboks while trying to regulate her breathing and not worry about the fact that Linda Palmer still wasn’t sweating.

Mrs Kline from No. 10 sat slumped beneath the Union Jack the Guides used for church parade, in a well-worn peach and turquoise tracksuit. The sort of tracksuit you put on, Dominique thought, to gorge and cry in. The sort of tracksuit she didn’t possess; not even as a secret. Mrs Kline was sitting with her legs stretched out across the brown carpet tiles that covered the floor of the Methodist Church hall, wiping sweat off her forehead and studying the palm of her hand.

Dominique wondered what had made Mrs Kline, who weighed sixteen stone and who had done the class barefoot, decide to take up aerobics. She didn’t strike her as the sort of woman losing weight meant anything to.

Linda knelt down next to her, her blonde perm letting off hairdresser-fresh aromas, and they watched as Mrs Kline put a pair of summer sandals on over some socks. It took her a while to get to her feet and when she did she walked unevenly towards where Dominique and Linda were sitting. Dominique realised, too late, that she was coming to speak to them, and that she should have said something before now anyway, given that they were all neighbours.

‘Haven’t seen you here before,’ Dominique said.

‘No. Well.’ Mrs Kline smiled shyly.

‘Thought you’d come along and give us a try-out?’

‘Well. Yes.’

‘Well. Great.’ Dominique hung back on her heels.

‘Well,’ Mrs Kline said, clutching the empty carrier-bag her sandals had been in. ‘Bye.’

‘What was she thinking of coming here?’ Linda said, realising that the story of Mrs Kline at Izzy’s aerobics class – that she could try out first on Joe when he got home – would go well with the gazpacho tonight. ‘Does somebody who’s murdered her husband and buried him at the end of the garden have the right to come to an aerobics class?’

‘That’s only rumour,’ Dominique said.

‘Well, I thought we were going to have to resuscitate her after the high kicks and that’s not fair on Izzy – having someone in the class she might have to administer first aid to.’

They watched the Reverend Macaulay talking to Izzy as she stacked the blue aerobics mats away.

‘What’s he doing?’ Linda said.

‘Telling her about the design for the new stained-glass window behind the altar.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘There was something in the local paper about it.’

‘But how d’you know that’s what they’re talking about?’

‘That piece of paper he’s showing her.’ Dominique watched Izzy in her rainbow-coloured head and wrist bands, smiling at the Reverend Macaulay.

‘Is stained glass something she’s into?’ Linda asked.

Dominique shrugged. Mrs Kline was more of a problem for her. As much of a problem as the rapport between Izzy and the Reverend Macaulay and their mutual interest in stained glass was to Linda. Things that didn’t fit; things that broke up the rhythm they lived their lives to. ‘Right. That’s me. Everything.’

‘You off?’ Linda asked.

‘Mick’s taking me out to lunch.’

Linda didn’t want to think about lunch – she’d been on a liquid shake diet for the past fortnight. ‘Where’s he taking you?’

‘Gatwick Manor – and the snow’s stopped so we might actually make it.’

‘The snow’s stopped?’ Linda said, then called out, ‘See you tonight,’ as Dominique left the church hall in her new sheepskin hat. ‘Around seven thirty. Don’t forget.’

Through the windscreen of her two-seater green Triumph that was an anniversary gift from Mick, Dominique saw Mrs Kline, in sandals, waiting at the bus stop, which was banked in grey slush. She slowed down, trying to imagine Mrs Kline in the seat next to her with her empty carrier-bag and having to talk to her for the ten minutes it would take them to reach Pollards Close.

Mrs Kline watched the green Triumph pass, not bothering to back away from the kerb when the car’s acceleration sprayed the pavement with more slush as it sped up again.

Dominique told herself that Mrs Kline probably had shopping to do or friends to meet for lunch, but she knew this wasn’t true: Valerie Kline had an armchair lunch every day in front of Dr Kildare repeats. She’d seen her through the windows of No. 10 with her legs rolled up under her, a plate of food balanced on the arm of the chair and Richard Chamberlain on the screen.

She’d probably watched the series as a teenager when it first came out, Dominique thought, suddenly able to see – clearly – an immaculate room with antique rugs and cut flowers that somebody had been taught how to arrange, and an overweight girl sitting in it, alone with Dr Kildare. And into this room walked a young man … or rather arrangements had been made for a young man to walk into this room and turn the overweight, lonely young girl into Mrs Kline.

Five years into the marriage, Mr Kline had bought No. 10 Pollards Close, a four-bedroom executive house on Phase III of the Greenfields development, and moved Mrs Kline and their adopted son into it. Then he left for work one morning and never came back. He hadn’t been seen since, and nobody in Pollards Close really remembered him. Dominique had heard rumours during waxes at Sinead’s that Mrs Kline waited a fortnight before informing the police. Without really knowing why, she had a sense that the marriage had been brutal. She thought about Valerie Kline at aerobics that morning in her peach and turquoise tracksuit, and the way she looked standing at the bus stop in socks and sandals with an empty carrier-bag in her hands. Then she thought about the table in the bay window that Mick always booked when he took her to Gatwick Manor because it overlooked the gardens. She couldn’t have lived Valerie Kline’s life; she couldn’t have lived a single second of life as Valerie Kline.

[8]

It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Linda was standing in the lounge of No. 8 Pollards Close tilting the blinds so that she could see out into the street. The blinds were part of an over-order for Quantum Kitchens that Joe had brought home and put up at the lounge windows and all the bedroom windows at the front of the house as well because Linda liked things to match. They were made of strips of stiffened fabric connected by chains that clattered when you tilted them. They were clattering now and it was making her nervous. The snow had eased off again and she’d just got in from the new Tesco superstore on the other side of Littlehaven that had launched an inflatable elephant for its opening week. She saw them launching it from the roof while she was there, and men in suits had been wrestling with guide ropes. When she got home she realised she could see it from the window in the spare room, but what had she been doing in the spare room anyway? She couldn’t remember. Now here she was looking out into the street from behind the same blinds Joe had in his office, chewing her nails and wondering why Dominique and Mick weren’t back from Gatwick Manor yet; eaten away by the fact that they were probably in one of the hotel’s rooms together right now having sex in the afternoon on linen sheets. A married couple having extra-marital sex with each other.

The only thing that managed to distract her was a purple Granada turning into the Close and parking outside her house. She watched as a man in a ski jacket with what looked like oil stains on it got out of the car and started to walk down her drive. She went outside.

‘Hello?’

‘Wayne Spalding,’ he said, flipping up the sunglasses lenses attached to his spectacles. ‘Local council.’ He paused. ‘Were you going out?’

‘No, I was –’ She looked down and realised that she still had her coat on – a grey fake fur one that an antivivisectionist once spat on. ‘Did you say local council?’

‘Environment department.’

‘The tree. Of course.’

‘We tried telephoning this morning, but there was no answer.’

‘I was at an aerobics class,’ she said automatically.

This seemed to please him, and the way he looked at her made her feel as though she had done something worthy; something moral even, and this confused her momentarily: a) because she didn’t like him very much, and b) she’d never really thought of aerobics as either moral or immoral. ‘D’you want to come through?’

She led Wayne Spalding through the garage and he held the door open for her as they went into the back garden.

‘You’ve got a lot of snow here,’ he said.

‘Hasn’t everyone?’ Linda smiled, and walked into the middle of the garden, trying not to notice the trail of dog turds dotted across it. ‘There she is. The bane of my life.’

Wayne Spalding turned his flat stare to a four-hundred-year-old Turkey oak. Half the tree overhung the back fence of No. 8 Pollards Close, its lower branches disappearing into the snow piled on the lawn.

‘You should see it in autumn.’ Linda crossed the snow with Wayne following her like a prospective buyer, his basket-weave grey loafers sinking twenty centimetres deep. ‘The leaves make me really frantic. Really, really frantic.’ The idea of a rogue tree was gaining momentum with her; it helped keep her mind off the fact that the Niemans were coming to dinner that night; that Joe hadn’t called yet; that Jessica was in her first ever detention; and that there were still no lights on in the Saunders’ house. ‘The leaves get – just – everywhere. All round here. Everywhere. My husband,’ she sighed, ‘well, he’s a busy man and it would take him all weekend – all of an entire weekend in something like October, November – to clear this lawn.’ She faded out, less sure. Wayne Spalding was still staring flatly, his bovine gaze on the spot where the lowest branches disappeared into snow like they were about to start growing downwards into the lawn. Linda felt a sudden panic. The tree had intentions. It wanted to ruin things for her.

‘You see what I mean?’ she said, pointing to the branches. She glanced at the dandruff in Wayne’s hair. ‘The council should be doing something about it.’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Wayne said, without turning round. He walked over to the fence at the end of the garden where some honeysuckle had been dying ever since Linda planted it two summers ago. ‘It’s nearly four hundred years old. Healthy,’ he said, looking up into the tree then reaching out for a lower branch and running his hand along its underside.

The garden at No. 8 was the same as all the other gardens on the executive side of Pollards Close: approximately one hundred and forty-four squares of turf that had grown into 144m2 of lawn infested with a strain of clover that not even Flymos were able to eradicate (Linda was convinced the clover was Irish), and bald patches where paddling pools stood during photogenic summers. The whole thing was framed with puddles of buddleia, lilac, viburnum and hebe. The gardens arrived on the back of contractors’ trucks and were left pretty much as they were delivered. The world in which people who moved there found themselves was too new for them to contemplate changing.

Wayne Spalding counted the paces between the spot where the branch touched the lawn and the house. He walked past Linda, his flat eyes on the patio doors.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just checking something.’ He paused, watching the TV through the double glazing. ‘Anyone in there? Anyone watching that?’

‘My dog, Ferdinand. He likes TV.’

‘You’ve got the TV on for your dog?’

‘He’s a dachshund.’

He turned and stared at Linda for a moment then walked back up the lawn, counting his paces again. ‘Waste of electricity.’

Linda didn’t say anything. She wanted to, but couldn’t think of anything, so she put her hands in her coat pockets instead.

‘You’ve got a lot of space between the house and the tree. A lot of space,’ he said to her, adding, ‘This is a big garden’ – making it sound like excess rather than achievement.

Linda began to get the feeling that her time was being wasted. ‘So what are you saying?’

‘I mean, even if there was a storm and the tree got hit by lightning – even if that happened and we determined that the tree would fall into your garden and not into the field, even then –’

‘Even then, what?’

‘Well, it wouldn’t hit the house.’

‘Hit the house?’ Linda shouted. ‘I was just talking about leaves.’

Wayne stared at her.

‘So I’d have four hundred years’ worth of oak lying across my lawn, but it wouldn’t hit the house? What then?’

‘You’d have to call a tree surgeon.’

‘And how much would that cost?’

‘Look,’ Wayne moved his hands slowly up and down, pressing the thick, cold air downwards with his palms. ‘Look,’ he said again, louder, as if Linda was already hysterical and not just showing signs of it, ‘I’ve done the risk assessment.’

‘You’ve done it? That’s it? That’s your risk assessment?’

‘That’s my risk assessment, and I can safely say that there is no risk. That tree poses no threat to your property, none whatsoever – not even in the event of an act of God.’

‘Wait. Wait. Wait.’ Despite the heavy cold, she could feel angel wings of sweat growing across her back. ‘That’s all there is to it? You walk across my lawn and that’s it? What if … what if we’re out here in the garden in the summer having a barbecue … and the tree falls down? What about that?’

Wayne thought about this, his face going grey now with the cold. ‘The wind would have to be gale force to bring that tree down – why would you be barbecuing in the middle of a storm like that?’

‘Listen, I phoned your department and talked to somebody about leaves, not lightning and … and storms, and oh, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Do not take the Saviour’s name in vain. I won’t have that,’ Wayne said quietly, pointing his thick mitten at her.

‘I’m not having this,’ Linda said after a while. ‘You walk across my lawn … you’ve got no equipment with you or anything, no tape measure or … or machinery. You don’t even have a clipboard. I want a second opinion.’

‘I can put it in writing.’

‘I don’t want your opinion. I want someone more senior.’

‘You want someone older or someone more important?’

Linda swung nervously from side to side not knowing what to say again, and this wasn’t like her. She had to be herself tonight; she had to be wholly herself because the Niemans were coming to dinner.

‘We can’t just go round cutting down all deciduous trees on the estate,’ he said.

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Deciduous means that a tree sheds its leaves in autumn.’

‘I know that,’ Linda snapped.

‘No you didn’t.’

‘I did.’

‘You didn’t. You should be more honest.’

‘I don’t accept this,’ she said loudly, trying to fold her arms, which was difficult with so much fake fur encasing them.

Linda followed Wayne Spalding back across her lawn, through her garage, and onto the road outside her house where he’d parked his car. ‘I really don’t accept this.’

Wayne got into the car and wound his window down. His trousers were wet to the knee. He flipped the sun lenses down over his spectacles again and two discs of tinted glass stared up at her so that she was looking back at herself, twice over.

‘Do you get hot in the summer?’ he asked her suddenly.

She checked to see if there was anybody around who might have heard this: only Mrs Kline, lumbering down the pavement towards them in the tracksuit she’d worn to aerobics that morning. ‘Do you get hot in the summer?’ he asked her again, his voice as flat as his eyes. She stared at his hands, loosely gripping the steering wheel. The oversize mittens were on the seat next to him and the backs of his hands were covered in freckles. She didn’t like freckles on men. Was Wayne Spalding hitting on her?

‘He planted trees to provide shelter from the heat.’

Linda hung back, lost. ‘Who did?’

The streetlights came on, making everything seem much darker.

‘God did – and you should think about that. You should think about that a lot.’ He turned the ignition on. ‘Do you have children?’

‘Just one daughter.’ Why was she telling him this?

‘Then you should think hard about trying not to take the Lord’s name in vain. For your own sake. For the sake of your daughter.’ He looked up at her. ‘I can help you, Mrs Palmer.’

‘I don’t need your help.’

‘People say that. Then things change. People change.’

‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’

She stood on the drive and watched the purple Granada pull away, thinking about phoning the council’s environment department and speaking to Wayne Spalding’s boss – if he had one – before he got back to the office, but she didn’t move.

The Granada disappeared round the corner into Merrifield Drive and the next thing she was aware of was Mrs Kline standing at the top of the drive.

‘Hi,’ Linda waved and turned abruptly towards the garage.

‘I didn’t know you knew the minister.’

She spoke so quietly, Linda half considered pretending she hadn’t heard. There were a couple of gateaux she needed to get out of the chest freezer in the garage for the party that night. ‘Knew who?’

‘The minister,’ Valerie said, more loudly this time, still smiling.

‘What minister?’

‘Minister Spalding. Our minister.’

Valerie Kline waited at the top of the drive.

‘The man in the car?’ Linda called out. ‘The man who was just here?’

Valerie nodded.

Linda hesitated then walked to the top of the drive. Valerie, she noticed, was still wearing sandals. ‘He was from the local council. He came about the tree. You know, the one that hangs over most of our back garden?’

Valerie didn’t know because she’d never been invited to No. 8 and didn’t ever expect to be.

Linda was becoming increasingly unnerved by Valerie Kline’s silent, comprehending nods. ‘We have a huge problem with the leaves. In autumn. A really huge problem.’ Behind her, through the open garage door, she heard Ferdinand whining. ‘So what’s this about a minister?’ she said impatiently.

Valerie stopped nodding, suddenly. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot he worked for the council as well – the environment department, isn’t it?’

‘So – he’s Minister Spalding?’

Valerie started nodding again. ‘At the Free Church. We hold a service up at the school on Sunday mornings, and I thought …’ she batted her hand quickly in front of her face, ‘… anyway, it doesn’t matter.’

Linda thought of Wayne Spalding as he’d been dressed today. ‘The Free Church? What’s that then – evangelical or something?’

‘It’s non-denominational, that’s why it’s called the Free Church.’

Linda couldn’t be certain, but wondered if Valerie might be laughing at her. ‘And Minister Spalding,’ she said hurriedly, ‘does he do that healing stuff?’

‘The healing stuff? He does the laying on of hands. Faith healing.’

‘What – like making cripples walk? Blind men see? Cancer disappear? Infertile women pregnant?’ She forgot, too late, that Mrs Kline’s son was adopted. ‘That kind of stuff?’

‘Sometimes,’ Valerie said, quietly.

It was starting to snow again.

‘He does that? What – like – miracles?’

Valerie shrugged.

Linda couldn’t shake the impression that Valerie was laughing at her, and it didn’t seem right that they should be standing here talking about miracles in the middle of a snowstorm.

‘I should go, we’ve got people coming to dinner tonight,’ she said.

‘Well … give my regards to your husband, and to Jessica,’ Mrs Kline replied, disappearing into the snow in her tracksuit and sandals.

Linda went into the garage and lifted the lid of the chest freezer, on the brink of remembering what it was she needed to get out for dinner that night when she heard the phone ring. She dropped the lid, letting it bang shut.

‘Where are you?’

‘Brighton,’ Joe said.

‘Still? It’s nearly quarter to four. I thought you said you were leaving at three?’

‘It took longer to pack away the stall than I thought – then I called in to see your mum.’

‘My mum?’

‘Just a cup of tea. I’m leaving now.’

‘Well, if it’s of any interest to you, I’m going out of my mind over here,’ Linda exploded. ‘There’s a blizzard you’re probably going to get stuck in if you stay there any longer drinking tea; Jessica – who’s meant to be coming home to help me – is in detention because of something nuclear; and this man from the council came round to talk about the tree, you know – the tree – and I thought we would just talk about the leaves, but he didn’t want to talk about the leaves, he came to do a risk assessment – with no warning or anything – and then when he got into his car to go, some end-of-the-line Granada – he had freckles, Joe, all over his hands – he started talking to me about God – the man from the council – and Mrs Kline says he’s a minister or something, and …’ She stopped suddenly.

‘Linda?’ Joe prompted her.

‘Gateaux.’

‘What?’

‘The freezer. Triple chocolate mousse cake and Black Forest gateau – that’s what I was looking for in the freezer.’

Down the line from Littlehaven to Brighton, faster than the speed of light, came a profound sigh of relief.

Tired, Joe Palmer had made a deal with Steve, his business manager. If Steve agreed to oversee packing up the two showroom kitchens and stand into the van, Quantum would pay for him to stay in the Metropole that night and he could drive the van back to Littlehaven on Saturday morning.

‘I could do that,’ Steve had said, off-hand but sincere at the same time. Neither of these were qualities Joe liked on their own, but Steve managed to run them simultaneously and it had always made Joe trust his business manager.

He’d left the Brighton Centre, where Britannia Kitchens roadshow had been running for the past three days, and crossed the road onto the promenade. As he walked it had started snowing again and the headlights of late-afternoon traffic picked people out, making them look more interesting than they did in daylight. Above and beyond the traffic was an uneven December night, and the sea, which he couldn’t see but knew was there. Something that was true of a lot of things in life, he supposed. He’d heard it dragging itself backwards and forwards across the pebbles on the beach, distant and impartial.

The pier had been open, sending out its multi-layered stench of fish and chips, waffles, candyfloss and donuts: smells he found less easy to stomach the older he got. He’d thought about the penny slot machines in the amusement arcade, but it was too cold and anyway he’d promised to drop in on Belle, Linda’s mum.

The Pavilion Hotel on the corner opposite the entrance to the pier hadn’t drawn its curtains yet and passers-by were treated to a panorama of geriatric diners eating in sync. Foreign waiters stood poised against green fleur-de-lys wallpaper as the diners stared out the window, past the SAGA TOURS coach, looking for someone or something they might recognise.

Joe had passed the Aquarium where he used to take Jessica when she was small, then carried on up Roedean Road that rose with the cliff. No. 26 still had its stained-glass hotel fanlight: a rising sun with LYNTON HOTEL written underneath. It used to belong to Jim, Linda’s stepfather, and after his death it had been bought by a trust that built sheltered accommodation for the elderly. It was flats now – he didn’t know how many. There were six buzzers by the door and he was sure there had only been four the last time he came.

How could they say the world was getting bigger when all the time they just kept on dividing it up like this. What was it Jessica said? Something about matter being continuous, that you could divide up one piece over and over again and never stop. He didn’t understand what Jessica said half the time – hadn’t understood what she’d been saying, in fact, since she was about nine. But then children, he discovered, were the one thing in life you could love without understanding.

He rang the bell for Flat Three, which used to be the upstairs residents’ lounge, and about four minutes later a young woman in jeans opened the door, a pair of scissors in her hand.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi.’ She stared at him. ‘Belle said it would be you.’

‘Who’s me?’

‘You’re Joe, aren’t you? Her son-in-law, Joe? There’s a photograph of you on the sideboard upstairs. You on your wedding day,’ she said slowly.

‘Ah.’ Joe didn’t want to think about his wedding day right then, and his prick – which had gone from belonging to Joe Palmer to belonging to a munchkin to belonging to a Lego man – was about to drop off with the cold.

‘Only you’re old now.’

‘Older,’ he corrected her, shoving his way into the hallway. ‘But then that’s only natural.’

The girl nodded, unconvinced, and led the way upstairs past the badly maintained stairlift tracks.

‘I sent Lenny down to get the door. She’s younger than me,’ Belle said as he walked into the flat.

She was sitting in her wheelchair with a Chanel towel wrapped round her shoulders, which Linda had got free with some perfume and given to her mum as a Christmas present. The girl, Lenny, went and stood behind her and carried on cutting Belle’s hair. The toes of her boots were covered in grey curls and a halo of them had formed on the carpet around the chair.

When Joe thought about it later, it was what he remembered most about that afternoon in December: the sound of the scissors and Belle’s grey curls on Lenny’s boots.

‘Don’t mind, do you, Joe?’ Belle asked. ‘We was right in the middle.’

‘You go ahead. Wouldn’t want to get between a woman and her hair.’

He went over to the window, pulling the nets to one side. A seagull on the ledge eyed him and let out a shriek then flew away. In summertime you got a bird’s-eye view of the nudist beach from here.

‘Not such a good view in December, is it?’ Belle said, smiling.

He looked to see if Lenny was smiling as well, but she wasn’t.

The room was lit by the gas fire and a couple of heavily tasselled standard lamps with shawls draped over them. The lack of overhead light combined with net curtains, snow and twilight made it difficult to see anything but shadows in the room, and the flat suddenly felt as though it was waiting for somebody long overdue.

‘Your eyes all right?’ Joe asked Lenny.

She nodded, tucking the scissors into her belt as she started setting fat pink curlers in the old woman’s hair.

‘D’you want tea?’ Belle asked Lenny, her eyes closed. Then, without waiting for an answer, ‘Go and make us some tea, Joe, and don’t forget the biscuits.’ Her eyes opened and followed her son-in-law into the kitchenette in the corner. ‘And you can take your coat off – the flat’s got central heating.’

The light in the kitchenette was orange and unsteady, and speckled with the corpses of flies. It made his eyes hurt. Belle’s cupboards were full and it took him a while to find the tea caddy – the one with elephants on that he remembered from his courting days – behind the rows of sugar, flour and canned fruit and vegetables that she always had in, never having recovered from rationing and the urge to stockpile. The whistling kettle had been replaced by an electric one, and as he plugged it in he wondered when the overhaul had happened and why Lenny, the hairdresser, didn’t like him. Animals and children liked him, which meant that most men and women did as well. Why didn’t the hairdresser? He looked down at his black suit and dark purple tie and thought about her standing in the hallway with the scissors.

In the room next door the hairdryer went on, and when he took the tea in neither of the women looked up. Belle still had her eyes closed and he hoped she hadn’t fallen asleep. He put the Coronation tray on the coffee table and walked past the photographs on the sideboard, as alarmed as he always was at how prolific they made his life seem. They were nearly all of him, Linda and Jessica. The only one Belle had of herself was of her and her first husband, Linda’s father, who had drowned in the sea while home on leave at the end of the war. This was the first thing Belle ever told him. Then she said that Eric had never been able to make her laugh while he was alive, but talking about his death always set her off.

There were no photographs of her and Jim, her second husband, or even just of Jim. When he died all the money from the sale of the hotel went to Brighton Cricket Club, who got a new clubhouse and practice wickets built with it.

Joe looked at a photograph of himself as a grown man then looked away. The hairdryer cut out.

Belle’s hand went up to her hair and Lenny unhooked the mirror from the chimney breast.

‘Isn’t it nice? Won’t last, but isn’t it nice?’

‘Won’t last if you keep touching it and messing it up. Here.’ Lenny took a can of spray out of the case on the table and covered Belle’s head in it.

The spray hung heavily in the heated air.

‘You staying for tea?’ Belle asked her.

‘I should go. I’ve got Mrs Jenkins in Flat Four to do, and she’s going out tonight.’

‘Jenkins is always going out,’ Belle grumbled. ‘Probably goes out more than you do, and she’s not “Mrs”. Never got married – whatever she says. Pour her a cup, Joe.’

‘Milk? Sugar?’ he asked.

‘Both,’ Lenny said, packing away the hairdryer, scissors, spray and rollers into the case.

‘How many?’

‘How many what?’

‘Sugars.’

‘Three. Please.’

‘How many sugars’ll you have, Joe, now she’s not here to tell you off?’

He smiled, but didn’t put any in his cup.

‘Go on, just have one.’ Belle turned to Lenny. ‘He used to have sugar with some tea in it when I first knew him. Won’t let you have sugar no more, will she?’

‘Linda’s just looking after me.’

‘That’s what she calls it, is it?’

Joe paused then dropped a spoonful of sugar into his tea. ‘Look what you made me do, Belle.’

Belle smiled, pleased at her son-in-law’s dissent.

Lenny, moving about rhythmically in the corner of the room, didn’t look up.

‘Joe’s been at the Britannia Kitchens roadshow at the Brighton Centre. His company had a stand there.’

Lenny looked up, taking in the suit. ‘That’s what you do, then?’

‘Course it’s what he does, I told you.’

‘What?’ Joe said to Lenny, over Belle’s head.

‘Build kitchens?’

‘He doesn’t build kitchens, he sells them, but that isn’t what Joe does.’ Belle slurped her tea and started on the biscuits. A flake of chocolate melted in the corner of her mouth and ran in a rivulet down one of the wrinkles there. ‘Joe makes money.’

‘I’m a carpenter,’ he cut in. ‘By trade, I’m a carpenter.’ Why did he think this sounded better than making money?

‘Was a carpenter.’ Belle wasn’t having any of it. ‘Now you just make money. Got a whole office full of people working for you. Joe’s got his own company.’

‘I’m a carpenter by trade. My dad was a carpenter.’ If Lenny didn’t look up or say something soon, he thought he was going to explode. ‘I’m from Brighton,’ he yelled. ‘Brighton born and bred.’

Lenny turned her back on him and clicked the clasps on the case shut.

‘Cassidy Street. Right there on Cassidy Street.’ He gestured blindly at the net curtains as if his entire past lay just beyond them.

‘Calm down, Joe,’ Belle said, leaning forward to pour herself another cup of tea and farting. ‘You’ve earned the money. No need to be ashamed of it.’

Lenny drank her tea in one go and at last turned to look at him. ‘What makes you think I’m from Brighton?’

‘I don’t know, I …’

‘You think I’m from Brighton?’

Belle started rattling the biscuit tin. ‘These’ll melt if we don’t eat them. What’d you put them so near the fire for, Joe? Look at this!’ She held up her hands, covered in chocolate, for him to look at. ‘Look at this, Joe. Why’d you get the chocolate ones out? It’s a bloody sauna in here with the gas on and you know what I’m like with the chocolate ones.’ She let out another fart. ‘I’ll sit here and eat them all. Why’d you get these ones out?’

‘I don’t know.’

Belle was disappearing out of earshot.

‘Turn the heating down, Joe. Have a fiddle with the thermostat or something, there’s bloody chocolate everywhere.’

‘Skirton Street,’ Lenny said.

‘What?’ Joe couldn’t hear. The flat was suddenly made of chocolate and it was melting.

‘I grew up on Skirton Street. The one after Cassidy.’ She was smiling.

Lenny the hairdresser was smiling.

‘The thermostat, Joe. Just behind the microwave.’

‘Skirton Street. I know Skirton Street,’ he said to Lenny.

‘There you go then,’ she said, walking past him into the kitchenette and re-emerging with the carpet sweeper.

‘Don’t know why you put the microwave there,’ Belle said to Joe, ‘I can’t get to the thermostat.’

‘All right, Belle, I’ll sort it out.’

‘It’s just behind the microwave.’

He went into the kitchenette and found the thermostat, which was above the sink. When he went back into the living room, Lenny was gone. ‘Where did the hairdresser go?’

‘Don’t know why you put the microwave there.’ Belle shook her head. ‘Didn’t you get me any tissue, then? I’m covered in bloody chocolate.’

Joe went back into the kitchenette and pressed his knuckles into the sink rim, letting his head drop between his shoulders. After a few minutes he grabbed the kitchen roll off the windowsill and went back into the living room.

‘Pass me that.’ Belle flicked her eyes over him, her hands full of kitchen roll. ‘You should phone Linda or I’ll be getting into trouble for keeping you here.’

He stood there watching the kitchen roll moving in her hands, the rings and liver spots suddenly intensely familiar.

‘I’ll be getting into trouble,’ she said again.

He sat down in the armchair that matched the lamp-shades on the standard lamps and dialled home.

After a struggle, Belle dragged the small leather pouf across the rug towards her. She heard ‘Brighton’, and ‘I called in to see your mum’, and ‘Just a cup of tea. I’m leaving now’, then settled her head back against the cover she’d crocheted for the wheelchair, put her feet up on the pouf and let out a small, silent fart. Joe was going to do something stupid, she was suddenly convinced of it – and Joe wasn ‘t the kind of man who could get away with doing stupid things and not suffer the consequences. What had she done?

Linda went into the shed to look for a bucket. She couldn’t remember whether they had a bucket or not, but she hadn’t been able to find one in the house or the garage so if they did turn out to have a bucket, this is where it would be. The torch-beam swung across the red-tiled roof and upper-storey windows of the doll’s house Joe built Jessica for her fourth birthday that was put into storage by the time she was six, after the incident with the Sindy dolls. Linda had been cleaning Jessica’s room one day and opened up the doll’s house to find a scene inside worthy of a Turkish prison. Jessica had a penchant, it turned out, not only for cutting off her dolls’ hair, but for holding bits of them – usually the forehead or breasts – against light bulbs until the plastic melted. There wasn’t a doll with nipples intact or a complete forehead left. The light hit a Classic Cars calendar for 1979, hung on a rusting nail, the page turned to May. The girl in the picture was wearing a white cowboy hat and looked happy. She didn’t know why Joe had put the calendar up. The off-cut from the lounge carpet at Whateley Road that he had put down on the shed floor was much more Joe than the Classic Cars calendar; much more the Joe she knew anyway. She looked down at the orange swirls, remembering Whateley Road as clearly as if it was a place she could walk into. They’d had a bucket at Whateley Road – Jessica’s old nappy bucket – that she used to mop the kitchen and bathroom floors with twice a week, and that Joe used to wash his car and the windows with. Whateley Road had been immaculate – bacteria free.

Then she moved to Pollards Close and met Dominique, who didn’t mop floors or put magazines at right angles on the coffee table, or iron the family’s underwear. Once a week an elderly woman with facial hair and arthritis came and cleaned No. 4 Pollards Close. She did the ironing as well, and in between her weekly visits Dominique just let the fallout gather. When they ran out of dishes she bought Findus ready meals and they ate them out of the cartons; clothes were worn un-ironed, and dirty underwear was left stranded on the bedroom floor. Linda remembered on only her second visit to No. 4 – while drinking coffee from a cup with rings of stains inside – the cleaner coming downstairs with a pair of lace knickers in her hand.

‘What d’you want me to do with these?’ She held them up in a crabbed hand to show where the lace panel at the front had been ripped.

The three women stared at the ripped knickers. Linda tried to take a sip of her coffee and burnt her mouth.

‘Bin them,’ Dominique said.

The cleaner nodded, her yellow eyes watering, and left the room.

‘No initiative,’ Dominique apologised.

Linda soon realised that Dominique and her cleaner were playing games with each other. War was going on; a war that had never been declared, which was what games were, she supposed: war without the declaration, and people played them whether they loved each other or hated each other. Not because life was too short, but because for most people life was too long. Even people like Dominique, who got their underwear ripped during marital sex. All Linda saw for months afterwards, every time she shut her eyes, was the pair of knickers held aloft in the cleaner’s arthritic hand. What kind of animal was Dominique married to? An animal who knew how to fly planes, and who looked like an anarchic version of Cliff Richard: Captain Saunders.

No. 4 was a pigsty whose pigs were having sex, and its slovenly glamour was something Linda spent a lot of her early months in Pollards Close trying to emulate, until Joe complained. Then, when she finally persuaded him to take on the Saunders’ arthritic cleaner themselves, she got embarrassed about the state of the house and ended up cleaning the day before the cleaner arrived. The thought of a stranger finding pubic hairs in her bath made her wince, and this was something she just couldn’t change about herself. After ten months the arthritic cleaner handed her notice in. She stood there in a badly felting jumper with a row of snowflakes knitted across it and told Linda that her conscience wouldn’t let her carry on taking money from her every Thursday. Linda handed her an envelope with her last week’s wages in and the yellow watering eyes nodded their thanks. No. 8 Pollards Close became immaculate once more, and that month Linda ordered over fifty pounds’ worth of home-improvement gadgets from the Bettaware catalogue, including a hands-free can opener, a vacuum packer for storing summer clothes under the bed during the winter and vice versa, and a stone frog with a hollow stomach to hide spare sets of keys in. She especially loved the frog that came lying on a lily pad – until Dominique pointed out that it looked like it was masturbating.

After a while she found a bucket shaped like a castle that they must have bought for Jessica on one of the Dorset holidays. Ever since the company had taken off she’d tried to persuade Joe to take them somewhere they’d need suntan lotion, but he didn’t like it abroad – wherever that was. The white plastic bucket handle had rust notched into it from where it had been hanging on a nail in the shed wall. Inside there was a web, but no spider. Linda went back into the garden. When did snow fall so hard and fast it technically became a blizzard? She swung round, the bucket in her hand, and tried to pick out the lights at the back of the house while wondering if anybody had ever died in a blizzard in their own back garden before, but was too preoccupied by the Niemans coming to dinner that night to imagine her funeral properly, and Joe’s grief over her tragic death.

Trying not to look at the tree, whose branches stood out clearly, she ploughed through the snow to where she’d seen the dog shit earlier. If this blizzard carried on the turds would be buried, but she needed to make sure because she wanted to put the garden floodlights on later, the ones Joe put in last weekend, and leave the curtains in the lounge open, and she didn’t want Mrs Nieman staring out through the patio doors at a trail of turds. She stumbled around for a while, her nose streaming and the bucket banging against her thighs, but the turds were buried without trace.

Just to make sure, she went back into the garage and flicked on the switch for the garden lights. Peering through the kitchen window, she could see floodlit snow and, if she concentrated, the pond Joe put in last summer for his fish. Joe loved fish; he loved sitting in his deckchair watching them, and he’d made a good job of the pond. She was proud of it as well because theirs was the only back garden in Pollards Close with a pond, but was it worth putting the lights on tonight if the guests had to concentrate in order to see it? Was concentrating something you should expect guests to do?

She carried on staring through the window, becoming slowly more aware of the kitchen behind her, reflected in the glass, than the floodlit garden on the other side of it. There were two empty plates on the breakfast bar where there had been a triple chocolate mousse cake and Black Forest gateau before she went into the shed. She turned slowly away from the reflection in the window to stare at the real plates on the real breakfast bar. For the next two minutes, she swung between reflection and reality, her life pivoting on the fact that the gateaux were no longer there. She’d been on the Slimshake diet for over a fortnight now. Was she so desperate for solids she’d eaten the gateaux herself – without even realising?

Still in Jessica’s old Wellingtons, she ran into the garage, yanked open the lid of the chest freezer and pushed her arms through a month’s worth of freezer food the Ice Man lorry had delivered only yesterday, but there were no more gateaux: cheesecakes, but no gateaux; ice cream, but no gateaux. She’d spent hours over the Ice Man catalogue preparing the order, and the gateaux had a whole centre spread to themselves. She could see that centre spread now as she walked in from the garage.

‘Ferdie! FERDIE!’ she yelled.

A dog’s collar bell tinkled in the living room.

She went through. The dachshund she’d asked Joe for last Christmas stood up on the sofa, but looked as though he was still sitting.

An oasis of brown and pink vomit lay underneath the coffee table, caught between spasmodic festive light from the tree and the aura from the TV.

Ferdinand was panting expectantly.

Linda went over to the patio doors and slid them open.

‘FERDIE, OUT!’ She gave a nasal yelp, trying not to breathe the stench in.

The dachshund jumped off the sofa and went over to the vomit, nosing his way round it.

‘FERDIE, OUT!’ Linda grabbed hold of his blue-studded collar, dragging him through the carpet and the open patio doors. ‘OUT, YOU FUCK.’ She slammed them shut before he managed to get fully outside and his tail, which was trapped inside, went stiff. Ferdinand screamed.

She slid the door open then shut it on the dog’s tail again.

‘You fuck, Ferdie, you fucking, fucking dog.’

Ferdinand was trying to turn round and reach the part of him that hurt, but his head kept smashing into glass. Linda didn’t hear the front door open. ‘Those were centre-spread gateaux, you fucking, fucking fuck of a fucking –’

‘Mum!’

‘What?’

Jessica came running into the lounge, covered in snow, her school bag still over her shoulder and her keys in her hand.

‘Mum – what’s going on?’

Linda turned round, but could hardly make out her daughter standing there. ‘What?’

‘Let Ferdie go.’

‘Why should I?’

The dog started to howl.

‘Let him go,’ Jessica shouted, trying to pull Linda’s arm off the door. ‘Come on, Mum.’

Ferdinand pulled himself suddenly out from between door and doorframe and shot across the garden leaving a thin trail of blood specks across the snow.

‘He’s bleeding. You made Ferdie bleed.’

Linda slammed the door shut and tried to regulate her breathing just like she’d tried to regulate it on the bike that morning and then at class, but failed because she was so wound up about the Niemans coming.

‘He ate the gateaux. Both gateaux,’ she said.

‘What gateaux?’

‘The centre-spread gateaux. The gateaux for tonight.’

‘He wasn’t to know.’

Linda surfaced from her rage, gasping for air. ‘And Mrs Klushky rang me today,’ she said, trying not to let the fact that Jessica hadn’t taken her shoes off in the hallway bother her.

‘Klusczynski,’ Jessica corrected her.

‘Klushwhatever. She gave you a detention.’

‘Did she tell you why?’

‘She told me, and we need to talk about this.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, and anyway the teacher who was meant to be giving it never showed.’

‘But it’s five o’clock now – what have you been doing?’

Jessica was watching Ferdinand in the garden. ‘I was with Peter Klusczynski. He was in detention as well. He had a fit during period two and Miss Witt sent him to special needs.’

‘You were in special needs?’

‘It’s where detentions are held.’

‘With Peter Klush …?’ Linda didn’t want to think of her daughter holed up for an hour alone with Peter Klushky. It would be just like her to fall for an epileptic. ‘But what did you do?’

‘We talked,’ Jessica said, staring through the patio doors. ‘It doesn’t matter – I think Ferdie needs to see a vet.’

‘It does matter. I need to phone the school about this.’

‘Since when have you ever phoned the school?’ Jessica said, rounding on her.

‘Jessica …’

‘I don’t want to talk about it, Mum.’

‘Well, we are going to talk about it. Maybe not tonight, but we are going to talk, and now I need you to clear that up,’ she said, pointing to the vomit underneath the coffee table. ‘There’s a blue jug under the sink, and some carpet shampoo. Use the floral bouquet room spray when you’ve finished. Leave no trace.’

‘Where are you going?’ Jessica asked.

‘Out.’

‘Out where?’

‘To find dessert. We have no dessert. I need to find dessert.’

Jessica let her miner’s bag, which had badges pinned all over it, slip off her shoulder onto the carpet. ‘But what about Ferdie? Ferdie’s bleeding, Mum.’

Linda ignored her. ‘When I get back we need to sort out the canapés. And,’ she stared past her daughter, suddenly realising that the blinds at the front window were still open, ‘shut those bloody blinds.’

She put the fake fur coat back on over her sweatshirt and jogged through the blizzard across the road to the Saunders’. Stephanie, who was six, answered the door dressed in a fluorescent emergency services outfit. Her feet, in rollerboots, were moving backwards and forwards across the parquet in the Saunders’ hallway.

‘Hi.’

Stephanie took an orange ice-pop out of her mouth and stared at Linda’s Wellingtons. ‘Hi.’ She put the ice-pop back in.

‘Is your mum in?’

Stephanie shook her head then took the ice-pop out of her mouth again. ‘My sister’s been crimping my hair. She’s going to do my whole head.’

‘Who’s there, Steph?’

‘Delta? Are you in there?’ Linda called out.

‘Who is that?’

Stephanie skated off down the hallway.

Linda hadn’t slept for a week when Dominique told her she was having her fitted carpets ripped up and parquet flooring laid down. Then Dominique told her how much it was costing – and she let Stephanie skate indoors? On the parquet flooring? She’d tried telling Joe at the time that Dominique would never get the asking price if they sold the house without fitted carpets, and Joe had said, ‘not these days’. ‘Not these days’? Joe wasn’t a cryptic man – she was used to understanding him. So what did he mean by that? She felt she was missing something that Joe was on to – that everybody but her was on to.

Delta appeared in a kimono that belonged to Dominique. Linda recognised it immediately. It was the one Mick had brought back with him from a trip to Kyoto, and she was struck – as she always was – by how much more attractive Delta was than her own daughter. Especially in Dominique’s kimono. She couldn’t imagine Jessica wearing any of her clothes.

‘How are you, Linda?’

Delta always called her Linda – never Mrs Palmer – and even though the smile was frank, for the second time that day Linda got the feeling she was being laughed at. ‘I don’t suppose your mum’s in, is she?’

‘Nope.’ Delta shook her head, then trod in the puddle of melted orange pop. ‘Shit – what’s this?’

‘I think it might be Stephanie’s ice-pop.’

Delta looked down. ‘Shit.’ She hooked her feet up one after the other and wiped them on the end of the kimono.

‘So – your mum’s not in?’

‘Sandra dropped Steph off after school – Mum and Dad were having lunch or something.’

‘Lunch? It’s nearly five p.m.’

‘Shit,’ Delta said again, still trying to wipe her feet.

A bedroom window opened and Stephanie hung her head out. ‘Delta, you promised you’d do my whole head.’

‘Just coming, Steph. Don’t touch the machine, it’s hot.’

‘You promised.’

‘And I’m coming.’

Linda caught Delta looking at her fur coat and her Wellingtons. She forgot she still had Wellingtons on. She straightened up.

‘Did your mum get her Ice Man delivery this week?’

‘What – the freezer stuff? I guess she did.’

‘And do you know if she got the triple chocolate mousse cake and Black Forest gateau? They’re difficult to describe – there was a centre spread in –’

‘I don’t do catalogues,’ Delta said.

‘No, of course not. Neither do I, really, but the Ice Man one …’

‘Have you got your mother-in-law to dinner tonight or something?’

‘My mother-in-law?’

Didn’t everybody know they had the Niemans coming tonight? And didn’t Delta know that mother-in-law jokes were for women who had them?

‘I mean,’ Delta said, dragging the words out, impatient at Linda for not getting it, ‘that freezer stuff isn’t something you give to people – it’s something you inflict on them. Have you read the back of the packet? Have you read what’s in that stuff?’

Linda read the front of the box where it gave you the maximum freezer storage time and – if it was microwaveable – how many minutes it took to defrost. ‘But does your mother still get the Ice Man?’ she said, coming back to her original point.

‘I guess it’s what Steph’s been eating all week. I mean, it’s Friday and she’s climbing the walls. She’s toxic. I’m probably toxic as well, but it’s too late, and Mum can cook, that’s what really pisses me off.’

Linda tried to be offended that Delta was swearing in front of her, but she was too busy worrying about Dominique and the Ice Man, and the fact that Delta’s nipples were pushing their way through the branches printed on the kimono because of the cold.

‘We have people round and she’s doing soufflé.’

‘She does soufflé?’

‘That’s what I mean. She only cooks for dinner parties.’ Delta paused. ‘So … d’you want me to go and look in the freezer and see if she’s got a triple mousse … mousse … what was it?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘What’s it for anyway?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Honestly.’

‘You sure?’

‘Honestly.’ Linda turned and sniffed the air. ‘What’s that?’

Stephanie skated up the hallway, screaming.

‘Steph? Oh shit, Steph. I told you to wait.’

‘You told me it was hot,’ Stephanie cried, clumps of burnt hair falling onto the shoulders of her cardigan.

‘Where’s the crimper now? Is it still on?’

‘I dropped it on the carpet,’ Stephanie sniffed.

The girls disappeared indoors and, turning away from the smell of burnt hair, Linda crossed back over the road to No. 8, temporarily caught in the headlights of a car. She stopped at the top of the drive thinking it might be Joe, but it wasn’t. It looked like Dominique’s green Triumph. Without waiting to find out, she went back indoors, took the Wellingtons off then went into the kitchen to attack the collection of cookery books she and Joe had been given as newlyweds. She left the cordon bleu one where it was because it had never been opened, and grabbed Good Housekeeping’s Quick Guide to Dinner Parties that she often used the beef bourguignon recipe from. Turning to Contents, she saw that there was a whole chapter on soufflés. A whole chapter, and no pictures – apart from a series of diagrams showing you how to prepare the soufflé dish. A hot soufflé had to make an impressive entrance at the end of the meal and TIMING IS CRUCIAL.

After reading the page through three times she finally digested the fact that soufflés had to be prepared in advance but served immediately. ‘Finishing Touches’ had a section to themselves. And what was everybody else doing while she was standing there making her way through ‘Finishing Touches’? Who was preventing Joe from roaming freely through his repertoire of flatulence jokes, then his record collection, and putting Pink Floyd on? Who was taking care of all that? How did Dominique Saunders manage to serve immediately. Come to think of it – had they ever eaten soufflé at No. 4? Linda couldn’t remember. The times Dominique must have served soufflé were the times she and Joe weren’t there – the dinner parties she and Joe weren’t invited to – and how many of those had there been?

She slammed the book shut. Who were these people? TIMING IS CRUCIAL. What did they know about her life? SERVE IMMEDIATELY. They didn’t know anything about the early years of her marriage and the house on Whateley Road; or what she and Joe had been through.

Whimpering with the effort of trying not to cry, she pushed Good Housekeeping’s Quick Guide into the bin, then went into the garage, the cement floor freezing the soles of her feet in their thin socks.

She pulled up the freezer lid and saw the box with the picture of the mandarin cheesecake on it.

‘Jessica!’ she shouted up into the house when she was back in the kitchen.

A bedroom door opened and she heard music, then feet on the stairs.

‘What’s wrong with your face?’ she said as her daughter walked in.

‘Ferdie’s bleeding.’

‘You’ve been crying?’

‘Ferdie’s bleeding, Mum.’ Then Jessica saw the dog’s water bowl on the floor by Linda’s feet and started crying again.

Linda stared at her. She hardly ever cried herself and didn’t know what to do when other people did – especially when those other people were her own daughter. She’d never picked Jessica up when she was small and started crying – grief left its marks on the shoulders of jumpers and blouses, and some of them were dry clean only. So now they stood in the kitchen and did what they usually did: Jessica sobbed and Linda stood staring at her, and after a while she got the mandarin cheesecake out of its box and put it on the cake stand to defrost.

‘I told you to go and change,’ Linda said, her back turned.

Jessica sniffed.

‘Did you clean the lounge carpet?’

‘Yes.’ Jessica sniffed again.

‘There’s a pineapple over there in the fruit bowl – why don’t you cut it up and mix it with some cottage cheese?’

Linda watched her daughter move round the kitchen in silence and start to deftly slice up the pineapple, still sniffing.

‘Ferdie ate all the desserts I’d organised for tonight. All of them.’ Linda paused.

Jessica didn’t say anything. She put the mixing bowl with the cottage cheese and pineapple chunks in to one side.

‘Then he sicked them up.’ She stared at her daughter’s back in its school pullover.

‘D’you want me to make dessert for tonight?’ Jessica said, turning round at last.

‘I’ve got dessert for tonight. I sorted it.’

‘I could make something,’ Jessica said, looking at the mandarin cheesecake.

‘Like what?’

‘Like – syllabub.’

‘Syllabub?’

‘We did it in home economics last Thursday, all you need is some double cream and some wine and some –’

‘I don’t like syllabub,’ Linda cut in.

‘It’s dead simple.’

‘I don’t like syllabub,’ Linda said again.

‘You’ve never even tasted it.’

‘I have tasted it.’

‘Haven’t.’

Linda began drying the knife Jessica had used to cut up the pineapple with. ‘Where’s Ferdie?’ she said suddenly.

‘Upstairs.’

‘Upstairs, where?’

‘On my bed.’

‘On your bed?’ Linda yelled, throwing the knife and the tea towel down on the draining board.

‘He needs to see a vet,’ Jessica yelled back. ‘You made him bleed.’

‘I want him off your bed and outside – now!’

‘We can’t put him outside in this – look – there’s a blizzard going on out there.’

Linda’s mind flicked briefly to Joe, who she hoped had the sense to take the new bypass home from Brighton and not the road over the Dyke, then turned back to Jessica, who was crying again and pulling the cuffs of her school jumper over her hands.

‘He’s a bloody dog,’ Linda shouted at her.

‘He’s your bloody dog. Dad bought him for you.’

‘Upstairs. Now. Get upstairs.’

‘I hate you.’

Linda turned away and picked the tea towel up off the draining board. ‘Yeah, well…’

‘And that cheesecake’s disgusting – me and Dad have jokes about that cheesecake.’

She swung round, but Jessica was already out of the room. The clock on the kitchen wall shook as she banged up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door shut.

Linda went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Dad and I,’ she shouted up into the darkness. ‘Dad and I.’

She went back into the kitchen and there was Joe standing in the doorway to the garage.

‘What’s all that about?’

‘I don’t know. You’re late,’ she said, looking at him.

‘I phoned. I was at your mum’s – you know what it’s like: tea, biscuits, amnesia, more tea, more biscuits.’ He paused, but didn’t mention that Belle had been getting her hair cut while he was there. ‘She looked well,’ he said after a while, then walked past Linda into the hallway.

‘Joe? Where’re you going?’

‘Upstairs. See Jess. Change.’

She followed him to the foot of the stairs. ‘When you’ve changed I could do with some help down here. We’ve got people coming tonight.’

Joe stopped, his hand on the banister. ‘I forgot.’

‘You forgot? For Christ’s sake, Joe.’

She went back into the kitchen and opened Jessica’s lunch box, which was lying by the sink, automatically shoving a handful of uneaten crusts and half a packet of crisps into her mouth. The only serving plate she had big enough for the canapés had a crack running across it, but she covered this with some green paper napkins then put cling film over the bowl with the cottage cheese and pineapple in it. From upstairs she heard running water, and a few minutes later Joe came back downstairs in old jeans and a sweatshirt.

‘I thought you might have worn your new polo shirt.’

‘I couldn’t find it.’

‘That’s because it’s still in the bag.’

‘Oh.’

Joe sniffed and disappeared into the garage. He came back with a can of beer.

‘So – who’ve we got coming tonight?’ he asked, watching her open a sachet of Hollandaise sauce.

‘Mick and Dominique – if they show.’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’

‘I went over there a while ago and they weren’t even back from lunch.’

‘Who were they having lunch with?’

‘Each other.’ Linda looked at him then poured the contents of the sachet into a pan of boiling water. ‘They went to Gatwick Manor.’

‘It’s expensive there.’

She looked at him again.

‘So – anyone else coming?’

‘I invited the Niemans – the new people at number twelve.’

‘The Niemans?’

‘Yes, the Niemans, Joe. The double-glazing people two doors up.’

‘The Belgians?’

‘I thought they were Dutch.’

‘It doesn’t matter – they all speak English.’

Linda stopped stirring the sauce. ‘I’m sure they’re Dutch.’

‘Well, why don’t we ask them?’

‘We can’t just ask them. Don’t you dare ask them.’

Joe started drinking the beer.

‘D’you want a glass for that?’

‘Jess seems upset,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘She’s lying on her bed upstairs with Ferd, and Ferd’s bleeding or something. She wouldn’t say what happened.’

‘Has she changed out of her school uniform yet?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You were only just up there.’

‘I didn’t notice.’ He finished the beer. ‘I said Ferd’s bleeding.’

She started to stir the sauce again. ‘Ferdie ate a triple chocolate mousse cake and a Black Forest gateau this afternoon.’

‘He did?’ Joe started to laugh. ‘Is pudding gone then?’

She felt him behind her. ‘Dessert – it’s dessert gone.’

‘So why don’t you make one of your steamed puddings?’ he said softly. ‘What about one of them treacle ones?’

‘I can’t give the Niemans steamed pudding.’

‘I love your treacle puddings. Best thing, they are.’ She felt his hair brushing her ear. ‘I’ll do the custard,’ he said.

‘Custard?’ Gravity gave her a short sharp pull. ‘We’ve got gazpacho for starters, Joe. After the gazpacho, we’ve got salmon en croute with Hollandaise sauce. Do you really think the Niemans are going to want to finish with treacle pudding? And custard? Why don’t we just throw a brick at them while we’re at it.’

‘I like treacle pudding.’

‘We’ve got mandarin cheesecake,’ she said.

‘But I bloody hate mandarin cheesecake.’

‘What’s wrong with everyone tonight?’

Joe disappeared into the garage again.

Linda stopped stirring to watch some lumps the size of Atlantic icebergs forming in the sauce. ‘Joe,’ she called into the garage. ‘Are you coming back in? Joe?’

Silence.

‘I could do with some company in here. It’s been a long day.’

Silence.

‘You know sometimes I wish I was a bloody schizophrenic – at least I’d have my other self to talk to.’

Joe appeared in the garage doorway, a second can of beer in his hand.

‘So what d’you want to talk about?’

She watched him drinking his beer, one hand in his trouser pocket, and one bare foot on the kitchen step. She didn’t know. ‘Aren’t you cold? You should go and put some socks and shoes on.’

‘I’m going into the garden.’

‘You can’t go out like that.’

He picked up some rubber clogs Linda had ordered from the back of a Sunday Times supplement, which was the only part of the paper she read.

Pouring the sauce down the sink, she watched through the window and falling snow as he went into the shed and came out with a deckchair, planting it in the snow next to where the fishpond was just about still visible. He had his back to the house and his feet in their rubber clogs stretched out over the frozen pond. What was he thinking?

She made a second batch of Hollandaise sauce then laid the table before going upstairs to shower. Jessica’s bedroom door was shut but the music had been turned down. She would have gone in – to make sure Jessica had changed and Ferdie hadn’t marked the bed – but she was afraid. Were other women afraid of their daughters?

So instead she showered, put on the new dress she’d bought at Debenhams the other weekend, where they’d also bought Joe’s polo shirt, then went into Jessica’s bedroom, wearing heels and fully made up. Jessica was lying on the bed with Ferdie stretched out beside her. She was still in her school uniform.

Over the summer they’d painted and refurnished Jessica’s room so that it was better suited to the needs of a fifteen-year-old girl taking A Levels three years early. That was at least four months ago and it still smelt of freshly unpacked MDF. The new furniture was dwarfed by a black and white CND poster Jessica had insisted on putting back up, alongside an even larger floor-to-ceiling poster of Snoopy. Without ever knowing why, Snoopy had always depressed Linda – even now, when she was on the antidepressants that came with the Slimshake starter pack to help overcome any emotional instability likely to be encountered switching to a liquids-only diet. On the wall above the stereo, the Advent calendar Jessica was still adamant about buying had nine open doors. Linda looked through the black sugar-paper snowflakes stuck to the bedroom window, down at the garden. Joe was still out there, and beyond him was the oak tree, which she’d started to feel inexplicably threatened by since Wayne Spalding’s visit that afternoon. She drew the curtains then turned to face the bed again.

‘Jessica?’

Jessica didn’t move.

On the pinboard above the desk there was a photograph of Jessica aged eight on the beach at Brighton, with Belle. They were both smiling. The photograph next to it was of an even younger Jessica on Joe’s shoulders; her hair was almost covering her face and she was yelling something at the camera. There was a river and castle behind them, in the distance. Linda tried to remember where they might have been that day, but couldn’t. She remembered the sandals Jessica was wearing – and the dress – but she couldn’t remember the day. Above the photographs were a series of images she’d first noticed a week ago when she came into the room to dust, and that she’d since asked Jessica to take down – of a captured Iranian soldier with ropes attached to his wrists and ankles, spread-eagled in the dust, about to be quartered by Iraqi-driven Jeeps. Jessica had to explain all that to her – and that American Indians used to torture prisoners in the same way, using horses. Why had Jessica told her this? Did she expect her to have an opinion on it or was she just giving her some sort of chance? Jessica’s German teacher had torn the pictures out of Das Spiegel for her. ‘She knows this is the kind of thing I’m into,’ Jessica had said – implying that she, Linda, didn’t.

‘Jessica,’ she said again, resisting the urge to pick up the can of Impulse body spray on the corner of the desk and shake it to see if it was being used. She watched her daughter roll onto her back, one arm resting protectively over Ferdie’s flank. ‘I told you to get changed.’

Jessica rolled back onto her side again and watched Ferdie blinking at her, wondering if he was trying to send her a message in Morse or something. Was it possible to blink in Morse? Probably – with either dedication or desperation.

Not wanting to push it any further, Linda went downstairs and arranged some Ritz crackers on the serving plate then took the cottage cheese and pineapple out of the fridge and started spooning it onto them in bite-size dollops. Joe was still in the garden, sitting on the deckchair by the frozen fishpond. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. Was it possible to fall asleep in a shirt and rubber clogs when it was minus five degrees Celsius? Didn’t people die if they fell asleep in the snow? Then she started laughing, thinking how funny it would be if she was in here putting cottage cheese and pineapple on Ritz crackers while Joe was out there dying.

Joe, hearing laughter, looked up and turned towards the kitchen window.

The Niemans arrived at seven forty, before the Saunders, which meant that even though there were two Niemans to two Palmers, Linda felt outnumbered. They arrived in coats, hats, scarves and gloves, looking like identical (European) twins with their matching spectacles and matching haircuts.

Joe had forgotten to close the door to the downstairs loo and the smell of bleach was hanging heavily between them as they all stood awkwardly in the hallway.

‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ Daphne said. ‘Winke was in Brighton today.’

‘Brighton?’ Linda echoed, excited. ‘Joe was in Brighton today as well.’

Winke gave Joe a slow, almost suspicious look, but didn’t say anything.

‘What were you doing in Brighton?’ Daphne asked sharply.

Joe had a brief but strong memory of Belle’s hairdresser stood in front of him with a pair of scissors in her hand, and forgot to reply.

‘He was at the Britannia Kitchens roadshow – at the Brighton Centre,’ Linda said. She waited for some sort of reaction to this, but there wasn’t any. ‘Quantum Kitchens – our company – had a stand.’

‘I wasn’t at the Britannia Kitchens roadshow,’ Winke said at last.

‘So.’ Linda laughed. ‘The coats, Joe?’

‘What? Oh, right.’

Daphne handed her coat to Joe and they all watched as he tried to get it onto the hallstand, which was already full.

As Daphne’s coat fell onto the floor for a third time, Linda said, ‘Upstairs maybe, Joe?’

‘Upstairs, where?’

‘The bed,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Nice coat,’ Joe said as he took Winke’s from him.

‘Thank you. Wait a moment, please.’ He pulled a spectacle case out of his coat pocket, waving it briefly in the air. ‘I might need these. My reading glasses.’

Linda tried not to panic. What had Winke anticipated doing that would require his reading glasses?

Joe disappeared upstairs with the coats while Linda stood smiling enthusiastically at Daphne and Winke, unable to believe that Littlehaven’s renowned entrepreneur was here in her hallway. She tried not to stare at Daphne’s grey knitted dress, which reached nearly to her ankles and looked like it was made of cashmere. Her jewellery was large, tribal; the sort of jewellery Linda would never have conceived of buying.

‘You have a nice hallway,’ Winke said, leaning towards her.

She was immediately suspicious. Was he laughing at her? ‘Well, I suppose they’re all the same. The hallways. In these houses, I mean.’

Daphne shook her head. ‘No, actually.’

‘So,’ Joe said, coming back downstairs, ‘what can I get you people to drink?’

‘I’ll just take a mineral water, please,’ Daphne said.

‘Do you have whisky?’ Winke asked.

Joe nodded.

‘Let me help you,’ Daphne said, sliding into the kitchen after him.

‘Would you like to come through?’ Linda led Winke into the lounge.

In spite of viewing No. 8 Pollards Close three times before buying it, it wasn’t until they moved in that Linda realised the lounge wasn’t wide enough to fit two sofas in facing each other, which meant that they had to go side by side, with the armchair near the patio doors. The effect, when both sofas were occupied, wasn’t unlike a row of seating at the theatre. Only there was no stage. Opposite the sofas there was a coffee table with a fish tank on top, and a TV cabinet. Winke and Linda sat on the sofa opposite the fish tank.

Linda had been preoccupied by thoughts of the Niemans for as long as she could remember. She had watched their comings and goings from behind the lounge blinds for so long, and the virtual Niemans had become so familiar, that it struck her now as odd – how unfamiliar the real ones were. Total strangers, in fact.

They heard laughter from the kitchen.

‘Your fish is dead,’ Winke said.

Linda sprang up and went over to the tank, peering through Perspex and algae to see if anything was moving in there. She could just make out bubbles coming from the statue of a diver standing over an open treasure chest. Maybe that was the fish. Maybe? What else was it going to be – the diver?

‘I think it’s breathing,’ she said, tapping on the side of the tank.

‘Fish don’t breathe.’

‘Yes, I read that somewhere,’ she said, trying to keep her voice level.

The reflection of Winke on the side of the tank didn’t look convinced.

‘Maybe you should clean the tank.’ He folded his hands on his lap. ‘Or buy a filter.’

‘I know, I know,’ Linda said, keeping it light. ‘I’m terrible. Jessica’s always telling me to clean out the tank, but I just get so busy the day runs away with me, then it’s time for that first glass of wine and everything just goes down the chute.’

Winke didn’t react to this, he just sat there with his hands in his lap.

Linda was thinking, simultaneously, fuck the fish and thank God for the fish. If it wasn’t for the dead or dying fish they’d both be sat there listening to Daphne and Joe laughing in the kitchen. And how long did it take Joe to ask Daphne if she minded tap water because they didn’t have Perrier, and to pour Winke a whisky? Did he realise that she was alone in here with Winke trying to find some common ground.

‘Is the fish your daughter’s?’ he said, after what seemed like ages.

‘Sort of.’ She tapped the Perspex again, smiling vaguely. Her tapping produced small shockwaves across the surface of the water; waves that pulled the fish out from behind the diver, on its side. There were clumps of white stuff that looked like cotton wool bulging from its body, and she might have cared more if the creature wasn’t so genderless. She hoped Winke couldn’t see as she started tapping on the other side of the tank, trying to send out waves that would pull the fish back behind the diver. She didn’t have the stamina to face the fish’s death right then, and once Winke knew it was definitely dead he might expect some kind of reaction on her part: like grief or resuscitation or burial even, and she hadn’t prepared gazpacho and salmon with Hollandaise sauce just so that the Niemans and the Saunders (if they ever stopped fucking in order to show up) could stand out in a blizzard and bury a fish.

The fish had a spasm.

‘Do fish dream?’ she asked Winke hopefully.

Winke didn’t answer. A sudden thought occurred to her – maybe Winke was vegetarian. Did vegetarians eat fish?

Then, after a while he said, ‘It’s a terrible thing when a child’s pet dies. When anybody’s pet dies, but especially a child’s. They have a connection to animals we just don’t understand, don’t you think?’

‘Jessica’s fifteen.’

‘I hope, for Jessica’s sake, the fish lives.’

‘So do I.’ Linda wondered how much longer she was expected to carry on kneeling in front of the tank waiting for the fish to either live or die.

‘What’s its name?’

That was enough. Linda couldn’t do the fish any longer – she’d done the fish. After dinner they’d either stay in the dining room for coffee or make sure, if they did come in here, that Winke was put on the sofa opposite the TV cabinet.

‘Valerie,’ she said off the top of her head, because she’d been thinking how like Mrs Kline Winke was. In fact, they could almost be related. She could see quite clearly, without making her mind stretch at all, Winke dressed as Mrs Kline and Mrs Kline dressed as Winke.

‘So,’ Winke said, nodding, ‘the fish is a she.’

‘What?’ Linda was by the door, trying to exit so that she could get Winke his whisky. She needed Winke to drink his whisky.

‘The fish – Valerie. Valerie’s a she.’

Linda looked at him closely, suddenly suspicious again. Was he laughing at her?

‘Unless you mean Valéry, which is a masculine name in both France and Russia.’

What was he doing bringing France and Russia into her lounge?

There was the doorbell.

‘Excuse me.’ She went into the hallway. ‘Joe! Winke needs his whisky. Joe?’

She opened the front door. Mick kissed her first, then Dominique.

‘Where d’you want us?’ Mick asked, tripping up over the step.

The hallway smelt suddenly of alcohol.

‘In there.’ She tried to guide them into the lounge, but Daphne was waving at them from a bar stool in the kitchen, food in her mouth.

Linda moved over to the breakfast bar. What was Daphne eating? How could Daphne be eating when nothing had been served yet?

Joe and Mick nodded at each other.

There were about five canapés left on the serving dish and a pile of pineapple on the paper napkin she’d lined the plate with. She watched Daphne take the fifth remaining canapé, pick the pineapple off and push the cracker into her mouth.

‘So – you found the canapés,’ Linda said.

‘You know Joe,’ Mick said, ‘you’ve got to lock him up.’ He stretched past Daphne and grabbed remaining canapés numbers four and three. There were two left. Linda tried to laugh, but couldn’t.

‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’m allergic to pineapple,’ Daphne said.

‘Maybe somebody wants to offer Dominique a canapé,’ Linda said, looking at Joe. ‘And Winke’s still waiting for his whisky.’

‘Poor Winke,’ Daphne said, smiling and watching Joe pour the whisky.

‘What can I get you two?’ Joe asked the Saunders.

‘No more wine,’ Dominique said.

‘Two glasses of red wine it is then,’ Mick said, pulling the other bar stool up next to Daphne.

‘We’ve been talking about beer,’ Joe told them.

‘Belgian beer,’ Daphne said proudly. ‘I’m going to send Winke home to fetch some Belgian beer.’

‘Please. Don’t. Really. You don’t have to,’ Linda pleaded.

‘Joe must taste some Belgian beer,’ Daphne said, banging her hand down on the breakfast bar with each word.

Linda handed Mick and Dominique their wine then went to take Winke his whisky.

Winke was kneeling in front of the fish tank with his reading glasses on and his face pressed up against the Perspex.

‘Your whisky.’

‘It is very strange, but I smell something like vomit here – and your fish is definitely dead,’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Maybe,’ Linda conceded.

‘Maybe? Definitely.’

‘Winke,’ Daphne said from the doorway. ‘Winke, I want you to go home and fetch some Belgian beer.’

Winke got slowly to his feet, his eyes still on the tank.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said to Linda, ‘we’ll sort this out when I get back.’

Linda, who was still holding his whisky, tried to nod as mournfully as she could, and sighed.

The front door shut and Daphne disappeared back into the kitchen, her tribal jewellery clinking as she moved.

Linda put the whisky down on the coffee table and stared into the tank. The fish was lying on its side just by the diver’s feet. It made the diver look guilty.

She turned the dimmer switch by the door so that the lighting level in the room went down, and hoped that a combination of flashing tree lights, low overhead lighting and algae would make it difficult for Winke to pick up where he left off.

Five minutes later the doorbell rang and she went to answer it. The porch light illuminated Winke, a crate of Belgian beer, and a younger, slimmer, taller version of Winke with blond blow-dried hair.

‘Paul carried the beer for me,’ he said, stepping back into the house and leaving his son and the beer on the doorstep.

‘Everyone’s in the kitchen,’ Linda said. ‘Straight ahead. Just there.’ She put her hands on Winke’s back and pushed him in the direction of the kitchen.

Paul was stamping his feet loudly on the doormat. ‘Mind if I come in?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

She stood to one side and watched as the Niemans’ son carried the beer into the kitchen, treading snow laced with mud from the soles of his shoes into the hallway carpet, which was beige. Resisting the urge to get down on her hands and knees and start removing the stains, she followed Paul into the kitchen.

The crate, which had been put on the dining-room table, was being unpacked by Daphne. The cutlery and fantailed napkins were pushed to one side, and two of the candles had fallen over.

‘Linda – we need glasses here,’ Daphne called out.

Linda squeezed past Mick, who was staring at the wooden gazelle he’d just picked up from the sideboard, and got to the cupboard where she kept her glasses. She made a show of moving around some tumblers and a couple of Jessica’s old baby beakers. ‘No beer glasses,’ she said, hoping it sounded as though they’d once had some.

‘Any cognac glasses?’ Daphne persisted.

‘I’ve got these.’ Linda held up a couple of tumblers.

‘Make it wine glasses. The bigger the better.’

‘Joe,’ Linda said, ‘we need glasses from the drinks cabinet.’

Joe unlocked the door in the sideboard behind him.

‘These’ll do,’ Daphne said, pushing past Mick who was still contemplating the gazelle, and taking the glasses out of Joe’s hands.

Everybody had a glass. Everybody had to drink. Daphne had taken over.

Linda tried to catch Dominique’s eye, but Dominique wasn’t seeing straight. Why weren’t they sitting on the sofas in the lounge with their pre-dinner drinks like she’d planned? Why were they all crowded round the dining table instead with an empty crate of Belgian beer on it and Joe and the Niemans – all the Niemans – pressed up against the frosted glass that acted as a divider between the kitchen-diner and the hall.

‘You’ll stay and eat with us?’ Daphne asked Paul.

Paul shrugged.

‘He doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to,’ Linda said. Repeating, ‘Really, he doesn’t have to.’ There was enough gazpacho for six people. There were six pieces of salmon and six dining-room chairs. Paul would make them seven, and she didn’t have the stamina to pull off the ‘fish and loaves on the shores of Galilee’ stunt tonight.

‘He’ll stay,’ Daphne said.

Linda stood smiling back at her. ‘So – will he eat fish fingers?’

Daphne laughed. In fact, she didn’t stop laughing for a long time after the fish-finger joke. Only Linda wasn’t joking. Fish fingers were the only thing she could think of to remedy the disaster of turning an evening for six into an evening for seven, and she was working on the premise that all children like fish fingers. Only Paul wasn’t a child. He was the tallest person in the room, and he was drinking beer. In fact, there were no children here tonight. Linda felt her hormones take a quick dive. She had to stop thinking about Paul Nieman.

‘I’ll get Jessica down,’ she said. Then, ‘Maybe she and Paul could eat before us?’

‘Yes, I’d like to meet Jessica,’ Winke said sadly.

‘Jessica,’ Joe yelled up the stairs.

‘Why don’t we just all eat together?’ Daphne asked.

‘I’ll get her, Joe.’ Linda went upstairs and knocked on Jessica’s door. When she went in, her daughter was sitting at her desk. ‘Jessica?’

‘I’m busy.’

‘What are you doing? Homework?’

‘No. Just something.’

‘I need you to come downstairs.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘You have to come and have something to eat.’

‘I already ate. You told me to get something earlier.’

‘Well, now you have to eat something with us. Downstairs.’

‘I’m busy.’

There was an A4 pad on the desk with the words ‘Biological Hazards’ written across it. Then a list underneath: Anthrax/splenic fever/murrain/malignant – she couldn’t see the rest. ‘Paul Nieman’s here, that’s why I need you to come downstairs. You know Paul, don’t you?’

‘He’s in my physics class.’

‘Well, then – downstairs. Now.’

Jessica stood up. She had a pair of washed-out jeans on and an oversize black T-shirt with the word ‘Kontagion’ printed across it in white.

‘For God’s sake, Jessica. I told you to get changed.’

‘Well, I got changed.’

Linda grabbed hold of her daughter’s arm, and kept hold of it as she pushed her down the stairs in front of her.

The crockery didn’t match and nobody commented on the gazpacho. There wasn’t enough elbow space, and Paul and Jessica, who Linda had hoped to sit together, were on opposite sides of the table in deckchairs from the garage – ones she hadn’t been able to wash the mildew off. She hadn’t even got round to lighting the candles.

‘Computers’ll never take off,’ Joe said.

‘You’re not tempted to get one for the office?’

Joe shook his head and Winke put his reading glasses on.

‘In two years’ time you won’t be able to avoid them.’ Then, waving his spoon at Joe, ‘The school’s ordered thirty-five BBC computers.’

‘When?’

‘Last week.’

‘How d’you know?’

‘I ordered them.’

‘At the last Governors’ meeting, we appointed Winke Information Technology Liaison Officer.’

Linda started to clap then saw the look Jessica was giving her.

‘We were thinking of starting up a distribution company – when the time’s right,’ Daphne added.

‘As well as double glazing?’ Linda asked.

‘For a while.’ Winke turned to Jessica. ‘You’ll get to use them maybe … learn some basic programming skills.’

‘You’ve got daughters, haven’t you? You should bring them over,’ Daphne was saying to Dominique.

‘Steph’s too young and Delta’s looking after her.’

‘Delta – that’s a beautiful name.’

Linda stood up and started to clear away the gazpacho bowls so that she wouldn’t have to listen to the story of how Delta was conceived in Egypt at the mouth of the Nile when Mick and Dominique used to fly together.

‘I read in the FT that Laker Air’s in trouble,’ Winke said to Mick.

Linda looked at Dominique to see if this was something she knew about.

‘Difficulty. Not trouble,’ Mick said. Then, seeing Winke smile, he added, ‘It’s weathered worse.’

‘Do you miss flying?’ Daphne whispered to Dominique, who was sitting next to her.

Dominique stared at the Belgian woman whose hand was on her arm. ‘I don’t know – it was a long time ago – yes,’ she added unexpectedly.

The two women smiled at each other.

Something in the way Daphne was resting her hand on her arm made Dominique run on, way beyond the usual confines of her ‘Mick and I got it together at fifty thousand feet’ speech. ‘I mean, I miss the flying, but not the job. The trolley, the foreign hotels between coming and going – I don’t miss that, but the flying itself …’

‘Was it what you always wanted to do?’

‘I didn’t know what I wanted to do – the only O Level I passed was Home Economics. Then I got accepted on this training programme, and –’

‘Do you ever think about going back to it?’

‘I don’t know – no – I’ve changed so much.’ This sounded indefinite, more like she was looking for reassurance than making a statement. ‘I’ve changed so much,’ she said again. Then, turning to Winke, ‘What were you saying about Laker Air?’

‘That it’s in trouble,’ Winke said, pleased to repeat this.

‘It’s fine, Dom.’ Mick, who had overheard, watched his wife’s face as it turned towards him, settling fully on him and resting there.

‘I hope so.’ Winke started shaking his head, and he was still shaking it when conversation moved on, and Joe was telling everybody his favourite story.

‘Believe it or not, it was one of the first jobs I took on after starting up the company,’ Joe’s voice was saying, ‘and it came my way through one of the estate agents in town – can’t remember which one. They’d been renting out a house for some people who’d gone to America short term then decided to sell, as renting it out was too much hassle and the last tenants had disappeared without a trace. The agents reckoned they’d get a better price if they had the kitchen re-done. So … I went in on a Tuesday, I think it was, yeah, a Tuesday. One of the first things I did was turn the freezer off so that I could move it out the way, and – bloody hell …’ He turned to Mick. ‘I know you’ve heard it already – don’t you dare say anything.’

Linda wanted Joe to finish his story and start making an effort with Winke so that in, say, two weeks’ time, Joe could ring him to talk about the possibility of offering Nieman double glazing at a reduced price to people who were getting kitchens designed and fitted by Quantum. She also wanted to ask Daphne whether they’d considered getting their original Laing kitchen replaced? The Nassams at No. 6 and the Saunders all had Quantum kitchens.

Joe let his chair fall forward, forcing his belly into the edge of the table.

‘Guess what I found when I opened the freezer? The missing tenant. Well, one of them.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Daphne looked cross. ‘Not in the freezer, surely.’

‘Seriously – I’m not kidding you.’

‘He’s not,’ Mick added.

Here was Joe talking about dead people, Linda thought. Dead people here in Littlehaven, where the only thing people should have to worry about was whether they ought to take advantage of the new offer by Quantum Kitchens and have Nieman glazing – at a reduced price – put in at the same time. Why was Joe the one rocking back on his chair legs, laughing, when she was the one who got to open the letter from the bank telling them they’d missed a mortgage payment.

‘It was in the papers and everything,’ Joe carried on. ‘The head was in the bottom drawer and everything else was in those freezer bags with labels and dates written on them. Each bag had a different date on it – never worked that one out. Must have been something personal; a private joke or something between the killer and her victim.’

‘Wait,’ Daphne said, ‘it was the wife who killed the husband?’

‘Well – according to the estate agent it was a husband and wife who left without paying their last month’s rent, only, technically speaking, I suppose the husband never vacated the property after all because he was in the freezer the whole time.’

‘Why don’t you two go and watch some TV?’ Linda whispered to Jessica.

‘Who’s “you two”?’ Jessica asked, staring back at her.

‘You and Paul.’

‘I need to go and see if Ferdie’s okay.’

Linda saw this as her last opportunity to reclaim the evening for six people. She’d managed with the gazpacho, but she just didn’t know how to make six salmon steaks into eight.

‘Ferdie’s fine.’

‘Who’s Ferdie?’ Paul asked.

‘Ferdie’s our dog,’ Linda said, then to Jessica, ‘and Ferdie’s fine.’

‘How do you know – have you been upstairs?’

‘Jessica!’

‘I’m going.’ Jessica shunted her deckchair back into the breakfast bar.

‘So what is this Kontagion thing?’ Winke said, looking at her T-shirt as she stood up.

‘Last year’s Glastonbury T-shirt for Youth CND,’ she mumbled.

‘You went?’

Jessica looked at Linda. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go – a friend brought it back for me.’

‘I think Paul should go to Glastonbury,’ Winke said, his mind on neither Paul, who was sitting opposite him, nor Glastonbury.

‘That was very good gazpacho, Mrs Palmer,’ Paul said as Jessica left the room.

‘What the hell’s gazpacho?’ Joe asked Mick.

Linda wondered briefly if anyone was checking Paul’s alcohol intake. Then whether anybody needed to – how old was he, anyway? ‘Teenagers,’ she said nervously.

‘You’re okay, you escape all this with a boy,’ Dominique said to Daphne. Then, turning to Linda, ‘I mean, when did you last get to use your own phone?’

Linda gave what she hoped was a sympathetic shrug. Jessica didn’t seem to phone anybody, and nobody phoned Jessica – apart from Mr Browne, who lived at No. 14.

‘And all the cupboard space taken up with cheap makeup – Delta doesn’t seem to stick to one brand, she just gets bored and moves on to the next one.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Linda said, hoping Dominique would leave it at that.

‘And that’s just the ongoing stuff. This afternoon – while we were out – the girls nearly set fire to the house.’

Linda tried to look surprised.

‘Some accident with a crimper – you should see Steph’s hair.’

‘Will Jessica be going to university next year?’ Daphne asked, turning to Linda. ‘I mean, what’s the procedure for someone her age, in her position?’

Linda didn’t know. She hadn’t thought about anything much beyond the feature Trevor Jameson was going to run in the County Times, and now she came to think of it – what was going to happen with Jessica next year?

‘You should think about an American university for Jessica – maybe wait four years, let her mature … specialise … get her head round the direction she’d like her research to take. I’ve got a good friend at Berkeley you and Joe should speak to.’

‘Anyway, you got your picture in the paper, didn’t you?’ Mick was saying to Joe.

‘I did.’ Joe looked pleased. ‘Yeah, I did.’

Linda put the mandarin cheesecake on the table and tried not to look at Daphne’s face. She had a feeling that Daphne would have an opinion on frozen mandarin cheesecake.

‘Well, it’s not soufflé,’ she said, because nobody else was saying anything.

‘Since when has anyone here made soufflé?’ Dominique asked.

‘Oh, come on, Dom, I know you make soufflé …’

‘I’ve never made soufflé in my life before. Have I ever made soufflé before, Mick? Mick?’

Mick looked up. ‘What’s that?’

‘I said, have I ever made soufflé before?’

‘You and soufflé? Never. Dom doesn’t cook, she – well, she just doesn’t cook.’

‘So you’ve never made soufflé?’ Linda persisted, thinking of Delta in the kimono; Delta who had lied to her. Why?

‘Linda, I’m telling you …’

‘Well,’ Linda lifted up the cake slice, her stomach vibrating with nausea, ‘this is mandarin cheesecake.’

‘I love mandarin cheesecake,’ Paul said.

[4]

Taking one last look at herself in the mirror, Dominique turned off the light in the en suite and went through to the bedroom where Mick lay with his head propped in his hand and A History of Winemaking open on the pillow.

‘You’re tired,’ he said, looking up at her.

She nodded, still yawning. ‘I don’t know how you can read – aren’t you drunk?’

‘I’m not drunk.’

‘You looked drunk tonight.’

‘Just doing a good impression – to make it look as though I was enjoying myself. For your sake.’

‘You weren’t enjoying yourself, then?’

‘Come on, Dom.’ He paused. ‘We had mandarin cheesecake.’

‘You shouldn’t pretend for my sake.’

‘I should.’ He shut the book and sat up, pushing the dressing gown off her left shoulder.

‘I can’t sleep,’ Stephanie said, walking into the room and bringing the smell of burnt hair with her.

‘Steph –’ Mick fell back onto the bed.

‘Come on, baby, it’s sleep time. And you can’t sleep in this,’ Dominique said, lifting the yellow hard hat off her daughter’s head. Stephanie was dressed in the full emergency services outfit she’d insisted on wearing to bed earlier and in the end Dominique had given in.

‘What time is it?’ Steph pulled the hard hat sharply back down onto her head.

‘It’s after midnight.’

‘Then it’s tomorrow. That’s late.’

‘It is late and you should be in bed now.’

‘I want to see Dad.’

‘Dad’s trying to sleep.’

‘But he just waved at me.’

Dominique turned round to see Mick lying with the pillow over his head and his right hand in the air, waving.

Stephanie squealed and jumped onto the bed as Mick pulled the pillow off his head and threw it at her. ‘I made up some new jokes,’ she said, bouncing up and down.

‘Like …’

‘Like – what d’you call a one-legged horse?’

‘I don’t know, what d’you call a one-legged horse?’

‘A unicycle,’ Stephanie said, still bouncing. ‘And – what d’you call a one-legged cow?’

‘I don’t know, what d’you call a one-legged cow?’

‘A unicycle. And – what d’you call a one-legged pig?’

‘A unicycle?’

‘Noooo.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just because. I haven’t thought of a joke for a one-legged pig yet.’

‘But why can’t a one-legged pig just be a unicycle like a one-legged horse and a one-legged cow?’

‘Mick,’ Dominique interceded.

Stephanie jumped off the bed and went running back to her room.

Dominique followed her.

‘Don’t worry,’ her daughter said from under the duvet, ‘I’m asleep.’

A china toadstool with a china mouse family inside illuminated the room with a dull red light.

‘Steph – you can’t sleep in that hat.’ She paused. ‘We’ll get an appointment at the hairdresser’s tomorrow morning – first thing.’ Dominique waited a few minutes. ‘Night,’ she said from the doorway.

‘Ssh, I’m asleep.’

When she got back to the bedroom, Mick was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

Taking her dressing gown off, she got into bed next to him.

‘What’s this?’ Dominique said, as something sharp dug into her left ear.

‘I was looking at it tonight.’

She picked up the wooden gazelle from the pillow and put it on her bedside table. ‘This is Linda’s, Mick.’

‘I got attached to it.’

‘You stole it?’

‘I put it in my pocket – they won’t notice.’

They lay there not talking and neither of them made a move to turn out the light.

‘I didn’t realise Laker was going bust,’ she said after a while.

Mick rolled over and looked at her, but didn’t say anything.

‘They’re going to make you redundant, aren’t they?’

‘Maybe – I’m over forty anyway, Dom.’

‘That’s what lunch was about.’

‘That’s not what lunch was about.’

‘How soon?’

‘I don’t know – nobody knows – I’ve probably got another month.’

‘Another month? When were you going to tell me?’

‘There’s nothing to worry about, Dom – the terms of the package we’re starting to discuss are very generous.’

‘You’re not going to look for another job as a pilot?’

‘We should go away,’ he said.

She didn’t say anything.

‘We should. We should go away.’

‘Where would we go?’

‘New Zealand.’

‘And what would we do in New Zealand?’

Mick raised himself up on his elbow. ‘We’d have a vineyard.’

‘A vineyard?’

‘I’d call it Dominique’s, and even though it would take a few years to set up and those first few years would be tight – difficult – after that we wouldn’t look back – award-winning wines – a huge export business – the girls helping – acres of land.’

‘My God, Mick.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve been thinking about this?’

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘But – why? I mean, New Zealand – why?’

‘Space. You. The girls. You.’

‘But, New Zealand, Mick. D’you know what you’re talking about? Do you know what it is you’re actually saying?’

‘No. But think about it.’

‘It’s the other side of the world.’

‘So we’d take our world with us – Delta and Steph. What would be left behind?’

She shook her head hard. ‘But – you fly, Mick. That’s what you do. You fly.’

Mick stared hard at her then slumped back onto the pillow, deflated. ‘I fly.’

‘You love flying.’

‘I love flying.’

‘And you don’t know the first thing about growing grapes.’

Mick sat up again and smiled.

Why did he see this as a positive thing?

‘I know, but I’m learning. I bought shares in a vineyard.’

‘You did what?’ Dominique sat up now as well.

‘And I thought we could go and visit – maybe at Easter-time. We could rent a villa for a fortnight or something over Delta and Steph’s Easter holidays.’

‘You bought shares in a vineyard, Mick?’ Dominique was trying to think and not to think all at the same time.

He passed his hand lazily over her breasts as he sank back onto the pillow and fell quickly asleep, leaving her alone with the night, and the vineyard in New Zealand.

[8]

Above the sound of Pink Floyd, Linda heard the flush of the downstairs loo and stood watching herself in the mirror as she held her breath and waited to see if Joe was going to turn off the music and come upstairs to bed. She’d already been down to see him once and she didn’t want to have to go down again. The music carried on. She watched herself exhale then pick up a cleansing pad from the pack by the sink and start to wipe off her make-up, rubbing at her cheeks, eyes and mouth much harder than she needed to.

She spent a long time doing everything in the bathroom – even giving her nails a brush and polish before going through to the bedroom. Then she sat on the end of the bed and listened to Pink Floyd coming up through fitted carpet. Forty minutes must have passed since she’d been downstairs and asked Joe if he was coming up and he’d mouthed the words ‘five minutes’ at her.

She got up from the bed and went downstairs.

Joe was on the sofa, watching TV with the sound off. He didn’t look up.

‘What are you watching?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How can you hear it?’

‘Subtitles.’

‘What?’ She moved closer to the TV.

He pointed to the screen where there was a band of black with words across it. ‘Subtitles.’

‘The people look Japanese. In the film. They look like Japs, Joe.’

‘Yeah.’

The fact that they were Japanese made her feel like she had a case – that and the fact that it was past midnight.

‘So – you’re coming to bed soon?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You are?’

‘No – I mean, I don’t know.’

‘Right.’ She stood there staring at the screen for another minute. ‘I’ll be upstairs.’ She stopped again by the lounge door, picking up the ends of her dressing-gown belt and letting them slip through her fingers. ‘I thought it went well tonight.’

‘Tonight?’ he said, thinking about this. Then, ‘Oh, tonight. Yeah.’

Back upstairs, she stood at the end of the bed, breathing hard, then took off her dressing gown and put a T-shirt on instead. She climbed onto the exercise bike and after a couple of minutes flicked straight to gradient. At some point the music went off and she thought she heard Joe climbing the stairs, but he didn’t come into the bedroom. She was so angry that she’d been cycling uphill for five minutes now without realising it, and her heart was starting to let out a strange metallic click.

Joe knocked three times then went in. At first he thought Jessica was asleep, but after a while she opened her eyes and took off the headphones.

‘I was nearly asleep.’

‘You should be. It’s one a.m.’

She leant over and turned off the stereo, trying not to disturb Ferdinand, who had his head on her stomach. ‘How was the film?’

‘I don’t know. Everyone died, apart from this one man at the end who was crawling around in the grass. Then he died too.’ He sighed and went over to pull the curtains shut.

‘They’re already shut, Dad.’

‘There was a gap.’

‘Does it matter? There’s nothing out there but fields and trees.’

‘Well, they’re shut now.’ He looked down at the desk. ‘Homework?’

‘No – just something I’m working on.’

‘Looks complicated.’

‘Not really.’

Joe switched the desk light on.

‘Dad, you don’t have to – you’re not interested.’

Joe looked more closely. ‘What is this, Jess?’ He read out, ‘“Botulism poisoning is very rare, but an ounce could kill close on forty-three million people. There is no immunity to it and no effective treatment.”’

Jessica rolled onto her side. ‘It’s part of a chapter on biological hazards.’

‘A chapter? What – you’re writing a book?’

‘On how to survive a nuclear attack.’

‘Since when?’

‘The summer holidays.’

Joe didn’t know what to say. He looked down and read again silently to himself the line he’d just read out loud. Then, glancing up at Jessica’s pinboard, he saw her aged four, sitting on top of his shoulders, and could almost feel the weight of her again. The castle in the photograph was Arundel. They’d walked – his parents and him and Jessica – along the river from Amberley to Arundel. That must have been before his dad got ill. Linda hadn’t come that day; he couldn’t remember why.

‘It’s more of a manual than a book, really.’ Jessica paused. ‘I’m writing it with Mr Browne – well, I’m doing the research anyway.’

‘And who’s Mr Browne?’

‘He lives at number fourteen – the end of the Close.’

‘The end of the Close? Our Close? What does he do?’

‘He was in the army.’

‘And why isn’t he in the army any more?’

‘He retired.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Thirty-seven, I think.’

‘He retired at thirty-seven?’

‘Or left, or something. I don’t know. It’s to do with his leg. Sometimes he uses a walking stick.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘Youth CND – he came to give a talk.’

Joe sat down on the end of the bed, looking at the blue seashells on the duvet cover.

Jessica sat up on her elbow. ‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

He felt for her legs under the duvet and gave her ankle a squeeze.

‘This book’s really important, Dad. It talks about how not to die. How to survive.’

‘And what if this bomb of yours never goes off, Jess, and you have to do more than just survive?’

Jessica fell back onto the pillow. ‘You’re drunk.’

Joe stood up, trying to hide his disappointment. ‘Probably.’ He turned the desk light off and heard her turn over in bed. ‘How’s Ferdinand?’

She didn’t say anything.

‘We can take him to the vet tomorrow, if you like.’ What did he want? He wanted to tell her about meeting a hairdresser called Lenny today. What was wrong with him? Jessica was the one person he wanted to tell and he couldn’t, because she was his daughter. ‘Night, Jess.’ He stood there waiting for her to say something.

Then, at last, ‘Night, Dad.’

He left the room, shutting the door behind him, and crossed the hallway.

In the master bedroom, Linda was going full tilt up a virtual hill thinking about the muddy footprints Paul Nieman had left in the hallway when he came in with the beer, and how much she’d wanted to clean the carpet. Then she pictured the scene again with herself naked, scrubbing at the mud in a pair of black marigolds, and Paul standing over her, angry.

‘Shit, Joe,’ she said, catching sight of him in the vanity-unit mirror. ‘What are you creeping up on me for?’

He shrugged and watched as she flicked the dials on the handlebars until it looked like a cartoonist was running her in slow motion.

‘Jessica’s writing a book.’

‘Seven miles. I just did seven miles,’ she said, breathless and preoccupied.

‘On how not to die – with a Mr Browne – Jessica says he lives at the end of the Close, but I’ve never seen him. Who is he?’

‘I don’t know, Joe, and I didn’t know she was writing a book.’ Linda got off the bike and picked up the dressing gown from the bed. ‘Mr Browne?’

‘She said she met him at Youth CND.’

‘I think I met him once.’

‘He was giving a talk.’

‘He seemed okay.’ Linda paused. ‘And anyway, she needs to be around other people more.’

‘She’s fifteen years old, Linda!’

‘That’s what I’m talking about – she never goes out.’ Linda threw the dressing gown back down on the bed. ‘Did you see her tonight, Joe? She doesn’t speak – she doesn’t eat… the way she talked to me in front of everybody.’

Joe ignored this. ‘She’s got things she needs to work through.’

‘Like what – the end of the world?’

‘Well, that’s one of them.’

‘Jessica never leaves her room – she needs professional help, Joe.’

‘For what?’

‘For just about fucking everything.’

‘What – like the time she had to see that educational psychologist – what was her name?’

‘Penelope – but she told us to call her Penny.’

‘She spent eight sessions with Jessica – alone – filling her mind with fuck knows what, only to tell us Jessica had a fear of dolls.’

‘I don’t want to start talking about Penny again – you refused the further counselling she recommended.’ The nausea she’d experienced earlier while stood over the mandarin cheesecake rose up again.

‘For fuck’s sake, Linda, this is our daughter we’re talking about … where are you going?’ he said, watching her. The T-shirt she was wearing had dark sweat patches on it.

‘The bathroom.’

‘It’s nearly one thirty in the morning.’

The door slammed shut, and a minute later he heard retching sounds. ‘Linda?’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Are you sick?’

‘It’s the solids.’

‘The what?’

‘The solids – dinner tonight. I’m not used to it.’

He listened at the door, but didn’t hear any other sounds, and after a while he went back into the hallway towards the other bathroom, stopping by the window like he used to when they first moved in. That was two years ago, and everything had been so new then that the contractors hadn’t even got round to putting tarmac on the roads and pavements. It was a new world they hadn’t finished building yet, and he would stand at the hall window in the early hours of the morning, half expecting to see virgin forest carpeting the horizon.

Now all he could see was the glow of Gatwick and, in the distance, beyond the Surrey Hills, the monochrome aurora borealis that hung over London. How had he ever felt himself capable of imagining that the world – his world – was still unfinished?

He went into the bathroom, looked into the macramé basket hanging from the ceiling and failed to work out what he was doing there, then went back to the bedroom and undressed in the semi-dark because Linda was already in bed, and the light on her side was off.

He took off everything apart from his vest, then got into bed and lay looking up at the ceiling where it had been pricked by Artex.

‘Your mum was having her hair cut today,’ he said, turning his head to face Linda, who had her eyes closed.

‘I don’t want to talk about my mother,’ she said, her breath smelling faintly of vomit. Then, after a while, ‘And I don’t know why she has that hairdresser – she can’t afford her.’

‘Well, it’s difficult for her to get out and about.’

The chains on the blinds started to rattle as the extractor fan in the en suite cut out, blowing a draught through the bedroom. Joe felt himself drifting off. ‘The soup you made tonight was good.’

‘Gazpacho, it was gazpacho,’ she said, ‘and before you say anything, it was meant to be cold.’

‘Why’s that, then?’

She didn’t answer, and Joe was almost asleep when Linda said, ‘She used to be in the army.’

‘You never said.’

‘Not my mother – the hairdresser. She was in the Falklands or something.’

He didn’t say anything, and after a while leant over to switch off the light on his side of the bed.

When he woke up it was still dark, and he didn’t know what time it was because the alarm clock was on the other side of the bed. Linda was lying on her back with her head turned away from him and her left hand curled into a fist.

He drifted off to sleep again.

23 DECEMBER 1983

[4]

The dark was still deep when Dominique left the house at five a.m. Mick’s flight from Florida – his last flight – was due to land in half an hour.

The road from Littlehaven to Gatwick was all new bypass, cutting across land with small strips of forest that deer used to graze in. She remembered pointing out the deer to Delta when she was small, but now there were no deer left to point out to Steph. They’d hit a deer once, in the red Renault, and Mick had wanted to stop and pull the animal off the road, but she hadn’t let him; she’d told him to keep driving. Then it started raining and they had to pull over anyway because the ton of running deer that had hit the windscreen had snapped both wipers clean off and they couldn’t see a thing. She’d tried to remind Mick about that deer a couple of years ago, but he couldn’t remember and this had shocked her. There was no way she could have forgotten a thing like that, but Mick told her, smiling, that he had no memory of it, no memory at all. As if he’d never been there in the car while they waited in the dark for the rain to stop, the dead deer and forest somewhere to their left, and Delta crying uncontrollably in the back. It was a shame the deer were gone, she thought, looking at the early-morning darkness and the way it hid the land’s details.

Leaving behind the patch of countryside the bypass intersected, she entered Gatwick’s network of roundabouts, Jacuzzi showrooms, electronics factories, out-of-town warehouses, hotels and – finally – the airport itself.

She had been a first-class air hostess working long-haul flights when she and Mick met. The first-class bit mattered, and ‘we got it together at fifty thousand feet’ was a conversation opener she still used. Most of the passengers in first class then were men, and she got on with men – even growing up without a father. It was women she didn’t like. Mick once called her a misogynist and it was true. She knew how to make men happy. How did you make a woman happy?

As soon as the plane wheels used to leave the tarmac – wherever she was in the world – she not only felt herself breathing again, but felt pleased to be breathing again. She never got claustrophobic in the pressurised cabin’s few cubic feet of reconditioned air and she never worried about dying. It was being on the ground she was afraid of: gravity. Anything that sucked you in or down or tried to anchor you in any way. She started taking as little time off between flights as regulation allowed and spending more and more time in hotel rooms in foreign cities with curtains shut and phials of sleeping pills, trying to defy gravity. As long as she had movement, as long as she had altitude, she was fine. It was her ground life that was going all autistic on her. Then Mick came along, and he changed all of that. Mick changed all of her.

When she told her mother, who was a scientist researching food dyes, that she was thinking of becoming an air hostess, Monica had just smiled at this new fatality in her life and said, ‘I suppose everybody’s got to do something.’

Then, two weeks later, Dominique got a phone call from her on a busy Friday night at the pub she was working in, and Monica told her she had an interview with someone running training sessions for Laker Air the next day. Which made Dominique feel, when she got accepted on the training programme, that the whole air-hostess thing had been her mother’s idea in the first place; that her whole life so far had been her mother’s idea. Even Mick; even Mick’s love for her; even her happiness – and Dominique being happy or not was the last thing on earth her mother cared about. It was just that happiness was part of the plan Monica had formulated for her daughter in the absence of academic success, because that’s what normal people were: happy. So she presumed.

Dominique stood for a while at the Arrivals barrier watching passengers from the Florida flight, jetlagged, walk through the automatic doors, thinking she should have done what Mick wanted and taken the girls on this last flight with him. Why hadn’t she just gone? She was about to leave her post by the barrier and get a coffee when she saw Laura, whom she used to fly with on Laker Air in the late Sixties.

Laura had always had long hair, but now it was cut short, close to the scalp. Her legs looked long and brittle and her knees too pronounced, but Laura was still flying. Dominique felt herself pause, trying to decide whether she wanted to talk to Laura, who was still flying, or not. Whether she’d ever liked Laura, who was still flying, or not.

‘Dominique. My God. Dominique.’

‘Hey, Laura.’ Up close, Laura felt taller than her, slimmer, and better smelling. The short haircut pronounced her cheekbones and shoulders. Dominique wondered how she was looking under airport strip lighting. ‘Just landed?’

Laura sighed. ‘Just landed.’ She parked the small suitcase on wheels by her side and kept hold of the two duty-free bags.

‘They’ve changed the uniform,’ Dominique said.

‘The uniform?’

She nodded at Laura’s navy suit and Laura looked down. ‘Oh – I’m with BA now.’

‘Since when?’

‘This was my first flight with them. To Delhi.’ She looked down at her suit again. ‘You don’t think it’s too dowdy?’

‘Dowdy? No.’

The two women looked at each other, trying to simultaneously absorb and keep at arm’s length their different lives.

‘God – isn’t it awful what’s happening to Laker?’

‘Well – you got out in time.’

‘Just. It’s the people with families I feel sorry for. God,’ Laura said again, suddenly exhaling. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

‘It has – can’t remember how long exactly, but – yes.’

‘Yeah, ages. God. So. You’re here waiting for Mick?’

Dominique laughed without knowing why. ‘He should be around somewhere – the screen says his flight’s in Baggage Reclaim and people are already starting to come through.’ She wished she didn’t sound so vague. It made it seem like her and Mick didn’t really speak any more, like one didn’t really know where the other one was; like they often missed each other.

And sure enough there was Laura laughing and saying, ‘It sounds like you lose your husband a lot.’

‘Not too often.’ Vague.

Laura nodded with her lips partly open. ‘I was in Mick’s cabin crew on the Barbados flight a month ago. One of my last flights on Laker Air.’

Dominique didn’t know what to say to this. Why were they talking about Mick? Laura gave the sleeves of her sheepskin coat a couple of tugs. ‘Where were you?’

‘Where was I when?’

‘Barbados – you should have been in Barbados.’

‘Well, I wasn’t.’

Laura paused. ‘Have you ever been?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve never been?’

‘No.’

‘Well, the next time he flies to Barbados, you get him to book you a seat on the plane,’ Laura said sympathetically. ‘I know it’s difficult with the kids and everything … how many have you got?’

‘Two.’

‘… But you should go. You really should. Barbados is …’

‘Laura!’

They were standing in the shadow of a second air hostess, who Laura didn’t introduce.

‘This is Mick’s wife. Mick Saunders.’

The other girl nodded.

‘I used to fly too,’ Dominique put in, ‘a long time ago.’

The girl nodded again.

‘When did you give up?’ Laura asked.

‘Well – I didn’t really give up – I got married,’ Dominique said, looking for the first time at Laura’s left hand, which was ring-less. She held on to this, and the fact that up close there was a food stain on the lapel of Laura’s jacket.

‘So,’ Laura said heavily, ‘there you go.’

‘There you go.’

‘Well. I’ll probably see you again. Give my best to Mick.’

‘I will,’ Dominique said, hands in pockets. ‘Bye.’

‘Bye,’ Laura replied, steering her friend away.

Dominique was thinking of going to the Laker Air desk and getting them to phone through and find out where Mick was when Laura parked her case and came running back.

‘I meant to say – I saw Mick go up to the observation deck.’

‘The observation deck?’

‘About ten minutes ago.’ Laura shrugged. ‘And I heard about him being laid off – I’m sorry.’

‘Well –’ The way Laura said it made Dominique want to defend, not Mick, but herself. ‘I think he’s pretty pleased about it. The package was good.’ She paused. ‘So good, in fact, that we’re thinking of emigrating to New Zealand and –’

‘New Zealand? When?’

‘I don’t know, I –’

Laura turned abruptly away, tripped over a suitcase somebody had parked in her path, then broke into a run.

Dominique watched her go, feeling unsettled. Something about the way Laura was running made her think she was crying at the same time. She rejoined her friend and the two women in uniform disappeared through the sliding doors that led to the car parks, the friend taking one last look at Dominique before the doors shut again. Dominique stood there wondering what either of them had to show for all those air miles they’d clocked up between them – after how many years of service? And even if there was anything to show – who was there to show it to? She started to make her way to the observation deck, thinking about the food stain on Laura’s lapel. Was Laura happy? Were women like Laura happy? ‘Women like’ – had she really thought that? There were no other women like Laura. There was only one Laura: Laura was unique. Just as she, Dominique, was unique.

She got into the lift, and a few seconds later the doors opened onto a lobby whose floor was covered in rubber matting. Through the lobby doors she saw Mick standing outside in the persistent dark in his overcoat and a pair of gloves. The gloves were thick woollen ones that made his hands look disproportionate to the rest of him, and his pilot’s cap was on the wall beside him.

When the automatic doors opened the wind nearly blew if off. A plane flew over and Mick turned his head to follow its undercarriage.

‘Your hat’ll blow off the wall,’ she said, stepping outside.

He turned round and smiled at her. ‘Hey, you.’

They stood looking at each other.

‘How’d you find me?’ he said at last.

‘Just did. Aren’t you cold?’

‘Maybe.’

They stayed where they were, not moving any closer.

‘Sad?’

‘Maybe.’

She wished she hadn’t said that. It sounded as though she was attacking him in some way. Her clearest, most instinctive thoughts always came across as aggressive when she articulated them.

‘I was waiting for you downstairs in Arrivals.’ She thought about mentioning Laura. ‘I didn’t know where you were.’

‘I was watching the planes.’ He broke off.

For some reason this seemed like a stupid thing for a pilot to say.

‘Was the flight okay?’

‘The flight was fine. How are the girls?’

‘The girls are fine. I left them both asleep. They missed you, but they’re fine.’

‘So everything’s fine.’ He reassured her with a smile, but it wasn’t enough to make her want to cross to him. ‘You know what I was thinking up there? I was thinking – I can’t remember the last time a child asked to come into the cockpit. We never get children up front any more and I was trying to work out why that was; why the fact that aeroplanes stay up in the sky at all doesn’t interest them any more. So I came up here.’

‘To watch the planes?’ she said.

He smiled at her. ‘To watch the planes.’

‘You look tired.’

‘Maybe I am.

‘You sure you’re okay? Nothing happened on the trip, did it?’

‘The trip happened. The flight happened, and the thing I’m still waiting to happen hasn’t yet – so I’m waiting.’

‘What’s meant to be happening?’

‘I’m meant to have some sort of feeling – definitive feeling – about the fact that I’ve just flown a plane for the last time. I don’t seem to be having that feeling.’ He paused. ‘I called you from …’ another plane went over ‘… Florida,’ he shouted. Adding, ‘Don’t worry – everything’s fine.’

‘It’s probably the jetlag.’

‘The jetlag. Probably. It always makes me maudlin.’

‘Well don’t be maudlin – when you’re maudlin you make other people sad,’ Dominique said.

‘So.’ Mick smiled then grabbed hold of her hand, pulling him towards her. ‘Come here.’

‘I am here.’

‘No. Come here.’ He kissed her. ‘I missed you.’

‘I missed you.’

‘I mean I really missed you.’

Dominique laughed. ‘There’s a lot of kissing going on here.’

‘I kissed you once.’ Mick put his arms round her, picking his cap up from the wall.

‘Why aren’t you wearing that?’ she asked.

‘No idea.’ He kissed her again, on the forehead this time. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

They left the observation deck and got into the lift, walking out a minute later into high-voltage airport lighting. They were holding hands and the world around them was moving rapidly.

The green Triumph made its way down the layers of multi-storey, through the barrier at the bottom and out into the morning.

Mick spoke to the woman in the car-park kiosk, calling her Barbara and asking her when her shift ended. Dominique knew that if she asked him in an hour or even three hours’ time when Barbara’s shift ended, he would be able to say three o’clock without any hesitation. Mick wasn’t just talk, he took people to heart. He listened to them, and they trusted him. Dominique didn’t ask – because the subject bored her – but she was pretty certain Mick had all the data on Barbara: husbands, lovers, children, other jobs. Mick would have the whole Barbara panorama at his fingertips because Mick understood that although Barbara’s life and death meant nothing to him personally, there were a lot of other people to whom it did. This was a leap of faith she herself had never been able to make. She didn’t give a shit about Barbara or how long her shift was, but Mick did.

For a while the road followed a metal fence with runway the other side, then turned off at right angles. She stared at the web of runway and lights and couldn’t ever imagine knowing what they meant.

‘I missed you,’ Mick said, turning to look at her.

‘You said. I missed you too. I think I already said that as well.’

‘One hundred and forty-four hours is a lot of hours to spend away from you.’

‘You were counting?’

‘I always count.’

She smiled and rested her head on the seatbelt. ‘You’ll never have to count again.’

By the time they parked the car outside No. 4, dawn was at last streaking highlights through the remains of night, diluting it with an early-morning grey. Stephanie answered the door in her gymnastics leotard, preoccupied.

‘Hi, Dad – can you make pancakes?’ she said to Mick. Then, turning to Dominique, ‘And can I take the mirror off the wall in the downstairs toilet?’

‘If you want –’

As they walked into the house the phone started to ring. ‘I’ll get that.’ Mick disappeared into the study and Dominique wandered into the kitchen where Delta was sitting drawing at the table.

‘Where’s Dad?’ she said.

‘On the phone.’

‘Somebody called for him a few minutes ago.’

‘Who was it?’

‘I don’t know – they wouldn’t leave their name. How is Dad?’

‘Jetlagged.’

‘No – I mean, how is he?’ Delta lowered her voice, anticipating a searing insight into the state of her father’s mind.

‘I don’t know.’

‘It must be weird,’ she persisted, ‘to suddenly stop doing something like that – after all these years – especially something like flying.’

She was floundering. They’d told her, but not Steph, that Mick had been made redundant. They’d told her that Florida would be his last flight, but they hadn’t told her what to think about this. Whether it was a good or a bad thing; whether it was something they were meant to be celebrating or not talking about. She’d been given facts without guidelines and wasn’t that interested anyway, so she was floundering.

‘Yes, it must be,’ Dominique trailed off.

She opened the fridge then shut it, staring at the magnetic letters on the door’s white surface for a while, trying to make out a pattern. Then, yawning, she went over to the kitchen table and sat down.

‘What are you doing?’ she said, watching her older daughter.

‘A sketch for a mural.’ Delta turned the sketch pad round and carried on adding details with a pencil.

‘What is it?’

‘A matador delivering the coup de grâce. I thought I could paint it on the wall opposite my bookshelves.’

‘Well, I don’t mind you painting there, but …’

Delta wasn’t listening. She turned the sketch pad back round to face her.

‘Won’t it give you nightmares?’

Dominique sat staring at the Great Wall of China, which was December’s picture on the calendar they got free every year from Mr Li’s Chinese takeaway. Then she went to find Mick in the study.

‘That was Station Pets,’ he said when she went in, signalling to her to shut the door. ‘They’ve got two hamsters left: a boy and a girl.’

‘Well, we only want one.’

‘Why don’t we just buy them both – she won’t be expecting two.’

‘But they’ll breed, Mick.’

‘So they’ll breed … we’ll buy a bigger cage or sell them or drown them or something.’

‘Don’t hamsters eat their young?’

‘Not these ones – they’re Russian hamsters. I told him we’d take them both.’

‘So why did you even ask me?’

He smiled at her. ‘He’s got a cage with a wheel, and because we’re taking two hamsters he recommended buying an extension with plastic tubing so they’ve got more to do … some kind of hamster gym. He’ll throw in the exercise ball for free.’

‘Hamsters need exercise?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Well, if we’re buying the hamsters we should buy whatever goes with them, you know, whatever makes them happy.’ She watched him run his finger along the edge of the desk. ‘What about the Sindy House?’

‘We’d better keep it – she might change her mind again. We could just give her both anyway.’

‘The Sindy House and the hamsters? I don’t know, Mick.’

She looked at him standing there in his uniform. How did he do it? How did he walk off a plane and into No. 4 Pollards Close and just pick up all the threads like that as soon as he crossed the threshold? She couldn’t have done that. He’d just landed a plane that had been in the air for over eleven hours and here he was talking about hamsters and Sindy Houses like he’d never been anywhere but here all the time. Maybe that’s why she stopped flying when she had Delta. Why they both decided she should stop when Delta arrived, because they both knew that if she carried on, one day she’d get onto a plane and never come back. Whereas Mick never had to come back because he’d never left in the first place.

‘Stephanie wants pancakes for breakfast,’ she said, as the phone started ringing again.

‘Hello?’ Mick sank onto the corner of the desk, his hand resting in his groin while staring at Dominique. ‘Hello? Monica? No – I just got back from Florida. Didn’t hear about any tornadoes – what? She’s just here,’ he said, passing the receiver over.

‘Stephanie wants pancakes,’ Dominique whispered, in a sudden panic.

‘You said.’

‘Don’t make Scotch ones, I want normal ones – lemon – sugar.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out.’ Mick blew her a kiss then left the room.

Sitting down at the desk, Dominique watched the door shut behind him. She was alone in the study with her mother.

‘Dominique?’ The voice was impatient, almost angry.

The first of her mother’s boyfriends she remembered was Clive, a child-development researcher, who specialised in Early Years. His arrival in their lives coincided with her own early attempts at speech, and on his advice the ‘mumumuh’ she was beginning to stutter was encouraged to become ‘Monica’ rather than ‘mummy’ because Clive believed that the great universals ‘mother’ and ‘father’ should be unleashed from their biological fetters and given spiritual status instead. They even managed to get the Danish au pair to go along with this. Clive stayed in their lives for only nine joss-stick-filled months, but two of his legacies remained (because they suited Monica): a belief that yoga was necessary to civilisation, and that Dominique should never have recourse to use the word ‘mother’ or any of its diminutives.

When she’d had Delta, she’d asked Monica if her daughter could call her ‘grandma’, but Monica said there was no way she could do ‘grandmother’ when she hadn’t even done ‘mother’.

‘Dominique?’

‘Sorry, sorry – we just got back from the airport. Where are you, anyway? Minnesota?’

‘Minnesota? Who told you I was in Minnesota?’

‘Mick did, I think. Anyway – I thought you were in Minnesota.’

‘I was in Montréal. Montréal’s got nothing to do with Minnesota. Are you sure he said Minnesota?’

Dominique wasn’t sure any more.

‘You probably heard him wrong.’

‘Probably. I don’t remember.’

‘That’s your problem, Dominique, there’s very little you do remember.’

‘I remember things,’ Dominique said slowly.

‘What would I be doing in Minnesota anyway?’ Monica cut in.

‘I don’t know, but weren’t you meant to be spending Christmas there?’

‘Where?’

‘Minnesota.’

‘I wasn’t in Minnesota,’ Monica exploded, ‘I was in Montréal. Montréal, Canada.’

‘Sorry,’ Dominique said. Then again, ‘Sorry.’

‘And no, I wasn’t meant to be spending Christmas in Montréal – I was running tests on healthy animals with the help of some people there so that we can get this new red food dye approved.’

‘So …’ Dominique said, unwilling to follow any of this. ‘Where are you now?’

‘Gatwick.’

‘Gatwick?’ Dominique sat up and looked out the study window at the side passage where there was mint growing between the paving slabs and the fence. ‘We were just at Gatwick.’

‘I’ve got some other people to see at Ciba Pharmaceuticals about the new dye, which is why I flew back.’

‘Ciba? How long are you at Ciba for?’

‘Oh – just a few days.’

‘But it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow.’

‘Yes.’ Monica paused. ‘So – how are all of you?’

‘We’re all fine – Stephanie’s excited. About Christmas. Stephanie’s excited about Christmas.’

‘And is Mick off flying again soon?’

‘Mick never flies over Christmas.’

‘Right. So. You’re all pretty busy then.’

‘Not really. Just getting ready for Christmas.’ She wished she could stop saying the word ‘Christmas’.

Monica paused again. ‘I did phone last week – I spoke to Mick.’

‘Mick? He didn’t say.’

‘I phoned right after I heard about the Harrods bomb. I was in Canada and I saw it on the TV, and I had this sudden feeling you might be up in London shopping, so I rang …’

‘When was the bomb?’

‘The seventeenth.’

She could hear Monica trying not to become angry with her again for not knowing the date of the Harrods bomb when it only happened six days ago. ‘I wasn’t up in London then.’

‘I know – Mick said.’ Monica paused. ‘I was thinking …’

‘What?’ Dominique laughed nervously. ‘You want to spend Christmas here?’

Monica breathed out. ‘I suppose I could do, couldn’t I?’

Dominique stared at Linda Palmer’s gazelle that Mick had brought downstairs and put on his desk. What was it he’d said about the gazelle? He’d said that it confronted him – that the gazelle confronted him. There was something going on between Mick and the gazelle that she didn’t understand, and it wasn’t even his – it belonged to Linda. She picked it up then put it down. How exactly did a wooden animal that fitted in the palm of your hand get confrontational anyway? She didn’t like it.

‘But you’ve probably made arrangements,’ Monica was saying. What else had Monica said that she hadn’t heard? This was something she’d always been able to do – fade people out. When she was a child she used to be able to make them invisible as well. Something that had prompted Monica to have her tested for epilepsy.

‘No arrangements – no. We’re having a small party on Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day – just family.’

‘Well, I’m family …’ Monica said.

Dominique heard the airport down the phone, and the Tannoy announcing a delay to the Dubai flight had more clarity for her right then than anything she and Monica were saying.

‘If you’re sure that’s what you want to do,’ she said. ‘Christmas here, I mean.’

‘And if you’re sure you could put up with me for three to four days,’ Monica said. Now it was her turn to laugh nervously.

Dominique didn’t say anything. She’d never heard Monica laugh nervously before. ‘So – do you want to come straight here or are you going to Ciba first?’

‘No, I’ll come to you.’

‘You’re sure? I can get Delta to come and pick you up?’

‘Delta drives?’

‘She was eighteen on her last birthday.’

‘I’ll get a cab.’

‘I would come myself but we’ve just got back from the airport.’

Why was Monica doing this? She’d never spent Christmas with them before – maybe once when Delta was small, but never more than once. Dominique couldn’t work out Monica’s motive – and life, for Monica, had to have motive.

‘I’ll get a cab.’

‘Okay – fine.’

‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Of course.’

‘You don’t sound sure.’

‘It’s unexpected, that’s all.’ Dominique paused. ‘Impulsive; and I’m not used to that in you. You’re not a very impulsive person.’

‘Well, I was here, and I thought … well, it’s Christmas.’

‘It is Christmas.’

The Tannoy was updating people about the Dubai flight, then the phone flatlined.

She stared out the window at the mint again, wondering where it came from. She’d gone through a stage of reading gardening books and they all warned against mint; mint and bamboo. There were others she couldn’t remember, but they were all difficult to control, and she never could work out why this was seen as a bad thing.

Out in the hallway, Stephanie was doing a headstand over the bathroom mirror, which was on the floor between her hands. ‘What are you doing, Steph?’

There were flecks of spittle on the mirror.

‘Watching the blood in my head,’ she said with difficulty.

‘Well, stop it – you’ll make yourself sick.’

‘It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Steph – pancakes,’ Mick’s voice called out from the kitchen.

Steph was leaning against the hallway wall looking at her Mickey Mouse watch. ‘Four minutes and twenty seconds that time,’ she said, walking unevenly into the kitchen where there was a plate of immaculate pancakes on the bench next to the hob.

Dominique followed her in. ‘Monica’s coming for Christmas.’

Mick, still in his pilot’s uniform, put the pancakes on the table. ‘You’re sure?’

‘I’ve just spoken to her.’

He got the maple syrup out of the cupboard and didn’t say anything.

‘Who’s Monica?’ Stephanie asked.

‘She’s your grandmother,’ Mick said.

‘Mick – you know we don’t call her that.’

‘OK. She’s Mummy’s mummy, which makes her your grandmother, only we call her Monica because she suffers from a disorder called babushkaphobia.’

‘What’s babushkaphobia?’ Delta asked.

‘A woman’s aversion to her grandchildren.’

‘But we don’t know a Monica, do we?’ Stephanie insisted.

‘She was here about a year ago – maybe longer,’ Delta said, without looking up from her matador.

‘Is she the one with the short hair and dragonfly earrings?’ Stephanie asked.

‘I don’t remember dragonfly earrings,’ Dominique said, sitting down at the table. Mick made his way round everybody, sprinkling chocolate drops from a packet over their shoulders and onto their plates.

‘Well, I do,’ Stephanie said.

‘Why’s she coming now?’ Delta asked.

Dominique shrugged, looking up at Mick. ‘She said she phoned last week?’

‘Last week?’ He thought about this. ‘She did phone last week – to make sure none of us got blown up in the Harrods bomb.’

‘That’s what she said.’ Dominique looked down at her pancakes. Mick had sprinkled chocolate drops in the shape of a heart.

‘Why’s she coming now?’ Stephanie repeated. ‘I hate Monica.’

[8]

Joe went into the lounge and shut the door behind him. ‘Where’s Mum, Jess? Jess?’

‘In the garage – doing a stock-take of the freezer.’

He moved over and stood in front of the TV.

‘Dad, I’m watching this.’

He looked down towards the screen at a newsreader standing in a field outside some barracks. ‘What is this?’

‘A documentary on para psychological training for soldiers.’

‘You didn’t feel like watching something more seasonal?’

The newsreader started to interview a couple of soldiers.

‘They did the same thing in America,’ Jessica said. ‘The Army Research Institute ran a programme to enhance the para psychological abilities of a few select soldiers.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning they were trying to train them to use a range of non-weapon-dependent techniques not readily available to the average soldier.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like walking through walls – being able to leave their bodies.’

‘How d’you know all this?’

‘I read.’

‘Oh, you read.’

‘They were trying to develop a First Earth Battalion.’

‘To fight what?’

‘I don’t know – intergalactic wars?’

‘Yeah, right.’ Joe sat down next to her. ‘I need your help with something.’

‘What?’

‘Mum’s Christmas present.’

‘You haven’t got her anything?’

‘Not yet, no.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘It’s Christmas Eve tomorrow.’

He leant forward, watching the screen.

‘That’s just so depressing, Dad – Dad?’

‘I was thinking of maybe underwear.’ He turned towards her and paused. ‘Jess?’

‘What?’

‘Well, what do you think?’

‘What’s it got to do with me?’

‘Well, you’re a woman, and …’

‘I’m not a woman – I’m your daughter.’

‘But I don’t know about size and stuff.’

‘You don’t know her size?’

‘Well, do you?’

‘Why the hell would I? This is really depressing, Dad.’

Joe watched the screen as a man in uniform started to levitate, then got up and changed channels.

‘Dad – I’m watching that.’

‘There’s got to be something else on.’ BBC2 was showing The Wizard of Oz. He watched Judy Garland get surrounded by munchkins – Jessica didn’t say anything – then sat back down on the sofa.

Why did men buy women underwear? To buy them the sort they imagined fucking them in or taking off then fucking them without. What did he imagine fucking Linda without? Without black? No. Without white? In fact, what colour underwear did Linda usually wear? He couldn’t remember. He saw her either fully clothed or naked, but never in between. In between was for people who didn’t make it to the bedroom; people with sex drives still intact; people like Mick and Dominique, according to Linda. He could imagine Mick buying underwear. Mick would have a place he went to regularly in Brighton or London where they knew his name and where all the assistants imagined being the woman he was buying the underwear for. Did Linda ever wonder what it would be like to be Mick’s wife? Why didn’t he have any drive for this kind of thing? Was he dead? Maybe he’d died and Jessica and Linda were just too polite to point it out.

‘Perfume,’ Jessica said, watching the screen intently now. ‘Get her perfume.’

‘She said if she got one more bottle of perfume or one more pair of earrings she’d …’

‘She’d what?’

‘I don’t know, she was too angry to finish.’ He felt a sudden, intense pity for Linda and, turning to Jessica, was about to say something cutting when a huge smile started spreading across her face as she watched the film, which meant that any minute now she was going to start laughing, and Jessica laughing was something he wanted to see.

Then the phone rang.

Joe was standing in the lingerie department at Farrington’s, Littlehaven’s only department store, listening to a woman with backcombed hair on the Windsmoor counter confessing loudly to another assistant that she always washed her face in her bathwater. He scanned the rails of mostly white underwear, broken by a single block of purple and more beige than seemed necessary. It was all wrong. He wasn’t going to find Linda here, and he definitely wasn’t going to find him and Linda here.

‘Can I help you?’

It was the woman from the Windsmoor counter who, up close, was much taller than him and had mostly grey teeth.

‘Well … yeah … I was looking for something for my wife. For Christmas. For my wife. For …’

‘… Christmas,’ the woman finished, then nodded as if she was thinking about this. ‘Let me show you our new range – Lissière.’ She headed towards the purple. ‘The lace is French,’ she said, and paused as if this should mean something to him, or maybe she’d just been trained to say the word ‘French’ a lot because everybody knew that the French were the only nation who had post-marital sex. ‘The sequin detail really is quite unique – of course it means it has to be hand-washed, but then I always hand-wash underwired bras anyway. My washing machine broke down once and when the engineer came out to fix it he found wire from one of my bras jammed behind the drum.’ She stared down at the purple Lissière bra. ‘I nearly died.’

Joe, who had been staring at the bra as well, looked up. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly.

They glanced quickly at each other, both suddenly aware that neither of them was going to enjoy this.

‘The range is entirely new. Very French.’

Joe nodded rhythmically in time to her patter. What was this – did you have to be French to fuck these days?

‘And look at the detail.’ She flicked up the single sequin sewn between the cups then flicked it down again. ‘You can tell it’s French.’ She held the bra out towards him. Unsure what he was meant to do, he rubbed the lace trim between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Very nice.’

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ She looked down, contemplating the bra again.

‘The only thing is … I’m not sure about the purple.’

‘It isn’t purple.’

‘It isn’t?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s lilac – you don’t like lilac?’