Philip Hensher
The Northern Clemency

Epigraph

what he would have done hoped to do for anyone else

E.M. FORSTER, Arctic Summer, principal fragment

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Book One

Mardy

Book Two

Nesh

Book Two-And-A-Half

In London

Book Three

Gi’ o’er

Book Four

The Giant Rat of Sumatra

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

BOOK ONE

‘So the garden of number eighty-four is nothing more than a sort of playground for all the kids of the neighbourhood?’

‘I wouldn’t say all,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘I would have said it was only the Glovers’ children.’

‘All of them?’ Mrs Warner – Karen, now – said. ‘The girl seems so quiet. It’s the elder boy, really.’

‘I’ve seen the girl going in there too,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘It’s during the day with her. She’s on her own generally. I grant you, it’s the older boy who goes in after dark, and he’s got people with him. Girls, one at a time. There’ll be trouble with both those boys.’

‘But, Mrs…’ Mr Warner said. He was slow to catch people’s names.

‘Call me Anthea,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Now that we’ve finally met.’

‘I mean, Anthea,’ Mr Warner said, ‘why doesn’t anyone tell the parents? They surely can’t know.’

‘That I don’t understand,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. She was stately, forty-six, divorced, at number ninety-three, almost opposite the empty house. ‘This isn’t the best opportunity, I dare say.’

They were at the Glovers’. It was a party; the neighbourhood had been invited. Most had been puzzled by the invitation, knowing the couple and their three children only by sight. Mrs Arbuthnot and Mrs Warner had passed the time of day on occasion. They had arrived more or less at the same time; both had the habit, at a party, of moving swiftly to the back wall the better to watch arrivals. They had made common ground, and Mrs Warner’s husband had been introduced. He worked for the local council in a position of some authority.

It was a Friday night in August. The room was filling up, in a slightly bemused way; the neighbours, nervously boastful, were exchanging compliments about each other’s gardens; conversations about motor-cars were running their usual course.

‘It’s a nice thing for her to do,’ Mrs Warner said, who always prided herself on thinking the best of others. She had left her son, nineteen, a worry, at home; she thought the party might have been smarter than it was, not knowing the Glovers. Other people’s children had come.

‘She’s a nice woman, I believe,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, who had her own private names for almost everyone in the room, the Warners, the Glovers included. ‘It’s a shame she couldn’t have waited a week or two, though.’

‘Yes?’ Mr Warner said, who believed that if a thing could be done today, it shouldn’t be put off until tomorrow.

‘There’s new people moving into number eighty-four,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘It might have been nice to introduce them to everyone. They’re moving in next week.’

‘Just opposite Anthea’s,’ Mrs Warner explained to her husband.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t ideal,’ Mr Warner said. ‘From the point of view of dates.’

‘People are busy in August, these days,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘They go away, don’t they?’

‘We were thinking about the Algarve,’ Mrs Warner said.

‘Oh, the Algarve,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, encouraging and patronizing as a magazine.

It was a good party, like other parties. Mrs Glover was in a long dress: pale blue and high at the neck, it clung to her; on it were printed the names of capital cities. In vain, Mrs Warner ran her eyes over it, looking for the name of the Algarve, but it was not there.

‘Nibble?’ Mrs Glover said, frankly holding out a potato wrapped in foil, spiked with miniature assemblages of cheese and pineapple, wee cold sausages iced with fat. Her hair was swept up and pulled in, in a chignon and ringlets. They had all dressed, but she had made the most effort for her own party.

‘I so like your unit,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said.

‘We got fed up with the old sideboard,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘It was Malcolm’s mother’s, so he felt he had to take it when she went into a home. She couldn’t have all her things, naturally, so we took it, and then one day, I just looked at it and it just seemed so ugly I had to get rid of it. We got the unit from Cole’s, actually.’

‘You got it in Sheffield?’ Mrs Arbuthnot said.

‘I know,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘I saw it and I fell in love with it.’

‘It’s very nice,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘I like old things, too.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Katherine Glover said. ‘I love them, really. I just think they have so much more character than new furniture. I’d love to live in an old house.’

There was a pause.

‘But it’s original, isn’t it?’ Mr Warner said, helping her out; they seemed to be stuck on the white unit, windowed with brown smoked glass.

‘Yes,’ Katherine Glover said. She gestured around the room. ‘I think we’ve got it looking quite nice now. Finally!’

They all laughed.

‘We’ve lived here for ten years!’ she said vivaciously, as if hoping for another laugh. ‘But—’

Karen Warner remarked that it was strange how you didn’t get to meet your neighbours properly, these days.

‘This was a nice idea,’ Mr Warner said, ‘having a party like this.’ But he was wondering why, on this warm August night, the party was staying indoors and not moving out on to the patio.

There were five of them, the Glovers, in the room. Malcolm was in a suit, a borderline vivid blue, waisted and flaring about his skinny hips, flaring more modestly about the ankles, his tie a fat cushion at his neck. He carried a bottle from group to group, his smile illuminating as he moved on. ‘My wife’s idea,’ he was saying to a new couple about the party. ‘I work in the Huddersfield and Harrogate.’

‘You work in Harrogate?’ the man said. ‘That’s quite a drive every day.’

‘No,’ Malcolm said, after a heavy pause. ‘The Huddersfield and Harrogate.’

‘The building society?’ the woman said. She was a nursery nurse, pregnant herself.

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said, his puzzled voice rising. ‘Yes, the Huddersfield and Harrogate, our main offices, just off Fargate opposite the Roman Catholic cathedral. It’s women like parties, mostly. It was my wife’s idea.’

‘It was a nice idea,’ the husband said. ‘We’ve not met a lot of people in the street.’

‘We’ve admired your front garden,’ the wife said. She sneezed.

‘The idea was,’ Malcolm said, ‘that by now there’d be new people in number eighty-four. Just over there. They’d have been more than welcome.’

‘That’s a nice thought,’ the woman said, sneezing again.

‘But there must have been a hold-up,’ Malcolm said. ‘At any rate, it’s still empty.’

Elsewhere in the room, people were talking about the empty house, and about the new inhabitants.

‘Anthea Arbuthnot’s met them,’ a man was saying.

‘Oh, Anthea,’ a woman replied, and laughed. ‘What she doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.’

‘We call her the Rayfield Avenue Clarion,’ someone’s teenage daughter said, and blushed.

‘I was saying,’ the man said, ‘Anthea Arbuthnot’s met them,’ as Mrs Arbuthnot came up, expertly balancing a pastry case filled with mushroom sauce.

‘Met who?’ Mrs Arbuthnot said.

‘The new people,’ he said. ‘Over the road.’

‘You don’t miss much,’ she said, in a not exactly unfriendly way. ‘Yes, I met them, quite by chance. The house, it’s being sold by Eadon Lockwood and Riddle, which sold me my house too, five years back. It was the same lady, which is quite a coincidence. Her name’s Mary, she breeds chocolate Labradors in her spare time, which was a little bond between us, a nice lady. I saw her coming out of the house one day with a couple as I was going down the road with Paddy, my dog, you know, and stopped to say hello. Naturally she introduced me to the people, they’d bought it by then, they were just having another look over. Measuring up for curtains and carpets, I dare say.’

The Glover girl, Jane, was at the edge of their circle, listening, her flowery print frock, her lank hair, the empty plate she had been carrying round the guests all drooping listlessly. The adults shifted politely, smiling. She was fourteen or so; just about old enough for this sort of thing. ‘Are they nice?’ she said.

Mrs Arbuthnot laughed, not at all kindly. Jane Glover just looked at her, waiting for the answer. ‘Are they nice?’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘I don’t know about that. They’re from London. He’s very London. She didn’t say anything much. They’ve got two children, nine, and a fourteen-year-old girl, I think she said.’

‘Were the children nice?’ Jane said, and now she was surely being deliberately childish.

‘They weren’t there,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Their name – let me see – it’s on the tip of my tongue…they’re called – Mr and Mrs Sellers. That’s it.’

‘London children,’ a man said, shaking his head.

‘I hope they’re nice,’ Jane said, and then just walked away. She knew all about Mrs Arbuthnot. Under no circumstances would she tell any of these people that she, Jane, was writing a novel. Already she hated the girl, over the road, fourteen.

‘He’ll break some hearts,’ someone was saying, in another part of the room. It was Daniel Glover they were talking about. He was sixteen, lounging over the edge of the sofa, his long legs spread. His mouth hung slightly open, and from time to time he brushed away the soft fall of long black hair. Every twenty seconds the pregnant nursery nurse was sneezing, and it was Daniel she was sneezing at. His lush musk odour filled the room, making the air itch; it was the eau-de-toilette he’d lifted from Cole’s on Tuesday, and he’d practically bathed in the stuff.

Daniel looked at the party. He was thinking about sex, and he counted the women. Then he eliminated the unattractive ones, the ones over thirty-five, his mother and sister – no, he brought his sister back in just for the hell of it. Balanced it out, removed some of the men. Then – what they do, he’d read about it – the men throw their keys into a bowl, the women pick them out, then—

He lost himself in lewd speculation. Or – he started again – you could just have an orgy here. A sex orgy on the carpet. Because that happened all the time, he’d read about it. It just didn’t happen here, in this house. But he bet somewhere round here it happened all the time. Probably on this street.

Mrs Arbuthnot observed with some interest that the elder Glover boy had an erection. She enjoyed the sight: she had divorced six years ago, her long-held ambition to take part in a game of strip poker never having been fulfilled or, indeed, mentioned to anyone, least of all her ex-husband. She envisaged, like Daniel, scenes of satisfaction; for her, they were what Daniel had done, or might be doing, to the girls in the back garden of number eighty-four, watched soberly by its four dark empty windows.

‘Hay fever,’ the nursery nurse said politely, still sneezing, feeling with alarm a little dribble in her knickers.

‘They’re called Mr and Mrs Sellers,’ someone said. ‘They paid seventeen thousand for the house. Anthea Arbuthnot told me.’

Katherine Glover was relaxing, now that her party was being a success. They were eating the food; she’d made pastry cases with mushroom filling, and prawn, she’d made three different quiches, she’d made Coronation Chicken (a challenge to eat standing), she’d made assemblages of cheese-and-pineapple and cold sausages, she’d made open Danish sandwiches in tiny squares, a magazine idea, and they were eating it all. There were dishes of crisps, too, and Twiglets, but those didn’t count in the way of making an effort. They were drinking the wine, Malcolm’s choice – she’d had three glasses – and in the background, the music was exactly right, Mozart, Elvira Madigan. It was all being a great success.

The sexes were dividing now: the men were talking about their jobs, their cars, about the election, even; the women about their children’s schools, about the cost of living, and about each other.

‘Your hand’s never out of your pocket,’ one said, and another observed that her house had doubled in value in five years. One woman, worldly in manner, said that Sheffield would improve when Sainsbury’s got round to opening a branch, as she’d heard they were planning to.

‘Oh, we know Mrs Thurston,’ another said, referring to the headmistress of one of the local schools.

‘She teaches the piano, doesn’t she?’ the nursery nurse said hopefully. ‘On Charrington Road?’ She was set right, and the others started recommending piano teachers to each other, boasting about their children’s grades, merits and distinctions.

‘It’s all going to the dogs,’ a man said. ‘This’ll be a third-world country by 1980,’ and the others gravely agreed. Malcolm made his rounds again; for the last twenty minutes he had said nothing to anyone, only smiled and offered the bottle, and he was circling too soon. All the glasses were full, and the guests refused with a smile, wondering about their host, who they did not know. Absently, he offered the bottle to Daniel, who took the opportunity, his fourth, to refill his glass, still thinking of tits.

‘It would have been nice if they could have come,’ Katherine said again. ‘Sellers, they’re called.’

‘Your son’s getting to be a handsome young man,’ they said in reply.

‘I’ve got two,’ Katherine said, laughing.

‘Yes,’ they said, wondering where the other was, the one they wouldn’t have meant, since he was, what?, nine years old.

‘We invited Mrs Topsfield, too,’ she said. ‘The old lady who lives in the great big house, the old one, at the bottom of the road, the edge of the moor. But only to be polite – she wouldn’t be likely to come at her age.’

‘I’ve often wondered about her,’ someone said. ‘A gorgeous house.’

‘It’s just her in it, apparently,’ Katherine said.

‘I do think they’ve done their house beautifully,’ Karen Warner said to her husband; they had been marooned together at one side of the room. It was a handsome room; one wall had been covered with a bold paper in a bamboo print, jungle green with lemony highlights, and the others painted the palest beige. The fat suite, pushed back against the walls, and the carpet were rough oatmeal; instead of a fourth wall, a single picture window gave on to the garden.

‘It’s quite like our house, the way it’s arranged,’ Warner said.

‘Not quite, though,’ Karen said. The estate, a hundred and twenty houses, all built in one go ten years before, was elegantly varied; there were a dozen or more differently shaped houses, arranged irregularly. There was nothing municipal about the estate; but, of course, she had said this many times before. ‘Had you heard anything at work about a Sainsbury’s opening in Sheffield?’ Warner informed his wife that he had not, and that such information would not have come his way in the course of his work at the council. ‘I do like that unit,’ she said in a rush, because now she, too, had seen the elder Glover boy, sprawled about his erection.

‘I didn’t expect to be invited,’ the nursery nurse was saying, to someone she didn’t know, ‘but I’m glad I came.’ It had been ten days before; she had been resting in the afternoon, her feet, horribly swollen in this weather even at six months, up on a stool. Through the window she had seen a woman in a sleeveless summer dress stomping up the drive; a familiar figure, some sort of neighbour, with an air of imminent complaint about her walk. What now? she’d thought wearily. But the woman hadn’t rung: there was the clatter of something through the letterbox that proved, when her husband got home and picked it up, to be an invitation. ‘But who are they?’ he’d said. ‘I think we might as well go,’ she’d said, not answering his question.

But the Glovers had three children, surely: the youngest a boy, wasn’t he? Maybe he was in bed.

The youngest was behind the sofa: he had been there most of the evening, slipping behind it quite early on. Timothy had with him his favourite book in the whole world. He had been reading it steadily all evening, letting his eye run over the familiar entries. He had taken it out from the public library eleven months before; he had renewed it once, then stopped bothering. It was now ten months overdue, which caused him great terror whenever he thought of it. In happy moments, he decided that he could conceal the book where no one would find it, and his parents would never uncover the gigantic fine now building up. The fear of punishment was huge in him.

But the terror did not touch the book. It was as good now as ever. The pleasure he found in letting his eye ride over it, touching on category after category, overrode anything else. Whenever he could, he returned to its calm instructions. Even when it was not quite right of him to do so, he sensed, he found a way to be alone with it, as now burrowing behind the sofa at his parents’ party. It was so important to him that often in the last months he had found himself telling others – his best friends Simon and Ian, his sister Jane, his mother but for some reason not his brother Daniel, not his father – some facts about his subject. More oddly, he found himself asking them questions about it, as if they could instruct him, feigning ignorance, wanting to find out if they knew what he already did.

The book was about snakes. Timothy gazed at the photographs as if at a family album, committing the names he already knew to a further refreshment of memory.

He had been there for three hours, wedged between the sofa and the large picture window. If the party went outside, they would see him, and probably laugh. From time to time the back of the sofa, the porridgy tweed panels between the wood frames, bulged as someone sat down, swelling towards him, like some inchoate mass searching for him. There was a queer smell of dust down here, and the nasty smell of spilt alcohol. It was his favourite place when there was anyone in the house.

‘I don’t know where he’s got to,’ Katherine Glover said to a departing guest; it was too warm for anyone to have brought coats, but she made a helpful gesture. ‘He’s a little bit shy.’

The guest smiled; her husband made a honking noise, understanding that the woman was talking about her son, not knowing that there was any son apart from the great lout who had been lolling on the sofa, gawping at the ladies.

On the mat was an envelope, which, surely, had not been there earlier; it was addressed to Katherine, and she picked it up. In front of her, the remains of her party; the poor pregnant woman, harassed and tired, waiting for her husband to want to go. But the husband was drunk, his hair rumpled, making a hash of a joke to a group of husbands. Where was Malcolm? Sitting down, his host’s bottle in his hand, all refills at an end; and the Mozart had come to an end, too, leaving the patient silence to dismiss the guests.

‘You looked so nice,’ Jane said to her mother, coming up to her in the hall, munching a cheese straw, ‘in your posh frock and your hair like that.’

Katherine felt so terribly tired. ‘I don’t know why I bothered,’ she said crossly. ‘They didn’t appreciate it at all.’

Jane looked at her mother in astonishment. ‘It was a lovely party,’ she said. ‘You should always wear your hair like that.’

‘What, to work?’ Katherine said. ‘Don’t be daft.’

‘Thank you so much,’ the drunk man was saying, ‘for a lovely time, my dear. We’ve had a lovely, lovely time.’

He leant towards her, as if to kiss her, but did not; Katherine had him by the shoulders, a gesture that might have been affectionate, holding him at arm’s-length inspection.

‘We’ve had a very good time,’ the pregnant woman said. But it didn’t look it.

‘When is your baby due?’ Jane said abruptly.

‘In November,’ the woman said, not smiling. She took her husband by the arm, and they went.

‘Where’s your dad?’ Katherine said, but then Daniel was in the hall, up from the sofa for the first time all evening.

‘Just going out for a second,’ he muttered.

‘One second—’ Katherine said, but he was gone. ‘Oh, well.’

And then Daniel, who had answered all polite inquiries with a brief grunt and a shrug, who had not moved from his perch on the arm of the sofa, like a vast and lurid ornament, proved himself to have been all along the ringmaster of the festivities. Because with his departure the party was decisively over, and the few remaining guests moved towards the front door where Mrs Glover, her daughter at her side, was standing. In kindness, they bent and said a word to Malcolm, who said something in return, and then, with a chorus of thanks, they were out.

‘I do love your unit,’ Mrs Warner said over her shoulder, a final kindly thought disappearing into the lush August night. ‘As I was saying, I do love your…’

Goodbye, goodbye…and Katherine opened the envelope in her hand. It was an unfamiliar hand, elegant and swooping, in real ink, and the general gist of apology was clear before the signature was deciphered. She read it again, and smiled, her first genuine smile all evening.

‘Have they all gone?’ she heard Timothy saying, as he got up from behind the sofa, book in hand.

‘I think so,’ his father said, his voice muffled, regretful in the other room. ‘Where’s your brother?’

Daniel was in the street. It was half past nine. The road and the estate, in this summer twilight, had a lush warm glow; in the houses, up and down the avenue, single lights were coming on automatically, guiding the couples home from the party; husbands and wives, arm in arm and in the summer gloaming turned into lovers. The thin trees, planted ten years before, had lost their daylit lack of conviction and formed a delicate orchard, marking the edges of the quiet street. The night was perfumed, and Daniel, perfumed too, sniffed it all up.

Barbara was there, waiting for him. He had told her to wait on the wall outside number eighty-four. It was less suspicious to be casual like that rather than, as she was doing, cowering under the porch at the side of the house. Everyone knew it was empty; anyone could see her from the street. It was asking for trouble. Worse, it showed Barbara didn’t trust him, didn’t automatically think he was right. He decided to dump her after tonight, or maybe after the weekend.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said, in a burst.

‘Well, I’ve come now,’ he said, and dived for her mouth. She gave a small squeal, the beginning of a protest; but he knew to let his mouth just stay at the edge of a kiss, not forcing it, and in a second her hard teeth seemed to make way. They stayed like that for a minute; once or twice she made a pretty little noise, almost animal, and each time, not quite knowing whether he was mocking or encouraging her, he made something of the same noise back, but deeper, the sound vibrating through their twinned lips, making them buzz and ache, fulfilling the desire and stirring up more. Finally he pulled away. He looked at her critically; the little squeal, the blonde hair frizzing up in one, the pink roundness of her pinked-up face, lips and tits. Perhaps the boys had it right when they called her Crystal Tipps and laughed at him. Or maybe they were jealous. ‘I came as soon as I could,’ he said. ‘They were having a party.’

‘You said they were,’ Barbara said. ‘I don’t know why I couldn’t be allowed to come. I’d have behaved.’

‘It was boring,’ he said. ‘There was nothing but neighbours. They didn’t know each other, my mum didn’t know them. I don’t know why she asked them.’

‘We know all our neighbours,’ Barbara said with astonishment, ‘their birthdays, star signs, the lot. The telly programmes they watch, even.’

‘That’s because you live in a terraced house,’ Daniel said. ‘You could hear everything through the walls. When they fuck.’

‘Do you mind?’ Barbara said, objecting to the word rather than Daniel’s snobbery. But she drew close again, pulling him with her out of the light from the street towards the empty, overgrown garden.

‘They were all saying,’ Daniel murmured, his mouth against hers, running his tongue against her lips as they walked backwards into the lyric night, ‘they were all saying, who’s that gorgeous girl, goes into the neighbours’ gardens with Daniel Glover—’

‘They were not,’ Barbara said, her eyes bright, her hand running down Daniel’s side.

‘They were,’ Daniel said, his hand, his rippling fingers rising, weighing, cupping, down and under, beneath and within. ‘And I said—’

‘Oh, give over,’ Barbara said. But Daniel carried on, his hushed, exuberant voice now muted, and as they fell back against the lawn, which had grown into a thick meadow, she gave in to what he knew she felt. There was some indulgent amusement deep within him, and he never completely surrendered to the sensation, was never reduced to begging animal favours or further steps in the exploration of what she would grant him. His gratification, always, lay in seeing her so helpless; his pleasure in the expert and improving knack of bestowing pleasure. The noises she made were on some level comic, ‘Nnngg,’ she went, and an observation post in him kept alert over the expanding border territory between her propriety and her desire. They began when he chose to begin; they ended when he said he had to go, and when he knew that she would say disappointedly, ‘Do you have to?’

Barbara was in his maths set; he’d heard some of the things she’d been letting out about him. Flattering, really. He didn’t talk about her. Another couple of times, and that would be it; he’d seen the way Michael Cox’s sister looked at him, though she was eighteen next month. That would be something to talk about.

It was not clear to any of the Glovers what the purpose of the party had been. Not even to Katherine, whose idea it had been. He hadn’t come, after all. When the last of the guests had gone, the other two children went upstairs, Timothy holding a book. Malcolm sat down and, with his heels, dragged the armchair into a position facing the television. He did not get up to turn it.

Katherine put the letter on the shelf over the radiator, and began to go round the room, picking up glasses and plates. Malcolm had put the empty bottles in the kitchen as he had got through them. There were two open bottles left, one red and one white. The food had mostly been eaten, the tablecloth around the large oval dish of Coronation Chicken stained yellow where spoonfuls had been carelessly dropped. She began to talk as she collected the remains. She was wiping the thought that Nick, after all that effort, hadn’t come. He’d said he would.

‘They seemed to have a good time,’ she said. ‘I thought the food went well. I was worried they wouldn’t be able to eat it standing up, but people manage, don’t they?’

Malcolm said nothing. She sighed.

‘It’s a shame the new people over the road haven’t moved in yet,’ she said. ‘It would have been a good opportunity for them to meet the neighbours. Most people came, I think. There was a nice little letter from the lady in the big house, saying she was sorry she couldn’t come. She doesn’t like to go home after dark. Silly, really – it’s only a hundred yards, I don’t know what she thinks would happen to her, and it’s not really dark, even now. They get set in their ways, old people.’

Malcolm gave no sign of listening.

She couldn’t be sure what the reason for the party had been. But for her it had been defined by the people who hadn’t come rather than those who had. Not just one person; two of them. All evening she’d felt impatient with her guests who, by stooping to attend, had shown themselves to be not quite worth knowing. She projected her idea of the sort of friends she ought to have on to the new people – the Sellerses – and Mrs Topsfield, with the exquisite handwriting and supercilious reason for not attending. The Sellerses were going to be smart London people. That was absolutely clear.

‘Did you miss your battle re-creation society tonight?’ she said to Malcolm, to be kind.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter, once in a while.’

‘You could have invited some of them to come tonight,’ she said, although she’d rather not have to meet grown men who dressed up in Civil War uniforms and disported themselves over the moors, pretending to kill each other. It was bad enough being married to one.

‘I thought it was just for the neighbours,’ Malcolm said. ‘You said you weren’t going to invite anyone else.’

Upstairs, Jane shut her door. It was too early to go to bed, but it was accepted that she spent time in her room; homework, her mother said hopefully, but, really, Jane sat in her room reading. There were forty books on the two low shelves, and a blank notebook. She had read them all, apart from The Mayor of Casterbridge, a Christmas present from a disliked aunt; she had been told that Jane liked reading old books and that, with a life of Shelley, now lost, unread, had been the result. Jane’s books were of orphans, of love between equals, of illegitimate babies, treading round the mystery of sex and sometimes ending just before it began.

Her room was plain. Three years before she had been given the chance to choose its décor. Her mother had made the offer as the promise of a special treaty enacted between women, something to be conveyed only afterwards to the men. Jane had appreciated the tone of her mother’s confiding voice, but was baffled by the possibilities. It was that she had no real idea what role her bedroom’s décor was supposed to play in her mother’s half-angry plans for social improvement, and she was under no illusions that if she actually did choose wallpaper, curtains, paint, bedspread, carpet, even, that her choice would be measured against her mother’s unshared ideas and probably found disappointing. Would it be best to ask for an old-fashioned style, ‘with character’, as her mother said, a pink teenage girl’s bedroom? Or to opt for her own taste, whatever that might be?

In the end she delayed and delayed, and now her bedroom was a blank series of whites and neutrals. She had failed in whatever romance her mother had planned for her; and, with its big picture window, the room showed no sign of turning into a garret. It looked out on to a suburban street. Daniel’s room, at the back of the house, had the view of the moor, which meant nothing to him. Over her bed, one concession: a poster, bought in a sale, of a Crucible Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. Daniel had seen it, not her – he’d done the play for O level. Someone had given him the poster, but it was over her bed that two blue-lit figures embraced, one already dead.

She wondered what the new people over the road would be like, and let her thoughts go on their romantic course.

It was the next day, in London. The house had been packed into a van. It was driving northwards, towards Sheffield. On every box was written, in large felt-tip letters, the name SELLERS.

‘Nice day for it,’ the driver said.

‘Yeah, you don’t want to be moving in the rain,’ the other man put in.

The driver was on Sandra’s right, his mate, the chief remover, on her left. On the far side the boy, ten or fifteen years younger than the others, who had said nothing.

‘Why do you say that?’ Sandra said. She was pressed up against the man on her left, and the driver’s operations meant that his left hand banged continually against her thigh. The lorry’s cabin was meant only for the comfort of three. There was a dull, dusty smell in the cabin, of unwashed sweaters and ancient cigarette stubs. The floor was littered with brown-paper sandwich wrappers.

‘Well, stands to reason,’ the chief remover said. ‘If it’s raining, that’s no fun.’

‘And there are always customers who insist on tarpaulins,’ the driver said.

‘Tarpaulins?’ Sandra said. ‘Whatever for?’

‘It’s their right,’ the chief remover said. ‘Say you’re moving a lot of pictures, or books, or soft furnishings—’

‘The customer, they don’t like it if you carry them out into the rain, and sometimes you have to leave them outside for a minute or two, and if it’s raining—’

‘Hence the tarpaulin,’ the driver said. Behind them, the full tinny bulk of the removals van thundered like weather. There was a distant rattle, perhaps furniture banging against the walls or a loose exhaust pipe. Below, the roofs of cars hurtled past.

‘Because,’ the chief remover said, ‘if something gets wet, even for a couple of minutes, if the whole load gets rained on, you get to the other end, see, and it’s offloaded and put in place, and a day or two later, there’s a call to the office, a letter, maybe, complaining that the whole lot stinks of damp.’

‘Hence the tarpaulin,’ the driver said again.

‘Course,’ the chief remover said, ‘nine times out of ten, it’s not the furniture, it’s the house, the new house, because a house left empty for a week, it does tend to smell of damp, but they don’t take that into consideration. But the tarpaulins, it doubles the work for us, it does.’

They were nearing the motorway now, having crossed London. The traffic that had held them steady on the North Circular for an hour was thinning, and the removals van was moving in bigger bursts. The car with Sandra’s parents in it, her brother in the back, had long been lost in the shuffle of road lanes, one moving, one holding; a music-hall song her grandmother used to sing was in her head: ‘My old man said follow the van…you can’t trust the specials like an old-time copper…’ No, indeed you couldn’t, whatever it meant.

She went back to being interested and vivacious before she had a chance to regret her request to travel up to Sheffield in the van, rather than in the car. ‘You must see everything in this job,’ she said vividly.

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ the boy surprisingly said, snuffling with laughter.

‘Don’t mind him,’ the driver said. ‘He can’t help himself.’

‘It’s a shame, really,’ the chief remover said.

‘A bit like being a window-cleaner, I expect,’ Sandra said, before the boy could say he’d seen nothing to match her and her jumping into the van like that. She was fourteen; he was probably five years older, but she was determined to despise him. ‘I mean, you get to see everything, everything about people.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ the chief remover said.

‘That’s the worst of it over,’ the driver said. The road was widening, splitting into lanes, its sides rising up in high concrete barriers, and the London cars were flying, as if for sheer uncaged delight, and the four of them, in their rumbling box, were flying too. ‘Crossing London, that’s always the worst.’

‘You see some queer stuff,’ the chief remover said. ‘People are different, though. There’s some people who, you turn up, there’s nothing done. They expect you to put the whole house into boxes, wrap up everything, tidy up, do the job from scratch.’

‘Old people, I suppose,’ Sandra said.

‘Not always,’ the driver said. ‘You’d be surprised. It’s the old people, the ones it’d be a task for, that aren’t usually a problem.’

‘It’s the younger ones, the hippies, you might call them, expect you to do everything,’ the chief remove said. ‘My aunt, you come across some stuff with that lot, things you’d think they’d be ashamed to have in the house, let alone have a stranger come across.’

‘That’s right,’ the boy said. He seemed almost blissful, perhaps remembering the boxing-up of some incredible iniquity.

‘Of course,’ Sandra said, ‘you’re not to know what’s in a lot of boxes, are you? There might be anything.’

The three of them were silent: it had not occurred to them to worry about what they had agreed to transport.

‘What was the place we said we’d stop?’ the chief remover said.

‘Leicester Forest East, wasn’t it?’ the driver said.

Sandra had watched the packing from an upstairs window, and only at the end had she thought of asking if she could travel with the men. She was fourteen; she had noticed recently that you could stand in front of a mirror with a small light behind you, approach it with your eyes cast down, then lift them slowly, and raise your arm across your chest, as if you were shy. You could: you could look shy. Whatever you were wearing, a coat, a loose dress, a T-shirt, or most often the new bra you’d had to ask your mum to buy to replace the one that had replaced the starter bra of only a year before, the shy look and the protective arm had an effect.

The old house had been stripped, and everything the upper floor had held was boxed and piled downstairs; the house had drained downwards, like a bucket with a hole. Sandra had been born in that house. She had never seen these upstairs rooms empty, and they now looked so small. Her clean room’s walls were marked and dirty. Only the window looked bigger, stripped of the curtains she had been allowed to choose and hadn’t liked for years – the pink, the peacocks, the girly rainbows and clouds. The net curtains were gone too – and if she had anything to do with it, they’d not be going up in her new room.

Her father was downstairs in the hall, telling the foreman a funny story – the confidential anecdotal mutter deciphered by bursts of laughter. Her mother, probably exhausted, was perhaps looking for Francis, who was lazy and clumsy, and had a knack of disappearing when anything needed to be done. She looked out of the window to where the van, its back open, was being steadily loaded with the house’s contents, exotic and unfamiliar when scattered across the drive. There were two men, one middle-aged, the top of his bald head white and glistening like lard, the other a boy. She waited in the window patiently, and soon her mother came out with cups of tea. The boy turned to her mother. He was polite, he said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Sellers,’ and when her mother went back inside, he was still facing in the right direction. She did that thing she knew how to do, and it worked; he looked upwards. Her gaze was shy, lowered. It met his modestly, and she gently drew her hand across her chest. Brilliant. She might have slapped him, the way he turned away, but he was the one who blushed. She realized that the driver and Mr Griffiths from next door, nosing about in his front garden, had also seen her. Mr Griffiths, who’d always been fond of her, and Mrs Griffiths too; from the look on his face now, they’d have something to think about if they ever thought of her ever again.

‘Have you seen your brother?’ her father said, as he thudded up the stairs.

‘No,’ Sandra said. ‘He’s probably down the end of the garden. Can we—’ she began. She was about to ask if they could have a tree-house at their new house, but she’d had a better idea. She was fourteen. ‘Can I go up to Sheffield with the movers in their van?’

Bernie looked startled. ‘There’ll not be room. A bit of an adventure, is it?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Don’t ask your mother. She’ll have a fit.’

So there she was, wedged into the van, clear of London, for the sake of the boy she had glimpsed – a movement of the arms, a flash of blue from the deep-set shadow under the surprising blond eyebrows. But he was saying nothing, and she was settling for enchanting the driver and the chief remover.

‘People do this all the time,’ she said.

‘Move house?’ the chief remover said. ‘Enough to keep us busy.’

‘No, I meant –’ But what she had meant was that people leave London by car, drive on to the motorway, set off northwards all the time, perhaps every day. She never had, and her mother, her brother and she had only ever left London when they went on holiday. She had never had any business outside London. ‘People either move a lot or not at all, don’t they?’ she said. ‘I mean,’ sensing puzzlement, ‘there’s the sort of people who never leave the house they were born in and die there. Dukes. And there’s the sort of people who move house every year, every two years. I don’t know what would be normal.’

‘The average number of times a person moves house in his lifetime,’ the boy said, ‘is seven, isn’t it?’ He had a harsh, grating voice, a South London voice not yet settled into its adult state.

‘Take no notice of him,’ the driver said. ‘He’s making it up. He doesn’t know.’

‘But the figure is increasing all the time,’ he continued.

‘He makes up statistics,’ the chief remover said. ‘That’s what he does. Once we were dealing with a musician, moving house for him – a sad story, he was divorcing his wife, and we had to go in and pick out the things that were going and the things that were staying. And we were moving his stuff and he said he’d be taking his cellos, because he had two, with him in a taxi, and wouldn’t let us touch them, though we handle your fragile things all the time. And all of a sudden this one says, “There are a hundred and twenty-three parts in a cello,” as if to say, yes, it’s best you handle it yourself. He’d only gone and made it up, the hundred and twenty-three parts. There’s probably about thirty.’

‘It sounds about right, moving seven times,’ Sandra said. ‘There’s a girl in my class who’s moved house seven times already. She’s only fourteen.’ Sandra thought she might have told them she was sixteen: she sometimes did that. Even seventeen. ‘This was two years ago,’ she added. ‘So she’d used up all her moves already, if you look at it like that.’

‘Fancy,’ the boy said.

‘Do you see that sign, young lady?’ the driver said. ‘A hundred and twenty miles to Sheffield.’

They were clear of London now; the banked-up sides of the motorway no longer suggested the outskirts of towns, but now, behind stunted trees, there were open fields, expansive with scattered sheep. In the distance, on top of a hill like a figurine on a cake, there was a romantic, solitary house. She wondered what it must be like to look out every morning from your inherited grand house and see, like a river, the distant flowing motorway. It was never empty, this road.

‘New home,’ the chief remover said sweetly. ‘Sheffield. And The North, it said.’

‘Have you ever noticed,’ the driver said, ‘that wherever you go, anywhere, you see motorway signs that say “The North”? Or “The South” when you’re in the north? Or “The West”? But wherever you go, and we go everywhere, you never see a sign which says “The East”?’

‘No, you never do,’ the boy agreed.

Sandra felt her story hadn’t made much of an impression. It was difficult, squashed in like this, to push back her shoulders, but she tried.

‘This girl,’ she went on, ‘you always wondered whether it was good for her to move so often. I mean, seven times, seven new schools. She never stayed long, so I don’t suppose she ever made proper friends with anyone. I tried to be friends with her, because I thought she’d be lonely, but she didn’t make much of an effort back. She’d only been in our school for three, four weeks when we found out the sort of girl she was.’

‘What sort was she?’ the boy said.

‘At our school, see,’ Sandra said, ‘you didn’t hang about after school had finished. Because next door there was the boys’ school. And maybe some girls knew boys from the boys’ school – if they had brothers or something – but this girl, I said to her one day, “Let’s walk home together.” And she said to me, “No, let’s hang around here and see if we can bump into boys because they’re out in ten minutes.” We didn’t get let out together, the boys’ school and girls’ school. And she jumps on to the wall, sits there, grins, waiting for me to jump up too. Because she just wanted to meet boys. That’s the sort of girl she was.’

‘Dear oh dear,’ the driver said. She had hoped for a little more concern: the older men might have had daughters of their own. The levity of the sarcastic apprentice had spread to them.

‘So you didn’t stay friends with her, then?’ The chief remover pushed back his cap and scratched his bald head.

‘No,’ Sandra said. Sod them, she thought. ‘Five months later, she had to leave the school because she’d met a boy and gone further. In a way I don’t need to specify—’ the adult phrase rang well in her ears ‘—and she had to leave the school because she was having a baby. Can you imagine?’

‘No,’ the driver said. He almost sang it, humouring her, and now it was over, the whole invented rigmarole seemed unlikely even to Sandra. ‘Probably best for you to leave a school where things like that go on.’

‘That’s right,’ the chief remover said, very soberly, looking directly ahead.

‘That’s right,’ the boy said. He plucked at his chin as if in thought. But he was trembling with laughter; the big blue van at their backs rumbled and trembled with suppressed laughter.

The blue pantechnicon, ahead of Bernie, Alice and Francis, formed a hurtling, unrooted landmark.

‘I don’t know which way he’s heading,’ Bernie said. ‘Expect he knows a route.’

Alice opened her handbag, brown leather against the brighter shine of the Simca’s plastic seats. She popped out an extra-strong mint for Bernie and put it to his mouth, like a trainer with a sugar-lump for a horse – he took it – then one for herself. They were on Park Lane. The van was a hundred yards ahead – no, that was a different blue van. Theirs was ahead of it.

‘We don’t need to follow them all the way,’ Bernie said, crunching his mint cheerfully. ‘We could be quicker going down side-streets. They’ll be sticking to the A-roads through London.’

‘I’d be happier, really,’ Alice said. That was all. Everything she had, everything she had acquired and kept in her life, had gone into that van – the nest of tables they’d saved up for, their first furniture after they had married, the settee and matching chairs that had replaced the green chair and springy tartan two-seater Bernie’s aunts had lent them…

‘That’s all right, love,’ Bernie said. ‘If you want to keep them in view, we’ll keep them in view.’

…the mock-mahogany dining table and chairs, green-velvet seated, from Waring & Gillow, brass-footed with lions’ claws, the double divan bed only a year old – their third since she had first come home with Bernie, him carrying her over the threshold and not stopping there but carrying her upstairs, puffing and panting until he was through the door of their bedroom and dropping her on to his surprise, a new-bought bed, and her not knowing she was pregnant already – and the carpets…

‘I know it’s silly,’ Alice said, ‘but I won’t feel easy about it unless we follow them.’

‘Well, we’ve lost them now,’ Bernie said. ‘We’ll catch up.’

It was true. London had spawned vans ahead of them, blue and black and green, rumbling and bouncing to the street horizon; the Orchard’s van was there somewhere, but lost. They ground to a halt in the dense traffic.

‘It can’t be helped,’ Alice said bravely. The carpets, all chosen doubtfully, all fitting their space. (She had no faith in the Sheffield estate agent’s measurements. The woman bred Labradors, which she’d mentioned more than once when she ought to have been paying attention.) The unit for the sitting room, a new bold speculation, white Formica with smoked brown glass doors, the Reader’s Digest books, the china ladies, the perpetual flowers under glass; the mahogany-veneer sideboard, a wedding present, once grand and solitary in the sitting room before furniture started to be possible for them; curtains, yellow for the kitchen, purple Paisley in the sitting room, red in their bedroom, the rainbow pattern Sandra had chosen…

‘Look on the bright side,’ Bernie said. ‘If they do get lost, or if they steal it and run away to South America, Orchard’s can buy us a whole new houseful of furniture. Insurance.’

‘They aren’t going to lose it, are they?’ A voice came from the back seat. It was Francis; even at nine, his knees were pressing hard into his mother. Goodness knew how tall he’d grow.

‘No, love,’ Alice said. Her own worry disappeared in her love for her son. He worried about these things, as she did. Once, on an aeroplane, she had found her own nervousness about flying vanished as she did her duty and comforted him. ‘They won’t lose it, and if they did steal it, they wouldn’t get far on the proceeds. Do you think they’d get much for Sandra? She’s up there with them, keeping an eye on things.’

‘I wouldn’t give you two hundred quid for Sandra,’ Bernie said, concentrating on the road. ‘Maybe if she’d had a wash first. What do you reckon, son?’

‘I don’t know where you go to buy and sell people,’ Francis said. ‘There aren’t people shops, are there?’

She hadn’t told Francis they were going to move to Sheffield until it was certain. She wasn’t sure, herself, how it had happened. Bernie had worked for the Electricity Board for years, the only member of his fast-talking family not to make money in irregular, unpredictable ways. They were at the outer edges of respectability, in most cases only having their churchgoing to take the edge off their quickness. Alice had first met Bernie at church, him and his family in their Sunday best. If it had been a deft illusion, it hadn’t been a long-lasting one; you couldn’t be surprised with Bernie – he was as open to view as an Ordnance Survey map. His family were proud of him and his proper job, his steadily rising salary, at head office, and Bernie paid back their pride by not renouncing his own quick ways, his broad mother’s broad manners.

But in the last couple of years, the job, London, had worn away at him. The series of strikes – every power-cut had driven him to a personal sense of grievance. ‘Don’t say that,’ Alice had said, the first time the house had gone dark, the television fading slowest, giving out a couple more seconds of ghostly blue light before the four of them were in pitch darkness, Bernie swearing.

‘Don’t say what?’ Bernie said, almost shouting.

‘You know what you said,’ Alice said.

‘I can’t think of a better word for them,’ Bernie said, getting up and groping for the fucking candles.

Though the power-cuts, random and savage, affected and infuriated every adult in the country – not the children, who across the nation took to it with delight, like camping, and in later years were to ask their parents when the power-cuts would start again, as if it were a traditional, seasonal thing – they affected Bernie worst. In part, it was the way neighbours, like the Griffithses, or the regular commuters on Bernie’s train would inquire pointedly when Bernie and his colleagues were going to get a grip on the situation. Everyone had a story of the power coming on and sparking up an abandoned iron, still plugged in, in the middle of the night, waking up Mrs Griffiths, as it happened, with a stench of burning, which proved to be her husband’s best shirt for the morning. ‘And a miracle the house didn’t burn down,’ Mr Griffiths said, suggesting that someone more honourable than Bernie might offer to pay for a new best shirt for the morning out of his own wallet. It drove Bernie mad.

On top of that the winter of 1973 was a hard one, and three or four times the train from the City to Kingston had failed. The first time, Bernie phoned Alice, who went to Morden Underground station to pick him up in their ancient black Austin, the same car they’d had when they first married, a cast-off from Bernie’s brother Tony. It had refused to start again in the car park at Morden, and Alice had had to phone Mrs Griffiths, begging her to give the children something to eat while the garage came out; they didn’t get home until after midnight. So the second time it happened, even though by that time Bernie had bought a new car, the Simca, he only called to say he’d be a bit late, got the Tube to Morden and walked from there. The third and fourth time, too; it seemed to be going on all winter, like the winter.

But by then he’d heard of a new job, a promotion, out of London. That would never have seemed like a recommendation before. ‘Bernard,’ his widowed mother had said, when they’d gone to tell her in St Helier, the ranks of crocuses lining up firmly along the path outside. ‘Bernard. You’ve never lived anywhere but London. You couldn’t stand it for a week.’ She ignored Alice, apart from a savage glance or two; the whole thing, she could see, was the boy’s wife’s idea. In a corner, Bernard’s shy uncle Henry sipped tea from a next-to-best floral cup, not getting involved; he would have to stay and hear the worst of it afterwards. But if it was unfair of anyone to think it couldn’t have been Bernie’s idea, you could see why they believed that. His whole manner – the way he blew his nose, the way he ate with his elbows out, as if always demolishing a pie in a crowded pub, his soft London complexion, even – made it impossible to think of him outside London. But it was only Bernie who wanted to move. Alice had been born near the Scottish borders, and had moved to London at the age Francis was moving to Sheffield, nine, at the war’s end when no one was moving into capital cities. It was Alice, though, who loved London; she dreaded the North’s forgiveness, the way it would look at her when she returned.

But there was no arguing with Bernie and, it was true, the job was a good one. Bernie had been offered the deputy manager-ship of a power plant. It was the best way forward, to take a hands-on, strategic role, Bernie said. He’d left it quite late; but the industry was expanding.

He was like that: he could sell you anything with his enthusiasm. It was for her, however, to sell the move to the children, and she had nothing but her love to draw on there.

Outside the car, the landscape was changing. London had gone on for ever, its red-brick houses and businesses clinging to the edge of the motorway, like small rodents to a balloon suddenly in flight. The soft green of the southern counties, too, had gone, with the cows and sheep, and now harder, more purposeful facts were looming across the landscape. A herd of vast-waisted cooling towers, steaming massively; a terrain untended, brown and barren; one town after another with no name, just a mass of black and brown smoke and soot. It was getting worse; Francis could see that.

He had never thought that his mother would, one night, come into his bedroom and, sitting on the edge of his bed, explain that they might be moving to Sheffield. It was not that he had thought they would go on for ever where they were; it was simply that, at nine, no concept of change had ever entered his head. She had sat there, her face worried, when she’d finished, and he’d wanted to comfort her.

‘It won’t be so bad,’ he said in the end. ‘We’ll all be there.’ He’d wanted to say that they couldn’t make her move anywhere – not quite knowing who ‘they’ might be. But he tried to comfort her and, misunderstanding, her face cleared.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d be brave about it. And it’ll be exciting – a new school, new friends—’ She hugged him. It was odd; they’d been trying to console each other. Still, he knew that, in her worry for him, she had expressed some of her own; he’d been right, after all, to think of consoling her.

They’d travelled up to Sheffield two or three weeks later. They’d gone by train, an experience so unusual to Francis, who had only ever gone into London by train, a journey of twenty minutes, that he paid no attention to the view outside. He’d taken fascinated pleasure in the toilets, mysteriously labelled WC, the wooden slatted windows with their frank graffiti, the extraordinary act of sitting around a table, the four of them, and a cloth being laid and lunch being served. You could eat soup on a train, which had bewildered him when he had read of it, in Emil and the Detectives. It was all so unlike the rattling compartment train from Kingston to Waterloo when the Lord Mayor’s Show was on. Now, in the Simca with its lack of event, he could start to look, with some apprehension, at his surroundings.

The week in Sheffield they’d spent at a hotel. The Electricity had paid for it – ‘It’s all a treat,’ Bernie had said, once they were settled in the beige rooms, the walls lined with nubbled tweed fabric. ‘Have whatever you like.’

‘That’s nice of them,’ Sandra said.

‘They’re grateful,’ Bernie said.

‘Can I have a glass of wine?’ Sandra said.

‘I don’t see why not,’ Alice said. It was to be their holiday that summer; they weren’t going to have another.

Each day, they took the car the Electricity had provided, and drove out somewhere. Mostly into the countryside. It was different from the countryside in Surrey. There were no hedges, no trees, and the villages were harsh, square and unadorned. Outside, the great expanses of the moors were frightening and ugly; even in bright sun, the black hills with the blaze of purple on their flanks were crude, unfinished. They parked the car and, with a picnic, clambered down into a valley where some terrible catastrophe seemed to have occurred, and about a stream, plummeting and plunging, black rocks were littered, huge and cuboid, just lying there like a set of abandoned giant toys, polystyrene and poised to fall again, without warning. Once they came across a dead sheep, lying there, half in the stream, its mouth open, its fleece filthy and stinking with flies. In Surrey it would have been tidied away. ‘Don’t drink from a stream, ever,’ Alice said. It would never have occurred to Francis even to consider such a thing.

On these outings Sandra, in the back of the Simca with him, was quiet and sullen. She didn’t complain: she followed whatever they were supposed to be doing, from time to time inspecting the sensible shoes she’d been made to bring with open distaste. Francis, as often these days, observed her with covert interest. She was five years older than him. In the room they shared at the hotel, she spent her time writing postcards to her friends, which, when she left them for him to read, proved cryptic or insulting about him in specific terms. Her weariness, never openly stated, only dissipated when they arrived at a market town, and the prospect of shops, on however unambitious a scale, revived her. She bought more postcards; she looked, she said, for presents for her friends, though nothing seemed to fit the bill.

Once they went into the centre of Sheffield, but even for Sandra, Francis could see, this was not a success. It was strange, confusing, and not planned, as London was, to excite. Francis was gripped with the prospect of getting lost; he had no sense of direction or memory for landmarks. They followed Sandra indulgently into one shop after another, and after a couple of hours stopped in municipal gardens by the town hall, an alarming construction like an egg-box.

‘We’ll have to come back here,’ Alice said to Bernie. ‘This is where the education department is. To see about schools.’

Francis’s dad bought him and Sandra a Coke each, and they sat on a bench in the dry city heat. ‘This will have been cleared by bombs,’ Bernie said, ‘these gardens, in the war. See where the old buildings stop and the new ones start? They’ll have been bombed during the war because of the steel, see?’ Francis looked around and it was right: a ripped-out space had been created, a kind of shapeless acreage, and into it, dropped in as exactly as false teeth, were new and extravagant buildings, the egg-box, a building with brass globes protruding from its top floor, others whose smoked mirrors for windows made no allowances towards the church-like blackened solemnity of the old town hall, a figure poised heroically above the entrance like Eros.

Two boys his own age had sat on a bench directly opposite theirs. It was term-time, Francis knew that, but they had not been taken out of school for a week because their families were moving – a licensed absence that had nevertheless caused him unspoken worry in the course of the week, even while clambering over Burbage Rocks, in case an inspector should materialize from behind a dry-stone wall. These were real truants, their hands dirty, and Francis looked at them in the way he would have studied photographs of Victorian murderers, possessors of a remote experience that would never be his. He sucked at his Coke, and lazily, one of the boys pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering the other boy one. He felt childish with his fizzy drink and already the object of contempt. Their conversation drifted over with its incomprehensible freight of words – ‘Waggy nit,’ one said, and ‘Scoile,’ the other said; a long story began, about Castle Market – the Cattle Market, did they mean? Why didn’t they say ‘the’? ‘Mardy’, ‘gennel’; one punched the other, hard, and the other said, ‘Geeyour.’ Francis tried not to look at them. He feared their retribution, or their mockery; he feared the idea that his father would take it upon himself to say something to them, something inflammatory and adult, and Sheffield would turn upon them.

His parents had planned to spend the next day going round and finding a new house to buy. Although Francis had inspected the pile of agent’s particulars in his parents’ hotel bedroom with fervour and wonderment at the sums – £16,000 – involved, he and Sandra were to entertain themselves for most of the day. His ideas of entertainment were few, and he knew they were not allowed to stay in their room, the cleaners demanding access every morning after breakfast. But his mother had done a little research, and had discovered that a public library was to be found in a Victorian villa at Broomhill, only three hundred yards away. They were to spend the morning there, and find their own way back to the hotel, where they could order lunch themselves as a special treat. Of course, they could not take anything out of the library, not having an address, but if Francis wanted a book to read – there was no suggestion that Sandra was likely to share in this desire – there was a bookshop, only fifty yards further on, where he could buy something. Alice gave him two pound notes, an unheard-of advance on pocket money, and, it seemed, not even an advance: she did it when Sandra and his father could not see, a little squeeze of the hand pressing the money into his fist.

The library filled the morning, but it was short. He sat under the wooden bookshelves that, even in the children’s section, bore the intimidating municipal heading ‘Novels’. It took him a moment to recognize some familiar and favourite books there, and it was a surprise to discover that he had been reading ‘novels’ when he thought he had been reading Enid Blyton, or a book about Uncle, the millionaire elephant in a city of skyscrapers, Beaver Hateman at his heels. Chairs were supplied and, greedily taking five books with him, head down and not acknowledging the look of the librarian, whether approving or sour, he went to sit. At first he could hear his sister: she was talking to someone downstairs, in her ‘mature’ voice, as he called it; maturity, much evoked, had become her favourite virtue, and whenever she thought of it her voice dragged and drawled to the point of a groan. ‘No, we’re moving up here in a few months’ time. Yes, from London. We thought it best to sample the local amenities. I do hope you don’t mind us coming in – my brother’s the real reader in the family…’

And then the voice somehow faded away. The old library, in Kingston, he’d been going to since he was four, and had read every book in their children’s section, except the I-books, which he didn’t like, when people told you a story and said I. Here, there were so many new and different books, and what his sister’s voice had faded into was a book, a little childish but funny, about a bushranger called Midnite, and ‘bushranger’ was the Australian word for ‘highwayman’, with a cat called Khat, and, look, Queen Victoria, and—

It was quite short, and he had almost finished it by the time his sister, hot and bored, came to fetch him. She had left the library to explore the little parade of shops. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time for lunch.’ He followed her, the last five pages abandoned; perhaps he could come back later. And perhaps he could keep the two pounds – you could spend it on books in London, too.

‘We’ve found a house,’ Bernie said, coming into the hotel dining room while they were still eating their lunch. He was glowing with relief and satisfaction. The dining room, hung with velvet wallpaper and dark curtains, had been daytime dingy, and the children had been talking in whispers, not daring to bicker, but there was Francis’s dad, as if he hadn’t noticed anything. ‘You’ll like it, kids.’

‘I’ve found a book,’ Francis wanted to say to complete everyone’s happiness. ‘I’ve found lots of books.’

‘It’s nice,’ Alice said, sitting down in a flop and looking first, with concern, at Francis. She had something to console him with. ‘You’ll like it.’

‘My name is—’

She began to write. But the paper was resting on the lawn. Her pen tore through the paper on the y of ‘my’, and then she was writing on grass through torn paper. Jane was lying on her stomach in a secret part of the garden. She cocked her head and listened. She kicked her heels up, bouncing them against her bum. There was nobody about.

She took the paper and, rolling over, sat up to write properly. At the end of August, the grass was dry and brown, crackling like a fire. Under her legs, it was itchy with gorse droppings, and she could feel a holly leaf or two. The holly tree in the far corner was constantly shedding leaves. Nowhere in the garden was ever completely free of them. She folded the paper, and wrote: ‘My name is Fanny.’

Jane paused. For as long as she could remember, her name had really been Fanny. Her paper-name, the name of the heroine of her book when it should be written. Now she was fourteen, it was time to write it.

It was a great shame, really, that it was the end of August. She’d let so much of the summer holiday go by without writing anything. Now that she had written four words, she regretted it had taken so long. Until now, it had been a running, contiguous commentary in her head, a third voice putting her smallest actions into a sort of prose – Jane left the house, shutting the door behind her. In the garden there were birds singing. Her mood was black – but now she was writing something.

She had switched on the lawn-sprinkler. The wet earth started to smell dense and delicious in the dry heat. The holly tree dripped with a tropical rhythm, irregular, on to the patio. The lawn-spray flung lazily in this direction with a hiss on each revolution, never quite reaching the little nest. A trickle of sweat, like a darting insect, slipped in a tickle from her armpit down her side; she could smell her own faint metallic odour. She was narrating in her head; she turned and began to write again.

‘My name is Fanny. I was born an orphan in the year 1863. My mother’…

It was a hundred years before her own birth. Her eyes filled with the sadness that by now Fanny was certainly dead. But she was Fanny, sweating in a sleeveless dress and no knickers in a patch of a Sheffield garden. Presently, as the cool wave of water in air, a jet of perfumed rain, swept over her head, she was lost in the thrill of authorship.

The garden was not squarely established but, like the whole estate, carved out of country and annexed in opportunistic ways. It swelled at the far corner to take in the substantial holly tree. (‘A hundred years old,’ Jane’s mother said reverently. She had always wanted to live in an old house, with character.) Elsewhere it wavered about in odd directions, claiming and abjuring patches of land. If the features of the garden seemed deceptively aged, like the trees, that was because the gardens had fenced-in patches of country. A moorland tussock, three feet square, brought in, surrounded by a lawn and a garden wall, like a rockery. The patchy lawn, the spindles of trees on the streets, rooted in squares of earth like tea-bags: those told the age of the development more clearly.

You could nest in the roots of the old holly tree where you were invisible from the house. For Jane’s less secret withdrawals, she went to read somewhere she could be discovered. You could sometimes hear a human noise beyond the garden and, in a series of corrections, understand that it was not, after all, one of the neighbours on either side at their pleasure, or a walker hugging the shore of the development before heading off into the wild heather of the country but the child’s-dismay-call made by a sheep, sheltering from the wind beyond the dry-stone wall.

But there was another better gift from the moor, which no one, Jane believed, knew about: three thick gorse bushes, brilliant banana-yellow blossom and always quick to slash at your arms. From the open lawn, it looked as if they went right up to the wall, but if you got down on your belly and wriggled through, a little space of secret untended grass opened up. You could sit there and watch, unnoticed. Her father was always talking about clearing the gorse bushes but he wouldn’t get round to it. Perhaps he was fond of them too. Here she had pressed down a space, clearing it of holly leaves and gorse twigs.

Another hiding-place had been the garden of the house opposite, empty for four months now. All summer it had been the province of her brother after nightfall; there he prowled and roamed, his girls coming to him eagerly. In the daytime, it had been hers. After four months of neglect, it had developed in unexpected, luxuriant ways. At first it was like a room enclosed, left tidy by the owners to await their return, and Jane ventured into it with a sense of intrusion. But quickly it began to grow and dissolve. An inoffensive small plant, a few shoots above the ground, had exploded, leaping through the trellised fence, a few more inches and a few more shoots every day. One day, all at once, a single slap of colour was there: a poppy had burst open, and then, for weeks, there was a relay of flowers, each lasting a day or two. Of course, her mother worked in a shop full of flowers, so they were not strange to Jane; but to watch them work their own stubborn magic, budding and bursting, fading and moulting on the stem, rather than dying, yellow and sour, in someone’s vase was new to her.

For weeks, the garden expanded along its permitted limits, and only the plants that Mr Watson, a gardener as draconian as Jane’s father, had admitted to his garden developed, stretching in their new freedom. But then the weeds started: the perfect lawn was scattered with constellations of daisies and, quite soon, dandelions. There were butterflies now and when, once, it rained overnight in torrents, the garden was filled with snails, come out to drink and feed. Best of all was a marvellous new plant, embracing and winding itself round anything, a fence, a post, running itself through other plants, with the most beautiful flowers like trumpets, like lilies, like the flowers of heaven. Jane had never had a favourite flower before, and whenever the craze for quizzes had arisen among the girls, she’d always replied, ‘Roses,’ when asked, a choice she knew was limp and conventional, as well as probably untrue. But now she really did have a favourite flower.

It was a shock to discover, when she asked her father, discreetly, that it was a garden pest called bindweed. Then he explained the complex and violent steps needed to eradicate it. Jane listened, but it seemed a little sad to her to remove a plant so beautiful, to prefer, as her father did, a border of squat green-tongued plants that would never flower or get anywhere much in life. Jane promised herself, when she grew up, a garden with nothing but bindweed, a dense bower of strangling vines and trumpeting innocent flowers.

Her garden visits were over now. A couple of days ago one of those neighbours had rapped at the window as she had been going in – slipping in, she had thought, unobserved as a mouse in the middle of the day. It had been embarrassing enough to see the neighbour at her mother’s party; that hiding-place was now closed to her, and the garden went its way in peace.

She smoothed the paper: she started to write again. Something caught her eye. From here, she could not be seen from the house, if she kept low, but she could see anyone standing near the windows. There was a movement in Daniel’s bedroom. Daniel was supposed to have gone swimming in the open-air pool at Hathersage; he couldn’t have got there and back so quickly. The figure moved again, and it wasn’t Daniel. The day was bright, and in the dimness of the house, Jane could see only the outline of a figure, its shape and gestures. It moved again: a hand travelled towards the face, then paused in mid-air, shifted, went downwards, as if it was going through something on Daniel’s ‘desk’.

It was Jane’s father. She hadn’t realized how absolutely she knew his shape and movements, the way he had of letting his hands start to do one vague thing before abandoning it nervously for something else. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ she remembered Daniel saying to her once, watching her with an amused horrid gleam, ‘I bet they don’t do it any more.’ ‘Do what?’ Jane had said. ‘What do you think?’ Daniel said. ‘And I bet Dad’s relieved more than anything.’

Lying there, undiscoverable, in the middle of the day, Jane might have preferred a burglar. She allowed herself a minute of speculative romance, but it was no good, it was her father; surprisingly here in the middle of the day, surprisingly in Daniel’s bedroom, but that was all.

Twenty minutes later, she heard the front door shut. She hadn’t heard it open, she reflected, though it usually made a solid clunk. He’d opened it quietly, she guessed, as if he had sneaked in; he’d thought there was no one in the house so he’d shut it as he normally did. It wasn’t much of an adventure, really. She got up, picked up her notebook and went into the house for a drink, brushing down her print dress as she went. She should have gone with Daniel to Hathersage for a swim. She’d said she probably would, that morning over breakfast, just before her dad went off to work.

‘We said we’d stop at the next service station,’ Alice said, noticing a sign.

‘Yeah?’ Bernie said, not concentrating on what she was saying. ‘Sorry—’

‘I said, we told the removers we’d be stopping at Leicester Forest East,’ Alice said. ‘The service station. It’s the next one – I think it said seven miles.’

Bernie was gritting his teeth: he was stuck between lorries, thundering along at a frustrating ten miles an hour below the speed limit, boxed in by faster lines of traffic solidly flowing to the right. He felt like a box on a conveyor belt. ‘Not a bad idea,’ he said. ‘They won’t worry if we don’t, though.’

‘It might be as well,’ Alice said. ‘Sandra.’

‘What about Sandra?’ Francis said, his chin resting on the back of his mother’s seat, his face almost in her hair.

‘Oh, nothing,’ Alice said.

‘Your mum means,’ Bernie said, ‘that she might be fed up of riding in the lorry by now. The excitement might have worn off.’

‘I didn’t mean that exactly,’ Alice said.

‘Or on the other hand they might—’ Bernie broke off. ‘We ought to get a radio in the car,’ he said, after a while. ‘Aren’t you hungry, Frank? I’m hungry. That wasn’t much of a lunch.’

‘It couldn’t be helped,’ Alice said. ‘Everything was packed away.’

‘I know, love,’ Bernie said.

New experiences filled Francis with automatic dread. He had disappeared when the removers had arrived, feeling that demands would be placed on him, but dreading most the presence of rough men in their emptying house. He had never eaten in a motorway service station before; whenever they had travelled, picnics had been packed to be eaten in fields or off the dashboard, according to rain. Now he felt, knowing it to be stupid, that indefinite dangers were presenting themselves, dangers involving crowds of strangers, unfamiliar islands of retail and cooking, the probability of being lost and abandoned. The fear of abandonment was always high in him, and the specific dread, on this occasion, was of the family losing their possessions, now loaded into an untrustworthy, wobbling van.

‘Here we are,’ Bernie said, as the half-mile sign flashed past; he signalled left, and then Francis’s favourite thing, the three signs indicating three hundred yards, two hundred, a hundred, with three, then two, then one finger. You could work out how fast you were going: just count the seconds between each sign and multiply by whatever. But, of course, they were slowing down. There was a fragile bridge, glass, metal and plastic, over the breadth of the motorway, and people walking across it as if they did not know they were at any moment to be plunged, shrieking, into the metal river of traffic when the structure collapsed. At this new terror he shut his eyes.

‘And there they are,’ Alice said, with soft relief. The van was reversing into a bay in the lorry park to the left; they drove right, and Bernie found a space. They got out and waited for the men and Sandra; but as they approached, they were a few feet behind her; she was walking with brisk anger. The youngest man had a flushed face, as if he had just been discovered in some peculiarly personal activity; the chief remover’s mouth was set.

They waited by the Simca, Alice smiling defensively. ‘Lovely day for it,’ she called to them, but they didn’t reply. Sandra, scowling, came up and took her father’s arm.

‘I think it’s best,’ the chief remover said, ‘that your daughter ride in the car the rest of the way.’ He had stopped; the other two kept going.

‘I thought she’d get fed up of it before long,’ Alice said hopefully.

‘We’ve got the directions,’ the chief remover said, ignoring this. ‘We’ll see you up there in a couple of hours, I reckon.’

He walked off, following the others. Bernie squeezed his daughter; no one said anything. In a moment, they went inside; Bernie had seen that the men were going upstairs, but there was a nearer café on the ground floor. They went into that and ate fish and chips, all together. And when the men went out, back to the lorry, they pretended not to notice, and sat there for fifteen minutes longer. Alice even had a piece of cake. Everyone did their best to be cheerful, talking around rather than to Sandra, and by the time they had finished, they could look directly at her. Although she was still a bit red, she no longer seemed about to burst into tears.

Daniel was home by half past four. He’d been at Hathersage all day, pretty well; it had been a hot day, a perfect one. The pool was built on a hillside just outside the Derbyshire village. Surrounded by schoolmasterly red-brick walls, it was concrete and tile inside; outside were the Derbyshire hills, and the huge sky. If you hurled yourself from the highest diving board, you were horizontal for one moment, poised above the water, framed against the sky and hills. Perfect. He’d got there at ten, in the first bus of the morning, still empty; later buses were full of kids, as he said to himself. Barbara had been supposed to come, and he’d told her to meet him at the bus stop at the bottom of Coldwell Lane at nine, but she hadn’t been there when the bus came. He’d got on anyway; not a bad excuse to dump her, especially since she hadn’t been on the next bus.

He’d spent an hour thrashing up and down, throwing himself off the diving board in bold, untidy shapes, enjoying more the gesture and the moment of flight than anything else, and grinning when he surfaced after a bellyflop, his stomach red and stinging, joining in with the laughter of the girl lifeguard. By eleven or so another bus had arrived from Sheffield, much more full, and they came in; some he recognized from his school, three girls from his sister’s year, finding Daniel splendid in his exercise, brown limbs jumbled, the disconcerting swirl of his turquoise-patterned trunks, flying above the vivid oblong of water which shone with the Derbyshire blue of the sky. He’d met some friends and made some more; he always did. But in the end he went home on his own, hardly saying goodbye, burying his face in a bag of cheese and onion crisps from the machine.

The bus home, the three-thirty, was as empty as the morning bus had been – too early for most people – but with all that day’s exercise he ached, sitting at the front of the top deck. Ached, too, slumping up Coldwell Lane when the bus let him off; it was uphill all the way, and just a bit too far; his black sports bag, the one he used for school, banged away in the heat at his bony hips. Half enjoying his exhaustion, groaning as he slouched up the hill, he almost expected Barbara to be sitting on the wall outside their house. Perhaps crying.

There seemed to be nobody in the house. Daniel was terribly hungry; he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, apart from the crisps. He went through to the kitchen, dropping his bag in the middle of the hall, and went through the cupboards and the fridge, banging the doors as he went. He poured himself some vividly orange squash; it was always too weak and watery when your mother made it for you, and he liked it about one part to three. In a few minutes, he’d got the stuff for a magic sandwich together, and sat down with a breadknife, contentedly putting it together and eating the constituent parts individually as he went.

‘That looks revolting,’ Jane said, opening the kitchen door. She must have been in the garden.

‘You don’t have to eat it,’ Daniel said, putting the sandwich spread on awkwardly with the breadknife. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I bet you had some chips in Hathersage,’ Jane said. She put down her notebook and pen on the table. He noticed that her dress was stained with grass.

‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘What’ve you been doing? Writing poetry?’

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Where’s Tim?’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘I only just came in. You know Jason in my year? Him and his brother Matthew were out on the crags a week ago and he said to me, “I saw your sister. And she was sitting on a rock and gazing at the landscape and guess what she was doing? She was making notes in her little book.” Making notes.’ He broke into hilarity.

Jane flushed, picked up her notebook and hugged it to her. ‘I couldn’t care less what someone like that says about anything I do,’ she said. ‘Whoever he is.’ She knew who he was: they’d thrown a stone at her.

‘Making notes, though,’ Daniel said, subsiding. ‘It was dead funny.’ He leant back in his chair, took a satisfied look at the complex sandwich he’d put together, with ham and sandwich spread, cheese and salad cream, all bursting out from the sides, then took an enormous bite. Much of it fell out, splattering his red shiny shorts and his brown legs.

‘That’s disgusting,’ Jane said. ‘You know what? Dad came home this lunchtime.’

There was a noise from upstairs, a little thud and a door opening – Tim coming downstairs. ‘I thought he’d gone out,’ Jane said. ‘I haven’t seen him all day.’

‘Upstairs reading his snake books,’ Daniel said. ‘He’s made himself a sandwich, though.’ He nodded at the mess on the work surface. ‘He’ll not have been starving.’

‘That was me,’ Jane said. ‘I was saying, I thought you’d gone out.’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘I was upstairs in my room. Can I have a sandwich?’

‘Make it yourself,’ Daniel said. ‘Upstairs with your snake books?’

‘Yes,’ Tim said, and then, in a singing tone, ‘Do you know—’

‘Probably not,’ Daniel said.

‘Do you know what the most venomous snake in the world is?’

‘No,’ Jane said, with a feeling she’d been asked this before.

‘Lots of people would say the cobra or the rattlesnake. But it’s not. It’s the inland Taipan. It can get up to eight feet long. If it bites you you’re bound to die. It’s brown, it’s called Oxy, Oxyripidus something. Oxyripidus – Oxy – I’m almost remembering it—’

‘Where’s it live?’ Daniel said.

‘Australia,’ Tim said.

‘Just so long as it doesn’t live near me,’ Daniel said.

‘It wouldn’t hurt you,’ Tim said. ‘It’s quite timid, really. It would avoid you and it’s probably more scared of you than you would be of it. You wouldn’t have to worry about it even if you were in Australia. Most people think snakes would attack you but they wouldn’t, really. They only bite if they’re in danger. I like snakes. I wish I could have one. Do you think if I asked they’d let me have a snake in my bedroom? I’d keep it in a glass case. I wouldn’t let it out and it wouldn’t have to be venomous – or not very.’

‘What do you mean, “if” you asked?’ Daniel said. ‘You ask them all the time, about once a week, and they always say no. You’re not getting the most venomous snake in the world to keep under your bed. Face facts.’

‘I’d save up,’ Tim said, reciting his case stolidly on one note, ‘and I’d pay for it myself. I wouldn’t want an inland Taipan – I wouldn’t want any venomous snake, really. And I’d buy the mice with my pocket money. They don’t need to eat very often, it wouldn’t be expensive. I wish I could have a snake. It’s not fair.’

‘I dare say,’ Jane said. ‘Go and make yourself a sandwich or something. I’m going to watch the telly.’

‘There’s nothing on,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s rubbish.’

‘It’s better in the holidays,’ Tim said. ‘There’s stuff on in the mornings. For children.’

‘It’s still rubbish.’

‘This boy told me a joke,’ Tim continued with his dull reciting voice, though the subject had changed.

‘What boy?’ Daniel said.

‘This boy I know,’ Tim said.

‘You haven’t seen anyone for five weeks,’ Daniel said.

‘Yes, I have,’ Tim said, not crossly, but setting things right. ‘I saw Antony last week. We went to the library.’

‘Did smelly Antony tell you a joke?’ Jane said incredulously. Tim occasionally gave the impression of a rich and varied social life once out of sight of his family, but Antony was its only visible representative. They’d all concluded, with different degrees of worry or amusement, that Antony, a boy as pale and quiet as a whelk, was not the tip of some festive iceberg but probably Tim’s best or only friend.

‘No, it wasn’t Antony’s joke,’ Tim said. ‘It was another boy, at school.’

‘You’ve been saving it up for five weeks?’ Daniel said.

‘I only just thought of it,’ Tim said. ‘There are these three bears, right?’

‘I thought this was a joke,’ Daniel said. ‘I don’t want to hear Goldilocks.’

‘It isn’t Goldilocks,’ Tim said. ‘And these three bears, they’re in an aeroplane.’

‘Not very likely,’ Jane said. ‘They wouldn’t let three bears on an aeroplane. They’d eat all the meals and then they’d eat all the passengers. And they’d open the doors at the other end and there’s no one there except a lot of bones and three bears who weren’t hungry any more.’

‘Well, there’s mummy bear and daddy bear and baby bear,’ Tim said, persevering, ‘and they’re in an aeroplane.’

‘Where were they going?’ Daniel said. ‘I can’t remember stories like this if I don’t know where they’re going.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tim said. ‘They never got there, anyway. Listen to the story and you’ll find out.’

‘Is this a joke or a story?’ Jane said. ‘You said it was a joke. Now it’s a story.’

‘I want to know where they were going,’ Daniel said. ‘Can they be going to Spain? I’d like a bear who went to Spain. Or can they be coming back? Then they’d have those hats on, those sombreros. A bear in a sombrero, there’s a sight you don’t see every day.’

‘They weren’t going anywhere,’ Tim said. ‘Stop interrupting. I’m telling a joke.’

‘They’ve got to have been going somewhere,’ Jane said, ‘or they wouldn’t have been in an aeroplane in the first place. Go on, tell us your joke.’

‘All right,’ Tim said. ‘So they’re in this plane, and suddenly the engines catch fire. I forgot – I should have said there’s only two parachutes on the plane.’

‘There’s only two parachutes on the plane?’ Daniel said. ‘For three bears, and a plane full of passengers, and the crew as well? That’s not very sensible.’

‘There’s not a plane full of passengers,’ Tim said, getting red in the face. ‘There’s only three bears.’

‘But even supposing there are only three bears – I suppose they’ve eaten all the other passengers, or maybe everyone in the departure lounge saw three bears getting on the plane, and thought, Hmm, do I want to get into a confined space with three hungry bears or, really, do I want to go to Spain that much anyway, and changed their mind and went home – I mean, even supposing that, there’s got to be someone flying the plane.’

‘Or even two,’ Jane said. ‘I think you have to have two pilots. When we went to Paris last year there were two pilots in case something went wrong with one of them.’

Tim thought for a very long time, breathing noisily. Finally, he said, ‘Daddy bear was flying the plane. Because he knew how to.’

‘Oh, that makes perfect sense,’ Daniel said. ‘An untrained savage wild beast from the Canadian wilderness who’d learnt how to fly a jet plane. One of the most majestic yet complex machines ever invented by the human race.’

‘No, it was invented by a moose,’ Jane said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

‘Called Harold,’ Daniel said.

‘And the daddy bear said to the mummy bear, “There’s only two parachutes, one for me and one for you.” So the daddy bear puts one on and the mummy bear puts the other on and they jump out of the plane.’

‘What – they didn’t even try to hold their infant?’ Daniel said. ‘Their poor suffering infant who they loved better than anyone else in the world? They just left the baby bear to die in a plane crash? This isn’t a funny story at all. It’s deeply moving and tragic.’

‘No, wait, because they go down, they go down in their parachutes, I mean, and then at the bottom, when they get to the bottom, there’s baby bear anyway.’

‘I’ve heard this before,’ Jane said. ‘It’s crap.’

‘And they say, “Oh, baby bear oh, kissy kissy, how did you get down safe and everything?” And the baby bear says, “Me not stupid, me not silly. Me hold on to daddy’s willy.”’

There was a lengthy silence. Daniel and Jane exchanged a sorrowing look.

‘That’s it, that’s the joke,’ Tim said. ‘It was funny, I mean, it’s funny if you don’t ask stupid questions all the time.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ Jane said, ‘is why they have to be bears. They could be anything. They could be people, or they could be donkeys. It wouldn’t make any difference to the joke.’

‘They couldn’t be donkeys, though, could they?’ Daniel said pensively. ‘If you think about it.’

‘Why couldn’t they be donkeys?’ Jane said.

‘Well, you couldn’t hold a cock with your hooves,’ Daniel said. ‘If you were a donkey. Have some sense, woman.’

‘You could try,’ Jane said.

Tim was crying now, fat tears amassing at his already reddened lids. The other two watched the familiar phenomenon. ‘It’s not fair,’ he finally said. ‘No one ever listens to anything I say. I don’t want to talk to you any more.’

‘I wish,’ Jane said, in her mother’s posh or telephone voice, ‘I wish you two would stop making Timothy cry. It’s not kind or clever.’

‘Do you want to go and watch Why Don’t You?’ Daniel said. ‘I’m bored of this.’

It was at least another hour after Leicester Forest East before the car felt normal again. It felt to Francis like a bubble of discomfort taking its time to rise upwards in him and burst. It was no one’s fault; whatever Sandra had done or said, it had been forgiven by the family without inquiry. Bernie’s affability towards the men had not crumbled, but his posture had stiffened, a protective, resentful attitude with which there was no argument. But in time the atmosphere cleared; in an hour Francis thought only he was trembling with that strange Francis-dread, the sort of fear that could be stirred in him by what had happened to someone else, or by events that were not about to transpire, that, imagined, could end in some catastrophe, none worse to contemplate than being shouted at. Sandra had been shouted at, in some way, yet she, his mother and father had passed from a stiff front of bravery to a real sense of being in the right. If, indeed, they hadn’t forgotten about it.

That Francis-dread came with a smell, a taste in his mouth as of sour clashing metals; it came from inside, and took time to go. He wondered sometimes if he gave off the smell of fear; animals, they said, always knew when you were frightened. Aunt Judith with her dog, making a beeline for him, making him cringe, because the dog could smell the emotion in his mouth. Yes.

But that smell and taste, so strong to him but unnoticeable, he guessed, to the other three in the car, was now being beaten down by a smell of the earth. The landscape had been changing, presenting familiar sights in unfamiliar arrangements – those bald, hopeful trees – as well as the unfamiliar, the monstrous. Hills were rising up, black and softly yielding, the great dunes of a black Sahara; and here, a building, a huge black box on sort of was it stilts, there were windows – were they? – but white, opaque, just a grid of white squares. It looked like something you would draw if you couldn’t draw, the idea of a big house but just a big black and white square. And out of the side, like a giant lolling arm, an immense conveyor belt. You could see the wheels running, carrying something, some kind of rubble up or down. The most terrible thing: there were no men. It was just a huge machine, a factory – a factory? – like a big black flimsy box, a black hill both flimsy and vast, and that terrible motion of the belt and wheels. Puking out, or forcing down the throat, an endless motion of forced ingestion or rejection, stone and gullet. It would carry on all night, all day. You could see that. The only thing human about it was the retching smell.

It was vivid and complicated, and it went by so fast that in a moment Francis was closing his eyes and trying to see it again, a moment after that, wondering if he had seen it at all. But there was that smell. And it seemed there were people, too, who lived in this smell, because there was a town, an estate, of matching red-brick houses. Just below the motorway. But they had somehow left the motorway now. A sign came up: City Centre.

‘What city?’ Francis said. His voice croaked a little.

‘This is Sheffield,’ Bernie said. ‘We’re almost there. New home. Did you see that factory – the works – some kind of, I don’t knew, coking plant? Is that right?’

‘How on earth do you expect me to know?’ Alice said, smiling.

‘You know everything,’ Bernie said.

‘I hate this,’ Sandra said. ‘I don’t want to come here.’

Francis was shocked at her bad manners: she shouldn’t say what he was thinking.

After they had returned from Sheffield the first time, when they had found the house, Francis had written to the magazine Sandra liked to read. He liked to read it, too, though it was less use to him. Jackie, it was called, with the kindly fashion advice that coloured girls could get away with wearing lovely bright shades, and the page of brisk nice answers from Cathy and Claire to girls who worried about what they should let their boyfriends do to their faces, mouths, breasts, vaginas. (Francis was horrified, not about to need the information.) He wrote, not to decent Cathy and Claire, but to the page before the appeals for foreign pen-pals, the place where readers described their home towns. He was egging himself on, he acknowledged that now, sitting in the back of the Simca with the choking smell of the coking plant in his throat. ‘When my friends first heard that we were moving to Sheffield…’ he began, then ran through the events of their week in the Hallam Towers Hotel, blithely equating them with what might be judged the principal attractions of the town. ‘Don’t forget to spend a morning browsing in Broomhill,’ Francis advised. He had read similar sentiments in his father’s Sunday Express.

He had not posted what he had written. And now he was glad of it. It seemed as if the Sheffield he had experienced had been created at the tip of a blue biro and had never truly existed. That city of hotels and attentive waiters, of dense Victorian villas dispersed through a verdant forest, breaking out like the frilled edges of amateur maternal pancakes into lavender moorland. It had been replaced by this stinking black city of vast boxes and artificial black hills and unattended vast machinery.

They went on. And poor Francis’s selfish focus and fear stopped him seeing the city he was entering, in 1974, its greatness, its sweep, the reason for those black hills and the stink. It was entering on the last phase of its industrial greatness, and Francis, in his little selfish fear, did not see it.

There it was: Sheffield, 1974. Francis saw the artificial black hills, the slag heaps piled up by the side of the motorway. But there were seven red hills in Sheffield too. The city was founded on them. The six rivers, too, the black-running Don, the Sheaf, naming the city, the Porter, the Rivelin, the Meersbrook, the Loxley. Each had its valley, some green and lovely, some lined with grimy warehouses, but all ran together, and they were the reason for the city. The waters, long before, had been harnessed to power forges, small hammering enclaves in dells; the steel masters had built their works, outgrowing the forces of the rivers, and the city had locked its blaze and fire inside those huge blank buildings, rising up on either side of those narrow streets like cliffs. The great noise, mysterious in the streets, continued day and night; those blast furnaces could never be shut down, and men poured in and out at unexpected times. Each man had his fiery function, and as they left their work, their eyes seemed soft, dazzled by the white-hot glare even through their smoked goggles. Francis saw none of it: he did not see the city that had made fire out of water. The rivers were hidden under a mountain of brick; the fires were deep inside those mausoleums. Only occasionally did a black river burst out for a stretch; only occasionally did a warm orange glow against a dark window suggest the fury happening within.

The city had been made by fire out of water. And there was the earth, too, which Francis did see something of. Around the city, in earthworks and diggings, coal was still heaved to the surface. It was everywhere. The city made its money from steel; it was driven by its waters; it was built on coal.

Francis saw almost none of this, as they drove into Sheffield for the first time. He saw a nightmare terror of a landscape; he ascribed evil to it. He had no means of seeing the money and power that these sights produced; he saw black waste, and bursts of fire, and smelt that hard, mineral smell. But he should have looked: in 1974, Sheffield’s splendour was coming to an end.

And the motorway, with its raw, uncouth society of fire and mineral gave way now to something like a town: shops, offices, glass buildings, bridges and, at last, people. ‘I don’t remember any of this,’ Sandra said. It was a shock to hear a voice in the car: they’d been quiet since the Sheffield turn-off.

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Bernie said. ‘We came up by train, don’t you remember?’ She subsided again; that wasn’t what she’d meant, Francis could tell. She was mostly just complaining.

‘I’d feel a lot easier if we could see the van,’ Alice said.

‘It’ll be at the house by now,’ Bernie said. ‘We’ll go up there to make sure, and then we’ll go off to the hotel. The men won’t want to start unpacking tonight.’

‘Where are they going to stay?’ Francis asked.

‘They’ll have made arrangements,’ Alice said.

Daniel, Jane and Tim drew the curtains and switched on the television. They watched Why Don’t You? – Tim fervently, Daniel making sarcastic remarks about the sort of kids who go on telly. Tim wanted to watch Blue Peter, but Daniel got up before it started and turned over to watch The Tomorrow People. Then the cartoon – it was Ludwig, which was rubbish. ‘Where’s Mum and Dad?’ Jane said. They were always home by now – they generally coincided, except on Fridays when Malcolm stayed late and Katherine came home before him on the bus.

The news started. It was boring. There was going to be an election. There’d been one before, Daniel remembered, and that had been boring too, because at school they talked to you about it and tried to get you to say who you’d vote for if you’d got a vote. At school, most of the kids said they were Labour but that was only because their parents were. There was one kid who said he was Liberal but everyone called him a poof, because the Liberals were poofs, everyone knew that. Sometimes Daniel said he was Labour but at others he said he was Conservative and once he told a girl he thought Communism was best. He didn’t really care. They were all old and boring.

‘I think the Conservatives are going to come first,’ Tim said, ‘and the Labour are going to come second and the Liberals are going to come third. That’s what I think.’

‘Why do you think that?’ Jane said, but Tim didn’t know.

They’d stopped talking. Even when Nationwide came on, and there was a story about a dog that drank beer, they didn’t say much. It was nearly seven o’clock before they heard the key in the lock. It was their mother. She looked tired and angry; for once her hair was untidy – she’d not really done it since the party the night before.

‘Has your father not called?’ she said.

‘No,’ Jane said. ‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He didn’t come to pick me up. I tried to call the office but they’d all gone home. I came home on the bus.’

‘These two’ve been in all day,’ Daniel said. ‘He didn’t call, did he?’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘No one’s called.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ Katherine said.

For some reason, Jane felt she couldn’t say she’d seen him at lunchtime. He hadn’t wanted to be seen; she didn’t feel she should let on.

But Daniel said, ‘He came home at lunchtime. And then he went out again.’

Katherine looked at him. ‘What did he do that for?’

‘How should I know? I didn’t see him. I was at the pool all day. Jane saw him.’

‘Jane,’ Katherine said, ‘did he say anything? I don’t know where he’s got to. If he’d gone to the pub he’d have phoned, surely.’

‘He never goes to the pub,’ Daniel said, ‘except on Fridays.’

‘But did he say anything about being late?’

‘I only saw him,’ Jane said. ‘I didn’t speak to him. I was in the garden. He didn’t see me, I don’t think.’

Katherine looked at her. It sounded strange, your family avoiding each other, hiding and not speaking. But it made sense to all of them. ‘I expect he’s been held up,’ she said. ‘Let’s not worry just yet.’

‘He’s never held up,’ Tim said, his voice emphatic. ‘He’s always home by now.’

‘He’s got a good reason, I’m sure,’ Katherine said. ‘Let’s not worry. Have you had your dinner?’

The children looked at each other, surprised. The idea of making their own dinner was a new one. No one had ever suggested it.

‘All right,’ Katherine said. ‘Just let me get changed. There’s the food from last night to finish up. That OK?’

‘Aren’t we going to wait for Dad?’ Daniel said.

‘He’ll be home soon,’ Katherine said.

They’d forgotten about the party food, which was sitting in the fridge on two big plates under foil, not separated out now, but the remains of half a dozen dishes jammed together. The vol-au-vents were flaking, soft and clothy, the Coronation Chicken a little brown and crusty round the edges; the rice salad, flecked with red peppers, hadn’t really been touched the night before, and it didn’t look nicer now. Everything seemed sad and unfestive, like tinsel in the full light of day. Jane and Daniel took it out, and she set the table with five places. There was some lettuce and tomatoes too; she made a salad, put out the salad cream.

‘I don’t like rice,’ Tim said, following her from the kitchen to the dining room. ‘I don’t like that yellow stuff either. I want beans on toast.’

‘You be quiet,’ Jane said. ‘You’re too fussy about your food.’

‘I can’t help it.’

Katherine came down, her face washed and recomposed. ‘Good girl!’ she said brightly, when she saw Jane had set the dinner out. They ate; there was nothing to wait for with the food. Daniel ate quickly; he was always hungry, and nothing got in the way of that. Katherine filled a plate for Tim, ignoring his protests; he poked at it, eating a little here and there. Neither he nor Daniel was thinking about their father. Jane put food on her plate – a strange assortment, like the hopeful random selection you make at a party, not necessarily meaning to eat everything but taking a bit of each. She watched her mother nervously; she was looking around her, on edge, not eating. After a few minutes, Tim said, ‘I don’t like rice,’ again. ‘I don’t like those red things, those peppers, in it.’

‘Then don’t eat it,’ Katherine said abruptly. ‘Go hungry.’ She got up sharply – almost as if she were going to strike him – and went into the hall. They could hear her rifling through the address book by the telephone. Jane and Daniel exchanged a short, scared look. Their parents had suddenly altered. From the hall, the noise of dialling.

‘Hello?’ Katherine said. ‘Hello, Margaret? This is Katherine Glover, Malcolm’s wife…Yes, that’s right, at the Dennises…Yes, I remember. I know this sounds a little strange, but did Malcolm have anything – Oh, I see…Really? That sounds unusual…No, I didn’t. Well, I’m sure there’s some perfectly innocent explanation – he’ll be home soon, I expect. Thank you so much – I hope I’m not disturbing you…’

And she put the phone down, then came back into the dining room. She didn’t sit down and go on with her dinner. She just stood there. ‘That was your father’s secretary,’ she said, ‘Margaret. She said he left the office at lunchtime and didn’t come back.’

‘He was here at lunchtime,’ Jane said, ‘and then he went out again. I thought he’d gone back to work.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘You said.’

She went to the window, peered out through the net curtains. She seemed lost in thought. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the new people are moving in. There’s a removal van.’

‘It came this afternoon,’ Daniel said, still eating. ‘They’ve left it, they’ve not started unpacking the furniture.’

‘Did you see them?’ Katherine said absently.

‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘They’ll be moving in tomorrow, I suppose.’

‘I wonder,’ Tim said, ‘where my dad’s gone.’

‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong, do you?’ Jane said. She remembered the stories she’d constructed in the garden as she saw the figure in the window. It seemed odd already that she’d imagined burglars.

‘No,’ Katherine said firmly. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

But then she went out again and started making phone calls, to the hospitals first and, finally, the police. One by one the children took their plates to the kitchen; Jane washed up, listening to the repeated query in her mother’s politest, most telephone voice. It seemed to her that there was something of blame and guilt in it. She could not understand it.

For years Katherine had been in the habit, in the mornings, of getting into the car with the children and Malcolm. First, Malcolm dropped off Daniel at Flint, the senior school – he insisted on being dropped a good three hundred yards from the gates, and she knew for a fact that most of his friends had exactly the same arrangement with their parents – then Tim, at his primary school, and Jane at the new middle school, less self-consciously getting out at the gate. Finally Malcolm dropped her in Broomhill with its parade of shops and went off to work.

That had been her routine since Tim started school. She did it almost every day, saying, as if it needed justifying, that it was nice to have a regular routine each day, and hers was to buy the groceries before ten each morning, then head back to do the housework. In reality, she hadn’t minded the housework when Tim was too small to go to school, just as she didn’t really mind it when the children were on their school holidays. It was the days when the four of them set off, leaving her on her own, with no one to talk to and nothing but dull tasks to do, that wore her down. The noise of Radio 2, so mild a burbling complement to breakfast, had to be turned off, or had to be listened to as if it were company; so, by the time Tim was seven, she had taken to getting into the car, going to Broomhill and filling the morning with the day’s small shopping – the fishmonger or the pork butcher, the little supermarket, the greengrocer – maybe the bank, and definitely the little tea-shop for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.

Crosspool was closer to shop in, of course, but it was a 1920s development, a shabby parade with holes in the Tarmac and a hardware shop with Chinese-made plastic flowers in the window, and no tea-shop. Broomhill was stone-built Victorian villas – it was a part of the city that hadn’t been bombed in the war. It had a dress shop, a bookshop, and the greengrocer sold courgettes. It was a nicer place, so Katherine put up with the tinny flavour of the brown-coloured filling in the cakes at the tea-shop, the burnt crusty nubbings of Mrs Milner’s rock cakes a guarantee of Broomhill’s middle-class, non-shop-bought authenticity. They couldn’t have afforded a house there, though.

Malcolm, not really thinking, often said it would be more sensible to go to the supermarket once a week, and was talking about buying a chest freezer to put in the utility room, but she discouraged him. At the words ‘chest freezer’ she saw her life retreating: lifting deep-frozen carcasses from their bed of ice, spending days watching joints defrost, drip by pink drip. In any case, he didn’t know that when she said she’d done the shopping by ten, she was dissembling: it was rare that she was home before two – she had so many ways of passing the time. A different woman, she often thought, would have dropped in at the pub for a gin and tonic; the Admiral Codrington was eminently respectable, apparently.

Two years before, Mrs Milner had said to her, ‘There’s a florist’s opening where Townsend’s the ironmonger’s used to be.’ She was sitting at Katherine’s table: she liked to take the weight off her feet when they weren’t too busy and, in any case, the eight or nine women who came in regularly, sometimes inviting each other to share a table, more often calling across if the conversation became more than usually interesting, hardly counted as customers to make a fuss of.

‘That’s a shame,’ Miss Johnson, the retired bank clerk, said. ‘It was useful, Townsend’s, for anything small about the house. I’d been hoping there’d be something useful opening up in its place.’

‘You can always buy a box of screws in Woolworth’s, I dare say, Mary,’ Mrs Milner said.

‘It’s not the same,’ Miss Johnson said. ‘It was a useful shop to have round the corner, and I don’t believe I’ve bought a bunch of flowers since Mother died, so a florist’s no use to me.’

‘I like a sprig of rosemary with lamb,’ Mrs Goldsmith said, intruding into another conversation. ‘I think it brings out the flavour.’

‘I don’t suppose Townsend’s found it easy to keep going, you buying a picture hook once every two years,’ Mrs Milner said to Miss Johnson. ‘Those old family firms with everything in little drawers and the assistant taking fifteen minutes to find anything, they’re on the way out, you mark my words. I think it’ll be lovely to have a florist nearby. I might even invite them,’ she went on grandly, ‘to supply the tea-shop with regular bouquets.’

‘That’ll be an improvement,’ Miss Johnson said, somewhat nettled, and poking at the limp anemone in a thumb-sized vase on her table. ‘Goodness, what a day – you’d never think it was June.’

‘I’ve never known June such a wash-out,’ Mrs Milner said, ignoring Miss Johnson’s rudeness. ‘As for the florist’s, they’ll all be buying flowers from it once it’s there, I think you’ll find.’

‘It’s a nice idea,’ Katherine said. ‘You never know – it’s on the way home from my husband’s work. He might take to stopping off there.’ None of the other ladies knew Malcolm, but politely suppressed ribaldry ensued.

‘It’s terrible, the parking in Broomhill,’ Janet Goldsmith said. ‘I’d remember that, Katherine, before you get your hopes up. Have you seen the new knee-length skirts in Belinda’s? Well worth a look.’

‘Buy yourself flowers and save the heartbreak,’ Mrs Milner said, but just then a man, a stranger, came in, bringing a burst of rain with a flapping umbrella, and she got up to fetch him the list of cakes.

Katherine hadn’t noticed the shop-fitting work going on at Townsend’s old premises, but over the next few weeks she took some interest in its progress. As the work came towards a conclusion, it became obvious that it was going to be a high-class florist’s, a cut above the two or three purveyors of scrubby chrysanthemums, tired-out roses and oversized daisies in unnatural colours to be found in the town centre. As soon as the plastering was finished, the decorators put up wallpaper in thin Regency stripes, red and white. Katherine had thought about Regency stripes for her own hall – and she watched with approval when the shop sign, in good solid brass Roman lettering on a dark-blue painted background, went up: REYNOLDS, just that. It wasn’t long before the shop opened, and Katherine went in on the first morning. She had plans.

Katherine had had jobs in the past. Before she knew Malcolm, she had worked in a solicitors’ office, a family firm in Sheffield that had taken her on when her father put her in the way of one of his old golfing cronies. She’d like that job. Nice, it had been, hurrying out of the office in Peace Square, down the steps of the Georgian building, sandstone and worn hammocky, at five thirty to meet her young man waiting there with, often, a protective umbrella held high – Katherine had a beehive, high and shiny as precariously roped-on furniture. It was a shock to remember that the young man must have been Malcolm. There hadn’t been any other young men. He’d been too shy to come in and wait with the senior partner’s secretary even when it was raining, apparently seeing a solicitors’ firm, with offices in a Georgian house in Peace Square, as in a social category above that of a Yorkshire building society.

The beehive had lasted after their wedding, but not long after, the changes of fashion and of her own status dismissing it. And the job at the solicitors’ went, too, Mr Collins having opinions about married women in the office that even then he acknowledged as old-fashioned. She didn’t mind, never having been brought up to stay where she wasn’t wanted, and got another job, actually, in a private boys’ school, a day school, a decade old but housed, like the solicitors’, in a building meant for more domestic and gracious purposes, a mill-owner’s town-house in Broomhill, blackened with soot. A neat line of iron stumps, like orphaned children’s teeth, marked the line where the railings had been before the war. There was no prohibition on married women here, and, indeed, they were employed in preference to virgins, though not through any valuing of motherliness – it was not that sort of school, or that sort of time. The masters wore gowns and often carried, actually carried canes through the corridors; rather, it was presumed that the experience of coition had removed from women any illusions about the male nature. Katherine helped out, her tasks too vague and multiple in that scandalous school to remember, let alone define. They went from sticking plasters on knees and sweeping up leaves to ‘playing the pianoforte’ in assembly and taking the boys to Forge Dam on a local-history expedition, shivering informatively in the laid-on rain. Everything fell under her title, calculated to distinguish not her but the school in the eyes of prospectives, of Headmaster’s Secretary. She was a sort of alternative to the headmaster’s wife, who was a hooting memsahib with the week’s dinners on a list. She’d quite liked that job too; at the end of her day, she could come home and, as never before or since, make Malcolm laugh about it. She had wondered if he wasn’t a little too serious, even as she was marrying him; now he was relaxing, and laughing. It was a happy time. It never occurred to her that stories about terrible schools are always funny to anyone.

The jobs ended with Daniel, and then there was Jane. Maybe, as Jane was going to school for the first time, maybe then Katherine was starting to say to herself the sorts of things that women, even in Sheffield, were saying to themselves in the mid-to-late 1960s, with a sense of what very mid-to-late 1960s things they were to be thinking at all. She might well have been thinking that she could, after all, go back to work in some way. But then Timothy came along – how had that happened? She couldn’t remember having sex after 1962 – but she couldn’t remember buying Malcolm’s socks either, although she must have done. Maybe it had been a part of her unremarkable domestic routine that had gone on automatically. It was a couple of years after Tim had started school before she dared to think of working, and it was only the florist’s opening that put in into her head.

‘Ah,’ the man said, as she came through the door of Reynolds’ that morning. The door was open, the flowers still in boxes, the ranks of gerberas like rows of medals, the chrysanthemums like mop-headed boys, the tulips shocked and upright as corn. The empty vases and buckets were arranged on the shelving display, which ramped up against one wall; the other was covered with a sheet of mirrored glass. ‘Ah – good morning. Good morning,’ he said again, more cheerfully.

‘Are you open?’ Katherine said.

‘Yes, absolutely,’ he said. ‘Just setting everything out. It’s our first morning.’

‘I know,’ Katherine said. ‘We’ve been looking forward to it. Well, you’re getting there steadily.’

‘And you’re our first customer,’ he said. ‘How hilarious. That calls for something, I feel. I don’t know what, exactly. There’s no kettle, so I can’t offer you a cup of tea, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can give you your choice of flowers gratis, as my first customer. We’ve got plenty of those.’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Start as you mean to go on.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ the man said, with a little gesture of relief. ‘Why don’t you sit down? You’re not in a hurry, are you? Sit down and talk to me. I’m just putting the flowers out and then you can choose properly. I’m Nick, by the way.’

‘I’m Katherine,’ Katherine said. ‘Is it just you working here?’

‘Well, at the moment,’ Nick said, lifting a row of yellow gerberas from their box in a single fine movement. ‘I haven’t had time to find an assistant, though of course I’ll be needing one. I suppose I’ll have to advertise and interview and my brother’ll want to have a say, and it all seems a bit…’

Just then Miss Johnson walked past the front window, her green tartan shopping trolley rattling behind her; she peered into the shop and saw Katherine, sitting on the one chair, apparently at ease with a young man struggling with flowers. Her mouth shut sharply. She walked on. She must have been on the point of greeting the new florist, but now she wouldn’t, and Nick would never know he might have been forgiven.

At home, Katherine did not immediately tell anyone that she’d taken a job at the new florist’s in Broomhill. She put the jazz-modern yellow and brown plates, twenty years old, in front of Malcolm, Daniel, Jane and Tim; with oven gloves she put one down for herself. On the dining-table was a red tablecloth. She went back to the kitchen, took off the oven gloves and returned. Nothing was really hers. The plates had been a gift from Malcolm’s mother – a wedding present. She’d chosen it, Malcolm’s mother, as the sort of thing a young couple would like, near on twenty years ago. Now, it looked exactly that: something nobody in particular had ever liked, just some postulated abstract entity of a young couple. The dining-table, another gift or cast-off; a repro of something Edwardian, again Malcolm’s mother’s – ‘Your father liked it,’ she’d said, in a challenging tone, as if Katherine and Malcolm were proposing to get shot of it and not her. Anyway, they’d taken it when Malcolm’s father died and his mother had announced that she’d be moving to a cottage in Derbyshire. Snowed in every winter now, too. Katherine put down the five plates, with chilli con carne on them, a new way to make mince interesting mid-week. Malcolm looked at his, perhaps at the patina of violent orange grease surrounding the mound of meat, then started to eat. Really, only the red tablecloth and the melamine-handled cutlery in this room had been her choice. The rest of it represented agreements, and all of it was potential lumber in Katherine’s mind. And that summed it up. She felt all she’d brought to this family were innumerable and faintly pathetic minor possessions, effortlessly chosen but easily replaced with something similar, or something quite different. The substantive structures of their existence, like the table they ate around every night, had been foisted on her without anyone ever considering that she might like to choose something herself.

She would start work a week later – no point in hanging about, Nick had said, with evident relief. She’d dropped in once or twice since then to talk over her tasks – it wasn’t necessary, Nick said, but she was in Broomhill anyway, as she often was.

‘Here, let me,’ she’d said, on one of her drop-ins, approaching him with opening arms to take a sheaf of sixty yellow roses from him. His lightly bearded face had a suddenly pagan look, a spark of alarm, like an intelligent animal’s.

‘No, no,’ he said, controlling the emotion, looking now amused, boss-like. ‘I can’t let you work yet, not until I start paying you.’

‘Well, I could start properly today,’ Katherine said. ‘You wouldn’t have to pay me the full day. You obviously need help.’

‘I can’t,’ Nick said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to talk it through with my brother. It’s half his money.’

‘Where is he?’ Katherine said.

‘New York,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll mention it at the weekend.’

‘Is he coming over, then?’ Katherine said, treading cautiously. She was inexperienced in lives and brothers like that, New York brothers; she felt in danger of saying something that showed where she was and where she’d seen. What she was.

‘No,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll speak to him on the phone.’

‘Can you do that?’ and ‘That’s an awful expense,’ came to Katherine, but she managed to say, ‘Of course,’ in quite a natural way, and went away quite soon afterwards.

This brother was a new, tantalizing fact, a good one for the tea-shop, but she’d not be in a rush to share it. In repetition, under the unsparing investigation of the Broomhill matrons and virgins, that urbane ‘of course’ would not save her, and she could hardly pass as a woman to whom phone calls to New York brothers were an ordinary matter. Pretence with a Jacqueline Susann flavour made those women’s eyes widen, their lips licked even if it were true, a holiday in Morocco with photographs from Boots; she could not associate herself with this bold life without examining her own, and it started with the furniture.

She could not revolt from the second-hand, passed-down nature of her house’s furnishings – hadn’t she always said she liked old things, family things? – uncomfortably eliding a guilty table her mother-in-law had bought thirty years before with the notion of a ‘family heirloom’. It was rather the sense that her life would pass among superseded objects, things too vast and bulky to throw away without life-changing resolution. She saw herself, elderly, negotiating her own house like a mountaineer with crampons. There was some betrayal of her own existence, too, in the choice of a flower shop. Responsibility; waste; luxury; gardens. That was what it was about. When the time came, she would put on her orange rubber gloves and throw away the stock at the end of the week with a flash of excitement like the anticipation of adultery. Goodness. She would set her face. Nick would fold his arms, study her. She saw the whole scene quite clearly, and she was starting there on Monday. What she had betrayed had, quite suddenly, become not her existence but her husband’s.

That oasis of mutable beauty, bought wholesale, was a startling addition to Broomhill’s black and, where cleaned, yellowish sandstone. Nick’s flowers were the only things sold there both useless and shortlived. Frivolous, unnecessary and lovely.

‘Have you seen the new shop? The flower shop?’ Miss Johnson said, bumping into Katherine a day or two after it had opened. They were outside the post office; this was Miss Johnson’s way of letting Katherine know she had been seen sitting casually with the young man, and had not been seen at all.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Don’t you think it looks lovely?’

‘Lovely?’ Miss Johnson said. ‘Yes, it does. It does look—’ she tried the word out ‘– lovely. It would be nice to have that and an ironmonger’s. You see, I’m not in a forgiving mood. I don’t know where I’ll go for the practical side of things now Townsend’s is gone.’

‘You could go to Marshall’s in Crookes,’ Katherine said, a little impatient at being dragged away from the topic of Nick after so promising a start. ‘There’ll always be ironmongers.’ She’d been thinking, and couldn’t come up with another florist’s in the whole of the west of Sheffield, even in the splendid beech-sheltered ramparts of Ranmoor.

‘Well, some people might think there’s more of a need for ironmongers,’ Miss Johnson said. ‘But you’re right, Marshall’s is perfectly satisfactory.’

Katherine wouldn’t let on she’d be working at Nick’s the next week, and left Miss Johnson to read as best she could the scene she’d witnessed. She was clearly busting to know. She satisfied herself by remarking that the young man seemed nice, and went on. She didn’t mind the prospect of acquiring a reputation for slyness when the news got out in the tea-shop.

Malcolm had to be told, of course, and the evening had to be chosen carefully. He was out two and a half nights a week. Tuesday was his battle re-creation society; Thursday the gardening club; Friday he liked to go out with the staff for a drink in the pub and wasn’t home before eight. ‘Liked to’ in the sense of ‘thought it a good thing to do’: he didn’t have much of a drink, and said they enjoyed it more than he did. Probably enjoyed it more when he’d gone, Katherine always thought. She toyed with the idea of saving it for one of those nights when he’d come in half an hour before bedtime, to limit the discussion. But there probably wouldn’t be much of a discussion anyway. On Wednesday she thought hard and recalled what Malcolm’s favourite dinner was. She shopped and bought it to soften him up. She even thought about getting a bottle of wine, but that seemed too blatant.

‘Steak!’ Malcolm said. ‘And mushrooms!’ He was standing in the kitchen doorway, having changed out of his suit. The room was steamy, loud with the radio and the steak’s sizzle. Most food he said nothing much about. But at either end of the scale, he had two responses: after anything new, he’d set down his fork and say, discouragingly, ‘Makes a change, at least.’ The other thing, the massively keen one, was what he said now, not even after finishing but before. ‘Haven’t had steak for an age.’

‘What’s so funny?’ Daniel said, wandering into the kitchen, looking for something to eat once his dad had gone.

‘Your dad,’ Katherine said, though really it was herself, the neatness of the plan. ‘Don’t start picking, your dinner’s nearly ready.’

‘I’m starving,’ Daniel said.

‘The inexhaustible appetites of the adolescent male,’ Jane said, coming down the stairs.

‘Gi’ o’er,’ Daniel said, lapsing into school talk.

She didn’t change the tablecloth, she didn’t get out anything but their usual weekday plates. For pudding there was, deliberately, the trifle left from the day before – a delicious one with strawberries in it: she’d been softening them up. The whole thing, apart from Tim saying, at one point, ‘I don’t like steak’ (‘Why not?’ ‘It’s got tubes in it’) was a great success. It was almost a pang to remember what she’d done it for; it was quite a glimpse of a perfect family, all sitting up neatly and eating their delicious steak dinner. The kids might as well have said, ‘May I get down?’ at the end.

‘Do you know what?’ Katherine said, when she and Malcolm were alone. ‘I’ve got myself a job.’

Malcolm looked at her in assessment; she looked back, firmly; he dropped his gaze to his empty plate. You could see him recalculating the steak, which had been only enjoyment, a treat.

‘We’re not that short of money,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve worked before. I like having a job. I haven’t had one since the children were born.’

‘What’s all this, then, all of a sudden? You’ve not said anything.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t looking for one. It’s just landed in my lap, in a manner of speaking.’

‘We’re not short of money,’ he said again.

‘It’s to keep myself busy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’

‘All right, then,’ Malcolm said.

She told him about the shop, which he hadn’t noticed although he drove through Broomhill twice a day. That confirmed something she’d instinctively felt. Malcolm, with all his fussing and tweaking at the plants in the garden, the membership of and regular attendance at the garden club, hadn’t had his attention drawn by a new florist’s. Nick’s business and Malcolm’s Thursday-night interest, both apparently concerned with the same thing, were in reality sharply separated. He wouldn’t have connected the shop with his own interest. They were, mysteriously, different things, and she felt the affront she was offering him.

‘Well, I don’t see why not,’ Malcolm said. ‘If you don’t like it, you can always give up. Who’s in charge of the shop?’

‘He’s not in charge,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s his own business.’

‘Oh, I thought it must be a chain,’ Malcolm said. ‘Interflora. Well, it might not work out for him, either.’

And then Katherine told him about Nick.

It had been easy, really. He’d given way limply, and she didn’t know why she’d made such a business about it in her head. She’d had an argument practised and rehearsed in her mind, marshalled her points; and they lay there now like gleaming clockwork devices for someone to come and claim them. She was almost disappointed. All those arguments had been, in their different ways, attacks on him. It was only afterwards, sitting in front of the telly, Daniel out somewhere, Tim and Jane upstairs, heads in books, that she started to feel a little annoyed; the things he’d just accepted, the things he hadn’t asked about. Shouldn’t you ask about the wages, apologetic though they are? She wondered, angrily, about his politeness to her.

At ten, Daniel came in – he’d been at his friend Matthew’s, playing that board game they played. At eleven, Malcolm got up, switched the television off, unplugged it, remarking that it was a relief all those power-cuts had stopped at last. He made the same remark twice a week. They went upstairs. As usual, she went to the bathroom first, stripped off her makeup, creamed her face. Malcolm had left his jacket on the back of a chair, and was just putting it away in the fitted wardrobe. She started to undress, unbuttoning her skirt. He went to the bathroom next; she put on her clean nightdress and, as she always did, took off her bra and knickers underneath it, like a shy bather fumbling with a towel. Through the wall, she could hear the fierce sizzle of his piss in the toilet. She got into bed, taking a book and her reading glasses from the bedside table.

He came back, and undressed without saying anything. She looked at him covertly over the top of her book. His hair was getting longer; untidy, though, and he’d be having it cut soon. He pulled his shirt, blue with a white collar, over his head. The first time she’d seen him naked, three months before they’d married, she’d been struck by the hair on his body; the little tufty patch between his nipples, almost circular, not quite amounting to a hairy chest. He turned now, and there was the other patch she’d not known anyone could have, a rough growth at the bottom of his spine, a monkey flourish. He wasn’t a hairy man; he’d not have a thick beard if he grew one. She noticed now that the rest of his back, which used to be spotty, was now lightly furred. Odd, the way you went on changing as you got older; that was what ageing meant.

He had an order to things: after the shirt, he took off his trousers, then his socks – his thin white legs! Then he put on his pyjama top, fastening one or two of the buttons, before taking his underpants off. Beneath the hem of the pyjamas, the little purplish tip of his penis, dangling absurdly; she’d had no idea about the penis, apart from Michelangelo’s David, and it had seemed long and thin, ugly with veins, a little bit sad, always had. It was something she’d read men worried about. Just then the possibility of sex came to her; she’d creamed her face, but she could wipe it off, strip her nightdress from her; her husband could take off his pyjamas again, and then, all that. It hadn’t been very much like that, ever; she didn’t know why she thought of it like that now. We could get flowers for the house, she thought. All the time; even in the bedroom. Nick, in her head, handed a huge bunch of unsold lilies to her, bearded, solemn, pagan. My life is on the point of change, she said.

And then Malcolm got into bed, and reached for his own book. For fifteen minutes, he read about the English Civil War; for fifteen minutes, before they put the lights out, she read, with less concentration, about an uninvolving girl called Pierrette in a château in Provence.

Although she had started work, Katherine’s morning routine remained the same. From the first morning, she took out a more careful outfit, though, one she’d decided on the night before: a neat jacket with a floral scarf, a pussy-bow tied at the neck. When the weather worsened, she would wear a poncho over it; she’d found and bought a purple one in Debenhams, the end of the week before. She’d sneaked it into the wardrobe, and if Malcolm noticed, she’d say, ‘Oh – this? I don’t wear it often, I know.’ He often didn’t notice. It was her money, she reminded herself.

When she arrived, Nick was already in the shop, the flowers in the boxes. It was fifteen minutes before opening time, and when she rapped on the door, smiling, he looked up, first surprised and then, oddly, relieved – had he thought she wouldn’t turn up?

‘I realized,’ he said, letting her in, the key fumbling in the thick chamois leather of his glove, ‘I don’t have your telephone number. I forgot to ask.’ He locked the door behind her.

‘I’ll write it down for you,’ Katherine said. ‘Now. Where have we got to?’

‘Well, let’s see,’ he said. ‘First things first. A cup of coffee. I’m dying for one.’

He started to pull off his gloves. He was nervous in some way; after all, it was a new business, the flower shop.

‘Let me,’ Katherine said. ‘You carry on with what you’re doing. Where are the things?’

‘I bought a mug for you,’ he said. ‘And the milk’s in the fridge. I remembered to get it on my way in.’

‘I tell you what,’ she said, ‘let’s have a kitty, and I’ll be in charge of the coffee and biscuits. I’ll need to know about your favourites.’

‘I can see we’re going to get on,’ Nick said, going back to stripping the stems of the yellow roses. ‘My favourite biscuits. Well, I like those pink ones, wafers. Or Iced Gems.’

‘My son likes those,’ Katherine said. ‘My younger son.’

‘They’re not a very grown-up sort of biscuit,’ Nick said. ‘I’m sorry for that. But I don’t think I could face the austerity of Rich Tea.’

‘My nan liked those,’ Katherine said. ‘My grandmother. She used to dip them in her tea. As I suppose you’re meant to. So now you know about the biscuit preferences of most of my family.’

‘I didn’t know you had a family,’ Nick said. ‘Though of course you’ve got a family. And what are your preferences in the biscuit line?’

‘Me?’ Katherine said. ‘Oh – anything. I just get what the children like, usually.’

‘The other thing I meant to say – I don’t mind if you don’t want to work on Saturdays.’

‘Saturdays?’ Katherine said.

‘Your family,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll manage.’

‘Oh,’ Katherine said. She hadn’t considered that; the arrangements had been vague. She didn’t want to reject what, for Nick, was evidently some thought-out kindness, and things could change later. ‘That’s very good of you. You’ll manage all right?’

‘I’ll manage,’ Nick said again. ‘Now. Let’s have that coffee and no biscuits – I remembered the milk, the biscuits didn’t occur to me – and we’ll go through the tasks of the week. It’s the same every week.’

Twice a week, on Tuesday morning – ‘but I went on Monday this week’ – and on Friday morning, before the Saturday rush, Nick went in the little van to the flower market. He’d be back before opening time, and together they’d strip the flowers’ foliage, plunge them into the buckets. ‘I’ll just get what tempts me,’ Nick said. ‘I suppose in a bit we’ll find out what sells and what doesn’t.’ That was the fresh stock, which he was dealing with. Apart from the flowers, there were leaves and other greenery, used in making up bouquets. There was, too, a range of dried flowers and grasses so the shop, even at the end of a busy day, wouldn’t look denuded. Some of that, too, could go into a fresh bouquet, like the shining coins of honesty, and some more exotic things: there were crabbed and arthritic fingers of willow twigs, and, against the wall, a fan of peacock feathers. ‘People come in sometimes, and they just buy honesty and peacock feathers,’ Nick said. ‘The trouble is they last for ever, so we won’t see them for another year, and we won’t get rich on that.’

There was, too, a range of vases for sale. ‘You’d be surprised,’ Nick said, ‘– at the number of people – I’ve already discovered this and I’ve only been here a week – who come in and buy a bunch of flowers, they’re the ones who’ve got something to apologize for, to their wives usually, I suppose, and then they remember they haven’t got a vase. You can charge what you like for those.’ Katherine looked at the strange collection: some big square greenish glass ones, a Chinese-looking one with dragons, and half a dozen in brownish pottery, a few Victorian ones with blurred transfers of fruit and vegetables.

‘Well,’ Nick said, ‘I had a flurry of custom on Monday, just after you came in – it must have been you, bringing me luck – and a little bit on Tuesday, but then it died down a bit. I had a good day on Friday, though, and actually, Saturday too. We were closer to running out of stock than I’d expected. Curiosity, I expect – we’ll see what it looks like in a month.’

‘And the vases?’ Katherine said, picking at a stuck-on rose on a goblin fantasy of fruit and flowers, bulging like goitres.

‘Don’t you like them?’ Nick said. ‘I was in York a week or two back, and I saw a florist’s, just closing down. I went in and I bought the stock. It must have been there years. He was glad to get rid of it. I thought it was a good omen.’

‘A good omen?’ Katherine said. ‘Yes, I suppose you could see it like that.’

Nick looked at her solemnly, his boyishly blue eyes, his untidy blond hair; she wondered if he knew what he was doing. All at once, he was laughing. ‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said. ‘If they wouldn’t buy them in York, they’re not going to buy them in Sheffield.’

‘I didn’t mean that, exactly,’ Katherine said, blushing. She shouldn’t kick off by criticizing him.

‘But you don’t like them,’ Nick said.

‘Well,’ Katherine said, ‘not all of them. That one, for instance.’ She ran her hand over it. It bore a jazz-modern pattern, orange and yellow and brown, the sort of thing Malcolm’s mad aunt Susan had had since before the war. ‘That’s fairly horrible.’

‘You don’t think it’ll come back into fashion?’ Nick said, still laughing.

‘And in the meantime we’re to have it cluttering up the shop and frightening off the customers?’

‘I see what you mean,’ Nick said. He took off his chamois gloves and, with his slight hands, picked up the vase. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll christen the good ship Reynolds.’

She followed him to the back of the shop. He gave a sturdy kick to the door. It flung open. The brick courtyard was shaggy with weeds, and a cat threw itself up a wall. ‘Right,’ Nick said. ‘Do you want to do it or shall I?’

‘Do what?’

‘Christen the shop,’ Nick said. ‘All right. I name this good shop –’ he hurled the vase with one movement against the wall ‘– Reynolds.’

The vase bounced, then rolled along the ground, coming to rest at their feet. They looked at it, soberly.

‘It must be melamine,’ Katherine said. ‘Or some such.’

‘I suppose it must,’ Nick said. ‘How hilarious.’ And then they were laughing and laughing; they did not stop until the bell at the front of the shop announced their first customer of the day.

That night, at supper, Katherine told the story; she tried to make it funny.

‘I don’t understand,’ Malcolm said. ‘Why would he try to smash a vase he’d bought?’

‘It was so ugly,’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t know why he bought it in the first place.’

‘Someone might not have thought so,’ Malcolm said seriously. ‘You can’t assume that everyone’s going to have the same taste as you. He’s not going to make a success of it if he goes on smashing his stock like that. I expect he could put it down to accidental damage, though it wouldn’t be exactly honest. If I were you—’

Daniel groaned.

Malcolm looked at him in astonishment. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said.

‘It’s funny,’ Daniel said. ‘He sounds a right laugh, Mum’s boss.’

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s what I’d expect someone of your age to think.’

Daniel groaned again.

‘That’s quite enough, Daniel,’ Katherine said. She looked down at her plate: the jazz-modern orange and brown pattern they’d always had. She ought to do something about it. And she agreed with Daniel: Nick was a right laugh.

She soon discovered that Nick needed someone like her. The shop was, of course, just a business. It took in perishable stock, relying as well on imperishable steady sellers – Nick ran an illogical but quite profitable line in minor stationery by the till as well as a carousel of cards, and it was surprising the number of people who popped in for a card, some of whom found themselves leaving with some flowers as well. (The cards were much more artistic – Monet! – on the whole than the dismal and ancient range to be had in the newsagent’s opposite and, being blank inside, were superior to his faintly common specifications of particular birthdays and particular family recipients.) It was, if you thought of it in an abstract, Malcolmish way, like many other retail businesses.

And yet it was not, because there was the question of the flowers that Nick went to fetch twice a week. Nick, you might easily assume, was a person who had little idea: he projected a kind of uselessness, and a casual Malcolmish auditor might conclude that he had no particular attraction to flowers and no particular aptitude that would make the business a success. But when Nick came in twice a week with his van of flowers, she perceived, without his having to say anything, a kind of magic. That twice-weekly unloading made her feel as if she had carried out some act of betrayal against Malcolm and, in particular, his garden. Malcolm’s garden was a matter of mulch and compost, of feeding and pruning, of weeding and trellises, espaliers, reading. Then for two or three weeks the flowers passed the baton of display from one to the next, with perhaps a brief spurt of mass exuberance in late summer; sometimes, despite all the weeding and reading and feeding, it did not happen at all. One January the three camellias had failed to do anything, just stayed there leggily with their glossy dark leaves, like the picture on a jar of face cream; and Malcolm had raised the question at his horticultural society at the church hall in Crosspool. Then, with all the conflicting advice he’d gathered, he’d come back and read some more. ‘Throw them out,’ she always wanted to say; and Malcolm had observed that he’d see what happened next year, infuriatingly.

The unloading of Nick’s van was a direct affront to that. Thirty perfect roses in each colour, red, white, pink, yellow and, once, exotically green; the masses of carnations, routine and nuptial; the lilies casting their high scent throughout the shop as they slowly opened, the stargazers, the tigers; those were the standards of the shop, and any found not to be perfect was discarded, not nurtured. The glassed-in gardens, heated with oil-stoves, that bred these frail fantasies, she longed to see those. They had to come all year round, the lilies for the Christmas table, the red roses for Valentine’s Day, because the dates when people wanted flowers – a wedding, a funeral, what turned out to be the frantic rush of 14 February and the guilty expressions before Mother’s Day – did not coincide with the natural lives of the flowers. And along with them came the exotics, things that had caught Nick’s eye. Some sold; some, like the almost tawdry beauty of the bird-of-paradise flowers at seventy pence a stem, did not. And Katherine knew that a man who had pinned his future on things that would burst out in colour for a few days and die was not someone who might as well be selling cabbages. That was Malcolm’s phrase for anything like that; Malcolm, whose garden, when it flowered, never ventured as far as the numbing scents of the flower shop. It was not precisely disapproving. The bookshop, the art gallery at Hunter’s Bar, the new record shop at the end of the moor where Daniel spent his Saturdays, casting out a deafening racket, painted an intimidating black inside, the scarlet legend VIRGIN on the shop face – Malcolm dismissed in them any higher aspirations, any apparently counter-cultural tendencies, with the observation that they were there to make money, they might as well be selling cabbages. But of Nick’s shop that was not true.

‘I went to university here,’ Nick said. ‘My brother too. Actually, I came here because he did. Studied the same thing he did, too. Law.’ He was watching her put together a bouquet; she had thought she knew how to do it, but he’d taught her how to do it properly. Start with one, make a spiral round it, alternating the flowers and the foliage, holding the bouquet in the left hand, adding with the right, and there it was: clip with the secateurs, a twist of ribbon and into the cellophane. Easy, after the first five.

‘You didn’t want to go into the law?’ Katherine said.

‘Well, I did for a bit,’ Nick said. ‘My brother went into a bank in the City, in London, and he’s done very well. Legal adviser. In New York for five years, but he likes it there. I think he’ll stay. Met an American girl, too.’

‘I used to work for a solicitors’ firm in town,’ Katherine said. ‘Before the children were born.’

‘That’s what I did, for a bit,’ Nick said. ‘I went to law school in Guildford after Sheffield, and then I got a job in London, big firm. Didn’t really suit me, though.’

‘That was a good job,’ Katherine said. She couldn’t help it. Sometimes she talked with Malcolm’s views.

‘Oh, I know,’ Nick said. ‘Ghastly. I did it for five years, and by the end of it, I was a sort of expert on this one tiny corner of the law. I won’t bore you with the details – it was something to do with industrial-property law. It came up all the time, and the answer was always the same, so whenever anyone found themselves in this one sticky situation, they’d be recommended to come to Oldman’s, who had an expert in the subject, meaning me, and I’d give them the same answer I’d given someone else the month before. And they’d pay some enormous fee, and I’d go home to my lovely flat in Little Venice – charming, you know, but quite a stink by the end of a hot summer – and have deep existentialist thoughts about the nature of existence. Well, after five years, I was reading Kierkegaard, not quite in the office, but nearly.’

A lot of this was obscure to Katherine. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said.

‘But in the end it was my dear old aunty Joan who came to the rescue. She died and left me a chunk of her money. I suppose she was still thinking of me as a nice little boy with perfect manners and curly blond hair and a velvet suit at tea on Sundays.’

‘Did you have curly blond hair?’ Katherine said. ‘How sweet.’ She looked, unable to help herself, at Nick’s hair now: tousled but, yes, curly, blond.

‘Perhaps not the velvet suit,’ Nick said. ‘My father, of course, was furious – he’s a lawyer too, great big house in Barnes, wanted us to follow in his footsteps, but I thought, One money-making lawyer’s enough. I’m going to sell the flat in Little Venice, take Aunty Joan’s money and go –’ he pulled a face and threw his hands up in mock horror ‘– into trade. Bugger.’

‘I could have told you that would happen if you didn’t put the coffee down first,’ Katherine said tranquilly.

‘It’s gone everywhere. Where’s that cloth?’

‘By the sink, where it should be. And your brother?’

‘Oh, Jimmy? Well, he was tickled by the idea, and I dare say he wanted to annoy the old man, too, so he put some money in. He just wants a finger in the pie. He was always like that, even when we were little boys, wanted to establish the rules of the game himself before we started playing.’

‘And your mother?’ Katherine said.

‘She died,’ Nick said. ‘Years ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Katherine said.

‘It was years ago,’ Nick said.

He was not one to accept sympathy, she found out. There were a couple of other incidents when, over the flowers and a cup of coffee in the morning, she tried to offer sympathy, and was rebuffed, first with surprise and then with faint amusement, as if his predicament were more of a shared joke than anything else. She had the impression, for instance, that his relationship with his father was difficult and oppressive, a Marxist nightmare of exploitation and liberation; Katherine had little idea of what Little Venice and Barnes might mean. ‘He’s not as bad as all that,’ Nick said. ‘He’s quite looking forward to coming up some weekend, actually, to see the shop. My brother said he said, “Well, at least someone in the family’s going to be making some money in an honest way,” as if I was going into the manufacture of – I don’t know – steel things, whatever they make in Sheffield.’

‘How hilarious,’ Katherine said. It was something Nick said. And the discovery of Nick’s response to sympathy there, or over his dead mother or, another instance, over a faintly outlined tale of unsuccessful love, was only one of several things she learnt about him. She was mastering the subject of Nick in pieces, from his favourite biscuit to the envisaged beauty of his future life, and she rehearsed it to herself on the daily bus ride home, on the fifty-one, as if it were her forthcoming specialist subject on Mastermind. Rehearsed it, too, in front of her family over dinner each night.

Jane could see that her mother was making a mistake with this. The rhythms of their day had been firmly established: she and Timothy would get on the same bus, the fifty-one, her with her friends and he with his friend, Antony, who lived just down the road. Two stops after, Daniel would get on, his school tie pulled down, a huge fat knot on his chest and just an inch or two of tie poking out, his black sports bag slung round his shoulders – she’d be getting on there next year, when she went to Flint. They ignored each other, Daniel with his noisy friends talking smut or football noisily, evicting the kids who didn’t know better than to bag the back seat on the top deck. It was only when they were walking down the muddy track after they’d got off the bus at the top of the road that they coagulated, usually after Daniel had cast a few showy insults their way. But then they’d be home, and there would be Mother, too, having started cooking dinner, the house bright and tidy. They all had keys, even Tim, but they hadn’t often used them.

That had changed, and now, when they got home, they opened up the house themselves, and it was grey and preserved from the morning, the breakfast things still in the sink, like an abandoned catastrophe. At first they were bewildered, at a loss, then afternoon television, children’s television, rose up like an appalling colour possibility; the telephone, too, which they fought over like rats. And there was, too, the possibility of bickering, always there but never quite bursting out in this way. Bickering: it was mostly tormenting poor Timothy, who nevertheless hardly seemed to suffer, just to accept leadenly the complex feints of Jane and Daniel’s mockery. Too often, even Jane thought, after a few weeks of her mother’s new job, as Katherine returned, towards six, she must have been greeted with three lined-up children, two faces sweetly composed, hands behind their backs, a third’s red and recently washed with a thoroughness surely slightly suspicious.

But if Katherine was suspicious, she did not show it, and her ‘I wish you two would leave Timothy alone’ survived – survived for years, in fact – only in their private exchanges, like a parrot-learnt and comic phrase from a school language that survives fossilized into adulthood when all possibility of expansion into grammatical expression has disappeared. Something decisive had changed when, a few weeks in, their mother came through the door, a little tousled but with a careless glow to her beyond what the weather could bestow, to be greeted with exactly this butter/mouth tableau, and said only, ‘How hilarious.’ A phrase Jane knew to be a possible expression but had never heard from her mother before and, reading its origins correctly, found there were more things to blush over than shame at having given your younger brother a Chinese burn while the elder sat on his chest.

But life was quickly full of such embarrassments. She wondered her father was not touched by it. Jane had learnt a lesson in behaviour from Daniel. That year, there had been a new girl at school. There were Indians in Sheffield, you saw them often in town, but they were poor and lost-looking and Ajanta was not like that.

‘My father,’ she said, on her first morning, ‘is a professor at the university.’ She said that, just going up to them in the playground at the first break, not waiting to be invited or anything. They’d been about to play a round of Witches and Fairies, but the plan evaporated. Anyway, they all felt a bit too old for that.

‘Where are you from?’ Anne, always the quickest to nose, said.

‘Bombay, originally,’ Ajanta said, ‘but we’ve been in America the last three years.’

‘Bombay,’ Anne said. ‘Where’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s a city,’ Ajanta had said, not put off, ‘in the south of India. Have you heard of India?’

‘Have you got brothers and sisters?’ Jane found herself asking.

‘Yes,’ Ajanta said. ‘I’ve got a sister. She’s going to Flint – is that what it’s called? And there’s my parents and Meena.’

‘Who’s Meena?’ Anne said deridingly, trying still to recoup some credit.

‘She’s my nurse,’ Ajanta said.

‘Your nurse? Are you ill or summat?’

‘No,’ Ajanta said. ‘You must know the use of the word “nurse”, to mean nursemaid. We say ayah. She’s a sort of family servant.’ Awed, they fell back.

But it hadn’t been long – the other side of an alarming birthday party, full of strange puddingy slices, covered with glitter you didn’t know whether to eat or not, and everything brought in not by Ajanta’s heavy-lidded mother, smoking away on the telephone, but by the tiny Meena who Anne, irretrievably, had mistaken for her – before the subject of Ajanta had taken over Jane’s conversation at home. What she said, what they ate, what Mrs Das had said about the standard of teaching in the West, as she confusingly called Sheffield, the games they had played and what Bombay was like, all a substitute for talking about Ajanta herself. She hadn’t been aware of it; it was only when Daniel and, amazingly, Tim had launched into a derisive chorus of ‘Ajanta says, Ajanta says,’ that she realized she’d been talking about her for days, weeks. It was something you ought to keep to yourself, whatever the something was you were immuring. She knew that now, at the cost of her besotted friendship – because, of course, you couldn’t go on as you had before, even in the playground where Daniel and Tim weren’t watching. The observation followed you even there. Ajanta herself hadn’t seemed all that bothered, or even to have noticed. But it was something you had to discover. You just didn’t talk like that. She’d found that out now.

But her mother, apparently, had never found that out. Here she was, night after night, talking about the flower shop, the day she’d had. It was like an itch in your nose, and you didn’t want to watch someone picking his nose over dinner. It was worst on Saturdays and Sundays when she didn’t work: she kept at it all day.

‘That’s looking nice,’ she said, coming up behind Malcolm, down on the lawn in kneepads. He was tugging at some weeds with a gardening fork, his gardening shirt on. It was a sunny day. Jane was sitting at the table on the patio with a book, the Chalet School; it was getting to an exciting bit, the new girl trapped by a sudden avalanche in a mountain hut with the strict history mistress and nothing but a few dry biscuits to see them through. Her dad had gone out early, and was working round the beds steadily, anti-clockwise, like a battery-powered machine. He’d got to about ten o’clock on the semi-circular dial. She paused, and paid attention.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The hostas, they’re doing well this year. Kept the slugs off for once. That trick with the orange peel seemed to do the trick.’

‘That’s a good job,’ her mother said. ‘It looked terribly untidy, all those bits of peel scattered all over the place. At least it’s serving a useful purpose. That’s lovely, too, isn’t it?’

‘The clematis? Yes, it’s had a good year. You never quite know with clematis.’

Her mother hummed a little tune. She was on the verge of saying something. She ran her fingers through the climbing plant growing over the fence, the foaming purple; she raised it to her nose, and let it drop. There was no scent. Jane knew that.

‘Did we never think of growing lilies?’ her mother said.

‘What’s that?’ her father said. Her mother repeated herself.

‘No,’ he said shortly. His voice was harsh with physical effort; his face, turned down, was flushed. ‘I never did. They come up, and they die off. Not much of a show, unless you’ve a lot of them, and nine-tenths of the year they’re nothing much to look at.’

‘I love them,’ her mother said. ‘Nick does very well with them.’

‘Who does?’

‘Nick,’ her mother said. ‘They’re very popular – they have a lovely scent for the house. Or there are gorgeous ornamental grasses you can grow now. Or honesty – you know what I mean by honesty? Even tulips. I love a big show of tulips.’

‘We have tulips,’ her father said. ‘Over there. Can always put some more in, if you fancy.’

‘I’d forgotten about the tulips,’ her mother said.

‘It’s not the time of year for them,’ her father said. ‘They were doing well six months back. I’m surprised you forgot.’

‘We’ve got such a lot of tulips now in Nick’s shop,’ her mother said. ‘You forget about when things bloom naturally.’

‘They’ll be forced,’ her father said.

‘I suppose that’s right,’ her mother said. She stood, irresolute. Jane’s father carried on tugging at the perhaps non-existent weeds, never having turned to look at her; and in a moment she went back into the house. She’d find nobody to talk to about Nick in there, Jane thought. She patted Jane’s head absently as she passed.

Jane thought the situation through, and decided the best way to deal with it. Anne was still sort of her best friend. A week or two later, after school, they went round to Anne’s house. She lived in Lodge Moor, in a modern house, brick-yellow, surrounded by innumerable stunted shrubs planted by the original builders. The ill-fitting windows rattled all year round with the ferocious wind. They went up to Anne’s bedroom: she was allowed to put posters up with sellotape, and her walls were lined with images of big-eyed brown horses, on which Anne was mad, and two or three pop-singers, just as glossy in their brown big-eyed gaze.

‘My mum’s having an affair,’ Jane said, once the door was closed.

‘An affair?’ Anne seemed frightened but impressed.

‘It’s happening everywhere, these days,’ Jane said, and sighed. ‘I only hope it won’t lead to divorce. It would break my heart if my parents split up.’

‘Who would you live with?’ Anne said.

‘I don’t know,’ Jane said. She hadn’t thought things out this far.

‘It’d be your dad,’ Anne said. ‘Your mum’d be off with her fancy man. It’d be all her fault – you wouldn’t let a woman who’d done that walk off with the children too. It’d not be fair.’

Jane let the full, lovely tragedy wash over her, its forthcoming bliss. She’d practically be an orphan, her and Daniel and Tim, coping bravely after a family tragedy; how they would look at her, when she moved up to Flint next year! ‘I don’t know,’ she said, honesty cutting in. ‘I don’t know that it’s come to talk of divorce yet.’

‘What’s your dad think?’

‘I don’t know that he knows,’ Jane said.

‘Well, how d’you know, come to that?’ Anne said. ‘You’re making it up.’ Then Anne got up, apparently bored with the subject. ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I got it down town on Saturday.’

She opened her white-painted louvred wardrobe doors. That was one of the things about Anne, along with her horses and her snappiness, her incredible wardrobe: there were things in there she’d grown out of, she having no small sister or cousin to pass things on to, all pressing against each other stiflingly. You couldn’t help but feel sorry for Anne’s clothes, suffocating each other in that breathless wardrobe. ‘Look,’ Anne said, and from the bottom of the wardrobe, she fished out a scrap of cloth, white and glistening, its price tag still on it even though it had been tossed to the bottom of the wardrobe, and a pair of strappy white shoes. ‘I got a halter-top and a pair of slingbacks from Chelsea Girl. The shoes were three ninety-nine.’

Jane didn’t know whether that was a lot or not. ‘Your mum go with you?’

‘Course she did,’ Anne said. ‘She paid. I’m going to put them on.’

She shucked off her school shirt. Jane looked, with envy, at her starter bra. Anne’s mother had bought it for her the first time she’d asked. No one else in their class had managed it, and Jane certainly not. But Anne didn’t have an older brother who’d overheard and laughed his head off. She put on the halter-top, twisting and fiddling with the strings behind. She slipped off the heavy brown school shoes, not untying the laces, and pushed on the slingbacks, squashing them on in a hurry, and then, striking a pose, the price tag dangling from her waist over the grey school skirt, she pushed forward her left hip and pouted. She twirled, the strap of her starter bra across her bare back.

‘Nice,’ Jane said.

‘Go on, you try them on,’ Anne said, and so they started to play, the lipstick coming out, the hairbrushes, the materials of femininity. Most of their afternoons turned to this.

‘I’m not making it up,’ Jane said, after a while, their makeup smeared, their outfits half on, half thrown off across the bed.

‘Making what up?’

‘My mum and her affair. I’m not,’ Jane said. ‘She talks about him all the time. She can’t stop herself. It’s like you and horses.’

‘Me and horses? What’re you talking about?’ Anne got up and peered into the mirror, admiring her face, this way and that.

‘It’s like the way, you know, you love horses, you, you’re mad about them, and all the time, it’s horses this, horses that.’

‘I thought you liked horses too,’ Anne said, drawing back a bit, offended. ‘I wouldn’t talk about them if you weren’t just as interested as I am.’

‘I am interested,’ Jane said, feeling that the conversation was getting away from her. ‘But you love horses, you.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Anne said. She sank to her haunches, clasping her knees to her chest like great adult breasts. ‘I’m not saying I don’t.’

‘So you talk about them, don’t you?’

‘If you say so,’ Anne said, not quite convinced.

‘Well, it’s like that with my mum,’ Jane said. ‘Every day it’s “Nick says this, Nick did that, Nick likes ketchup with his chips.”’

‘Everyone likes ketchup with their chips,’ Anne said. ‘That doesn’t prove anything, if you ask me.’

‘Yes,’ Jane said, gathering the logic of her case. ‘Yes, that’s it, though. If everyone likes ketchup on their chips, why’s she bringing up Nick especially? You see what I mean?’

‘You’re daft, you,’ Anne said, ‘I think you’re just romancing. Anyway, you don’t want your mum and dad to split up, do you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jane said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

‘Who’s this Nick, then?’

‘He’s her boss. She got a job, working in a flower shop. In Broomhill, it is.’

Anne sighed. She was eight months older than Jane: sometimes she took advantage of this difference to make an emphatic point. ‘I would say,’ she said heavily, ‘there’s nothing in it. I’m glad my mum doesn’t have to go out to work.’

‘My mum doesn’t have to either,’ Jane said. ‘She just wants to. I know what. I’m going to go down there one day after school, I want to have a look at him. Do you want to come?’

‘What’ll that prove one way or the other?’

‘Are you going to come?’

‘If you insist,’ Anne said, and then, from downstairs, her mother called something. She rolled her eyes. The call came again. She got up from her squatting position, and impatiently flung open the door. ‘What do you want?’ she shouted rudely.

‘There’s squash, girls,’ the polite voice floated up. ‘And biscuits. I know the sort you like.’

‘We’re busy,’ Anne yelled. ‘We’re talking about Jane’s mum. She’s got a lover.’

There was a short silence downstairs. Jane could feel herself blushing. ‘I wish—’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sure she’s not, not really,’ Anne’s mum called. ‘There’s squash and biscuits. Shall I bring them up?’

But the idea of going down Broomhill the next afternoon had been agreed on. The next day they had geography last thing; Anne had volunteered the pair of them to put away the Plasticine contour map of Yorkshire the class was making, and the labelled cut-away of the strata of rock underneath a coal-mine. The task had been occupying them for weeks – it was supposed to be ready for Christmas Parents’ Day and they were all sick of it and Miss Barker’s shrill exhortations: ‘I don’t care whether it’s done or not, you’re only showing yourselves up.’ For weeks, as if it were tainting them with the nightmarish horror of its incompletion, there had been a rush to the door as the bell rang. But this evening Anne lingered, tugging at Jane’s skirt as she, like the rest, got up, slinging her bag over her shoulder. Miss Barker had been about to collar someone at random as usual, but, with a mistaken glitter in her eye, she alighted on Jane and Anne, fingered them as dawdlers for the punishment of putting the stuff away. Anne and Jane, they weren’t good girls – they’d already been done for giggling five minutes into one of her lecture-reminiscences, and would have been done worse if Miss Barker had known that Jane had giggled at Anne saying, ‘It’s her wants a lover,’ meaning Miss Barker. So she couldn’t have known that Anne’s dawdling was in aid of volunteering for the task, or at any rate – you wouldn’t want to show Miss Barker that much willing – allowing herself and Jane to be landed with it. Jane thought she might have been consulted – ‘There’s good girls,’ Miss Barker said when they were done, which was enough to make you puke – but she saw the point when they’d finished folding the plans, scraping the mess of the afternoon’s Plasticine off the tables, put the whole almond-smelling bright geologies back into 4B’s geography cupboard, and gone out, fifteen unhurried minutes after the end of school. It was as empty as a weekend glimpse; everyone had gone, swept off in the fifty-one bus. She and Anne shouldered their bags and turned in the other direction, of Broomhill, without having to explain to anyone, and that was a good thing.

All the schools were turning out: the big boys and girls from the George V in their standard black blazers, and the snooty ones, the girls in purple from St Benet’s, where you paid to go, like Sophy next door to Anne, where she claimed you got to learn Russian and, like drippy, bleating Sophy, to produce the horrible sheep-like noise of the oboe too. They were all heading in the same direction, the opposite one to Jane and Anne. Jane felt like a truant, the two of them in their ordinary clothes.

‘Do you think Barker cares?’ Anne said.

‘Cares about what?’ Jane said.

‘About Parents’ Day,’ Anne said. ‘She goes on about it enough.’

‘I reckon she’ll get the sack if it’s not ready,’ Jane said, ‘if it’s not perfect, that geology thing.’

‘I hope she does,’ Anne said. ‘We might get someone who doesn’t—’

‘“When I was in Africa,”’ Jane quoted, a favourite conversational opening of Miss Barker’s, liable to lead to any subject, and they laughed immoderately, clutching their stomachs and saying it three or four times.

‘She made me eat cabbage once,’ Anne said, ‘when she was sitting in the teacher’s place on our table at dinner. I hate cabbage.’

‘She’ll have had to eat worse in Africa,’ Jane said. ‘She’ll not have sympathy for you, being fussy over a plate of cabbage, when you think what she’s had to force down.’

‘Missionaries from a pot,’ Anne said. ‘I dare say.’

‘Worms and grubs,’ Jane said. ‘Toasted over an open fire.’

‘Only like marshmallow,’ Anne said.

‘Not much like,’ Jane said.

‘But cabbage, it’s horrible,’ Anne said. ‘She made me eat it, she said it didn’t taste of much. I think it tastes right horrible.’ Jane agreed, and they went on.

‘“When I was in Africa,”’ Anne quoted again, but she hadn’t thought of how it could go on after that and fell silent. Missionaries, cannibals, and that right funny film in Geography with a black man in a wig like a lawyer’s where they’d laughed and Miss Barker’d turned the lights up to talk in low serious tones about (one of) her disappointments.

There was the Hallam Towers on the left, and on the right, the gloomy ericaceous drive that led up to the blind school – there were dozens of blind children up there: you never saw them. And then the library, and then they were in Broomhill. It was a journey you took with your mum and dad, perhaps; it wasn’t a schoolday journey. So they were a little bit solemn as they turned the corner into Broomhill proper, with its parade of shops, marking not what they passed but what they were heading towards.

Jane suddenly thought how unwise this idea had been, to turn up without warning her mother. What if – her novelist’s imagination creaked into gear and saw, clear as anything, her mother and a young lover, a David Cassidy perhaps, embracing and kissing in a bower of flowers in the shop window. But it could not be helped now. For some unspoken reason, they did not cross the road. Over there, the flower shop’s awning, pink and domed, the only one sheltering the Broomhill street, like a flushed, guilty, cross and bad forehead, and, inside, a figure, two figures, moved, gathering, circling, busy.

They stood opposite, watching. Jane clutched her bag. ‘Let’s—’ she said feebly, but it was too late. They had been seen. The figures had paused as if surprised, then one came to the broad window, resolving its dark outline into her mother, not bearing the surprised, suspicious expression Jane had envisaged, but a flash of uncustomary delight as the other figure came up behind her. Jane raised her arm to wave, but was arrested by an insight as she took in the worried face beside her mother.

It was Anne’s insight, too. ‘But he’s old,’ she said. ‘I thought—’

‘What did you think?’ Jane said, snapping a little. She already felt defensive about this man.

‘He doesn’t look like anyone’s lover,’ Anne said.

‘I never said he was,’ Jane said irrationally. She didn’t need to come closer: she somehow knew what this man was like, better than her mother could, and she could surely see that what animation he possessed was a matter of sparks thrown off by a chill and flinty interior. She was right: Nick had aspects of fire, could briefly blaze, but they were mere sparks, giving little light and no heat, capable only of a short spectacle, of the casual infliction of harsh smarts on anyone standing by, foolishly admiring.

As for Nick: he ran that shop for another ten years. But whenever he looked out of the shop window and saw someone, two people, on the opposite side of the road, inspecting his façade, he always felt that same sudden way. He always felt the same as he did that first afternoon. And then, they were only two schoolgirls.

‘It’s my daughter,’ Katherine said. ‘And her friend. They never said.’

‘Ask them in,’ Nick said.

It had been eighteen months or so before when Nick and Jimmy had had the idea. They’d been in Jimmy’s new house in Fulham. Jimmy said Chelsea, though it was really Fulham. Miranda, Jimmy’s wife, certainly said Chelsea. She was as decisive about that as she was about the fact that Nick, and Jimmy’s other not very desirable but probably useful colleagues could be offered drinks at five thirty, but shouldn’t expect to stay for dinner. Colleagues! Ha! After all, the nanny’d be bringing little Sonia in her best dress down for dinner: a nice thing – as Miranda said, voice rising – if she grew up mixing with people like Nick.

‘You won’t have any difficulty finding a taxi on the street,’ Miranda would say, drifting through and interrupting their conversation. ‘This is Chelsea, after all. It’s not, it’s not fucking, what, Streatham or somewhere.’ Miranda’s hair curled out in a single wave backwards about her features. She’d flick it back, give Nick or whatever-his-name-was a level stare, her mascaraed or false eyelashes held painfully apart, go to the bamboo-fronted bar, and, with leisurely disdain, mix herself a Dubonnet and gin, three fat ice cubes and a straw, before returning to the kitchen to shout at Solange, the put-upon au pair, acquired, like so much else in this house, in one of Jimmy’s fits of sexual ambitiousness, and now hanging around, disappointing him and annoying Miranda.

The house in Fulham was a step up from the two-bedroom flat in Islington. The money had been flooding in so fast that Jimmy had had a job knowing what to do with it, keeping it in fat bundles (he’d once confided) in a painted oak chest under little Sonia’s bed and taking it out periodically to press it into the hands of shop assistants. The results – a pair of gold-tasselled sofas glowering at each other across the drawing room like a pair of retired rival strippers, a whole pack of waist-high china hounds glistening throughout the open-plan living area, vast surfaces of built-in brown smoked mirrors, ankle-high white shagpile and two at least of those horrible leather rhinoceroses you saw in Liberty’s. The results all bore something of the bewilderment of the moment of their liberation, as Jimmy brought out a wad of crinkled fivers and counted out several dozen of them in a more than respectable shop. He’d have paid cash for the house if he could; as it was, he was reduced to transferring it from bank to bank to bank first. Nick put the money Jimmy handed over irregularly but lavishly into a bank account and worried about that all the time, though it wasn’t an account in his own name.

‘I’m fed up of it,’ Nick had said. ‘I’ve done this too often. I’m getting too old for it.’

‘No reason why you can’t go on for ever,’ Jimmy said. He stretched out in his armchair – a vast leather job, like an intricate wooden puzzle in its manoeuvrability of parts, given to strange hummings and shiftings at Jimmy’s fingertip command. He looked as if he might stretch out his arm for, what?, an august cigar. Or just another whisky to go with the one nestling in his fat groin.

‘I don’t like it,’ Nick said. ‘I’ll do it one more time, I promised, but that’s it. I’m too old for it, you’ve got to find someone else to help us out.’

‘The older you get,’ Miranda said, wandering in – she’d been listening through the serving hatch, ‘the better you get at it. More believable. No one’s looking at you. When you’re bald and seventy—’

‘Thanks, darling,’ Jimmy said. ‘Now go and—’ He flicked parodically in the air, readjusting an imaginary blonde hairdo, not taking his eyes off Nick.

‘Fuck off,’ Miranda said, not aggressively, but she went.

‘Silly bitch,’ Jimmy said.

‘How hilarious,’ Nick said.

‘Hilarious,’ Jimmy said. ‘Unless you’re married to it.’

‘She’s all right, Miranda,’ Nick said.

‘I know,’ Jimmy said, and it was his voice rising now. ‘I wouldn’t. Have her any. Other way. But what are you saying?’

‘Nothing, I suppose,’ Nick said.

They sat there for a moment. Jimmy got up and refilled his glass, a heavy crystal pail. It might have been chosen for its effectiveness when thrown in marital rows. He didn’t offer to refill Nick’s. In any case he had half an inch or so of gin and tonic left.

‘I tell you what,’ Jimmy said, coming back and flinging his legs over the side of the vast leather contraption.

‘What?’ Nick said.

‘We’ve got to sort something out,’ Jimmy said. ‘This might work out all right.’ He was talking about the money problem. Nick had meant him to. He’d evidently been on at Miranda about it; Miranda had been on at him. He recognized the rhythm of the complaint. ‘I reckon a nice quiet little business, you in charge, everything looks hunky-dory. Somewhere outside London.’

‘Come on,’ Nick said. ‘I’ve always lived in London.’

‘Not in London,’ Jimmy said.

‘Forget it,’ Nick said.

‘Christ, you’re difficult,’ said Jimmy, who was not Nick’s brother. They went right back: Nick’s mum had lived in the same street as Jimmy’s family when they were children, Nick an occasional holiday visitor – his parents divorced, it was his father who hung on to him mostly, paying for the good school, though his mother got him half the holidays. Jimmy was a permanent resident of the shabby suburb. They’d hated each other, thrown stones, shouted names, then one day they’d met each other down at the shopping-trolley-stuffed Wandle, had tortured frogs together one wide-eyed afternoon with a bicycle pump, and that had been that. ‘I’m suggesting something might suit you. A nice little shop somewhere, I don’t know – Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Derby, Exeter, Sheffield, Bristol. Sells stationery. Whatever. Looks nice. You do the books every Friday, no one troubles you, all looks nice and proper, even pay the taxes the end of the year. Why not? Posh boy like you, they’d lap you up.’

‘Why not London?’

‘You don’t want to be in London,’ Jimmy said.

‘No,’ Miranda called through, ‘you don’t.’

‘Why doesn’t he want to be in London?’ little Sonia said, coming in in her regulation evening outfit, an inflammable party dress shining like royal icing, red ribbons popping in and out of the hem to match her red patent slingbacks.

‘That’s enough,’ Miranda said, following her; she might have meant it for Sonia, but she was looking at Nick. He went.

It seemed to him that nothing had been settled, that it was just an idea of Jimmy’s, which had come and would go. Certainly, through all the arrangements for the next trip, he didn’t mention it again, or suggest that this might be Nick’s last. Nick was more nervous than he’d ever been: the guys out there, they knew him well and obviously thought his demeanour odd. It was almost as if, without him wanting it, his body was conspiring to bring this occupation to an end by crippling his boldness with the appearance of guilt. But he got back all right, and after the last stages had been gone through, the money safely logged and counted, Jimmy had brought the whole thing up again.

It was Miranda’s day off, and Jimmy asked Nick to come with him and Sonia (‘Don’t tell Miranda, and you, don’t tell Mummy about him coming with us, darling, and if you’re good I’ll buy you – what do you want most, darling?’) to, of all places, the zoo. It was a dank day, not quite raining but in its London way not quite not raining either; the air was heavy with moisture. Behind bars, the show-stoppers cowered, the lions flat out on their sides, like half-eviscerated carcasses on their way to being rugs. Even the polar bears, presumably used to worse than the gloom of a London November afternoon, had a disgruntled air, casting hungry eyes upwards.

‘I like them,’ Sonia said.

‘They’d eat you up in one gulp,’ Nick said humorously. He was not much good with children, who generally knew this.

‘Don’t go putting nightmares into her head,’ Jimmy said. ‘They wouldn’t eat you, darling.’

‘I know that,’ Sonia said. ‘He’s just being stupid, this man. I can’t listen to things like that, I can’t remember them, neither.’

‘All right,’ Nick said. ‘Fair enough.’

‘I’d like to have one,’ Sonia said. ‘I know you can’t have one, not in a house, but I’d like one, to have rides on, maybe, and you could put your face in his fur, sometimes I reckon.’

‘Yeah, that’d be nice,’ Jimmy said. ‘You ask your mum. Maybe she’ll get you one.’

‘Don’t be so silly,’ Sonia said. ‘I want to see the penguins now. They come from the same place as these polo bears.’

‘No, they don’t,’ Nick said. ‘They come from the other end of the earth. The polar bears live in the north, penguins live in the south.’

‘It’s a bit cold, isn’t it, darling?’ Jimmy said to his daughter. ‘Don’t you want to go and see some inside animals?’

‘No,’ Sonia said. Today she was in a heavily embroidered Afghan coat over a puffed and ruched red-and-green dress, more ribbons, but now sort of gypsy ribbons. Nick’s nightmare: that Sonia be abducted from his company, and he be obliged to describe her wardrobe to the police. ‘I think what I want is to see the penguins now, on their slides. I like their slides. I’d like to have a go on one, I reckon. I went inside once and I looked at the inside animals. And I liked the first one, because it was small and furry and you could put it in your sleeve and then it would look out at you and go—’ she gestured at her nose with her little fist in its fur mitten, making a small squeaking noise ‘– but then in the next case there was another small and furry animal and that wasn’t quite so nice. And the lady I was with’ – adult, drawling boredom – ‘oh, you know that lady I mean’ – normal voice – ‘that lady I meant, she made me go round every case in the inside part of the zoo, and do you know? Every case, it had in it a different small furry animal, apart from the ones where the animal was supposed to be hiding at the back. And I liked the small furry animals at first but after a while I got really a little bit bored of them all. But she made me go round all of them, and I think really they were all the same animal. They were quite sweet, but they weren’t very exciting. I think I want to see the penguins now and the real slide.’

‘I know what you mean, sweetheart,’ Jimmy said. He didn’t seem to have been listening, but Nick knew what she meant: the world was full of small furry animals with large eyes, and only the first ones you came across would you feel like putting up your sleeve. After that, you’d be wise to their small furry ways, and could step past their cases with a light step. He’d rather go and see the penguins now, too.

‘It’s all settled,’ Jimmy said, when they were at the penguins’ enclosure, watching their antic waddle.

‘Yeah?’ Nick said, not following.

‘The shop,’ Jimmy said. ‘The shop I was on about.’ The penguins hesitated: over their pool was a double slide, a double helix, and at the top of it they crowded, as if with empty bravado. It had once been white, but the paint was peeling, the concrete coming through in patches, the penguins projecting nerves. At the top, they jostled each other, as if trying to pick on one to shove down first. Nick had seen it before, and knew that as soon as one was sent down, the rest would follow.

‘Oh, the shop,’ Nick said. And then the whole thing was settled.

My God, Nick thought, the first time he saw it. There wasn’t much for him to organize: Jimmy was taking charge, dealing with everyone from the end of a phone. The hardware merchant had gone, leaving an interior prickly with shelves and pigeonholes, all painted the same unrenewed cream. The pigeonholes were still labelled ‘2½'', ‘60 watt’, ‘mortices’, the letters punched out white on those black plastic strips, now, many of them, peeling off and some littering the floor with a detritus of wood-shavings, nails, the screwed-up balls of newspaper used for packing. They would go: a florist’s would demand no extraordinary expertise – he’d been on a course, anyway, Jimmy’d thought of that. But the point was that the shop had to be run. It couldn’t be like little Sonia, upstairs with last year’s Christmas present, an eighteen-inch toy greengrocer’s with imperishable plaster-of-paris cauliflowers, pretending to weigh them out and demanding, as Sonia tended to, real money in exchange.

Nick wasn’t sure he was up to it. He’d never done such a thing. He’d been a waiter; he’d worked in bars; he’d tried more ambitious jobs, a bit of responsibility, a job in local government, which – you couldn’t lose that sort of job, his mum had said – ought to have done him. But it turned out you could lose that sort of job, if you were Nick. And then he’d bumped into Jimmy again, and his life had taken that particular nervous but lucrative direction. It seemed a lot to undertake, running a flower shop.

But without him having to do anything very much, the shop took shape. The workmen came and went, and Nick only opened the door and made them cups of tea as they tore down the shelves and sanded the stained and knobbly floor. ‘Dost a gnaw—’ one workman asked the first day, and broke off, laughing, when he saw that Nick did not understand even that. And he did not know. Nick did not know where – as it turned out he was being asked – the nearest hardware supplier was, this one being thoroughly stripped down and a drill bit needed. After that, whenever a decision was needed, it was to Jimmy they appealed; even the first time a dilemma arose, and they had to have been under Jimmy’s instructions in this regard not to appeal to Nick who, they knew, would be the shop’s proprietor. They kept a pile of two-pence pieces by the door, on the shelf, like a church’s cumulative charity; at least once a day, the foreman took the upmost half-dozen to the phone box to clarify things with Jimmy. Nick made more tea; there was, as yet, no working toilet and they had to nip into the pub at lunchtime or, after two thirty, piss in the yard out the back.

For a few days Nick hovered, an ingratiating smile on his face, then got tired of it, and took himself off. He started to appreciate, with unwelcome clarity, the overt diffidence about him that had made him so useful to Jimmy in the past. Though the diffidence would shortly become useful again, he had only really been aware of it when, as now, it made him risibly ineffective in the eyes of workmen. The area seemed appalling to him. The mincingly genteel tea-shop; the 1950s American-modern laundromat and Co-op; further back, the dismal Victorian philanthropy of the black-pillared Greek-style museum, with its leaking prehistoric beasts, its dismal paintings of local industries or, up the hill, that same Victorian philanthropy, the same Greek pillars in front of a library, and no more alluring. Sometimes, the layers of change were manifest on a single site: a men’s boutique, with a psychedelic shop sign in purple, had kept hanging outside the three balls of the pawn-broker who must have preceded it. The changes of the district: Nick started to be aware of them as time passed, as the weather improved and a surprising yellow spurt of, what was it?, crocuses, could that be it?, emerged from a crack in the pavement outside the shop and, hardly less cheering, a pod of mushrooms bubbled up beneath the carpet they’d laid in the lavatory. Became aware of those slower changes as his business took shape. The scoured-smooth emptiness of the hardware shop began to be filled. The plasterwork was finished off, and the Regency striped wallpaper piled up, ready for application; a display unit, rather like an Olympic podium, but with spaces for five rather than three winners, was installed and painted a nice dark maroon; a reproduction desk was brought in at, apparently, Jimmy’s order – he hadn’t shared this decision with Nick. Like other decisions passed up-country by Jimmy – his insistence that the flowers should bear no prices – it added that crucial sense of class to the enterprise.

All that strange period, Nick behaved and thought much more like a client than the instigator of a business. Jimmy had booked him into a hotel while he found somewhere to live, saying he should take his time about it; but Nick had done nothing in that direction. He returned to the Hallam Towers every night, dined richly – after five weeks his waistband was uncomfortable with the lobster sauces and no exercise – and settled down to an early night after his daily phone conversation with Jimmy. After a few weeks, it looked as if he had set up camp within the room, the walls lined with bagged laundry, a short shelf of borrowed thrillers by the bedside.

The workmen knew all about this impermanent existence, returning to their own wives and children after a day spent not asking for Nick’s instructions about anything. So did the hotel staff, and so did Jimmy. ‘Have you got yourself a supplier yet?’ Jimmy said one night.

‘Supplier?’ Nick said, rather thrown by Jimmy’s familiar term.

‘Flower supplier,’ Jimmy said. ‘You been to the market yet?’ There was the sound of Jimmy heavily waiting at the end of the phone.

‘I’m planning to go the day after tomorrow,’ Nick said.

‘You should have gone by now,’ Jimmy said. ‘Important to strike up a relationship. I want it up and running by – what did we agree on?’

‘Two weeks yesterday,’ Nick said.

‘Two weeks yesterday,’ Jimmy said. ‘You think they’ll be done by then?’

‘I would say so,’ Nick said. ‘It looks almost ready now.’

‘Well,’ Jimmy said, ‘this is what you want to do.’

The question of the market hadn’t gone from Nick’s mind, but he’d put it aside as if someone were to deal with it on his behalf. After this conversation with Jimmy, he told the workmen in the shop he wouldn’t be around the next day, and asked the receptionist at the hotel for a four thirty a.m. wake-up call. ‘Hilarious, I know,’ he said dismally.

The flower market was fifty miles away, in a more urbane, less industrial city that could stretch out its lines of supply in all directions into very different places, some more austere even than Sheffield. Nick had had the whole thing arranged for him, and instructions had been passed down. At a layby on the A1, shortly before six, his hands in fingerless red woollen tradesman’s gloves clutched a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, the hand-drawn map pinned to the bonnet of his little van with an elbow. He knew he would get lost.

But it seemed to work in an all but professional manner, and in only half an hour he was parking outside a grimy Victorian market hall, open to the elements, pillared with flaking green paint over rusting green metal, and everywhere ornamented with idealized brick bouquets, now blackened and snotlike. His laisser-passer was accepted, and he went in.

His breath condensed before him. It seemed early, but he could see that the market had, even now, passed the peak of its exchanging, and men and women were pushing wheeled pallets full of ranked blooms towards him on their way out. The market ways were still banked with flowers but great holes had appeared in them as the marauding buyers had carried off the best. Well, he was not here to buy, not today; and that was a useful commercial lesson to have learnt, he told himself. The buyers, the marauders, were men and women, some genteel-looking, the women in capes and ponchos, the men in Harris tweed coats, like Nick, but others rough boys, carrying off the helpless innocent blooms to smaller, more diverse markets, to sell chrysanths beside meat stalls, greengrocers, fishmongers, cheap clothing stalls, provision merchants.

He walked on until he came to what seemed one of the biggest stalls in the market, its depleted fields of carnations and tulips stretching out like blankets. He stood there, irresolute. The man in charge registered him, shook his head in a knowing way and, as his subordinates smirked at this demonstration of who he was, leant forward to spit richly, the abundant phlegm of a smoker’s early-morning mouth splattering like puke on the floor.

‘Help you?’ the man said.

‘Yes,’ Nick said firmly. ‘I hope so.’ He explained his situation, or some of it: a new flower shop, a need for a regular relationship with a supplier, and – it did no harm – a frank though not exactly explicit acknowledgement that it was all new to him, he hadn’t a clue about what stock to take. Mr William, he said his name was – Nick was pleased with this: it suggested to him an old-established family in the trade, where the long-retired dad in the nursing-home might be the name on the board referred to as Mr Gracechurch, the hard-nosed chief remaining Mr William until his father’s death. Nick addressed him as Mr William in what he hoped was a respectful way at least three times during the conversation. Mr William was serious, helpful – ‘You’re not thinking of buying today, I take it, sir,’ he said. In twenty minutes advice had been given about stock – ‘Though, of course, you’ll come to know your customers PDQ’ – and an agreement made about the days Nick would turn up – a little earlier, Mr William suggested, than he had today. It all seemed quite easy. Nick just hoped he hadn’t made a mistake in choosing his supplier; in fact, he’d hardly chosen him at all. He took what comfort he could from the greetings Mr William threw behind his back at passing florists; a popular and – yes? – respected man around here.

‘One last thing, though,’ Mr William said, as they shook hands. ‘If we’re to do business on a regular like basis, let’s not be getting each other’s names wrong. My name’s Williams, Roy Williams. It’s got an s on the end.’

‘How hilarious,’ Nick said, aghast. ‘Not hilarious, sorry, I didn’t mean – just – sorry,’ he said, stumbling backwards and, for some reason, bowing. The man wasn’t a Gracechurch at all, and though Nick had never heard of the Gracechurch family before half an hour ago, the revelation of Mr William as the acquirer of the guise of Gracechurch made the original owners seem unattainably grand, the present owner tainted for ever with the suspicion of dishonesty, as if Nick had made a mistake not starting twenty years before, and dealing with those imagined excellencies of the fabled Gracechurches. The embarrassing exchange made him, finally, feel the entire fraudulent nature of the enterprise.

He drove off, face burning, and when, after breakfast, a charity shop presented itself with, in the window, a rigid array of donated vases, there was only one thing he could do. He went in and bought the lot. At least I can, he thought, driving away with the hideous clanking load in the back, at least I can – but reassurance wouldn’t come. It would not come, either, when he arrived back in Broomhill and and, in front of all the builders, he had to unload seven unbelievably ugly vases. They had done a good job, the builders, in producing an elegant interior for his shop; they had to see how ugly these vases were. But they said nothing.

It was to this state of concentrated hopelessness that Katherine presented herself. Until then he hadn’t thought of taking on an assistant but, of course, shops had them. It was easy for him to understand why he’d taken her on: she had come through the door and, immediately, reassuringly, he had seen someone who was projecting an idea of herself with even less competence than Nick did. She seemed to take him at his word, swallowing brothers in New York. He felt himself growing bigger in her eyes. He didn’t despise her for it – in fact, he rather liked the way her presence made him feel about himself. He liked, even, the way she said ‘Nick’ to him, saving herself up, then using his name, enjoying it.

It seemed a good idea. It was a very good idea and, surprisingly, Jimmy agreed. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Don’t let her near the books, that’s all.’

From then on, things improved. Three weeks after the shop’s opening, when he looked out of the window and saw two figures opposite, observing his front of a business, he felt only a small shudder of alarm, which subsided immediately as he saw they were two young girls.

Katherine said, ‘It’s my daughter. And her friend.’

‘Ask them in,’ Nick said. It was going to be all right.

It was a Sunday morning, a month or two after Katherine had started her new job, when Jane’s father put down the Sunday Express and said, ‘We ought to go out somewhere.’

Jane had been looking forward to the Sunday Express. There was the Foreign News page, a page she always enjoyed, with the story about the man coming back early and disturbing his wife with her lover in an unusual hiding-place – the names and the nation changed from week to week but the story was the same. She’d been looking forward to a boring Sunday, maybe a bike ride down the crags.

‘Go out where?’ her mother said.

‘It’s a nice day,’ Malcolm said. ‘We could go out somewhere after lunch.’

‘We never go out somewhere after lunch,’ Daniel said. He was sitting on the piano stool, one sock off, picking at his feet, absorbed as a grooming monkey. ‘On a Sunday. Mrs Kilwhinney, right, she said to us, “Do you ever go out into Derbyshire with your family, on a Sunday?” and only this one kid, this right spastic, said he did. But no one else.’

‘I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make,’ Malcolm said, with the heavy irony he sometimes used in Daniel’s direction. ‘But this afternoon, this family is going to get in the car and go for a drive in Derbyshire. Is that understood? And have a nice time. All right?’

Malcolm got up from the breakfast table and, without exactly storming, walked emphatically out of the room and upstairs; he often retreated to the study and his military books at moments of stress.

‘What was that?’ Daniel said.

‘It’s you that’s supposed to have tantrums and slam doors,’ Jane said, neatly swiping the Sunday Express. ‘The problems of adolescence in the young male.’

‘You read too much,’ Katherine said mildly. ‘It’s nothing unusual. Your father wants to go for a drive in Derbyshire. I don’t know why that’s so strange. Lots of people do it.’

‘It’s strange for us,’ Jane said. ‘We only do it when Nana comes.’

‘Well, perhaps it would be a good thing if we started doing it,’ Katherine said. ‘There’s some of the most beautiful country in England out there, and we look at it once in a blue moon. I don’t see that it’s “spastic”, Daniel, and I’ve asked you once—’

‘Okay, okay,’ Daniel said, and put his sock back on.

‘It’s disgusting,’ Katherine said. ‘But the other day, Nick, at work, he mentioned he’d been to Haddon Hall at the weekend, this would have been last weekend, and he was saying to me how beautiful it was. Well, I was really quite embarrassed to have to admit that even though I’ve lived forty years in Sheffield, not fifteen miles from Haddon Hall, I’ve never been there. Of course, Nick, he’s interested in beautiful things, he’s sensitive to them – a florist, it’s to be expected. But don’t you think it’s terrible that we live here and we never bother to go and enjoy all the beautiful things on our doorstep, and someone who’s only lived here for three months, he’s making so much more of an effort?’

‘We went to Haddon Hall.’ Tim sounded aggrieved. ‘Martin Jones was sick in the coach into a bag and Miss Taylor threw it out of the door of the coach without it stopping. I told you we went. You never listen.’

‘Well, it was only an example,’ Katherine said. ‘Of course I remember you going.’

‘It was boring. I don’t think I like beautiful things.’ Then Tim thought hard for a moment, and said, ‘Haddon Hall, more glass than wall.’

‘That’s Hardwick Hall,’ Jane said. ‘You’re mixing up beautiful things.’

‘No, it was Haddon Hall,’ Tim said, in a kindly, regretful tone. ‘Hardwick Hall we didn’t go to. I did a project about it, though. I got seven out of ten and I drew pictures. Oh.’

‘It was Hardwick Hall, wasn’t it?’ Jane said. ‘That’s got more glass than wall?’

‘I don’t care which one it was,’ Tim said. ‘It might be both of them probably.’

‘The point is,’ Katherine said, her voice lowered and slow, she might have been passing on a moral lesson, ‘don’t you think it would be nice if someone, Nick for instance, Mr Reynolds, said to me on a Monday morning, “What did you get up to at the weekend?” And I could say – or it could be your teacher, it could be anyone – instead of “Not much,” or “Mucked about”, or “Washed some socks,” I could say, “We had a lovely day out in Derbyshire. We went to see, I don’t know what, and it was really beautiful”? Don’t you think that might be nice? I’d really like, once in a while, to say something like that to Nick.’

Jane concentrated on the newspaper, as if she weren’t listening. She thought of her father’s outing, a suggestion out of nowhere; she listened to her mother, lovingly speculating on how she could describe a Sunday afternoon to Nick, the sort of person she could become for his sake. She had never gone on so much about beauty; you could hear the rhythm of her voice changing, as if some contagion had taken hold of it. She doesn’t understand anything, she said to herself.

‘Well,’ Daniel said, ‘you could always say it. It wouldn’t have to be true. And then we could have the best of both worlds. We could muck about and you could still say that you’d been somewhere posh and it was beautiful. But you wouldn’t actually have to go there.’

‘That,’ Katherine said, ‘is exactly the sort of thing I would expect someone of your age to say.’

‘How hilarious,’ Jane said, looking up from the paper and its breathless foreign adulteries, its lovers safely absurd, in faraway cupboards. How hilarious: she meant it to wound. But the outing happened.

After lunch, Malcolm said, ‘Can you be ready in ten minutes? I want to be off soon.’

‘Just let me do the washing-up,’ Katherine said.

‘Leave it,’ Malcolm said. ‘I want to be off, or it’ll be getting dark.’

‘It’ll only take ten minutes,’ Katherine said. ‘I’m not leaving the washing-up to fester.’ And in fifteen minutes they were in the car.

Sheffield fell away from you so quickly, and the gardens joined, broke up, grew and became moorland. There was a garden centre right at the edge, the very last thing of the city, or the first, and Jane had always found something funny about that: it wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever say to anyone, or even properly explain, but it was something to do with all that green, rooted life out there, going on without anyone doing anything, and then it got into the garden centre and people sort of then thought it was all right, one of those green things, to pay money for it and put it in their gardens, even though – Jane wished she could explain this thought properly. She just knew there was something funny about the garden centre being at the border of the city, like Passport Control for plants. Ah well. She loved the country, even those walking-distance views and landmarks she had to concentrate to see.

But Jane’s pleasure was being ruined by the noises and silences in the car. Her father’s concentration on the road had a different quality of silence to it, compared to Tim’s dense, bewildered concentration, or the quiet amusement Daniel was extracting from the situation. She wondered what her own pained silence sounded like from outside – perhaps very much like sulking. She looked out for the real boundary, a circular grinding stone turned upright and labelled ‘Peak District National Park,’ although no wildness began there. She looked forward to the moment that the car laboured whinnyingly upwards, crested the brow of the hill, and there before them, expected in advance and announced on its appearance, was the Surprise View, a valley opening up idyllically; the only surprise, ever, was if the weather had cleared or condensed on that side of the hill, and they came out of or into low-lying cloud, the view revealing itself or a dense white obscurity descending on the car. The weather today was clear; piles of clouds, seeming less vast than the purple expanse of the moors.

‘I thought we’d go to Chatsworth,’ her dad said, a recognized outing. That was all he said, hardly waiting or seeming to expect any response or excited agreement. But all the way her mother kept up a running commentary, and the texture of it was by now familiar, unvarying. She offered one posh superlative to the landscape after another, comments not exactly hers. And she could not keep off the subject of Nick. They might have been driving through the native country of someone dear to them, a figure of historical renown, and she, speculatively, saying what this meant or might be supposed to mean to Nick; Nick; Nick.

Jane sat there, trying not to listen. No one interrupted. And her father? Well, perhaps he was letting her off the leash in giving her excited voice its indulgence, as if to let her hear herself and shame her out of what, for weeks now, she had been unable to stop saying.

In half an hour, they were through a further gated border, and inside the huge estates of the duke. Just outside was a village, a peculiarly picturesque river running through it and, conspicuously, a pub of some pretensions. Nick had been there; he said the food was exceptional, to match anything one might find in London. Jane thought it was a servile, ugly village, ugly with flowerbeds. Once through the gates the quality of the country changed, not to lawn, exactly, but to well-tended grazing land, prettily organized copses and views. The sheep were whiter, the grazing cows like an illustration on a can of evaporated milk, the river, of a glassy clarity, wending its elegantly serpentine way between trimmed banks. Nick thought it one of the most beautifully landscaped estates in the country, if not the world; he had been knocked out by the beauty of Chatsworth, and liked often to come over here. Perhaps even today.

It was not that she disagreed with it, though the estate had a colossal smooth elegance that was not, Jane thought, exactly right here in the north; it was calculated as precisely as that estate village in orange brick. She thought the whole thing beautiful too, and was pained by how Nick’s views, filtered through her mother’s mesmerized infatuation, spurred her on to indignant silent disagreement. She wanted, rather, a kind of beauty that required no one to say, ‘How beautiful,’ and that, she was convinced, was what Chatsworth had: it spoke to the sort of mind that regarded the epithets of beauty and loveliness with shy scorn. And, most of all, there was the great house, rushing now into view: the encrusted palace, the dense magic of its gardens and beyond, a landing-strip of water with a single fierce jet, forty feet high. Seen from the far side of the house, it flung a firm trunk of water upwards, and at the top the mild wind seemed to carry it away like a willow’s foliage.

If Derbyshire had failed, Chatsworth did the trick. Katherine’s conversation dribbled to a halt, her gesturing hands froze in mid-air, then fell to her lap. Her head, which had been turning from her husband to her children in the back, now turned to the great house. Malcolm’s head and shoulders seemed to relax, his eyes no longer flickering tensely in and out of the rear mirror. They drove into the car park, gravel splashing under the tyres, chickens, exuberant as a flowering bush, scattering. He bought a parking ticket through the window. They all got out; locked the doors.

‘You know,’ her dad said, in his mildest voice, ‘that village in the park? Edensor, it’s called, spelt E-D-E-N, there’s an interesting story about that. One of the dukes, a hundred years ago, he wanted to build a model village on the estate for his high-class workers, as you’d call them, the important people, like the chief housekeeper, maybe, the gamekeeper or the head gardener, so he asked an architect to come up with plans for the houses, and the architect, he was nervous and produced a range of ideas, different houses, so that the duke could choose the style he wanted and then they could go with that one. But whether the duke didn’t understand –’ they were walking now into the main hall of the palace, stout ladies sitting under a fat, gaudy allegory on the ceiling ‘– or whether he liked them all about the same, he just said, “I’ll have those, all of them,” and so every house in the village, it’s in a different style. Two adults and three children, please. Of course, I’m not myself all that interested in the house, it’s the garden I like best, but you children, it’ll be interesting for you to see the house, you’ll enjoy it.’

They’d been into the house on school trips and on a family outing – years ago, when Nana Glover was still alive. But they drove through the park regularly, on their twice-yearly trips through Derbyshire, and every time Malcolm pointed out the village, and explained the facts of it. Jane found it comforting, like that longer story about the village of Eyam, the only place, apart from London, where the plague had broken out. She didn’t mind being told things more than once: it was a signal that everything was all right in the world. But a moment after they had begun to climb the stairs to the main rooms, her mother started again, her bright eyes glossing over the spectacle of the house and examining the other visitors, waiting for Nick to appear at any moment and, in the meantime, giving her family the sort of comments he might be expected to produce or perhaps already had. She had dropped his name, but there was nothing of her in what she was saying, and she kept it up through those many golden rooms, explaining them, their views, their historical associations, their – now painful word – beauty to her silent family. At last it was done, sculpture gallery, Mary Queen of Scots rooms and all.

‘Shall we go and have a look at the gardens?’ Katherine said, flushed with pleasure.

Outside on the gravel path, the others said nothing. To the right there were the elaborate gardens, their games and winding path, and the vast single jet; to the left, the car park and the toilets.

‘It’s getting a bit late,’ Malcolm said. ‘It’ll be dark before long. Maybe we’ll save the gardens for another day. We’ve had a nice time, though, haven’t we?’

It came out more plaintive than you’d have expected, and though Daniel said, ‘Lovely,’ and Tim said, ‘Yes,’ his voice rising into a question, Jane put herself into it, for her father’s sake, and said, ‘I’ve really enjoyed it. I wish we did it all the time.’

‘I thought you were looking forward most to the garden,’ her mother said.

‘Well, I was,’ Malcolm said. ‘But we’d better get off. I just want to go to the toilet.’

‘Can’t it wait until we’re home?’ Katherine said – and whether she now thought it was common to piss on the porcelain of Chatsworth, a thing Nick would never presume to do, or whether she imagined the dukes and their sons, the little lords, drove to Edensor for that purpose, or whether she just didn’t want to think about anything so low, nobody could tell.

‘I want to go to the toilet,’ Malcolm said, voice rising in something like anger, and two passing ladies, posh in pearls and dung-coloured sweaters, burst heartlessly into laughter. ‘Well, I do,’ Malcolm said childishly, kicking the gravel.

‘Go on, then,’ Katherine said, and with one last look at the posh ladies, retreating up the gravel path towards the formal gardens, he did so, plucking at his anorak.

‘You know something,’ Daniel said, when they were half-way home, ‘I need to go to the toilet. I wish I’d gone.’ And Jane’s dad – she enjoyed these witty streaks in his character – slowed to the edge of the speed limit, and maintained thirty miles an hour, ignoring Daniel’s complaints and the line of drivers behind them.

After that there was no more talk of anyone having a lover. Jane wondered how her mother could be so blind, so deaf: deaf to what she sounded like, blind to the protective shapes her father started to form whenever her conversation took a familiar turn. Anne might have mentioned it once, after that outing to Broomhill, but it was clear to Jane that she hadn’t got the force of the situation across, and Anne made her references to the lover in so amused a tone that the discussion couldn’t go anywhere; it could only become a joke, like Miss Barker’s impact on the continent of Africa. Nor were there any more Sunday outings.

At first Jane felt that she would never get on with her mother’s conversation, the way you waited for Nick to enter it at any moment, but time wore down anything. Soon it was the same as Tim’s dreaming evocation of snakes, his paragraphs of detail and longing, and they divided the long evenings between them like a pair of madmen supervising the silent sane. That might have been harmless, and there was no chance of it going beyond mad talk, Jane thought. It could never develop into a situation beyond easy horrid embarrassment.

But Jane was wrong, because after some months a suggestion surfaced and her mother had, apparently, decided to give a party, something never done before by the adults. There was no doubting the reason for this party. It was as if Tim had decided to hold a party to which the snake of his dreams would be invited. You could not say that, not to Daniel, not to Anne, not to anyone. Tell a teacher, was the advice in Jackie when things got bad for the correspondents of Cathy and Claire. But Jane thought of Miss Barker – and thought that Cathy and Claire didn’t know what they were talking about, and she went on thinking that until the night of the party, and the food was laid out to snare Nick, and her mother in a long blue dress, and the doorbell rang for the first time, and it was only Mrs Arbuthnot from over the road.

Perhaps even then it might have been all right. Tim and her dad were standing in the dining room, looking at but not touching the food. There were vol-au-vents, a dish of bright yellow cold chicken curry, decorative arrangements of cheese on sticks, and a whole Brie, cut open, oozing, but smelling strongly of ammonia. There were loaves of French bread, sliced into rounds and in baskets, and small bowls of pickle and bowls of butter, and on the sideboard, glasses set out in ranks with the bottles of white wine, Malcolm’s task, already open. There were bowls of crisps and nuts and, of course, in the middle of the table, and on the piano, and elsewhere in the house, in vases half theirs and half borrowed for the occasion, arrangements of flowers from Nick’s shop.

‘Are they going to eat all this?’ Tim said. ‘Have they had their dinner?’

‘They’ll eat it,’ Malcolm said. ‘Even if they’ve had their dinner. And I suppose if they don’t, we’ll be living off vol-au-vents and Coronation Chicken all week, you’ll see.’

‘How hilarious,’ Tim said. There was a silence.

‘What did you say?’ Malcolm said.

‘I only said it was hilarious,’ Tim said, faltering.

‘Did you say,’ Malcolm said, ‘“how hilarious”?’

Tim didn’t answer; he didn’t know what he had said or done wrong. But Malcolm left the room, with two bottles, his face set, and prepared to act like a host to whoever might come through his front door, to pretend they were welcome. Because that was what he had to do, just for tonight.

Mr Jolly, John Ball and Keith the boy had their routine worked out for an overnight stay and, under Mr Jolly’s direction, they reckoned to clear a good two hundred pounds a year on top of their wages. They worked together as a team. The routine was that you got money from petty cash for a bed-and-breakfast on overnight jobs, but of course you never used it. You slept in the van and kept the money. If they’d been sent out with just anyone, the routine wouldn’t have been possible. You’d have to explain each time, and word would get out, and they’d put a stop to it. As long as Mr Jolly had been with Orchard’s Removals, which was getting on for twenty years, they’d kept their teams fixed – maybe not for a day job, within London, but for overnights and more.

‘It’s that sort of consideration,’ a management wife had once said to John Ball at a works Christmas party, ‘that sets Orchard’s apart, and that’s why we never have any trouble with—’

‘Strikes?’ John Ball had said, and she’d blushed as at an obscenity from an over-familiar acquaintance. Yes, they liked to send you away with your team so, generally, Mr Jolly, John Ball and Keith could work their routine once or twice a week. Maybe everyone did; you didn’t ask.

Mr Jolly, the chief remover, had a kind of contempt for the management on account of this. Even while robbing it in this small way, he wasn’t grateful for the slackness. He’d have put a stop to it. They didn’t even ask for receipts, it being believed that the sort of establishments the men would use were not necessarily able to produce that sort of documentation. You just took the three quid each and signed for it. Later, on the way home, you divided it up; John Ball had three quid, Keith the boy thirty bob, and Mr Jolly took the rest. The firm’s accountant was called Perks, something which always made Mrs Jolly laugh as she took the cash, made a little roll of the notes and put it into the tea caddy on the shelf in their Streatham kitchen for a rainy day, the fifty pee over going straight into her pocket for a couple of glasses of mild for herself later.

‘Oi!’ Mr Jolly always said.

‘Oi yourself,’ Mrs Jolly always replied. He didn’t really mind. They’d managed to get to Majorca on the tea-caddy money last year.

But sometimes you wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to spend the money in the way it was meant, particularly in the summer. It was still quite warm now, at the beginning of September, even as far north as Sheffield. Mr Jolly had known worse than Keith – they weren’t especially smelly, the three of them. After a hard day’s work, you parked, went maybe to a pub for a pint or two and a bite of supper, then back to the van. The van itself was packed with someone’s furniture, beds, sofas and cushions, everything you could want for a nice restful night. That’s what Keith had said when he’d joined the team, complaining about the real sleeping arrangements. It had never occurred to Mr Jolly or (John Ball said, amazement in his voice) to John Ball. What an idea! It would be like – Mr Jolly said – it would be like a doctor treating, er, breaching – a lawyer suing a judge for – er – a thoroughgoing breach of – well, it wasn’t to be thought of, and, oddly, hadn’t been until Keith said it and then they all started thinking, hard, about those lovely soft beds in the back that they could arrange as they liked…

But they had their standards, so they went back to the van and made space for themselves in the cab and in the little loft arrangement over it with its porthole window, just about big enough for two with a blanket rolled up between you. Keith stretched out on the seats, complaining about Mr Jolly’s snoring and about the gear stick in his back all night. It didn’t seem so bad when you woke up, nice and warm and toasty often. Then you went off in search of a caff for breakfast and, ideally, a stand-up wash at a sink. When you came back and opened the cab door, phew! It was like something had died in there, and you left the doors open while you did the second half of the job.

‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said.

‘Good job you said so, then,’ Keith said. They were sitting disconsolately on the wall outside the house in Sheffield. It was a quarter to eight in the morning. They’d woken up an hour earlier, and Keith had been sent out on a recce for a caff. They’d looked the night before and seen nothing but, as Mr Jolly said, they’d been tired, they’d not looked everywhere. It was hopeless. The house was in a new development in the middle of one suburb after another, not the sort of place where anyone would think of opening a nice caff. Keith had come back shrugging. ‘No joy,’ he said.

‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said, ‘as soon as I saw where they were moving from. I knew the sort of place they’d be moving to. No caffs, you see.’

‘All right,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘You underestimate your uncle Bill. Get out the emergency supplies, John. You’ll find a Primus stove stowed under the cabin—’

‘That’s not safe—’

‘I dare say, but there it is, and you’ll find some bacon and eggs and a tin of milk too.’

‘How long’s that been there?’

‘Not long enough for you to worry about. So there you are – bacon and eggs and a cup of tea. Get going.’

Mr Jolly lit a cigarette and watched, with satisfaction, the preparations for his pavement breakfast. In a moment John Ball came back, Primus in hand. Behind him, Keith balanced bacon and eggs, a packet of tea and a tin of condensed milk. ‘Where’s the frying pan, Bill?’ he said.

‘Same place,’ Mr Jolly said, an awful doubt rising. ‘Along with the kettle.’

‘There’s no kettle,’ John Ball said. ‘And no frying pan.’

‘We could—’ Keith gestured towards the van.

‘We could what?’ Mr Jolly said.

‘I know where the kitchen box is,’ Keith said. ‘We loaded it last. It’s at the back of the van.’

‘No, Keith,’ Mr Jolly said, and John Ball shook his head in something like sorrow.

Everything seemed confusing in the Glovers’ house. Nobody woke Timothy. He got up on his own, washed his face, dressed himself. Downstairs people were talking, quietly. When he came into the dining room for breakfast, nothing was being made ready. His mother and sister were sitting at the table, without even a cloth on it, both dressed, his brother standing looking out of the window. His sister had her hand on his mother’s. That frightened him a little bit. Then he remembered about his dad.

‘I phoned the police,’ his mother said, as he came in. She seemed to be talking to someone else, not to Timothy. ‘They said they can’t do anything until he’s been gone twenty-four hours at least.’

‘Where is he?’ Timothy said.

‘We don’t know,’ Daniel said, not turning from the window. Outside, there was a van; there was some activity.

‘Daniel,’ his mother said. Timothy knew, really, that his father had gone and no one knew where. He was just being silly.

‘Look at that,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s amazing.’

‘What are you looking at?’ his mother said. ‘Oh, the new people. I’m not—’

‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘Come here.’

As if humouring him, his mother got up and went to the window, followed by Jane. They stood for a moment, watching.

‘Good heavens,’ his mother said.

‘I know,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s so strange.’

The van was in the early stages of unloading: the men had taken out the first of the furniture, some tea-chests, and left them on the pavement. They must have been waiting for someone with a key. There, on the pavement opposite, was the Glovers’ unit. It was exactly the Glovers’ unit, and Timothy did what they all probably wanted to do: he ran out into the hall and made sure that the unit, their unit, was still in the sitting room. It was. He came back into the dining room.

‘That’s extraordinary,’ Katherine said lightly.

‘What is?’ Jane said. ‘What are you all looking at?’

‘That,’ Katherine said. ‘The unit?’

‘What about it?’ Jane said.

Daniel stared at her, astonished, but she seemed genuinely baffled. ‘It’s the same as the one we’ve got,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Oh, yes. I suppose it is quite similar.’

‘It’s exactly the same,’ Katherine said. ‘I hope they take it in soon. I don’t want everyone in the street thinking…’ She tailed off.

Timothy liked the thought of all your furniture outside, arranged, exactly as it was in the house, on a lawn, or maybe on the pavement. ‘Can’t we move?’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Katherine said. ‘We’re hardly going to move just because the new people over the road have the same unit we have. Did you think Cole Brothers had made it just for us?’

‘No,’ Timothy said. ‘I meant—’ He didn’t know what he meant, and then he remembered he hadn’t said hello to Geoffrey that morning. There didn’t seem to be any breakfast.

He went upstairs cheerfully. His father hadn’t come home, but he expected there was a good reason for that. And maybe later that day the police would come, in a car with the lights flashing on top, and maybe they’d take him for a ride, so that would be OK. He went into his room and shut the door. When you came in, there was a bit of a fishy smell. The books hadn’t said. He supposed his mother would find out about Geoffrey soon, though it had been three days now without discovery. Timothy knelt down, and pulled a square, flat glass container from underneath his bed. Geoffrey raised his head and, looking straight at Timothy, flickered his tongue happily. ‘Sssss,’ Timothy said, though of course Geoffrey hadn’t made a noise and wouldn’t. Timothy knew that Geoffrey, flickering his tongue, was sniffing, tasting the air to see what was around, but he liked to think it was a friendly gesture. Geoffrey liked Timothy, Timothy knew that, and Timothy certainly liked Geoffrey. To buy Geoffrey, the glass container and the small objects in it, Timothy had saved all of his pocket money for three years, two months and one week, ever since he had first started being interested in snakes.

But Geoffrey ought to see the world, Timothy thought. He reached into the case, and took Geoffrey out, one hand by his neck, the other holding his tail. He didn’t put him round his own neck, of course. He had once seen a picture in the newspaper of a lady doing that, a lady with not many clothes on. The snake had been a yellow python, and gazed out of the picture with an expression of great sadness. That was an awful thing to do to a snake. So Timothy just carried Geoffrey out, very gently, opening the door with his elbow, and into Jane’s bedroom, to show him the interesting spectacle of a van being unloaded.

Outside, the men had stopped. They were talking to each other surreptitiously, out of the corners of their mouths. Always in this sort of place, you attracted an audience once you started work. Actually, wherever you were, you got one. It was just that when the house got to a certain size, cost a certain amount, once you got to houses with gardens and trees planted in the street, the audience stayed inside. It didn’t gawp on the street, not even the kids. The most they’d do was come out into the garden, pretend to be pruning. It wasn’t you they were watching, it was the chance, which might be the only one, to have a really good look at what the newcomers had got in the way of furniture.

‘Enjoying it?’ John Ball muttered to Keith, as they carried a sofa out, one at each end.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Keith said. ‘I’m loving it.’

‘Not you,’ John Ball said. ‘I meant them. I hope they’re enjoying it. Look at them.’

And, indeed, there was quite a lot of discreet attention. At the kitchen window next door, a lady in a housecoat was doing the washing up very slowly. A woman who had walked up the road with a chocolate Labrador ten minutes before was now walking back again on the other side of the road; you could see the dog hadn’t expected that, and was looking up at his mistress with a baffled expression. And directly over the road, hardly concealing themselves, a woman and two kids were at the downstairs window, really staring, and upstairs in the same house—

‘What’s that kid got?’ Mr Jolly said.

‘What kid?’ John Ball said.

‘The kid in the house over the road, the one in the upstairs window. He’s holding – it looks like—’

‘Christ,’ Keith said. He was thinking of the girl who’d ridden with them in the van, the way she’d stood in the upstairs window of the house and flashed her little titties at him. He looked back at the kid, and this was, in a way, even more strange. ‘He’s got a snake.’

‘Do you think they know where they’re moving to?’ John Ball said.

‘Give me Streatham, any day of the week,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Look at them, all of them staring, and not one of them, it wouldn’t occur to one of them to come out and say, for instance, “Oh, I can see you’re hard at work already, I don’t suppose you’d like a cup of coffee to start the day with,” or – the least you could expect – an offer to let you fill your kettle at their kitchen tap. Makes you sick.’

‘We haven’t got a kettle,’ Keith said.

‘They don’t know that,’ Mr Jolly said, shaking his head as he carried on unloading. The pavement was thoroughly blocked with all these possessions; they’d better come soon.

‘You’ve got the coffee-table,’ Keith said, as Mr Jolly put it down on the pavement, just next to the sofa.

‘So we have,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Cheeky sod. Right. I’m going over there.’

John Ball and Keith put themselves down on the sofa, just as if they’d been hard at it for hours. Mr Jolly, in a good humour, fetched three chipped old mugs from the cab of the lorry, walked up the driveway of the house opposite. The kid in the window upstairs with the snake – it was definitely a snake, there was no doubting that – he drew back into the bedroom with a look of alarm on his face. Maybe the snake wasn’t supposed to come out of its cage; maybe he wasn’t allowed to play with the thing before school. He rang the doorbell.

There was a confused noise inside. People talking, their voices raised and muted at the same time. It was a couple of minutes before anyone came to the door. It was a woman; she was dressed – that hadn’t been the delay, then – but her hair was unkempt. She held the door half open, looking at Mr Jolly with her mouth tense. She might have been expecting him, someone like him; she looked as if she was expecting something bad to happen to her, the next time she opened the front door. She said nothing.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you, madam,’ Mr Jolly. ‘This is a bit cheeky, like, but…’ He explained their predicament. She listened to the end; he grew less and less hopeful of success as he went on, she looked so unencouraging.

But then she surprised him by saying, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then ‘It’s awful to have to start work without a hot drink in the morning,’ and ‘No, I don’t know where you’d find somewhere to serve you breakfast, not without going right down into, I don’t know, Crosspool,’ a name that meant nothing to him.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said, handing over the mugs but not inviting himself in.

‘Who’s that, then?’ A girl’s voice came from the back of the house. ‘It’s not—’

‘No, it’s not,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nobody.’

Mr Jolly overlooked this rudeness, put it down to some kind of distraction as she carried the mugs away, almost at arm’s length. She left the front door open and Mr Jolly standing there.

‘It’s all with milk and two sugars,’ he said, calling into the kitchen where she’d gone, having forgotten to ask him any of this.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’ she said, coming out again, the mugs still in her hand.

‘Milk and two sugars,’ he said. ‘If it’s no trouble.’

‘It’s only instant,’ she said.

‘That’ll be perfect,’ he said, not having expected any other kind.

The conversation was not closed, but he felt foolish standing there. The other two sat on the other side of the road, talking with amusement to each other, watching his suspended embarrassment. Mr Jolly settled for a performance of head-scratching, whistling, inspecting his watch and looking up and down the road in an exaggerated way. He bent down and ran his second and third finger underneath a flower, a fat yellow familiar one, without picking it.

‘Don’t do that,’ a boy said, standing at the open door. It was the boy who’d been watching them from the upstairs window, a snake round his neck. The snake had been disposed of. Made you shiver to think of it. ‘That’s my dad’s flowers.’

‘I was just looking,’ Mr Jolly said. He was no good with children, having none; his sister neither, never wanted them, not that they couldn’t have had them, him and his wife. ‘I wasn’t going to pick.’

‘Just because he’s not here,’ the boy said.

‘Gone to work, has he?’ Mr Jolly said heartily. ‘Me too. We’re moving your new neighbours in, over the road, there. That’ll be nice for you, won’t it? Having new…’ He trailed away. The boy was looking at him, a horrified gaze.

‘That’s right,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘He’s gone to work, definitely.’

‘Good,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Make a nice early start. I saw you, just then with – you know, your friend—’

‘What friend?’

‘Your special friend, the yellow one,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘At least he looked yellow from where I was standing. You know –’ he made a face ‘– sssssss.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the boy said. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone else what you thought you saw only they might think you were mental or something. You wouldn’t want that, so don’t mention it to anyone, what you saw.’

‘Here you are,’ the woman said, bringing out the three mugs, now filled with coffee, on a shamingly clean tray. Amazingly, she’d only gone and put some biscuits on a plate as well. ‘I do hope my son isn’t bothering you.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Mr Jolly said, now rather baffled, and with the door closing firmly, he walked steadily back, balancing the tray carefully.

‘That’s the ticket,’ John Ball said comfortably. ‘Use your charm, did you?’

‘They’re all bonkers round here,’ Mr Jolly said, relieving his feelings a little. ‘Fit for the hatch, they are.’

‘Biscuits, too,’ Keith said. ‘You should have tried for bacon and eggs.’

‘That’s enough,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘And take your hands off those. This fucking job—’

‘That girl, rode with us—’ John Ball said.

‘Mental,’ Mr Jolly said.

‘Glad to get shot of her,’ Keith said.

‘Mental,’ John Ball agreed.

It had been a long night for the Sellerses. They had stayed not in the funded luxury of the Hallam Towers Hotel but in a small family hotel; since the week in the summer, looking for a house, the Electric had ordered a cut-back. Alice had found the Sandown, and apologized for it as soon as they had rolled up there, the night before. She ought to have known. The advertisement, found in a hotel guide, had used an illustration, not a photograph, and a highly fanciful one; you couldn’t have assumed that the hotel in reality would have had a horse-drawn carriage with a jolly coachman drawn up outside, but the false impression of window-boxes and carriage lamps at the door surely went further than excusable exaggeration. But there were few hotels in Sheffield, and it was only for one night; the front door already locked at eight, opened up to them by a fat man in cardigan and slippers, masticating sourly on slowly revolving bread and cheese, the slight marshy suck of the orange-and-black carpet underfoot, and the forty-watt lightbulbs casting their yellowish light over a long-term resident peeling the pages of an ancient Punch in the lobby.

There was naturally no food to be had, and only a shrug when, their bags deposited, Alice asked after nearby restaurants. Still, they found one and, thank Heavens, it had what to the children evidently seemed some quality of fun; an American-style restaurant with flags on the wall and drinks called Fudpucker; they were alone in the restaurant, but it would do to perk up the spirits. Alice wouldn’t say anything about what they had left, she wouldn’t.

It was a restless night. The hotel had once been three Edwardian semis, now joined together, the gap between the second and third filled with dismal grey prefabricated corridors, and the original rooms split with partitions. There seemed to be few people staying, but, perhaps to save the legs of the chambermaids, all of them were apparently squeezed into the same corner of the hotel. Bernie undressed and, without seeming to pause to think about it, pulled out his red pyjamas from the overnight bag, put them on. It was an agreed signal, undisguised, what he did with them at this point; it was kind of him to know how tired she would be, to remember that there could be better reassurances between them on this hard night than sex.

‘Goodnight, love,’ Bernie said, and as he got into bed, swinging his legs up under the cheese-smelling pink candlewick bedspread, rolling into the same central hollow in the mattress she had fallen into, he gripped her hand and kissed her and groaned and laughed all at the same time. She smelt his warmth; and, as ever, even at the end of the day, the warm smell of his body was a sweet one, like toffee. Always had been.

She was reassured for a moment, could have found the hotel and Sheffield funny as Bernie meant her to, but then, through the wall, there came an ugly noise: a human voice, groaning. It was horribly clear.

‘What’s that?’ Alice said.

‘It’s from next door,’ Bernie said, whispering.

‘It’s not the kids, is it?’ Alice said.

‘No, they’re the other side,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s—’ But then the noise resumed, and some kind of wet slapping noise, too; a single voice giving in to a single pleasure, and Alice clenched her jaw and tried not to think of it, tried not to hear it. It went on, the noise, in a way impossible to laugh about. Bernie coughed, sharply, a cough meant to be heard through the partition. But the noise continued, the animal noise of slap and groan, a middle-aged man – it was impossible not to visualise the scene – doing things to himself in the light of a forty-watt bulb, and not much caring whether anyone heard him through the walls or not.

Presently it stopped and, as best she could, Alice unclenched herself. Bernie was tense, pretending to sleep. It was better than trying to find anything to say. The sound of heavy feet padding around the room next door, clearing up – good God, clearing what up? – was concluded with the sharp click of the light switch and, in a startlingly short stretch of time, with the gross rumble of a fat man snoring. Alice lay there against Bernie’s slowly relaxing body, counting up to five hundred, over and over.

In the morning, they dressed and were about to leave the room when she heard the door of their wanking neighbour open and shut.

‘Hang on a second,’ she said to Bernie. ‘I just want to brush my hair before we go down.’

‘You’ve just brushed it,’ he said.

‘I want to brush it again,’ she said. She picked up the brush, and in front of the tiny wonky mirror she brushed her hair again, thirty times, until it was charged with static and flying outwards, until the man, whoever he was, was downstairs and anonymous. But all the same, when the children had been collected and they were all sitting round the table in the ‘breakfast room’, she could not help letting her eye run round the room. Everyone else there was a man on his own, each at his little table, in various positions of respectability, and the four of them talked in near-whispers. It could have been any of them; she rather wanted to know now, to exclude the innocent others.

‘Well,’ Sandra surprisingly said, when they were decanted into the green Simca, the hotel bill grumpily paid, ‘I don’t think we’ll be staying there again.’

‘Well, of course we won’t,’ Bernie said, turning his head. ‘We won’t ever need to.’

‘That’s not really—’ Sandra began.

‘I think the Hallam Towers was a better hotel,’ Francis said. ‘From the point of view of quality.’

‘Yes, of course it’s a better hotel,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m under no illusions there.’

‘If anyone asked you,’ Francis said, ‘Mummy, if anyone asked you to recommend a hotel to stay in in Sheffield—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Alice said, her temper now breaking out for the first time, ‘let’s just shut up about it, and never think about the bloody place ever again. I don’t know why we’ve always got to discuss everything.’

‘Your mother’s quite right,’ Bernie said. ‘Give it a rest, Francis.’ He smiled, amused and released from some of the tension of Alice’s bravely kept-up face.

‘You said “bloody”,’ Sandra said, gleeful and mincing.

‘I know,’ Alice said. ‘It was a bloody hotel. It’s the only word for it.’

‘Bloody awful,’ Bernie said. ‘Bloody awful hotel,’ he went on. ‘Arsehole of the world’s hotels.’

‘That hotel,’ Francis began, ‘was really the most—’

‘That’ll do,’ Alice said. ‘We all agree.’

The thing was that Bernie had taught her to swear, and he liked it, sometimes, when she did. She wasn’t much good at it, she knew that. But she’d grown up in a house where you earned a punishment for saying ‘rotten’; anything much stronger she’d never heard, or heard and never understood. Bernie and his family, they swore; swore at Churchill on the radio (‘Pissed old bugger’), at the neighbours (‘Stupid old bastard’), at any inconvenience or none, at each other, at inanimate objects and, strangest of all, affectionately. His mother, his aunts, even; and she’d tried to join in, but she couldn’t really get it, couldn’t do it; she couldn’t get the rhythm right somehow, couldn’t put the words together right, and it obviously became a subject of fond amusement among the whole clan of them when Bernie’s shy fiancée hesitantly described the Northern Line as a bollocks, whatever bollocks might mean.

It was a fine day. As they drove up the long hill towards their new house, a constant steady incline, three miles long, Bernie hummed; she had sworn and made him cheerful again. For some reason, it was nine o’clock by the time they turned into the road. ‘Here we are,’ Bernie said. ‘There’s the van. Christ, look!’ and, to their surprise, by the removal van, outside one of the houses, on the driveway and spilling out on to the pavement, was most of their furniture. It took a moment to recognize that that was what it was. In the sunshine, it looked so different, arranged in random and undomestic ways, like the sad back lot of a junk shop. The sofa against the dining-table, the dining-chairs against Francis’s bedroom bookshelf, one of the pictures, the pretty eighteenth-century princess hugging a cat, with no wall to be hung on, leaning against a unit. Their beds, too, stripped of sheets and mattresses like the beds of the dead, laid open to the public gaze, shamefully. Their possessions; they seemed at once many and sadly inadequate to fill a house. In the old place, they had stood where they stood for so long that you stopped seeing them. But on the lawn, in the driveway, under the sun, laid out as if for purchasers, you saw it all again. Some of it was nice.

‘There’s the men,’ Bernie said. ‘Well, they’ve made a start, at any rate.’

‘They might have waited,’ Alice said.

‘Look, Sandra,’ Francis said. ‘There’s the men.’

‘I know,’ Sandra said, angrily. The car stopped: they got out.

‘Morning,’ the foreman said.

From his bedroom window, Timothy watched the family get out. There were four of them. He had taken Geoffrey out of his case again, to let him watch the excitement. The father got out of the little turquoise car, like a box, and stretched his shoulders back. Timothy imitated him. And there was a mother too, holding her handbag tightly, a sweet nervous expression. The boy was tall, taller than his mother though Timothy thought someone had said that he and the boy were the same age. Timothy hated him already.

But he was really looking at the girl by now. He had no interest in the others. She stood there in a cloud of frizzed hair, and yawned. As she pulled her arms upwards, her wrist in the other hand’s grip, her T-shirt popped loose of her waistband, pulled tightly against her chest. Even yawning she was lovely; even from here her beauty was defined. ‘Venus,’ Timothy said to himself, and found he was stroking along his snake’s back, pointing Geoffrey’s head towards the lovely girl. The removers had seen him when he had stood here. But the girl did not seem to see him, to pay any attention to him. He wondered why not. He promised himself something about this sight; he knew it was important; he promised himself he would never forget it. He had heard of people seeing each other, and knowing immediately that was the person they were to marry. He filed it away.

The husbands of the road left for work at seven thirty, at eight, at shortly after eight, to be at work by nine. Some had noted the removals van, blocking half the road; the later departures had observed the furniture being placed right across the pavement, and worried, some on behalf of the furniture, some on behalf of anyone wanting to walk down the pavement, as was their right, not obstructed by household chattels and trinkets. That was quite good, but when the interest of the road quickened with the arrival of the new family around nine o’clock, the curiosity was limited to the non-working wives. Most of them welcomed this; they preferred not to have to share their mood of observation with a man. It usually meant dissembling, pretending not to be all that interested. But if you were on your own, you could take a healthy interest, and not have to explain anything to anyone.

Anthea Arbuthnot, in her flowered housecoat, was paying close attention. She had been finding important things to occupy her around every single one of the windows with a good view ever since the men had started unloading the van. Finally, she had drawn up a chair and a small table by her sitting-room window and made a show of reading the Morning Telegraph over a cup of coffee. ‘They’ll not have driven up from London this morning,’ she said to herself, and started speculating about their arrangements.

In Karen Warner’s house, her husband had gone to work an hour before. Her son, nineteen, a disappointment, lay at full length on the sofa. It was one of her rules: he might have nothing to do and nothing to get up for, but he would get up every morning and not lie in bed. In practice, it meant he got up, dressed, stretched out on the sofa and remained horizontal all morning. The telephone rang.

At the other end, Anthea Arbuthnot announced herself; Mrs Warner agreed that it had been nice at the Glovers’, the other night, and nice to have had a chance to meet in a social manner. Karen wondered, rather, why Anthea Arbuthnot was telephoning at the expensive time of day when she was only a hundred yards away. But in a moment she pointed out that the new family had just arrived, that they were standing outside with their furniture spread across the road, and invited Karen to pop round to take her morning coffee with her at, say, eleven. Putting the telephone down, it seemed to Karen that Anthea might have invented some kind of purpose for her telephone call, some occasion to justify the invitation – the loan of the garlic-crusher she’d been so interested by the other night would have done.

‘Really, she’s no shame,’ Karen said out loud.

‘Pardon?’ her son said, after a minute.

But Karen had been talking to herself – he wasn’t much company, her worry of a son. ‘I hope you’re planning to get something done today,’ she said.

‘Probably,’ he said.

Further up the road, the nursery nurse had phoned in sick. Everything about her seemed to be swelling, not just her soft parts, her belly, her breasts, not even her joints, her ankles, her knees, her elbows blowing up like warty old gourds. Everything seemed to be swelling, even her bones, and her face was purple and tight and aching with the effort involved in lying flat on a bed for eight hours. The nursery was growing politely unbelieving – you could hear it in their voices. She knew they’d put the phone down, and start swapping stories about Chinese peasant women giving birth behind bushes in their lunch breaks. The phone rang and she felt it might be something important – she couldn’t ignore it.

It was only the woman from down the road, the one they’d met the other night. ‘I let it ring,’ Anthea Arbuthnot said, ‘because I know what it’s like. You’re at the other end of the house and by the time you get there it stops ringing just as you pick it up and you spend the whole day wondering who it might have been. How are you, my dear?’ She apologized, she hadn’t noticed the new neighbours moving in; she agreed the other night had been nice; she demurred at the suggestion of coffee later, but there must have been some uncertainty in her voice, because in two more exchanges she had agreed to lug herself down the road. She put the telephone down, and scowled at it.

Taking the key from a willing, smiling Bernie, Alice opened the door to the house. She thought nothing of all these neighbours; she gave no thought to their being surrounded by all those accumulated possessions which in her case were pressed into boxes or arranged haphazardly in the open air. Behind her, the children came in, at first cautiously, craning round corners, and then with increasing confidence of possession, Sandra striding boldly upstairs, already arguing over her shoulder with her brother over bedrooms, something already decided. Outside, Bernie was discussing matters with the men in high good humour: he was good with workmen. Alice thought it would be a relief when the house was straight; she thought, too, that after being left empty for all those weeks, it smelt like a cloakroom, like the smell of dust heating on a long-unused toaster, and, a little, of piss. It looked not empty to her but emptied, robbed, and a little pathetic. She walked through the empty rooms; they seemed small, but she reminded herself that empty rooms did seem small. You put furniture in them, and they started to seem larger; you went on putting furniture in them and at a certain point they started to seem small again.

It was the curtains that gave each room its air of abandonment rather than emptiness. All the curtains had been left behind, and still hung limply at each window. It had made sense to Bernie, and to Alice too, at the time: your old curtains aren’t going to fit the new windows. And the house was going to be empty for weeks, maybe months. There wasn’t much you could do about that, but perhaps if there were curtains up, it might look to anyone passing that it wasn’t abandoned. You heard about squatters, these days.

Bernie came in and, shyly, put his arm round her waist where she stood, at the back window.

‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Look at the garden.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’ll need some work. Nobody’s touched it for months.’

‘Maybe more than that,’ she said. ‘Oh God,’ she said.

‘What?’ Bernie said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Just so much to do,’ she said.

‘Not so much,’ he said. ‘I tell you what. I’ll mow the lawn straight away, it won’t look so bad. And then we’ll leave it till spring.’

That wasn’t really what she’d meant, but she said, ‘You’ll need more than a lawnmower. It’s too long for that, the grass. You know, I wish—’

‘What do you wish?’ he said, smiling; it was something they had always come back to, her wishing, his asking to know her wish.

‘Oh, I was thinking about the carpets,’ she said. ‘What’s it going to look like, none of the old carpets fitting properly? I wish we’d persuaded the Watsons – oh, well, never mind. You don’t suppose—’

‘What?’ Bernie said.

‘I’ve just had an awful thought,’ Alice said. She loosened Bernie’s arm, and turned round to look at the light fitting. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘They haven’t,’ Bernie said. ‘They can’t have done.’

‘Maybe they’ve just taken that lightbulb,’ Alice said, without any hope.

‘Let’s go and look,’ Bernie said.

Room by room, they went through the house, and it turned out to be true. ‘What are you looking at?’ Sandra said, as they came into the room where she and Francis were bickering, and her mother explained. The children stopped their argument, and followed their parents through the house. For whatever reason, perhaps after the negotiations over the curtains and the failed ones over the carpet, the Watsons had apparently, before leaving, gone through the house and carefully removed every single lightbulb. It was incredible. On Francis’s face was a look, a usual one with him, of something like fear; he felt these difficulties as catastrophes, personal catastrophes, Alice always thought.

‘Well,’ Bernie said, when they had finished, and had settled, the four of them, on the sofa in the middle of the sitting room, ‘I’m going to write them a letter. Give them a piece of my mind. How many lightbulbs is it? Fifteen?’

‘Problem?’ the foreman said, coming in with the smaller of the coffee-tables. Alice explained.

‘Happens all the time,’ the foreman said. ‘You’d be surprised. Mostly out of meanness.’

‘My dad works for the Electricity,’ Francis offered.

‘Well, he’ll know all about lightbulbs,’ the foreman said jocosely.

‘No,’ Francis said seriously. ‘It’s mostly other things.’

Katherine had made her phone calls now, lying to everyone except the police. To the building society she said that Malcolm was unwell; he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sleeping after a restless night. She said this in her best, her bored telephone voice, consciously removing the fact that she had, the night before, called the same woman in a state of panic, telling her about Malcolm’s disappearance. She could hear the puzzlement at the other end of the line, and finally his secretary said, ‘But he seems all right.’

Katherine said sharply, ‘No, he’s not well.’

‘He’s asleep at home?’ his secretary said. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Are you suggesting—’ Katherine said.

‘It’s just that he phoned five minutes ago,’ the secretary said. ‘I was sorry to hear about his mother.’

‘His mother?’ Katherine said. ‘Oh – his mother—’

‘Yes, being taken ill like that – what I don’t understand—’ she went on, but Katherine interrupted her with apologies before putting the receiver down. She sat by the telephone, breaking out into a light sweat of sheer panic, her heart thumping, and in two minutes she dialled the same number and apologized – the confusion with Malcolm’s mother, she’d meant to be phoning the children’s, Daniel’s school, it was Daniel, their son, who was ill. ‘I must be going round the bend,’ she said amusedly, ‘ringing the number next to the school’s in the address book and saying Malcolm when I meant Daniel.’

‘That’s all right,’ the secretary said, obviously thinking there were better things for her to be doing. She phoned the florist’s, and this time, to Nick, but with even more of a telephone voice, it was her that was ill. ‘Eaten something,’ she said. ‘Awful bore.’

Nick told her not to worry, he’d hold the fort; there was something almost enthusiastic about the way he said it, and then he apologized again for not making it to her party the other night. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ he said. She had forgotten all about that; almost all about that; but he had reminded her, and that absence, so painful and crucial, returned at once, shamefully battling in her mind against this now more urgent, more dutifully felt absence. To the police, she would have told the exact truth, but now she could only tell them that Malcolm had turned up safe and sound, and in a sense, so he had.

Thank God, with five of them, the washing was constant; thank God that supplied her with something to do. As far as she could see, going through the piles, then, her heart beating, their joint wardrobe, Malcolm had taken no clothes. What that meant, good or bad, she couldn’t articulate even in her mind. She took it all downstairs, at least three loads, and deposited it on the utility-room floor. That was where the washing-machine, the boiler, the freezer, all sat together. It was a good thing with the washing machine; an efficient new one, its cycle went into passages of immense fury you couldn’t make yourself be heard over when it had been in the kitchen. Even in the utility room, it made the walls of the house shake at its juddering climaxes. She put a load of washing in. That would be something to fill the time, that and the ironing. She could have welcomed the children going off to school, or at least engaging in some kind of holiday activity that would have removed them for a while.

As for her, back in the dining room, she looked out of the window at the activity outside. Then, quite abruptly, she decided to go and offer the new neighbours a cup of coffee. Get to know them. It wouldn’t do to give the removal men coffee, and then be remote and stand-offish with the people you were going to live opposite. She stared, hard, at the unit, identical to her own, facing her house for anyone to see. Drawn out by that, she slipped on a pair of shoes and walked out of the house, leaving the front door open. ‘Won’t be a moment,’ she called.

‘There’s Katherine Glover,’ Anthea Arbuthnot observed to Mrs Warner, both comfortably settled at the window with the best view. ‘I thought she wouldn’t be long.’

‘Why’s that, then?’ Mrs Warner said, enjoying this.

‘I wouldn’t suppose she’d put up with all that cheap tat lying about in the road,’ Anthea said. ‘She’s very hot on that sort of thing. Only the other night, she was saying to me that something or other, I forget what, was bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood. One of nature’s complainers, I’d say.’

‘She works, she was telling me,’ Mrs Warner said, not believing a word of Anthea’s version, quite rightly.

‘That’s right,’ Anthea said. ‘But it’s a very superior job, I believe.’

‘Those children, they’re not very superior,’ Mrs Warner said.

‘Not at all,’ Anthea said. ‘Do you know, I think she’s just going over there to take a better look. Some people really are appallingly nosy,’ she went on, but that was a joke, and both she and Karen tittered at themselves and their shameless vigil. ‘I don’t think much of that suite,’ she went on. ‘I wouldn’t have it in the house myself.’

‘Hello?’ Katherine called, hovering in the front door, calling into the empty house. She didn’t like to ring the doorbell when the door stood open.

‘Hello,’ the youngest of the removal men said satirically, coming through with a single chair. ‘Mind your back.’

‘Hello?’ she called again, and a woman her age, hair untidy, an expression of nervousness, came out into the hallway. At the same time, a pair of children, a boy, a child’s face, but too tall, and a girl with an unusual forward stance, dark and unformed, came halfway down the stairs, stood and looked.

‘Not there,’ an impatient man’s London voice said from somewhere else, and then ‘Who’s that?’ as he, too, came through, his shirt sleeves rolled. The four stood there and looked at Katherine, almost as if puzzled. She gathered herself.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Alice said, once Katherine had explained, had welcomed them to the neighbourhood, had suggested refreshments. Introductions had been made; Bernie had smiled quickly and returned to the sitting room. The children stayed where they were. ‘We’d like that –’ but the children shook their heads, and Bernie had things to do. ‘Well, I would, anyway.’ Katherine would have liked to have a look round the house – she’d never really known the Watsons, and the layout of all the houses was slightly different – but in a moment she and Alice were going back together over the road, and Alice was asking what the previous owners were like.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Alice said, ‘I hope they weren’t great friends of yours, but…’ and she explained about the lightbulbs.

Katherine laughed a little and, no, she hadn’t known them well. ‘Come in,’ she said, with a big gesture. Alice had stopped halfway down the front garden path and was looking up at the front of their house. ‘It’s wistaria,’ Katherine said, laughing. ‘You’re shocked to see it doing so well up here, I can see, but it’s had a good year, ours,’ and, seizing Alice’s arm in a frank way, brought her into the house. ‘They surely didn’t take all the lightbulbs,’ she said, and then she was explaining about the Yorkshire character. ‘You’re from London,’ she said, not asking a question, and then was off on a great paragraph of generalisation. She could hear herself, how faintly mad she sounded, setting out what the people of Sheffield were like, and the people of the whole county too, all three ridings, ‘though we aren’t to say ridings any more, that’s all gone’, their tightness with money, the way they wouldn’t waste a word, their honesty and openness.

‘I see,’ Alice said, evidently wondering a little as they came into Katherine’s house. But Katherine went on, unable to help herself, and Alice helped her out with a banality she’d heard or read or seen, that there was a friendliness and openness in the north, which just wasn’t there in the south.

‘You won’t find people keeping themselves to themselves in the same way here,’ Katherine went on, forgetting that she had said exactly that of the departed miserly Watsons, who were nothing if not Yorkshire, had, indeed, according to Katherine, embodied the manners of the whole county.

‘I can see that already, the friendliness,’ Alice said, smiling awkwardly at this generous neighbour.

‘That’s kind of you,’ Katherine said. ‘But you’ll find that we’re all like that around here.’ She thought of saying that there were few people in the area who didn’t keep their door on the snib, but fell silent: this new neighbour would quickly discover that it wasn’t true, for one thing, and in any case it would have made the road sound a little common. She put the kettle on; she heard herself and her brave party voice, not able to be kind without making a comment on that kindness.

‘Normally,’ she went on, ‘I’d be at work by now.’

‘Really?’ Alice said. ‘Where do you work?’

‘Well, it’s quite a new thing,’ Katherine said. ‘I used to work, before the children were born. I mean, when I met my husband I was working at a solicitor’s, and then, after we married, I carried on working, though of course there was no real need, not at the solicitor’s, I didn’t carry on there. I worked at a school, not as a teacher, a sort of administrative job. Do you know Sheffield? No? Well, you must go and have a look at Peace Square. Most of Sheffield was bombed in the war, but that, it’s eighteenth century, untouched, really charming. That was where I worked, in the solicitor’s. Of course, when the children came along I gave up work, though you know, then, I don’t know if it was different in London, but it was quite unusual for a woman to go on working after she was married. You gave up, didn’t you, when you married, not when the children came along? It was the done thing.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said.

‘And, of course, the children – well, there were three of them, there are three of them, I should say, so it’s only quite recently that I suddenly thought, I’m bored with sitting at home all day, doing nothing, I’m going to go out there and get a job to keep me occupied. And I did, and it’s the best thing,’ she said emphatic ally, as if insisting on her point, ‘I ever did.’

‘Where do you work?’ Alice said.

‘In Broomhill – oh, you won’t know – a florist’s shop, a new one,’ she went on. ‘It’s only opened a year or two. Nick, the owner, he’s from London – he studied up here, and then he stayed, and he’s opened this little florist’s, and it’s doing very well. He was supposed to come to a party here a night or two back, but something came up and he couldn’t come. Actually, we were thinking, your house, we thought you’d probably be moved in by then and it would have been a good chance for you to meet everyone in the neighbourhood. That’s when we were planning it, and we set the date, thinking, they must be in and settled by then, the Watsons, they’d been gone so long, and then the date was fixed and the invitations sent out and we discovered, my husband and I, we’d missed you by two days. What a shame! You could have met him then.’

‘Your husband?’ Alice said. ‘I’m sure—’

‘No,’ Katherine said, ‘Nick, you could have met Nick, except that he couldn’t come. And you hadn’t moved in. I meant Nick. I don’t know why he didn’t come. Go away,’ she said, raising her voice, as Daniel wandered into the kitchen.

‘Your son?’ Alice said, nervously taking a cup of coffee.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘I’m sorry, I should have introduced you. How old are your children?’

‘Well, Sandra’s fourteen, and Francis, he’s eleven,’ Alice said.

‘So they’ll be going to—’

‘Going to?’

‘I meant their schools.’

‘Oh – I think Sandra’s, it’s called—’

‘The thing is,’ Katherine said, setting her cup down on the work surface and staring out of the window, ‘you’ve really found us at sixes and sevens this morning.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said, thinking that the woman needn’t have asked her over if it was as inconvenient as all that.

‘The fact is that my husband’s left me,’ Katherine said.

All at once there seemed to be an echo in the kitchen, and both Katherine and Alice listened to the noise it made. Katherine had spoken definitely, but she listened, now, to the decisive effect of a statement she had not quite known to be true; she listened to it with something of the same surprise as Jane, sitting on the stairs listening to her mother going on. Alice listened, too; she knew that some sentences needed to be treated, once spoken, with respect, left with a small sad compliment of silence.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said. ‘Was it very recently?’

‘It was last night,’ Katherine said, almost angrily.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said. ‘Listen, I’m sure you really don’t want a stranger just at the moment – it was kind of you, but I’d better leave—’

‘Of course, you’ve got so much to do,’ Katherine said.

‘No, it’s not that,’ Alice said. ‘There must be someone who can come and—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘There isn’t anyone, really.’ It was true. Her party rose up before her again; she found it difficult to call any of them a friend, and impossible to imagine, say, sitting with that pregnant girl and telling her anything. ‘I don’t have any friends.’

‘I’m sure it just feels like that,’ Alice said.

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s true. I’ve never had any friends, not really. You have friends at school, people you think are friends, but you lose touch with them afterwards. They get married, they go off and live on the other side of the city. And really all you had in common with them was that you were sitting in the same room with them most days, and when that stops, you don’t have anything much to talk about any more. And the people you work with, when you work, you leave, you say, “Oh, we’ll stay in touch,” and you mean it, and they mean it, but you don’t. Maybe you see them once in a while, just bump into them, and they tell you what they’re doing, their children, and you tell them what your children are doing, and then you go on and nothing ever comes of it.

‘My God, you’re wondering, what have I walked into?’

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t worry about that, I’m fine. You can talk to me, I’m here.’

‘There isn’t anyone else,’ Katherine said simply. ‘I thought about Nick. Nick, he’s my boss, he runs the florist’s. I thought he was, you know, my friend, but he isn’t, not really. I’m just counting them up. There are the neighbours – they’re just neighbours, really. There are other people – I used to meet these women for coffee in the morning, but…Can you imagine? They say, what – “We’re thinking of redecorating our lounge,” and you say, “That’s interesting, my husband’s left me.” They wouldn’t be able to say anything back. And Nick – I’ll tell you something. It’s all about Nick, really. I’m sure it is.’

‘What do you mean?’ Alice said. She felt that this woman had really forgotten the situation; she had forgotten that Alice wasn’t just a passing acquaintance she’d never see again, but someone who from now on would live opposite her. She, after all, was now exactly one of those neighbours and Katherine didn’t seem to understand that.

‘I’ve been silly about him,’ Katherine said, ‘I suppose. I like him, a lot. Well, he’s honestly not anything like most people in Sheffield. His brother lives in New York.’

‘I see,’ Alice said.

‘I don’t have a brother in New York, I don’t know anyone who does,’ Katherine said. ‘He’s funny, he’s really funny, when he talks – that’s the only way I can put it. And, you know, I’ve been kidding myself about him, I see that now. Because he’s a bit hopeless, really, and I’ve helped him out, I’ve kept him going, or so I thought, and he must have been quite grateful for it, or so I thought. But I had a party, it’s the first party I’ve had for I don’t know how long. Malcolm, he just doesn’t like the idea.

‘It would be a nice idea, you know? I said so to Malcolm. I said, I said wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little party for when the new neighbours move in, not just for that but for all the road to meet each other because these days, people, they don’t know each other, not because – but – well – I don’t know. I don’t know why people don’t know each other these days. My husband, Malcolm, he works in a building society, but he’s got lots of interests, outside interests, and he does know people. You wouldn’t think it to meet him, but he’s got all these friends through his societies – he’s keen on gardening, he’s in a society, and of course there’s the battle re-creation society, too—’

Katherine, so measured in her speech, had begun to loosen and quicken, her voice now free and bold, her vowels quick and emphatic with the speech of her Sheffield childhood. It was as if for years now she had been answering the telephone under observation. The voice was liberated from constraint and full, of all things, of new love.

‘Battle re-creation?’ the new neighbour was saying, puzzled.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s an odd thing. They re-create old battles – they dress up, once a year or so, they act out old battles, just as they were, on the moors. Of course it’s usually the Civil War, that’s usually it – they can’t stretch to different uniforms every time, but once they joined forces with a society from Wales and they did the battle of Waterloo, that must be ten years ago. It takes a lot of work, it’s only once a year. Malcolm loves it. He’s got friends through that, you see.

‘But most people, these days, they don’t have the time, and they don’t really make friends with their neighbours particularly. I didn’t expect Malcolm to agree to the party, but he did. The kids, they weren’t around – I can’t remember why not – oh, it was – well, we were on our own, and it was a nice moment, not that I’d engineered it or planned it to get a favour out of him. But I asked and he said straight away, “Yes, let’s have a party.” He said it straight out, and he gave me a big smile, and it was something I’d asked, and it was something he could say that would please me. You see, he wanted to please me.’

‘He sounds a nice man, your husband,’ Alice said.

‘I think he is,’ Katherine said, almost surprised, it seemed, at the insight she’d been led to.

‘And you know him best,’ Alice said.

‘Do you think so?’ Katherine said.

‘Well,’ Alice said. ‘You know, I honestly don’t know – I mean, I don’t know you, I certainly don’t know your husband but—’

She stopped. Katherine withdrew her hand; without her noticing it, she had reached out and rested it on Alice’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ Katherine said, after a time. Something of her formal voice had returned; she might have been regretting the lack of stargazer lilies, late on a Friday afternoon. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘That’s all right,’ Alice said. ‘But you do know him best.’

‘I wonder,’ Katherine said.

‘You must do,’ Alice said. ‘Married to him.’

‘Maybe,’ Katherine said. ‘It was just that moment. When he said, “Yes, let’s have a party.” He hadn’t wanted to please me like that, not for years. He used to want to, it used to be all the time and you never noticed. You know when it’s been dry, all summer, and then one day it rains; and then everywhere there’s this smell of grass and earth and flowers, everywhere.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Yes, I know that.’

‘But you never noticed it had gone, that smell,’ Katherine said. ‘And after a while, if it goes on raining, you can’t smell it any more. It’s just the air, it’s just ordinary, you take it for granted.’

‘It was like that.’

‘Yes, it was like that,’ Katherine said. ‘But I’m so stupid. I always ruin everything, always. He said that, and immediately I said the thing I was thinking really. I said, “Let’s have a party,” and he said yes. And then I said we could ask all sorts of people, not just the neighbours, and he said, yes, we could, why not? I don’t know who he was thinking of, or who he thought I could be thinking of. But then I said what I couldn’t help saying, I said, “For instance, we could ask someone like Nick.” And he didn’t say anything. But I went on, I said, “After all, he’s never been here, he’s never come to the house, it would be nice to have him over.” It was an awful thing to say, it really was. I said it anyway. I don’t know what he said back. Maybe he said, “Yes, why not?” but it was awful for him. I don’t know what I’ve been doing to him. I couldn’t help it.’

By now they were sitting. Alice looked away from the beginnings of Katherine’s tears. The kitchen was brilliant with elective cheerfulness, constructed with wallpaper and blinds and spotlights; its morning yellow sunlit and shining with well-kept order and cleanliness. But there was a woman weeping in it, somehow. Alice had walked lightly across the road, and found herself in a place without landmarks. She looked out of the window tactfully; incredibly, her family were there, getting on with the unloading.

‘You’ll be wanting to get back,’ Katherine said dully.

Alice turned back to her. Probably better, she told herself firmly, that the woman tell her all this. She was going to have to tell someone, and better her than one of the woman’s children. There were things your children should never hear. She’d forgotten the woman’s name. That was awful, and now surely irreparable.

‘That’s all right,’ Alice said. ‘It’s better that you tell someone.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘That’s right. It’s better I tell someone like you all this rather than the children. Or a neighbour.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, startled. ‘Of course, I am a neighbour now.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Yes, I suppose you are.’

‘Listen,’ Alice said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something directly, because—’

‘Depends what it is,’ Katherine said, smiling, wiping her face with a tea towel – the Beauties of Chatsworth, Alice registered irrelevantly. There was something cheeky in her recovering voice; it wasn’t true, Alice thought, that you saw what people were really like only in a crisis.

‘You don’t have to tell me anything at all,’ she said. ‘You really don’t. But is that really the whole story?’

‘The whole story?’

‘I meant about Nick,’ Alice said. ‘Nick? That’s his name?’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘About Nick?’

‘You and Nick, I mean,’ Alice said.

‘Me and Nick,’ Katherine said. A formality came into her voice again as she saw what Alice had meant. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not having an affair, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘That was what I was suggesting.’

‘Well,’ Katherine said, attempting a light laugh, ‘I suppose you did ask permission to ask a direct question, and I don’t know a more direct question than that. No, as it happens, Nick and I are not having some sort of mad passionate affair. I suppose there isn’t an enormous amount of point in my saying that. I wouldn’t be very likely to say anything different to you if we…’ she paused for a second ‘…we were in fact having an illicit affair. But one doesn’t happen to be.’

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘No, I believe you.’ It was true. She did believe it. Oddly, it was the way the note of deception had crept into the woman’s voice that convinced her. The woman, whatever else she was, had no gift for lying, and in most of what Alice had heard from her, the note of helpless truth had been audible. It was only at that point, asked directly if she were, in fact, having an affair, that the voice had started to listen to itself as if to monitor its scrupulous lies. And yet the voice was telling the truth; Alice had no doubt of that. The woman was not having an affair, as she said. But Alice had touched something secret and cherished; she had touched, surely, some characteristic and elaborate pretence. Katherine had lapsed into what, surely, was her usual allusive and interior style where Nick was concerned; she had treasured him up and made a precious mystery out of him before the only audience she had, her husband and children. There was nothing there; Alice could see that. But she’d played it out, and he’d believed what she’d wanted him to believe. The woman sat there in her kitchen, looking firmly ahead, away from Alice. She was smiling tautly, her expression now as she wanted it to be, and that must be bad to live with. An affair would be better; that was something to forgive, to walk away from. To have done nothing wrong, to make a secret of nothing, to coach yourself in the gestures of mystery and deflection, to turn your head away to suppress a manufactured expression of recalled rapture, all that, daily; from that there was no walking away.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Alice said.

‘Malcolm?’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t know. He’s just gone.’

‘He didn’t say anything?’ Alice said.

‘Nothing,’ Katherine said. ‘Not even a letter.’

Alice looked at her, seriously wondering. ‘He’s just disappeared?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Just like that.’

‘But—’ Alice said. ‘Sorry, but – I mean – are you sure that he’s not – well, it could be anything, it could be—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘He’s all right. I know that. He phoned his office this morning. I don’t know where from. He’d do that – he’d phone the office so as not to let them down. Me—’ She left it at that. ‘No, he’s not hurt or in an accident. If that’s what you mean. He’s obviously left me. He told the office that his mother’s been taken ill and he had to go over there all of a sudden.’

‘And she hasn’t been taken ill?’ Alice said.

‘Not urgently,’ Katherine said, and started laughing, an ugly sound.

‘Not—’

‘She’s dead, she’s been dead for five years. I’m surprised the building society didn’t remember that when he said so. It’s a stupid thing for him to say to anyone. Honestly, I don’t have any doubt what’s happened.’

‘I see,’ Alice said. She didn’t see at all. There must be other solutions to this situation; she just couldn’t see what they were.

‘It’s just the waiting,’ Katherine said.

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘I can see that. Not knowing.’

‘When there’s some news,’ Katherine said, ‘that won’t be so bad. Then I’ll know where he is, what’s happening, even, God forbid, if he’s done something stupid, but then we’ll know, there’ll be things to do. It’s the not knowing.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Have you talked to the children?’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Yes. Well, sort of. Not all this. There’ll be time enough.’

‘If I were you,’ Alice said, ‘I’d just go and sit with them. You know, be all jolly and cheerful, as if nothing much has happened. They’ll be worried, too. I don’t know, go and help your little boy, show an interest in the snake, that sort of thing—’

‘The snake?’ Katherine said. ‘How on earth did you know about Tim and snakes?’

‘Well, I saw him,’ Alice said. ‘In the window.’

‘But how do you know—’

‘He was holding it up,’ Alice said.

‘A snake?’ Katherine said. ‘He hasn’t got a snake. He never shuts up about them, it’s snakes from the moment he wakes up, but I promise you—’

Alice looked back at her, and, incredibly, felt herself starting to blush. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you anything you didn’t know. But he’s definitely got a snake up there. When we were walking up your drive, I looked up and there he ws in the window with a snake round his neck. I’d better be going.’

Outside on the stairs, Jane had been listening to quite a lot of this. The kitchen door had been taken off, long ago, or perhaps there had never been one, she couldn’t remember. There was a sort of open-plan idea going on, and whenever anything was fried in the kitchen, the smell carried right upstairs, the light patina of grease settling on almost everything throughout the house. You could hear anyone talking in there, too. She’d heard everything her mother had to say, but this would bring her out of the kitchen, and Jane got up briskly and walked back to her bedroom. In a second her mother was following her; up the stairs at quite a trot, you could hear. ‘Timothy,’ she said, raising her voice, ‘Timothy!’ and into his bedroom. Jane came out on to the landing; so did Daniel. Downstairs, the new neighbour was standing in the hallway; she looked a nice woman, and tried a smile, a confused one, on the pair of them. The moment for her farewell was on the far side of some terrible family scene. She just stood there. Jane would have done the same.

‘Is this true?’ Katherine said, in the doorway of Tim’s room.

‘What’s this now?’ Daniel said.

‘Tim’s got a snake,’ Jane said to Daniel.

‘Is it true?’ Katherine said.

‘Is it true what?’ Tim said. He had got up from his bed, had backed nervously away to the window. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘You heard what your sister said,’ Katherine said. ‘Have you got yourself a snake?’

Tim said nothing for a moment; his fingers, behind him, running fretfully along his little shelf. ‘I’d love a snake,’ he said forlornly, but his regular request, so long overlooked or greeted with the same brief riposte had lost conviction. ‘I really would.’

‘Do I have to hear from the neighbours that you’re hiding a snake in the house?’ Katherine said. ‘Where is it?’

‘It smells in here,’ Daniel said, coming to the door of Tim’s room. ‘It really does.’

‘I haven’t got any kind of snake,’ Tim said.

‘Are you lying to me?’ Katherine said. ‘What’s under your bed?’

‘Nothing,’ Tim said, breaking out into a wail, but Katherine was already on her knees, dragging out the glass case with one, then two hands. She pulled it into the middle of the room, and knelt there, staring at the thing. It was like an aquarium of air; littered with small rocks, little toys and, ignoring all of these, curled up, was a snake; thirty inches long, yellow, skinny and ugly. With a gesture of disgust, Katherine got up, pushing the case to one side, and stared at Tim. He started to cry, turning his face away.

‘What is that?’ Katherine said.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Daniel said, coming in and peering at the thing.

‘It’s – please don’t – I didn’t mean—’

‘That,’ Katherine said, ‘is a snake. And where did it come from?’

‘I – I—’ Tim said, but it was all too much, and his tears overcame him.

‘You can’t keep it,’ Katherine said. ‘There’s no argument about that. It’s going straight back to wherever you got it from.’

‘What’s he called?’ Jane said.

‘Geoffrey,’ Tim said, through his tears. ‘I only wanted a snake called Geoffrey.’

‘How do you know it’s male?’ Daniel said, looking closely. ‘Look, he’s seen me, he likes me—’

‘The man in the shop said,’ Tim said. ‘And, besides, you can tell the difference between male and female by—’

‘That’s enough,’ Katherine said, not letting Tim set out his expertise; it was the way he comforted himself. ‘It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s going back to the man in the shop. My God, it’s not dangerous, is it? You’ve not been as stupid as that?’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘He wouldn’t hurt anyone, he wouldn’t. I take him out, I talk to him. You can tell he’s not venomous, because the venomous ones, generally—’

‘If I want to know about fucking snakes,’ Katherine said, beyond everything now, ‘I’ll ask for the information and I won’t have to think about who to ask, I’ve heard enough about them now. I could write an essay on the subject with everything we’ve all had to listen to. All I want to know now is where it came from and then you and I are going to take it back there. And I’m going to give the man in the shop –’ and, as she said that, she dropped into an awful, mincing voice of parody, nothing like Tim’s voice, but just the voice of loose cruel mockery ‘– a piece of my mind for selling anything, let alone a snake, to a small boy on his own. My God, what must he have been thinking of?’

Tim’s tears, which had been drying up, burst out with great force, and downstairs Alice, still hovering and listening, decided that she would not be missed, and should probably not hear this. She tried to feel pity: not eleven o’clock and all this deposited on top of the situation. But Katherine had sworn at her child, and had spoken to him not even as a sardonic teacher speaks, but as one child to another, a bully in the playground. No one should be heard speaking like that, and Alice let herself out quietly.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ Tim said.

‘Of course you meant to,’ Daniel said, apparently enjoying the situation. ‘You must have saved up for months.’

‘Years,’ Tim said. ‘I thought you’d like—’

‘Of course I don’t like it,’ Katherine said. ‘How do you open this thing?’

Tim, crying, said nothing, and Katherine got down on her knees and fiddled with the case. With a single quick gesture, she reached in and took the snake with both hands, one hand behind its head, the other about its tail, and stood up. The snake buckled and writhed in mid-air, astonished and frightened, its tongue flickering in and out. ‘Don’t take him back there,’ Tim said, dashing at her and trying to seize her arms. ‘He doesn’t like it there, please don’t—’

‘All right, then,’ Katherine said, nearly smiling, ‘if that’s what you want—’

And she walked out of the room decisively and down the stairs, the snake in her hands, her children following her.

‘That was Caroline,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, coming back from the telephone. ‘You know, nice young thing, she works as a nursery nurse, very pregnant, I mentioned. She says she’s just setting off now so she’ll be here in five minutes, tops. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

‘Oh, good,’ Mrs Warner said.

‘No, I won’t, she’s coming out again,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, sitting down. Over the road, Alice had opened the front door of the Glovers’ house and closed it behind her, very gently. ‘She’s been a time.’

‘Saw herself out, I see,’ Karen Warner said. ‘Too much trouble to take your guests to the door to say goodbye. Manners.’

‘Terrible,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Would you have said that she enjoyed herself, meeting the Glovers?’

‘Well,’ Mrs Warner said, observing Alice treading, very gently, down the path, as if trying to escape without being noticed, casting a glance upwards at the house. ‘I expect it was very nice for her, really.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Very nice. All the same, I think I might pop over there when they’re a little settled. You don’t want them to be thinking that we’re all like that, do you?’

‘Like what?’ Mrs Warner said, rather sharply; she didn’t altogether approve of being superior about your neighbours, even if they probably deserved it, particularly two days after you’d drunk their wine and ate their food and admired their furniture.

Mrs Arbuthnot, who would have said exactly the same thing, hastened to qualify her point. ‘Not all the same,’ she said. ‘People, they aren’t all the same, are they?, even if they all live in the same road, and it’s nice to meet – well, anyway. It was a nice party she gave.’

‘Very nice,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Of course,’ she went on, offering Anthea a little concession in return, ‘I’m not sure about letting those children stay up, cluttering up the party. A little out of control.’

‘The boy,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, enjoying this part of the conversation. ‘The girl, of course, she’s not so bad, but I agree, I wouldn’t have them around, any kind of children, particularly when they’re at that difficult age. I notice you didn’t think of bringing your John along.’

‘No, I certainly didn’t,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘If you ask me, it’s nice to have an evening without your great lump hanging around and embarrassing you, and it’s not as if he needs a babysitter. They are a worry, though.’

‘A worry?’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. She remembered Mrs Warner’s John, hopeless. Mrs Warner explained.

‘Well,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said finally. ‘I’m sure it’ll all come right in the end. Now – goodness – what—’

Opposite, the front door of the Glovers’ had opened again. The removal men at the new people’s house, the new family, the husband, the girl and the elongated boy, as well as their mother, were all standing outside in an awkwardly arranged group, and had an excellent view. Through the door of the Glovers’ came Katherine. In her hands she was holding a – what was it – something limp but flexible, like—

‘That’s never a snake she’s got there,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘It is, it’s a snake. Goodness me.’

‘Where’s that from?’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Not the garden, surely.’

‘I never heard of—’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, but she dried up at what was happening. Behind Katherine and her snake came her younger boy, screaming and crying, tugging at her ineffectually, and the two others standing by. The windows were shut, but the boy was screaming, ‘You fucking, fucking mother,’ as Katherine marched down the path.

‘Disgraceful,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘He can’t be more than –’

‘Eight,’ Mrs Warner supplied. ‘Imagine. Look, here’s Caroline—’

But the nursery nurse, just heaving herself down the road, coming into view, stopped dead at Arbuthnot’s gate, and, like the new family and the removers and, inside, Anthea and Karen, watched Katherine and the children.

‘Don’t you ever—’ Katherine was screaming at her son, who was screaming back. ‘And if you ever do anything like that again – this is what happens when you do something as naughty as—’

She ran out of words. She didn’t seem to see anyone else around her; the snake, held between her two hands, she raised above her head in a bold, a dancer’s gesture, and flung it down on the pavement. ‘Stop it, stop it!’ Tim was screaming, over and over, but she raised her foot and brought the heel of her black shoe down on the snake’s head, crushing it in one. It flailed behind her like a whip. The screaming rose, went beyond words, and the little boy’s face purpled with terror and violence. His limbs flailed away from him in undecided, unformed gestures, as if some invisible force was plucking at them, and he screamed and screamed. Behind him, his sister turned away and, with a gesture too theatrical to be anything but instinctive, covered her eyes. Over the road, the new people, the Sellerses, stood and stared, and you couldn’t blame them.

‘My God,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said in her house, and Mrs Warner’s mouth moved, and it formed the words without being able to say them. Only Katherine, across the road, seemed composed: she had done what she had meant to do, and now it was all done, all over, and she stood up straight, paying no attention to her screaming son. But had it been enough? There was, surely, a little uncertainty in the way she scanned the houses, at whoever might be watching what she had so publicly done. The doorbell rang.

‘My God,’ Anthea said, hurrying to let Caroline in. ‘Did you see—’ she said, opening the door.

But the nursery nurse, enlisting the doorjamb to support her bulk, was muddily pale, grey to the point of greenness in the face; she had seen it. And it had been all too much for her, the sight of a woman, a mother, flinging down a snake almost in her path and then stamping on it, the snake’s head making a vile porridge on the pavement, and then the screaming – Caroline leant forward, as if in a swoon, and Anthea came forward with her arms open to catch her. But she leant forward in a single shy apologetic motion and, for the first time in several months now, vomited over Anthea, vomited copiously over the small glass coffee-table, the hallway rug, the art-deco figurine of a Greek dancer Anthea had always meant to have valued, everywhere.

‘My God!’ Anthea said – it was all too much and, with a little scream, she ran upstairs, plucking at her puked-over bosom as Caroline, still bubbling over, tried to raise herself up and start apologizing.

‘It could have been worse,’ Mrs Warner said, coming out gingerly, and trying not to look, guiding the poor girl into the downstairs clockroom, trying to help her without actually touching her. Because if there was one thing she hated—

The van was quite unloaded, and the removers gone, and Bernie had fetched thirty lightbulbs, half bayonets, half screw-ins, a mix of sixty and hundred-watt bulbs, and Alice, Sandra and Francis were sitting in their new sitting room, the furniture somehow arranged. They were surrounded by sealed boxes in the evening light, eating a kind of scratch supper off their knees, just for tonight.

‘Sounds like she’s not all there,’ Bernie said.

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘She’d had a shock.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ Bernie said.

‘Who? Oh, her husband,’ Alice said. ‘That’s an awful thing to say, love.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m worried at the idea of living opposite someone like that.’

‘She must be mental,’ Sandra said.

‘Imagine what it’d be like being married to her,’ Bernie went on. ‘You wouldn’t be blamed by anyone, really, for leaving her. Mentally unbalanced.’

‘We don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘It might be the shock, your husband ups and goes. That’s a terrible thing to happen.’

‘No, love,’ Bernie said. ‘Anyone normal, they just get on with things. They don’t—’

‘She took the snake,’ Francis said meditatively, telling the story bit by bit, almost more for himself than for anyone else, ‘and she threw it down and she jumped on its head until it was dead, and it was the boy’s snake, and he was there watching.’

‘That’s about the sum of it,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s not normal, whatever’s happened to you. It’s not still lying there, is it? Christ.’

‘No,’ Francis said. ‘The girl, his sister, she came out a while ago with a plastic bag and a broom, cleared it up and threw it away, and she washed the pavement down, too.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Bernie said. ‘Someone in the family’s got a bit of sense, apart from him, the dad, had the sense to walk out.’

‘Poor woman,’ Alice said. ‘I wish—’ She dried up and took a forkful of Russian salad from her plate of cold food. It was like the supper of a Christmas night, the dinner she’d arranged for them the first night in a new house, and the events of the day similarly cast a sensation of exhausted manic festivity over their plates.

‘What do you wish, love?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ Alice said. You couldn’t say to your husband and children that you wished you’d kept the information of this woman’s situation to yourself. You owed her nothing, you wouldn’t keep anything from these three. But she still thought she might not have repeated any of that. ‘I bet he’ll be back,’ she said, surprising herself.

‘Why do you say that?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just think he will be. He doesn’t sound like the sort of man who wouldn’t come back. He works in a building society.’

‘She sounds mental,’ Sandra said. ‘Killing the little boy’s pet like that in front of him. I wouldn’t mind a snake as a pet. If she couldn’t have it in the house, she could have found a home for it. Oh, well, who cares?’

‘You’re not to be getting ideas,’ Bernie said to Sandra, ‘about snakes.’

‘No, I don’t really want one,’ she said. ‘But killing it, that was horrible.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘It was horrible.’ But she felt—

She felt what Katherine, across the road, felt.

Katherine was sitting on her own in the dining room. The table was empty and not set; there was no food and Katherine had not prepared any. The children had been into the kitchen and had picked up what they could from the fridge, from the cupboards; children’s meals, the sort of thing they arranged for themselves between meals, coming home from school. At least Jane and Daniel had; Tim was still upstairs, gulping and muttering to himself in his room. The last time she’d looked, his face was in his pillow and he refused to take it out at any expressions of regret or apology. Inconsolable. It was just too bad for him; and he liked his food. She didn’t worry, not for the moment. What she felt was that the primary drama of the day, the awful thing that had happened to her, was Malcolm’s disappearance. But that, now, was inside and had only happened to her. What had taken its place, and remained in its place, was what she had done in the street: stamped on her son’s snake at the utmost pitch of despair and rage. Malcolm would come back, there was no doubt about that. That would finish the story in everyone’s memory; his disappearance, for whatever reason, would end up being trivial and anecdotal. What would remain was not what had been done to her but what she had done. In the dining room, only the small lamp on the piano was switched on, and the room was dim and gloomy, a pool of light in the blue evening. She sat, her hands on the table, like a suspect in a cell; she breathed in and out steadily, knowing what she had now made of herself. And in time night came, still with no word from Malcolm, whom everyone had now apparently forgotten.

Eventually she got up, switched the lights off, one after another, and went to bed. Over the road, the lights were still on. She looked at her watch and it was only a quarter past ten.

Malcolm came back two days later. She had stopped caring. That morning, she had taken the rubbish out, and over the road, the new people, they’d been coming out at the same time. She had been prepared to pretend that they hadn’t seen each other – she just didn’t want to think about the things she’d said to Alice. And she’d thought they would probably want to do the same, ignore her politely. Maybe, in a few months, they could pretend to be meeting for the first time, and everything could be, if not forgotten, then at least not mentioned, and they could both pretend they had forgotten. But Alice obviously didn’t know the rules of the game. They were getting into their ridiculous little car, some kind of small square boxy green thing, and Alice saw Katherine with her boxes of rubbish, the remains of the party, the empty bottles, the smashed glasses, the chicken carcasses, which had been attracting flies outside the back door waiting for the binmen’s day. She hesitated, evidently not knowing what she was supposed to do, and raised a hand. It was a gesture that might have been a greeting, or might have been the beginning of her scratching her head.

Perhaps it might have been possible. Perhaps if Malcolm had never left, she’d now be wandering over, asking how they were settling in, when the children would be starting school, offering advice about plumbers and local carpet-fitters, meeting the children and the husband, inviting them over for a drink with Malcolm and her children some time in the next day or two. But it was hard to see how she could manage that on her own. Alice didn’t seem to understand the rules of the situation. All the other neighbours did: the day before, Katherine had been walking slowly down the road, and the door to Mrs Arbuthnot’s had opened, issuing Mrs Arbuthnot, a scarf on her head and a shopping trolley, setting off for the supermarket. Mrs Arbuthnot had seen her approaching, and rather than continue and be forced to meet or ignore her, she’d performed a small pantomime of forgetting, slapping her forehead almost and shaking her head, going back inside until Katherine was safely past. Katherine blushed. Of course, she couldn’t know anything about Malcolm yet, could only have wondered about him not coming home, the car no longer in the driveway, or maybe she’d seen the business with the snake, heard Tim’s wailing. That sort of ignoring would not go on for ever, but only until these things were not the most recent and conspicuous subjects to talk about in a chance encounter. But Alice didn’t seem to know that, and raised her hand uncertainly. Her husband, opening the car, saw the gesture, and looked over the road to where Katherine stood. He waited, watching in the interested way of someone who hadn’t met her yet. Katherine smiled, but she could not wave because of the bags in her hands. She put them down, turned, and went back into the house.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to your party,’ Nick said, when she had got to work. ‘I was terribly looking forward to it. I don’t know what happened. It was all a bit chaotic. I went home and called my brother, you know, in New York, and then I sat down with the paper, just for five minutes, before getting dressed and coming up to your party, and all of a sudden I woke up and it was four hours later. I don’t know what happened – it must have been getting up so early for the market. And then, of course, it was far too late to come. I felt such a fool. I was so looking forward to it.’

‘That’s all right,’ Katherine said, stripping the leaves off a box of roses, her sleeves rolled up over her reddened forearms, Marigolds protecting her hands. They were white roses, just flushed with pink at the ends of the petals; lovely, unlasting. She had her back to him, her face down, concentrating on her task, and she let very little into her voice.

‘Was it a good party, though?’ Nick said.

‘Oh, it was just the neighbours mostly,’ Katherine said. ‘You’d have been bored.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Nick said. ‘I’m sure I would have loved it. Nobody ever asks me to parties. Well, there’s nobody I know who would invite me to a party, apart from you. I feel such a fool.’

‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ Katherine said, but there must have been something wrong with the way she said it, because Nick came up behind her and put a hand on her arm, as if he was about to turn her round to face him. The touch of him: she actually flinched. She could not endure the sensation.

‘Don’t be cross with me,’ he said, taking his hand away. ‘I can’t bear it if you – if anyone, I mean, if anyone’s ever cross with me. It’s just something I hate. It’s so silly, too, to fall out over something like that.’

‘Oh, no one’s going to be cross with you,’ Katherine said. She meant it to come across contemptuously, but it came out wrongly, as a confession of loneliness. Nick’s statement, which ought perhaps to have been that admission of loneliness, had instead been amused, self-reliant, adding to his confidence rather than anything else. Katherine had assured him that nobody could possibly be cross with him, and the words had their face value, a confession of admiration. All at once she was in tears, and gulping, trying to wipe her face with her arm and scratching herself with the rose in her yellow-gloved hand.

‘Katherine, don’t,’ Nick said. Without turning she could not tell whether concern or embarrassment would be in his face, but in a moment he took the rose from her, laid it on the pile, the right-hand one, of prepared roses, and he turned her round, her face lowered, not ready to meet his eyes and what might be in them. He so rarely used her name. No one did.

There was still quite some laundry to get through; that had been neglected in the days before the party and now it was keeping her busy. At home, she set the dinner to cook, and went through into the utility room to get on with it in the meantime. The children were in the sitting room, watching the noisy television they all seemed to get something out of. A year or two before they had extended the house. A garage had been built on the strip of land to the side, and what had been the garage, separated from the house, was turned into the dining room and, behind it, an intermediate sort of room, leading from the dining room into the garage.

After dinner, that evening, Katherine went back to the utility room. She had to do something to fill her mind with blankness. You could not hear the telephone from there, but the children would get it, and fetch her. Anyway, there was nobody to ring her, and if it rang, it would only be one of the children’s friends. The washing-machine had done one load – shirts and blouses – and was now starting on another, underwear. Normally, she would have transferred the shirts to the tumble-dryer, a newish acquisition, but today she wanted the chores to keep her busy, and she was ironing her way through a damp pile.

The door opened, the one from the dining room. It was Malcolm. She stopped and looked at him. He was wearing the suit he had been wearing that day, but a shirt she had never seen before, and no tie. He’s been buying new shirts while he’s been away, she thought, with a flush of anger. There were no children behind him; they’d probably taken themselves upstairs, whether to bed or just to be on their own. They’d been avoiding her, but now she didn’t care. After all, he’d come to see her first.

‘Are you back?’ she said harshly.

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘Yes, of course I’m back.’

‘I was worried,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ Malcolm said. ‘But you know why I went like that.’

She stared at him, and thumped down the iron. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, frankly, I don’t know why you went like that. I haven’t the faintest idea.’ She had to raise her voice; the washing-machine with its noisy rhythms was going into the racket of its spin cycle.

‘You want me to tell you?’ Malcolm said. ‘All right,’ and he started to speak. He was telling some sort of story, and in his hands, his face, you could see the weight of the conviction behind the story; telling what had led up to this, and what he had been doing the last few days outside the house, where he had been. His face went from pleasure, enjoyment as he thought of something, and rage, pain, irritation and puzzlement. He came into the utility room, and started walking up and down. But she could hardly hear any of it. His voice, always rather soft and low, stood no chance against the furious racket of the washing-machine. She watched, fascinated, and in all honesty not all that interested. It would probably be better, in the long run, not to know. She knew, afterwards, exactly how long Malcolm’s explanation had taken, because it was the exact length of the spin cycle. It took four minutes and twelve seconds. The spin cycle came to an end, juddering across the amplifying concrete floor, and made one or two final groans before going into a quieter reverse. It was Daniel and Tim’s socks in there, mostly black.

‘So that’s it, really,’ Malcolm said finally.

‘Yes, I see,’ Katherine said.

‘I don’t think there’s much point in going over and over it,’ Malcolm said.

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘I’ll not be bringing it up, asking for details. We’ll just get on with it.’

‘Exactly,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s the best thing, just get on with things, don’t go on about them.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘The new people moved in over the road.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Malcolm said. ‘Nice, are they?’

‘They seem nice,’ Katherine said. ‘Why don’t you go and say goodnight to the children?’

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’ll do that. I suppose I could just tell them—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Just tell them you’re back. That’ll do.’

‘Probably best,’ Malcolm said. ‘All right, then.’

There seemed to be something more he wanted to say; perhaps he could see in her face that in the last few days something had changed for her as well. But what would he know? For Malcolm, nothing in the situation as he knew it had changed; Tim had not had a snake under his bed, and still did not have a snake under his bed; his wife’s concealments remained his wife’s concealments; and he was back where he had always been. In a few days’ time he would wander across the road, drop in on the Sellerses, ask them over for a drink, and they would come over, none of them mentioning at any point any of the things he had caused or missed, and everything would be quite all right. ‘Is there any supper left?’ Malcolm called from the stairs.

‘There’s a bit,’ Katherine called back, but her answer was lost as the doors upstairs started to open, and something like conversation began again, and even the children pretended that there was nothing so very extraordinary, as there indeed was not, in their father coming home in the evening, the only cause for comment a shirt not seen before, the only remarkable detail a man in a suit, and no tie, and no sign of a tie anywhere.

BOOK TWO

Afterwards he could never accurately reconstruct the rules of the game. The game and its rules had come from nowhere, like myth or tune. It disappeared afterwards, leaving no trace in memory, not even its name, perhaps still being played by generations of children who discovered it, just as Francis had in the autumn of 1974, in a playground and lost it again within the year. But preserved only in that way. What he had in his memory was the sense of a chase, a circle of tremulously linked limbs, some raucous and pungent chant, and, more, the ecstatic terror of wriggling as the quarry turned and buckled under the hand of the pursuer, the ecstasy whichever way the roles had fallen that day; above all, a thick, vivid rise in the chest at the promise or the enactment of violence which, years later, he identified with some shock as an adult sensation, the sensation of erotic desire on the brink of fulfilment. It had been some form of chase, that was all; surely it was the subsequent recognition of its banality that removed its exact excitements from the memory. But a game of chase alone could not have accounted for that speechless thrill, ending with the crack of bone against concrete, a stifled and jubilant cry. There must have been something else.

The school building was new. The school had been recently transferred from an old and blackened building further up the hill to something modern. The old school was a decorated stone edifice, conspicuous with Victorian aspiration and benevolence; with its two entrances, still inscribed BOYS and GIRLS, it looked very much like a school. The new one, oddly, did not. Built in yellow brick, a single storey, the whole shape of the building was difficult to construe as Francis and his mother had crossed the empty playground, that first morning. The building bulged out at either side of a wide external staircase, burst into angry and fanciful geometries of brick and glass, sagging unexpectedly on to rounded banks of grass and, already, well-trodden flowers. He held his mother’s hand tightly. An odd pair, given his height; but he held his mother’s hand tightly.

Inside the building, they made their way somehow to the headmaster’s office. He contributed nothing to this, allowing his mother to make the enquiries, follow the signs, and only when they were sitting on two out of the line of five chairs, the kind lady remaining behind her desk, did he realize that he could not rely on his mother to lead him round his new school from now on. But waiting there, his main concern was for her: in her clothes, the tight smile which was in her mouth but not her eyes, there was something he ought to be able to console. He wanted to tell her that it would be all right, not altogether knowing that himself. But now the headmaster himself was coming down the corridor, buoyant from his assembly; down there, a daunting flood of children, all of whom he would shortly have to come to terms with, all of whom knew exactly where they were going.

The headmaster was affable; the secretary on the way out smiled kindly; a kiss had come from nowhere; and suddenly he was walking by the side of a teacher who, apparently, he had been introduced to, who, apparently, was now his teacher. His mother was gone. It had been her kiss. Once, when he was much smaller, he had in a moment of confusion in a classroom said, ‘Mummy…’ before realizing that he was addressing his teacher. He went clammy, as if he had already done it again, as his first act in a new school.

‘Quiet, now,’ the teacher said, coming into a room. It was full of children; they fell silent and looked at him. It was a terrible moment. The teacher had an extraordinary voice. She talked, too, in that strange way, as she went on to explain who he was, where he came from – London, it produced giggles across the classroom – and assigned a boy to show him round; she talked in that way where ‘castle’ sounded like ‘cattle’, a blunt and, to Francis, not very friendly-sounding manner of speech. He was surprised and ashamed on her behalf: he had not thought that a teacher, a person in charge, would speak in the ordinary way everywhere.

The boy he was supposed to sit next to shoved up roughly, and turned his face deliberately away from Francis, placing his hand against it so that Francis could not see anything of him. He was a naughty boy, you could see that straight away; he started hissing and sniggering to two other boys, naughty boys too, across the aisle, who leant forward and examined Francis from a safe, contemptuous distance, their lips curling like crimped pastry. He thought about his friends; they might be sitting at this exact moment, hundreds of miles away, in that sensible classroom, not just-built but old and solid, and there might be – his heart leapt to think of it – an empty chair there now, and perhaps a new person, someone a little like him, being guided to it.

The lesson started, but no one had taken out any books: they were just sitting there. Francis had been dreading that; he thought that he might be the only one without the books, and though everyone would notice no one would help. He had imagined he would go through his whole life in this school without books and, which he had anticipated and accepted, without friends. But there were no books. He placed his pens and pencil, the ruler and rubber on the table; he had brought them with him. He could not understand what sort of lesson this was. The teacher was just talking, and in a moment he listened. It was a while before her words started to make sense. She was talking about the government. He did not know what sort of lesson that could be part of. From time to time she asked a question, and nobody put their hands up so she answered it herself. Some of those questions Francis knew the answers to, but he didn’t put his hand up. It was like a party you weren’t sure you were meant to be at and he kept quiet, though it was painful for him not to be able to put his hand up to answer a question he could answer. The boy next to him went on talking to the boys over the aisle, and there was a sort of malice in the hiss, which was directed at Francis.

‘Michael,’ the teacher said abruptly. That was the boy’s name, which Francis hadn’t taken in, and the boy straightened up, lowered his hand from his face, and gave Francis a poisonous look, as if he had betrayed him. There was a smell as if of boiled peas from the boy; it was shocking, he was sitting next to a bad boy who wasn’t even clean. ‘Do you want to tell the class the name of the prime minister?’

‘Don’t know,’ Michael said eventually, full of scorn at being asked something so stupid.

‘Perhaps our new boy knows,’ the teacher said, quite gently.

‘It’s Mr Wilson,’ Francis said. He hardly knew how to pretend not to know.

‘Very good,’ the teacher said, enunciating with surprise in her voice, as if talking to an idiot. Francis felt himself getting a little cross. ‘And how long has he been prime minister?’

‘He was prime minister before,’ Francis said. ‘But there was a general election this year and he became it again. He’s Labour. I thought the Conservatives were going to come first, but they didn’t.’

‘Very good,’ the teacher said, now really surprised. ‘Quite a lot of people thought, like – like our new friend from London here’ – a wave, a giggle, but why? – ‘that the Conservatives were going to win. Now, who can explain to me what a general election is?’

The lesson went on, but Francis felt he shouldn’t have said anything, should have said, ‘Don’t know, Miss,’ and swapped what he possessed for something he might have, popularity and the quality of being ordinary. Once the attention of the teacher went elsewhere, the naughty boys on the other side of the aisle said, ‘Kick him,’ quite loudly, and Michael, the boy he was sitting next to, gave him a hard angry shove. Francis did not know how to respond, and blushingly rearranged his pens and pencils, his ruler and rubber. In time, the lesson came to an end; it was interrupted – and it had only really been a speech by the teacher, diversifying into reminiscence of a life led partly, it seemed, in Africa – by a bell that, so unexpectedly, was exactly the same as the bells in the school in London. The class got up, their chairs screeching on the floor, and the teacher, too, screeching for them to sit down until they were given permission to go. But half the class were already through the door, and she only wanted to say one more sentence before they were dismissed.

It was playtime. The boy he had been assigned to had disappeared and, anyway, Francis would not follow that boy: he knew well what would happen if he tried to make friends, having said in clear London tones who the prime minister now was. He didn’t know what to do or where to go, but he followed them anyway, and was soon in the playground. It was already full, and excited with noise.

All of a sudden, a boy was by his side, addressing him.

‘Do you see that girl?’ the boy said. Francis recognized him slowly. He must be in his class, he supposed; but there was some familiarity apart from that.

‘Yes,’ he said, though he did not know which girl the boy meant.

‘I think she’s so beautiful,’ the boy said. He was a strange boy: his voice was not ecstatic but robotic, as if he was producing an interesting fact. ‘Venus was the Roman goddess of beauty so I call her Venus.’

Francis did not know what to say to this. The boy was looking away from him across the playground. It seemed that he hadn’t actually been talking to Francis at all, not specifically. His buck-toothed face was flushed, his hair stuck down against his pink forehead. He called out, ‘Venus, Venus, my love, my love,’ and ran away towards the girls. At this they scattered, giving little screams, running off in twos and threes, severally. Francis was alone again; he stared at the concrete in furious amazement. He was alone again.

Francis concentrated very hard on walking round the complete edge of the playground. He pretended that the narrow stone edging to the asphalt square was a tightrope, suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, and he balanced on it carefully, placing one foot in front of another. That was a game you could play on your own and, after a few moments, he forgot almost everything. With arms spread out like wings, he really was walking a tightrope, forgetting whether it was a good game or just something to make yourself look occupied. He was three-quarters of the way round the square when he hit a flight of steps, interrupting its clear progress. On it there was a group of boys and girls mixed up together. He dropped his arms.

‘Were you talking to that Timothy?’ a boy said, addressing Francis.

‘He just came up to me,’ Francis said. ‘He said he was in love with a girl called Venus and then he ran off again.’

‘He calls me that,’ a girl said. Francis wouldn’t have recognized her: she seemed ordinary, not an object of devotion. ‘I wish he’d stop, it’s stupid, I hate him, he’s mental.’

‘Where do you come from?’ one of the girls said. ‘You’re in our class.’

She rhymed it with ‘lass’, but it wasn’t unfriendly, her tone. ‘I come from London,’ Francis said.

‘She’s thick, that Barker,’ another girl said. ‘You’ve got put in the worst class you could be put in. They put people there for punishment, she’s that boring.’

‘“When I was in Africa,”’ a boy said. ‘She should talk to that Timothy, he’s always on about snakes when he’s not calling you Venus.’

‘I’m called Andrea, really,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t know where he got Venus from. I’m going to tell my mum if he carries on.’

‘She’s always saying that,’ the boy said. He raised his voice into a dull shriek. ‘“When I was in Africa.”’

‘Aye,’ they chorused appreciatively. It was a party trick of this boy’s, you could see, the shrieking imitation of, who?, Miss Barker’s voice and her usual sentence. ‘“When I was in Africa.” What’s London like?’

‘It’s all right,’ Francis said. ‘We lived outside London, really.’

‘I’ve been to London,’ a girl said.

‘You never,’ one of the boys said. ‘You’re a right liar, you.’

The consensus of the group was that it was obviously a lie, to claim to have been to London. But Francis was surprised: he thought everyone, always, had been to London. It wasn’t anything to lie about.

‘You don’t want to sit with that Michael,’ a boy said.

‘He smells a bit,’ Francis said.

They all laughed; one of the boys clutched his sides, and pretended to roll about on the ground. ‘You’re a right one,’ a girl said. ‘But it’s true, he’s got a right pong. Miss Barker, she always puts people next to him who can’t refuse, it’s like a punishment, and you have to sit next to him for an hour. She doesn’t mind people who pong. It comes of living in Africa. “When I was in Africa—”’

‘Well, you’ve only had the miserable torment of sitting next to Smelly Michael for an hour,’ a sensible-looking boy, in neatly pressed trousers and a short-sleeved grey shirt with a sleeveless home-knitted sweater, said. ‘You can come and sit next to me, if you like. I’ve not got anyone sitting next to me because Neil Thwaite’s in hospital. He’s got something wrong with his blood.’

‘I heard he’s going to die,’ a girl said.

‘No, he’s not,’ the boy said. ‘I saw him in the hospital, he’s bored. But he’s in hospital a while, so you can sit next to me.’

‘She told me to sit next to that smelly boy,’ Francis said. ‘At my school in London, you had to sit where you were told and then you stayed there all year. I didn’t mind. I was next to Robert who was my friend. But won’t I get in trouble if I move?’

‘No, no,’ they shouted.

‘Anyway,’ the boy said, ‘if she asks, you say, “I can’t sit next to that Michael because I’m allergic to the smell he puts out, it makes me sick and I can’t answer questions and my hand wobbles when I write.” That Michael, his family, they live in a maisonette, they’re right poor. You can sit where you like, so come and sit next to me.’

‘He didn’t know who the prime minister was,’ a girl said. ‘I’m Sally, and that’s Paul, and that’s the other Paul, and—’

‘He was going to be kept back a year because he doesn’t know anything,’ Paul – Francis’s new neighbour – said. ‘But his mum came down and she shouted and they let him go up anyway, but he knows nowt.’

‘He knows—’

‘He knows nowt,’ the other Paul, the impressionist, the playground raconteur said. ‘Don’t you know what “nowt” means?’

Soon, that vocabulary, like the shared and tender vocabulary of friendship, was clarified, and Francis was tenderly aware that if he had walked out of that classroom with near-tears of fright and isolation, he had walked back in surrounded by six immediate friends, and his near-tears were from a different source. They were the last back in, and Francis felt that a wave of shy surprise and interest went through the rest of the class, admiring and envying the bold step that that mixed and sophisticated group had taken in befriending the boy from London without waiting to see what the general view was. Francis felt full of pride at the step he had taken here.

The game began every day at half twelve, once they’d finished their doled-out lunch, bolted it down. Sometimes, too, at half ten and quickly at the quarter-past-two playtime as well, till the luxurious expanse of the game they could play at dinnertime to the point of stitches in their sides seemed almost improbable next to the swift trailer of its morning, its afternoon versions. Francis was absorbed here, both anonymous and accepted, whether a blank member of a playtime cadre, or a person with conspicuous friends, but in either case protected.

At break – that was what they called playtime, whether a more serious or just a more Sheffield word – the game began again, returning to the beginning and each time, somehow, getting a little bit further. It was as if with each attempt they had got a little closer to its essential heart, to some prize it concealed, like a team of adventurers taking turns to whittle at some initially unpromising and rude block. Inside there was some prize.

That was it, the allure of the game. Though there was not and could not be any real prize, it seemed far more like a formal, famous game, the sort you played under gracious adult supervision at a celebration, a birthday party, and yet infinitely more violent and exciting. It did not seem like a playground enterprise of shamefaced silliness, of rhymes and stomping that no adult could be allowed to hear, but like a brilliant expansive entertainment with printed rules, played in your best clothes, but with the dazzling promise of unconstrained fury, too. It was a game that should have been put away for best occasions, and was played, irresistibly, every day.

But outside the game and its allotted hours, his social standing was obscure. He felt himself good at the game through something barely commented on by others or previously noticed by him: his height and swiftness. He had grown up into this scale and, in London, the moment to observe any change or the disproportion had never presented itself. But to arrive here in such a state, taller than anyone else in the class and faster too, as the game proved, made him obvious to them and to himself. In the playground, and to his immediately acquired circle, that was something fine, dangerous, admired; outside it, it seemed to make him only conspicuous.

One day, during PE, Miss Barker set them a race in the playground, a relay race between four teams. Each runner was to touch a marked-out point at the middle of each straight border; Miss Barker marked them, and those were the rules. The first runners from each team set off, and ran along the border of the whole playground. It seemed that they had not understood, and when it came to Francis’s turn, third in his team, he set off directly, running only between points, carving a small diamond like the points in a game of rounders. He was not stopped, and got home twice as fast as the other teams; the other runners in his team followed his example, and the others, doggedly, to their longer route. He had done the right thing, it turned out, but his height and swiftness, as well as this spirit of enterprise, had marked him out.

A few weeks after arriving, at the beginning of a lesson, as they were sitting down red-faced and busy after morning playtime, Miss Barker came into the classroom. The fourth years had been in the classroom before then, and on the board was an abandoned impatient tangle of x and y, the obscure and useless corners of the alphabet, mixed incredibly with numbers, some normal-sized, some shrunk and sent to the top of a letter like a scratch on the forehead, symbols poetically abstruse and, for the moment, as blank as the hieroglyphs of a kingdom disinterred from the sand; a frail language occasionally glimpsed about the school that it seemed impossible he, or any of them, should ever comprehend or, like French, converse in and, looking at it, he brought a measure of wilful ignorance even of those fragments he could have understood. Miss Barker sighed, sagged. ‘Francis,’ she said, her eyes not quite alighting where she spoke, ‘could you come and clean the blackboard before we start?’ She had not quite addressed him by name until then, not since she had introduced him to the class, but Francis was up quickly and taking the board rubber from her somewhat unwilling grasp. ‘Yes – all right then,’ she said oddly, with a half-smile to his side that he didn’t understand, and let him do the task, slowly and seriously. It was the first task he’d been asked to undertake in front of the whole class, by name; now they couldn’t go on calling him ‘new kid’. There was a sort of buzz in the room. When he had finished, he went back to his seat. The two girls behind him were scowling at him, and as he sat down, one of them – yes, her name was Frances, wasn’t it? – kicked his chair hard.

‘She di’n’t mean you,’ the girl said, not lowering her voice, and Miss Barker, before embarking on another of her unplanned and circuitous ‘lectures’, an improvised and loose chain of her morning’s happenstance thoughts, was pleased to say, ‘Well, Frances…’ she paused like a skilled comedian awaiting what indeed came, an appreciative laugh ‘…I’m sure you can do it next time. If our new friend from London will let you.’ As if he had no right to his own name, and she’d politely forgotten it out of good taste. The class laughed, and not at the old woman. Francis felt heat in his face.

‘He’s right tall, that new kid,’ the girl behind him said derisively to her glued-on friend at the end of the ‘lecture’, meaning him to hear. ‘It looks ridiculous, being as tall as that. Someone ought to say something to him, that new kid.’ And then it was time for the game again.

‘She’s horrible, that old Barker,’ Anthony said, as they were sitting on the steps, wrapped in coats and scarves, Anthony’s coat a broad yellow check, handed down from a brother, with orange mittens hanging from his wrists by sewed-on strips of elastic.

‘She’s mental,’ Susan said, a nice girl with an always blocked nose, the snot perpetually at the rim of her nostrils; she had hair like a dog’s. ‘She’s boring and mental, too,’ she said. ‘The way she goes on, one thing after another, it makes no sense. Are you supposed to be taking notes, or what?’

‘And mardy,’ one of the Pauls said – one of those words, Francis was working out what it meant, the limits of its meaning, and then he’d be using it too.

‘I say,’ Andrew said – he was addicted to this archaic opening style, odd in his Sheffield voice, or in any voice, these days, and had once asked Francis shyly if he had ever heard of a book called Jennings, ‘it was before you came, you know,’ a tactful way of saying the unmentionably rude, alluding to a time when your friend didn’t exist, ‘but our last teacher in Two CL, she was ill once a whole week and we had Barker, and she just came in and lectured like she does now, and we were meant to do maths and geography, all sorts. Well, she said then that once she were out on the moors driving with a friend, she said, and she sees a little boy by the side of the road and she, they stop and, and they say, “Can I give you a lift?” and the little boy says, “No, me mam says don’t take lifts off strangers.” And she said, “Well, isn’t that a shame, that you can’t offer a child a lift, when he’s on his own, out on the moors?”’

‘I wouldn’t get in a car with that Barker,’ Francis said boldly, and they all laughed.

‘That’s it,’ Andrew said, quite seriously. ‘I told m’dad, and he reckons that, you know the Moors murders, when they done them kids in, over Manchester, he reckons that after them, they were shut up, there were some more murders, and he reckons they didn’t get all the murderers. So m’dad, he says, do you think that old Barker, she’s one of the Moors murderers and she never got caught?’

He was so serious in his face, and it made Francis jump when Sally gave him a scoffing push. ‘Your dad never said that,’ she said. ‘Not your dad. You’re mental, you.’

‘No, though,’ Anthony joined in, quite crossly, ‘there were this kid, right—’

‘Oh, shut up,’ they all said, and went to play the game.

The girl who sat behind Francis was called Frances, and beside her, her best friend was called Tracy. They had been each other’s best friends since the very first day at infants’, when they’d been sat next to each other, and they’d always be best friends. They had each other, bossing and sniping, and Tracy thought Frances the loveliest name in the world. She wished she was called – well, not Frances, that wouldn’t make sense, but a name that was lovely just like Frances was a lovely name. She thought about it all the time, about not being called Tracy.

‘Why did you call me Tracy?’ she said to her busy mother in the hall of their Crosspool house. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked.

‘I just liked the name,’ her mother said. ‘Are you putting your coat on, or do I have to do it for you?’

‘I wish I was called something else,’ Tracy said.

‘You’ll be late for Sunday school,’ her mother said, ‘if you don’t get a move on.’ They were out of the house now, the door shutting tight behind them, her mother taking Tracy’s hand.

‘Why’s m’dad not coming to church?’ Tracy said.

‘He’s got to work today,’ her mother said.

‘I wish,’ Tracy said, but she stopped herself; she was about to say that she wished her dad didn’t work in a coal mine. ‘I wish I was called something else.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with “Tracy”. It’s a nice name,’ her mother said, not knowing what Tracy had been going to say.

I wish my dad didn’t work at the mines, she thought. It took all those explanations. What does your dad do? He works for the Coal Board – not down the mines, he’s not a miner, but he works at the mines, he works up at the top, he only goes down the mine sometimes, he doesn’t work down the mine. She wished he had another sort of job, a job like, for instance, the job Frances’s father had, managing a supermarket. What does your dad do? ‘Oh, he’s a bank manager,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I wish I was called Sara,’ she said out loud.

‘Sarah?’ her mother said. ‘Why the heck is being called Sarah better than being called Tracy?’

‘Not Sarah, Sara,’ Tracy said. ‘There’s no h, you say Saaara.’

‘The heavens preserve us,’ her mother said, ‘and what’s that on your face? My Lord—’ and outside the church, she whipped out a handkerchief, spat on it, and rubbed briskly at Tracy’s face. ‘How you manage to get a smut on your face ten seconds after leaving home, I’ll never understand.’

‘Frances doesn’t go to church,’ Tracy said. ‘She says they don’t believe it. They go to the garden centre usually.’

‘I dare say,’ Tracy’s mother said, not hearing this for the first time, ‘but in this family, we go to church.’

‘Is Frances going to go to hell?’ Tracy said.

‘I’ve had enough of your cheek for one morning,’ her mother said, hissing under her breath as they took their places in one of the back pews.

So on Monday morning Roy, Tracy’s father, set off for work with a feeling of rank injustice at having had no weekend. On a Sunday, too, he observed. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but living right on the other side of Sheffield, it was a good half-hour in the car even on a Sunday morning, and for what? Sometimes he felt like insisting on moving back to where he’d come from, five minutes from the pit. But she was right, really; the schools were better on that side, and with the way he’d moved up from the job his father had done, hacking away in the dark, to a job up top, managing and holding meetings, making decisions in a suit and a tie every morning, it was as well to live somewhere else. These days, particularly. It used to be that the managers lived a street or two from the men, but nowadays those bigger houses, imposing as they were, were lived in by miners just the same or lay empty.

The traffic wasn’t too bad, apart from the roadworks on the Wicker, which had been going on for months now, and he was in the car park at quarter to nine, locking the yellow Capri and striding into the office with his hard black lockable briefcase. The car park was full; the men, too, had their cars now, and they’d had to reserve the management’s places, each job described with white paint on the asphalt. The charcoal buildings, the meccano towers and conveyor belts had a temporary air, like the great heaps of slag all about; even the sign at the entrance and the gates were cheap and temporary, like the signs on building sites.

He said a quick good morning to Carol and Norma. ‘You’re meeting John Collins at eleven thirty,’ Norma called after him.

‘I’d not forgotten,’ he said, as he shut the door to his office. Collins was the NUM man, not as bad as some; they were the same age, they’d been at school together, and they got on as well as could be expected after last year’s shenanigans. After all, Roy was a miner, had been, and his father; that still counted for something. ‘I’m down below first, if anyone wants to know,’ he called, already pulling off the jacket of his suit, hanging it carefully on the coat hanger on the hook behind his chair.

There was nothing particularly wrong; Hoppelton, the mine manager, liked the management to go down the pit at least once a week, whatever was up. Some of them did it at the same time each week; Roy liked to be a bit spontaneous, talk to the men, keep them on their toes. Monday morning was as good as any other time. The girls knew not to come into the office without knocking firmly on the plywood door and waiting for a response. He opened the door of the grey metal locker where the miner’s outfit was kept. He neatly untied his tie, undid his tiger’s-eye cufflinks – they matched the fat orange-and-brown tie, Tracy’s present to him last Christmas though chosen with her mum (they smiled at him from a frame on his desk). He undid his shirt, hung it up, his trousers on the hanger, bouncing them a little to keep them pressed, and then his vest, pants and socks, folding them neatly and placing them neatly, with the rest of his clothes, in a suit-carrier to take over to the pit baths.

It was important to undress completely before starting to put on the miner’s kit; it wasn’t strictly procedure, but he liked to keep these things separate. Everything was kept separate; there were even underpants handed out from Stores; a bit like being in the Army again, he’d thought the first time he’d collected some. He’d never quite got used to putting on communal pants, owned by the mine, the NCB, the Government, he supposed in the end. But he wasn’t going to buy himself his own special pants. More trouble than it was worth. They were grey and frayed, but as clean as they could be got. The socks, and then the bright orange all-in-one plastic-coated boiler-suit, the hard inflexible plastic boots with the metal toecaps, and with the helmet and gloves, he was ready to go. ‘I’ll be two hours,’ he said to the girls as he left, walking through the office, his suit carrier in his hand, with a completely different walk from the way he’d walked in, stomping as he went. They nodded; they’d plenty to be getting on with.

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