THE PRESIDENT’S CHILD

FAY WELDON

Contents

Cover

Title Page

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About the Author

Also by Fay Weldon

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

On Sunday afternoons, when the world pauses and waits for the next great event, when the streets are empty and unnaturally still and the weight of obligation hangs over the land, the residents of Wincaster Row come calling on me. They come out of kindness because I am blind; and out of kindness to them, in the desolation of Sunday afternoon, I gather past and present together and tell them stories.

Today I tell them about Isabel, who fell in love, and in so doing made the whole world falter and take a different turning.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Listen! How the rain blows against the window-pane. Easy to feel, on such a day and in such a place, that great events are nothing to do with us, that we are cut off from sources of worldly energy, that people and politics are entirely separate; that the mainstream of life is, in fact, a long way off.

‘It isn’t so,’ I tell them. ‘Isabel lived next door. The river flows at the end of the garden; what’s more, it’s deep, wide, muddy and tricky: not the tranquil flowing stream you might hope for. Isabel almost drowned!’

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. In the end we will all know more than we did before. Shouldn’t that be enough to base a life upon?

The women of Wincaster Row don’t agree, of course. The pursuit of knowledge clearly isn’t enough for them. They want happiness, love, sex, good dinners, money, consumer durables, admiration, laughing children and goodness knows what else besides. They still live in the real world, and not in their heads.

We are all women today. Oliver the architect from No. 13 couldn’t come, nor Ivor the alcoholic from No. 17. They had domestic commitments. So we have earth-mother Jennifer from No. 9, who is pregnant yet again; and cross Hilary, in serviceable jeans and clumpy boots, from No. 11; and pretty, clever little Hope from No. 25, fidgety for lack of sexual excitement, which she needs, or so Hilary complains, as a heroin addict needs a fix.

There are no even numbers in Wincaster Row. The demolition men got to that side of the street before the conservation society were able to step in – or rather lie down in the path of bulldozers. Hilary still limps, on a wet day, and now, listening to me, she rubs her damaged knee.

‘Is it true about Isabel?’ asks Hilary. ‘Or will you be making it up?’

Hilary, Jennifer and Hope expect truth to be exact and finite. I know it is more like a mountain that has to be scaled. The peak of the mountain pierces the clouds and can only rarely be seen, and has never been reached. And what you see of it, moreover, depends upon the flank of the mountain you stand upon, and how exhausted getting even so far has made you. Virtue lies in looking upwards, toiling upwards, and sometimes joyously leaping from one precarious crag of fact and feeling to the next.

‘More or less true,’ I say.

Isabel was my neighbour. She lived next door, and filled my world with life and energy and bustle. Now the house is empty, and weeds break through the pavings of the front path, where once little Jason, Isabel’s son, played and grizzled and imposed his riotous will upon the world. The gate swings loose and creaks. Estate Agents have planted a ‘For Sale’ sign amongst the weeds: it stands like some kind of enemy tree, unexpectedly sprouted.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. The river’s nearer: it flows just outside the door. Keep the sandbags ready; who knows when the water will rise? Listen! It’s raining harder than ever.

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if it was true,’ says Jennifer. ‘Isabel never quite fitted into Wincaster Row.’

‘She was too perfect,’ says Hope, ‘if that’s what you mean. She had it all made, unlike the rest of us. The perfect companionate marriage. The true, the new, the sharing!’

Though some of us think Hope has it all made: unmarried and self-supporting and no children, and not yet thirty, and prone to falling in love, and being fallen in love with: skipping up and down the Row, little and light, and remarking, from time to time, ‘What I don’t understand is, since sex is so nice, why doesn’t everyone do it all the time?’

Wincaster Row is in Camden Town, on the fringes of central London. It is an island of privilege in an underprivileged city sea. In the summer Bach and Vivaldi flow from open windows, over lawns and flowerbeds, keeping at bay the sound of police sirens and ambulance bells. In the winter, although the windows are closed, the sound of alarm comes nearer. A communal garden has been contrived out of dust and rubble. Oliver the architect, and Jennifer, who loves gardens, were instrumental in its creation, and so was Camden Council, which broods over these parts like some sort of touchy, monolithic god.

We are not perfect, here in Wincaster Row. We are not entirely rational or entirely noble or entirely forgiving. We have our fears and our angers and our points of obsession, like anyone else. But we are kind to our children, and each other; the struggle for self-improvement is assumed, and with the improvement of the self the improvement of the world. I think we are good people.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Don’t mind the rain. The farmers need it. Pray it isn’t radioactive.

We are not so much the salt of the world – salt is taken for granted these days – as the handful of mixed herbs which makes the meal at all possible. For the most part we are communicators – we teach, or work in television or films or publishing, or are in some way connected with theatre, or think we ought to be. We are social workers and diplomats and civil servants. We aspire to the truth.

We rattle round the mountain a fraction higher than the rest of the world. We are brave if we have to be: we will, if pushed, put public good before private profit. We would even die for a principle, unless it damaged the children.

We crawled up on to this island of civilisation, carried by tides we never quite understood; now we live better than we could ever have expected.

There are others like us all over the world – enclaves of aspiration in New Delhi and Sydney and Helsinki and Houston, and in all the big cities of the world; and little clusters of us in towns and villages everywhere – in Blandford, Dorset, and Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and Tashkent, Georgia, our goodwill crossing barriers of language and social organisation; a great upswell of the culture of kindness. We read each other’s books, listen to each other’s poems. On Sunday morning gatherings, at drinks-before-dinner time, in Moscow and Auckland and New York and Oslo and Manila, our children will be misbehaving, and anxious parental eyes will follow their noisy course about the room, wondering where error lies, and why it is that children reflect the parents’ uncertainties, rather than their certainties. Self-doubt defines us, as well as aspiration.

At any gathering in Wincaster Row which included children, Isabel’s Jason would be the noisiest and the roughest and the most disobedient. He was a blond, stocky child, with firm, well-covered limbs, a clear, high complexion and widely spaced, wandering blue eyes, which for a time needed glasses with one lens blacked out, to check the wandering. As a baby he had cried a good deal and slept very little. He was on his feet and breaking things by the time he was a year old and speaking three months later, the better to say no. By the age of two he could tell his letters, but at six was still declining to read. He developed a tearful roar which he would use when thwarted, and a persistent self-pitying grizzle when he was bored or uncomfortable. He demanded, and he received, and was much loved.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Some children are more difficult to rear than others. Those most troublesome young grow up, eventually, to be the most co-operative and benign. That is the wisdom of Wincaster Row. If no one disciplines you, you do it yourself, eventually. Kropotkin said so, long ago.

Isabel and Homer said it to their neighbours, and each other. They shared the penances and triumphs of their beliefs, as they shared their lives, their income and the household chores. Isabel and Homer were partners in a New Marriage, in which all these things were shared, all things discussed. Up and down Wincaster Row we looked to Isabel and Homer to show us how to live, and worried because they didn’t quite seem to belong. He came from America; she from Queensland, Australia.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Rain is an extra hazard to the blind. A stick will tell you where the kerb is, but very little about the depth of the puddle the other side. When it rains, I stay indoors. I have good friends, a solicitous husband, and one of those machines which, if spoken to, will type back a printed version of what was said for the sighted, and a Braille version for the personal use of the operator. Thank God for progress, the silicon chip, and money.

The rain blows harder against the window-pane. Hilary turns on my central heating; it’s mid-summer but it’s cold. Presages of what’s to come! Surely men and women can be friends and lovers too? Be both parents and partners?

Homer and Isabel married because Jason was on the way. Isabel told me so, as she told me many private things. She was my good friend. When I first lost my sight it was Isabel who looked after me. My husband, Laurence, had often to be away. He is an investigative reporter: he fills up the back pages of newspapers, and is often away. Isabel guided me through the new, frightening dark, until I became accustomed to it. She was a good guide: she did not, at the time, understand fear; although later she was brought to it. She could not comprehend the terrors of my new place; she skated happily over practical surfaces, warning me of tangible objects – here a chair, there a step – and understandable events – you cannot read the telephone bill, but you can use the telephone to ask how much it is – ignoring the intangible, the horrific and the confusing – the voiceless shriekings and weepings and moanings in my head. There was a kind of obduracy in her that helped me; a startling common sense; a refusal, almost, to believe that going blind was a major event. She was blind to my blindness, in all but a practical sense.

And just as well, for so major an event did the failure of my sight appear, at first, to my husband, so filled were his own eyes with tears of guilt, remorse and pity, that for a time he could scarcely find his own way, let alone mine.

‘For God’s sake, Laurence,’ Isabel would say, ‘go back to the pub –’ and he would stumble back, unshaven and morose, from whence he’d come, leaving Isabel to teach me how to comb my hair by touch and code my clothes, by feel, upon the shelves: and leaving me, of course, bereft of the comfort of Laurence’s presence, however tiresome and maudlin he might be, however given he was to saying, ‘Oh, it is useless, hopeless. It is not just the beginning of the end, it is the end itself. We had better just give up, and die together.’

Now that I can no longer see people I hold memories of their appearance in my mind. They appear on the pale sheet of my memory: black-edged, cut-out figures, clearly defined. Laurence stands looming in a doorway, outlined by the light, blocking it out: sensuous, thick-set and fleshy: facing me, four-square: then he turns his head so that the light catches his face and his eyes are as wide and his cheeks as delicate as a girl’s.

Isabel lies upon a stone slab, hands folded in prayer, like some carved saint who achieved great glory in life and is remembered in death. Light from stained glass windows shines upon her imperfect profile, and glances off her long, broad-hipped body, the breasts unduly flattened after Jason’s birth. Then in my vision she sits up, and turns and smiles at me, and rises and stretches, confident and proud of her body, and saunters off, in so modern and careless a fashion as to put all thoughts of graven knights and saintliness out of my mind.

When she is gone the church is cold and empty and I am left in the dark again.

Isabel’s profile is imperfect because when she was nine she was kicked in the jaw by a horse her mother loved. ‘Don’t fuss,’ said her mother.

The Flying Doctor did, however. Isabel and her mother lived far into the Australian outback and were dependent upon rather makeshift medical arrangements. The doctor flew in, and wired and stitched and re-firmed teeth, and all would have been well had the horse not got her in the jaw a second time, barely a week later.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said her mother, ‘what do you do to that horse?’

Here and now, sisters. Here and now. Build your houses strong and safe, love your children, and die for them if you have to, and try to love your mothers, who didn’t.

‘I patted its rump,’ said Isabel. ‘The way you told me I should.’ But her mother wasn’t listening. She was on the phone, getting a message through to the Flying Doctor. ‘I feel a right Charlie,’ she said.

The wet season was upon Harriet and Isabel by then: the helicopter carrying the Flying Doctor back crash-landed, and the doctor was injured. The yellow mud rose up around: if you went out in the rain your head hurt. The new injuries to Isabel’s jaw got forgotten, one way and another: her chin thereafter protruded too much and her mouth was flattened, and her teeth leaned backward, and joggled together; the doctor lost an eye and a leg. Isabel felt the responsibility of it all, but thereafter, having survived that, dreaded none. And the imperfection of the bottom half of her face, compared to the cool, gracious, wide-eyed perfection of the rest of it, gave her a quirky charm when she was young and a look of intelligence as she grew older. She inspired love as much as lust, in the souls of the young outback boys, who roamed in packs across the desert in that for the most part loveless land.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Rain in London is safe and mild, for anyone, that is, except the blind. It beats upon hard pavements and rolls away down drains. It doesn’t drown the world in yellow mud.

‘It’s no life for you here,’ said Isabel’s mother when her daughter was fifteen. ‘Not someone like you. You’d better get out.’

‘Come with me,’ said Isabel. They were all each other had.

‘There’s the horses,’ said Isabel’s mother. ‘I can’t leave them.’

Of course. Isabel had forgotten, momentarily, about her mother having the horses. They weren’t splendid horses; they were rather shaggy, moulting, ailing animals, plagued by a hundred insect pests, who did nothing but stand reproachfully in a field and consume what was left of Isabel’s patrimony, in sacks of feed and vet’s bills. They kicked up dust in the summer, and stirred up mud in the winter.

Isabel’s mother loved them; and Isabel tried to love them for her mother’s sake, and failed. Chatto and Windus and Heinemann and Warburg and Herbert and Jenkins – (Seeker died, of a snake bite). Memories, all, of Isabel’s mother’s past. Isabel’s mother grew up in literary London and was swept out of it and into the outback by Isabel’s father, who farmed and was Australian. Presently he went off to war and never came back, preferring life in a grass hut with a Malaysian girl to life with Isabel’s mother and Isabel. Mother and child stayed where they were, selling off land, thousand acre by thousand acre, until there was nothing left but the wormy wooden house with its rickety balcony, and the six horses in a single field, and the snakes sleeping in the tindery undergrowth, and Isabel’s mother, dusty and yellowy, grown into the landscape.

Where else was she to go, what else was she to do? Pinned down by war, world events, her own stubborn nature, and a baby? When it rained it was as if she called down the heavens to avenge her, and if they drowned her doing it, so be it. Pit-pat, spitter-spat.

‘But what will you do?’ Isabel asked her mother, ‘when I’m gone?’

‘What I’ve always done,’ said her mother. ‘Look at the horizon.’

Isabel thought her mother would be glad when she had gone: that her mother had done her duty by her. That though she, Isabel, felt great intimacy with her mother, her mother did not feel the same for her. The child is accidental to the mother. The mother is integral to the child. It is a painful lesson for the child to learn.

Seeker’s body had gone to the knackers; all except the head, which Isabel’s mother had had stuffed and put in the hall. It rolled glass eyes at Isabel the day she left home, while the flies buzzed about it. Seeker was the horse responsible for Isabel’s lopsided jaw: her mother had wept when he died, swollen horribly.

‘Why are you crying?’ asked Isabel, at the time. She had never known her mother cry before.

‘Everything went wrong,’ said her mother. ‘It was the war. And how could I go back afterwards? Everyone would have said “I told you so". They never wanted me to marry your father. They all said it wouldn’t work.’

‘What everyone?’

‘Everyone,’ said her mother, desolately.

And who indeed was everyone? Harriet’s friends and family had scattered. That was what war did. It took families by the scruff of their neck and shook them and tossed them in the air, and didn’t even bother to see where they fell, as the farm dogs did with rats.

But Isabel’s mother hadn’t been there to see the war, of course. War rolled across far continents, killing everything it touched. Isabel’s mother just sat and gazed at an unchanging, yellow horizon, over which a red sun rose and fell, and the people of her past had atrophied in her mind, set in their condemning ways. Would anyone bother now to say, ‘I told you so'? Of course not. Or was there anyone left to say it? Isabel’s mother could hardly know any more. She never answered letters, and presently they’d stopped coming.

Now she wept over Seeker, who had ruined her daughter’s face; but saved her character.

‘It’s unlucky to be beautiful,’ Harriet said to Isabel, once. ‘If you are, some man just comes along and marries you and stops you making your way in the world.’

The hot sun and the hard rain had turned Harriet’s skin to leather, and stubbornness had set her mouth askew, and her eyes were red-rimmed from staring at the horizon. But once she had been beautiful. Isabel thought she was still beautiful. And so, no doubt, thought Isabel’s father, long ago.

Isabel’s mother wouldn’t talk about Isabel’s father. ‘He did what he wanted,’ was the most she ever said, ‘the way all men do.’

Isabel thought he must have been strong, to have farmed so many acres on his own, and powerful, to rule over it. She thought he must have been one of the natural lords of that land: tall, lean, bronzed, mean, with features sharpened by the hot wind: packs of dogs and horses and lesser men scurrying at their heels. The lesser men were red from Foster’s and rendered stupid, if they hadn’t been to begin with, by the coarseness and ignorance in which they traded. If there was a flower, they trod it underfoot, and laughed. If there was a dog, they kicked it. That was why the dogs snarled and snapped.

She could not see her mother with that kind of man. Her mother saw visions, too, Isabel was sure of it. Her mother saw something of the infinite in the yellow dust, or in the rusty clouds swirling over the flat land, that sometimes illuminated her face and made her sigh with pleasure.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Isabel the little girl. ‘Is there something out there?’

‘Something more than I can tell,’ said Isabel’s mother, averting her eyes from the horizon, scraping away at burnt, thin-bottomed saucepans.

Isabel tore a leg off her favourite doll, smeared it with mutton fat, and gave it to the dogs to chew.

Isabel told me so. She never confessed it to anyone else; not Homer her husband, and certainly not Jason her son. I am blind and can be trusted not to condemn.

Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Jennifer has made tea. Hilary offers me a plate of biscuits.

‘Chocolate chip a.m.: lemon sandwiches p.m.,’ she says, describing the plate to me.

I take the chocolate chip from nine o’clock. Lemon sandwiches flake all over the carpets, and though the blind can vacuum clean it is not a very efficient process. Hope brought them with her. She should have known better.

I have been blind for two years. I crossed a road without looking. A car hit me behind the knees. I bounced on to its bonnet and off again, cracking my head on the kerb, somewhere to the left of the medulla; in the area which controls the sight. The blow did unspecified damage which means my eyes simply fail to register what they see. The fact intrigues surgeons and eye specialists and indeed psychiatrists, and I am forever up at the hospital while they peer and probe and inject and intrude. They did an operation which left the left side of my right hand insensitive to hot and cold, but achieved nothing except my pain and terror and humiliation. Occasionally some irritable physician will remark, ‘I am sure you could see if you wanted to.’

There are ranks in blindness, of course, like anything else. I, being slightly mysterious in my plight, almost wilful, and my eyes looking pretty much like anyone else’s, come high up on the scale. A noble blindness. To have been born blind, or to have gone blind through illness, ranks lower. A pitiful, punitive blindness. The sense that God afflicts us at our birth because we deserve it is strong. The millions of India live by the notion, after all.

An accident, however! Accidents happen to everyone. They are dramatic and exciting; children love them, and the wearing of the plaster that signifies calamity. I ran into the street because I had had a quarrel with my husband Laurence, and I didn’t see the car coming because I was crying, or perhaps because I didn’t want to.

Listen to the rain against the window! Summer rain. Each drop is a lost human soul, driven by winds it cannot comprehend, trying to get in here where it is safe and warm, where we gather our infirmities together and make the most of what we have. Be grateful for the glass that saves you from the force of such savagery and discontent. Drape it with curtains; polish it on fine days; try not to see too much, but just enough for survival’s sake. Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, or waste too much energy on other people’s woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.

These things Isabel taught me in spite of herself. Little by little, she revealed herself and her story to me. Pit-pat, spitter-spat. Draw the curtain.

2

On Jason’s sixth birthday Isabel woke with the feeling that something was wrong. She was launched suddenly into consciousness, one second lying in dreams, the next starting into alertness. She thought perhaps there was an intruder in the room, but of course there was not. Homer lay beside her as usual on the brass bed, on his side, relaxed and peaceful, legitimate and uxorious, the delicate skin of his eyelids stretched fine over his mildly prominent eyes. His face had the vulnerable, slightly raw look that faces do, which go bespectacled by day and naked by night.

He slept quietly. He always did. A man with a clear conscience, thought Isabel. Not weltering and hiding deep down somewhere beneath the levels of consciousness – but neatly and tidily, just below the surface, afraid of nothing because he had done no wrong. If Homer slept, what could be amiss?

Something. Jason? No. If she listened hard, as now she did, she could hear the rhythmic change in the stillness which meant that Jason too slept soundly in the room above.

Nothing unusual was happening outside in Wincaster Row. It was half-past six, too early for the milkman, the paperboy or the postman: those ritual early callers who come like the sun, to remind each household that it is not alone but owes a living, perforce, to the rest, and must soon get up and make it. Well, time enough.

The fright that woke Isabel did not diminish with the discovery that there was no cause for it; rather it intensified into a profounder apprehension: the feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

Work? But what could happen there? She had so far presented four late-night programmes for the BBC: they had gone successfully; she had a new two-year contract; the work was comparatively easy. True, it involved the professionalisation of the self, every Monday night, the handing over of the persona for consumption by millions; but that came easily enough, and was forgotten by Tuesday afternoon. Even if her contract was cancelled, and she was ignominiously dismissed, she would not see that as disastrous but as a practical problem. This sudden new fear, now so powerful that it made her catch her breath and hug her chest, had nothing to do with practicalities.

Jason’s birthday? In the afternoon he was to have an outing to the cinema with five school friends. That, although nothing to look forward to, was surely nothing to fear. In fact Homer was to return early from the office and take them to the cinema, while she would stay home and ice the cake and cut little sandwiches into animal shapes. The division of labour was fair, and had been accomplished, as usual, without acrimony.

‘It’s true I’ll get to see the film,’ said Homer, ‘and you won’t. But watching Superman II with five six-year-olds is a dubious pleasure. You’re sure you don’t want to do it the other way round?’

‘No,’ said Isabel. ‘Besides, you’d make the sandwiches with brown bread in spite of it being Jason’s birthday.’

‘Jason’s digestion doesn’t know it’s his birthday,’ said Homer.

Nothing there, surely, to have her sitting up in alarm in her lacy white bed, in the safety of the dark, green-papered walls, the gilt mirrors on the walls throwing back images only of what was familiar and loved.

Isabel got out of bed and went upstairs to Jason’s bedroom. She, who once slept in the nude, now slept in a nightie – as do the mothers of wakeful children – which served as dressing gown as well.

Jason slept on his back, arms outflung, an expression of benign calm on his face. At the foot of his bed were stacked presents, wrapped by Homer and herself the night before.

Jason’s American grandparents had sent a cowboy suit in real leather, with silver-plated holsters and guns.

‘Should we?’ said Homer. ‘Guns?’

‘It’s his birthday,’ said Isabel. ‘And everyone else does. And research shows that children deprived of the formalised expression of aggression via fantasy perform more aggressive acts than children not so deprived.’

‘How convenient,’ said Homer. But the guns were beautifully made, light, delicately filigreed, and Jason would be proud of them. So Homer sighed and added them to the pile.

There was no present from Harriet in Australia. There never was.

‘I don’t think my mother is a woman at all,’ Isabel had said to Homer the night before. ‘Not now. Once she was, but now she’s turned herself into the trunk of an old gum tree, and the sand has silted her up.’ Homer had kissed Isabel and held her hand and said nothing, for there was nothing to be said.

Harriet! Of course, that was it. Something wrong! Isabel went downstairs to the living room – the two ground floor rooms made into one – where the blinds were still down, and the two companionable glasses still stood from the night before, and three half-smoked cigarettes, evidence of Homer’s attempts to give up smoking by the idiosyncratic and expensive method of smoking less and less of each cigarette he lit. She telephoned Australia. She could dial direct now: she did not need the intermediary of a telephonist. Twelve numbers, and there was her mother, and her past.

The telephone rang and rang in her mother’s house, unanswered. The instrument stood in the window sill by the front porch, and whenever it rang grains of sand would jump and bounce around its base in a dance of amazement. Isabel had watched them, many times. Perhaps my mother is lying there on the kitchen floor, she thought, on the other side of the fly screen, and that’s why she doesn’t answer. She’s dead, or had a stroke, or a heart attack; or she’s been raped and robbed; or perhaps she has a boyfriend at last and stays out nights.

A tune rang through her head. A folk singer had sung it on last week’s show:

‘Bad news is come to town, Bad news is carried, Some say my love is dead, Some say he’s married.’

Or perhaps she no longer answers the phone. Eight years since I last saw her. She has sunk finally back into herself; allows me to live her life for her.

The ringing stopped. Her mother said hello.

‘Hello, Mother.’

‘Oh, it’s you, Isabel. How are you, chicken?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Everything OK? Husband, kid and so on?’

‘Yes, they’re fine.’

Silence. Then:

‘It’s very late at night. I was in bed.’

‘I’m sorry, Mum. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be? Nothing ever changes here. How about your end?’

‘I have my own TV show. Once a week. It’s only a chat show, but it’s a start.’

‘Good on you, chicken. Given up journalism, have you? Or did it give you up?’

‘It’s the same thing, really.’

‘Is it? I don’t watch much TV; I wouldn’t know. It all seems rather crude to me. But this is Australia, isn’t it. Down under, here. Enjoy it, do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the main thing. Homer doesn’t mind?’

‘No. Why should he?’

‘You know what men are. What suits you never suits them. Listen, chicken, I hate to do this to you, but there’s some sort of goddamned hornet got through the hole in the fly door. This place is rusting to pieces. I’ve got to go.’

‘Of course, Mother. Is it big?’

‘Very.’

‘It’s Jason’s birthday today.’

‘Jason? Oh, the little boy. He must be – what? Four, five? Give him my love. I’m not much use as a granny, but at least I exist.’

‘At least you exist. Bye, Mum.’

‘Why don’t you just call me Harriet? Bye, sweetheart.’

Isabel crept back into bed, dry-mouthed, tasting dust and ashes. Everything was possible, yet everything was impossible. She could wring what she wanted out of the world – success and wealth and personal happiness – and it would do her no good. Her mother would always stand somewhere at the periphery of her vision, out of touch but never quite out of sight, watching her efforts and smiling, passing on the knowledge that the old would do better to keep to themselves – that in the end all goods must be pointless and all sweets tasteless. Better be deaf, and lame, and blind, than know these things too young.

Homer turned towards her in the bed. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Early.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Ringing my mother.’

‘Christ, why?’

‘It’s Jason’s birthday.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Not what I wanted her to say.’

‘What was that?’

‘Well done. Congratulations. I miss you. Why don’t you fly out and see me. The things your mother says to you.’

Homer enclosed her body, as he did her mind, the better to drive out doubt. He folded her in lean, well-exercised arms. He weighed, year in, year out, exactly what the chart at the doctor’s surgery said he should, increasing or decreasing his calorie intake as the need arose. He cycled to his office every weekday morning, and cycled home again every evening. Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he rose early and ran almost the entire circuit of Regent’s Park.

‘I would live for ever if I could,’ he would say. ‘As I can’t, I will live as long as I can.’

He is a happy man, thought Isabel, he must be. And she wondered what it would be like, to have such an appetite for sheer existence, and when they made love, would try to catch it from him: but the very evenness of his temperament somehow prevented there being a surplus of whatever it was he had; he kept it to himself: worked upon her physically and rhythmically, and left it to her to create the heights and depths she felt appropriate, which, indeed, she did create and felt no disappointment in him, and could answer, in truth, were anyone impertinent enough to ask for details of her love life, ‘Why yes, it is very good. At any rate, neither of us looks elsewhere for partners.’

Homer’s body was as neat and orderly as his mind. It smelt sweet. Her response to it was easy and immediate. She trusted him. Homer did one thing at a time. She liked that. When he made love he focused his energies and concentrated upon the action of body against the body within, as if the least he could do for his partner was to keep the messiness of emotion out, to offer himself clean and whole and untired and uncluttered. The show of emotion, affection, came before and after. It was Isabel’s nature to do everything all at once: to concentrate the emotions of the day in herself, however inchoate and troublesome and tumultuous, and open her legs at night and be taken body and soul. And because she offered both, he took both, body and soul: but to her he offered one at a time. Body first – this, and this, like this, firm and decisive – soul after, icing on a cake, made a little too thin, slipping and sliding and insecure. ‘Was that all right, Isabel?’ And she would say yes, yes, of course, never quite recovering from one night to the next that he found it necessary to ask. What was, was.

He never cried out aloud in orgasm: the noise was stifled, as if there were always listeners, watchers. ‘Hush, hush,’ he’d say to her, if they were away and the bed creaked: or even at home, when she forgot, when something – perhaps only the accumulated emotions of the day – required a wilder protest, noisier relief. And since they were not the emotions he, Homer, had engendered, she had no real right to them at such a time, and so was readily hushed.

Sometimes, after they’d made love, she would weep and not know why.

‘What’s the matter?’ he’d ask.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t I do it right?’ he would ask, slipping and sliding into insecurity, and she would laugh, because he so patently did do it right, and brought her such gratification.

‘Of course you do it right,’ she’d say.

‘Then what is it?’

But she couldn’t say. Perhaps she wept for the sorrows of the world, or because all things end in death, or because she could not experience pleasure without experiencing too the pain of knowing it must end, or perhaps she wept because Homer never did.

Today at least there was an easy answer.

‘I’m crying because my mother upset me,’ she said. ‘I wish she loved me more.’

‘I wish my mother loved me less,’ said Homer. ‘Then I wouldn’t feel so responsible for her.’

‘We’ve both run out on them.’

‘Run out?’ said Homer in surprise. ‘I like to feel I’ve run in.’

Sometimes disagreeable people would suggest to Homer that he had run out on his country; that his anti-Vietnam stand made him anti-American: that living in Europe was a form of treachery to the country that had nurtured him.

‘If you say so,’ Homer would say, easily. ‘I guess you’re right. I’d rather the world was my oyster, than America, in its present mood, was my country. I’m doing nothing illegal. I pay my taxes. I just like it over here.’

But now that self-doubt and national guilt suffused the American soul as much as they did the European, he crossed the Atlantic more easily. He went to the States some three or four times a year, about his employer’s business, or to take Jason to visit his grandparents.

‘I know they support the handgun lobby,’ he’d say, ‘and so on and so forth, but a breath of air-conditioning and general efficiency can be quite stimulating.’

Isabel, unsure of her welcome, never went home to Australia. Sometimes she wondered, had Jason been a girl, whether Harriet would not have taken more interest in her grandchild.

‘Don’t worry,’ Homer would say. ‘We’ve made London our home, so let it be. We’ll build our dynasty downwards; we’ll forget what has gone before. Our past lies in our genes – that should be more than enough.’

Jason, the child of the continents, played happily in Wincaster Row, and wanted no other life.

Jason’s birthday – upstairs, Jason woke and yelled his greeting to the world. It was not his custom to meet the day with quiet murmurs or gentle moans, as did to all accounts the children of Homer and Isabel’s friends; rather, he liked to hail it with a shout of mixed elation and reproach.

Having released, as it were, the pent-up noise and passion of the night, he would then fall back into sleep for some five minutes before waking, permanently, for the second time. This time his yell would demand acknowledgement: it would go on until one or other of his parents appeared in his room.

‘I expect he’ll calm down when he reaches sexual maturity,’ Homer would say, ‘and has something else to do with the night and his energy.’

‘Five minutes’ grace,’ he said this morning, dabbing away at Isabel’s tears.

It was Homer’s turn to see to Jason, but since it was his birthday both parents went. Isabel got out of her side of the bed; Homer got out of his. They pulled on jeans, and T-shirts, and sneakers. The telephone rang. It was one of Isabel’s researchers, apologising for the earliness of the call, asking permission to contact a Norwegian architect breaking a world tour in London that day. Isabel’s anxiety disappeared. The world was back to normal. There were decisions to be made, money to be earned, the world to be mastered.

Homer opened Jason’s door: ‘Pa-ra-pa-ra-pa-ra,’ rattled Jason, firing his new filigreed gun at his parents, machine-gun style. ‘I’m six, I’m nearly seven, I don’t have to go to school today.’

‘Yes, you do,’ they said. Jason yelled and screamed and stamped. His parents reasoned and explained and cajoled.

Homer took Jason to school on Mondays and Wednesdays and collected him on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Isabel took him on Tuesdays and Thursdays and collected him on Mondays and Wednesdays. On Fridays both parents took him and collected him. The routine suited everyone.

Jason rode behind Homer on the bicycle when the weather was fine. Today was a bicycle day. Jason, still tear-stained, turned round to smile at his mother as they rode off. It was the smile of a prince to a courtier, immensely kind and immensely gracious. It was all-forgiving. It was clear to Isabel that he had always meant to go to school.

Isabel returned to the kitchen for coffee. The radio was on. The news had begun. Isabel listened half-professionally, half as an innocent citizen. She knew a sufficient number of journalists, had met enough editors, had worked on the fringes of enough news rooms, to know the processes by which balance was evolved: the half-accidental, half-purposeful ways in which bias was created, and truth, once again, slipped through the fingers and scattered, like a drop of mercury splashing on the floor: elusive in the first place, now gone for ever. Today some things were clear enough.

The long haul up to the American Presidential election had begun. The Primaries were under way. An outsider, the young Senator from Maryland, was looking good for the Democrats. His name was Dandridge Ivel – commonly known as Dandy Ivel. The commentator, speaking over a crackly line, was speculating on the advantages of having youth at the American helm again, harking back to the Kennedy era, and Camelot, and the golden age of the USA, before national shame, depression, monetarist policies, inflation, unemployment and street riots became commonplace topics of conversation. The age before responsibility – the adolescence of a nation. Perhaps the USA could be young and vigorous again, with Dandy Ivel at the helm? The commentator, his enthusiasm bouncing and crackling off some ill-functioning satellite, left no doubt that he was a Dandy Ivel fan.

Isabel sat down. The house was quiet. The big school clock on the kitchen wall ticked with one rhythm: the grandfather clock in the hall, proud amongst the bicycles and coats, ticked with another. The school clock had to be wound, every day; the grandfather clock every eight. It was Isabel’s job to wind the former, because she so easily forgot the latter. Homer never forgot.

She made herself a cup of coffee. Homer limited himself to two cups a day, and never drank the powdered kind. He feared the powdering agent was carcinogenic.

How would she ever live without Homer, who structured her life and surrounded her personality, and had made her lie-about, sleep-around personality into something so sure, so certain? Isabel clutched her arms across her chest. She had a pain. She rocked to and fro.

Of course she had known: she had seen or heard some mention somewhere of Dandy Ivel’s name, and repressed the knowledge. Of course she had woken up afraid; of course she had rung her mother; of course she had wept.

Dandy Ivel, President of the United States.

Once, Isabel thought, I believed that events were haphazard and unrelated. I believed that people could be loved and left, and that happenings receded into the past and were gone, and that only with marriage, or its equivalent, and the birth of children, did the real, memorable, responsible life begin. Now she saw it was not so. Nothing was lost, not even the things you most wanted to lose. All things move towards a certain point in time. Our future is conditioned by our past: all of it, not just the paths we choose, or are proud of.

There was nothing to be done except say nothing, do nothing, hug the knowledge to herself. All would yet be well.

After an earthquake a house changes. Ornaments stand minutely different on the shelves; books lean at delicately altered angles. The lamp hangs quiet again at the end of its cord, but all things have discovered motion: the power to act and upset. The house laughs. You thought I was yours, your friend. You thought you knew me, but see, you don’t. One day I may fall and crush you to death. It seemed to Isabel that the house she loved so much had changed. It mocked her, and laughed.

Isabel went next door to drink her coffee with Maia. Maia had quarrelled with her husband and run out into the street with tears in her eyes and stepped in front of a car, and lost her sight. Nothing is safe. Husbands, tears, cars, eyes. They won’t be sorry; you will.

Maia and Isabel talked, and said nothing very important. During the day Isabel went into her Hello-Goodnight office. Alice, the researcher, had found the Norwegian architect, but it transpired that these days he built underground houses, not solar-powered holiday homes. In consultation with the producer, Andrew Elphick, it was agreed that it would do neither the architect nor the programme any good were he to appear on it.

‘We’re an informative but light-hearted show,’ said Elphick. ‘Our viewers don’t want to switch off Hello-Goodnight and have nuclear nightmares about the end of the world. They’re common enough without us helping. Don’t you agree, Isabel? I don’t mind us being serious about feminism, racism, homosexuality or any of the other social trimmings, but I won’t devalue the currency of the end of the world in a late-night chat show.’

Isabel saw what he meant. So did Alice, who was thirty-two, and had just turned her back on promotion in order to work just one more time, every time, with Elphick, whom she loved. Elphick was tall and broad and sad and clever and had red hair and a boyish smile. He was forty, and married. He was not popular with the camera crews or studio staff, at whom he shouted and raged, as if married to them.

‘Isabel,’ he said to her as she left the room, ‘do you have a social conscience?’

‘Of course,’ she replied, startled.

‘I thought you did,’ he replied. ‘It’s rather like mine. We know where our duty lies. It’s to fiddle as prettily as possible while Rome burns, so that Nero throws us a penny or two.’

He was drinking already. It was his occupation on five days out of seven. On the other two, run-up days and recording days, he kept sober. His face was lined by scars – from going, rumour said, through too many car windscreens. He only ever slept with Alice when he was drunk – and was thus able to keep his sober self, his real self, faithful to his wife. He believed in individual probity and sexual responsibility, and would not have shifty or immoral people on his show.

‘The example of achievement,’ he would say. ‘That’s what the people need to see. The power of the individual to shape his own destiny.’

‘Her,’ said Isabel, in duty bound.

‘Or her,’ he said, bored.

He caught Isabel’s hand and kissed it, as she left, pressing it to his cold lips. She felt he was desperate rather than lecherous, and removed her hand gently.

‘You don’t really like me, do you?’ he said. ‘No one I like likes me. They put up with me but they don’t like me.’

‘Alice likes you,’ said Isabel.

Isabel went home in time to receive Jason and his friends. The television was on. The video played an endless stream of Popeye cartoons. Parents came and failed to go. Isabel, after all, was a celebrity. Homer, unusually, was late home. The noise was great: Jason paced up and down in the way he had when impatient or cross, head bent forward, hands clasped behind his back, like some adult in a ridiculous cartoon. It made the grown-ups laugh, and that made Jason crosser.

‘Daddy’s late,’ he said. ‘We’ll miss the film. It’s no laughing matter.’

Which made them laugh the more, to hear the adult phraseology from the child’s lips.

Jason’s friend Bobby, who could never be trusted near anything technological, flicked the switch on the video which sent it back to transmitted television. There, on the screen, pacing up and down, head bent forward, hands clasped behind his back, against a background of the stars and stripes, was Dandy Ivel.

‘For all the world like Jason,’ remarked Bobby’s mother.

‘Isn’t that a coincidence!’

‘Stop walking about like that, Jason,’ said Isabel.

‘Why?’ asked her son, not stopping.

‘It’s sloppy,’ said Isabel.

‘I think it’s rather cute,’ said Bobby’s mother.

Jason’s mother slapped her son on the cheek just as Homer came in.

‘Isabel!’ cried Homer, shocked.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Isabel, to both Jason and Homer. It was hard to say which one of them looked more hurt.

Homer switched off the television and ushered the children into a waiting taxi. Isabel iced the cake, while Bobby’s mother watched, critically. Isabel wished Bobby’s mother would go home, but she didn’t. She stayed to help and cut the bread for the elephant sandwiches; she cut far too thickly and failed to butter the slices to the edges.

‘Do you suffer much from premenstrual tension?’ asked Bobby’s mother.

She wore a lacy peasant blouse and a full cotton flowered skirt.

‘No,’ said Isabel, shortly.

‘I never saw you hit Jason before. And he wasn’t doing anything wrong, was he? I just thought it might be PMT. If men had to suffer from it they’d soon do something about it. I sometimes hit Bobby when I’m suffering. I’m sure most women do.’

‘Happy Birthday Jason,’ wrote Isabel, in green icing, by means of a rolled paper spill fastened with a safety pin.

‘A pity Jason isn’t older. He could enter a Dandy Ivel double competition.’

‘I hardly think so,’ said Isabel. ‘He’s fair and Dandy Ivel looks fairly dark to me.’

‘Jason has the kind of hair that’ll get darker as he grows older,’ said Bobby’s mother, getting the elephant shape wrong. ‘I’m afraid these sandwiches look more like hedgehogs than elephants.’

‘Anyway,’ said Isabel, ‘I think Ivel will fade into insignificance pretty quickly. I hardly think he’ll get the presidential nomination.’

‘I think he will,’ said Bobby’s mother. ‘I did an evening course in political sociology. I think the women of America are longing for a husband figure. They haven’t had one since Kennedy. Dandy Ivel looks like the kind of man who’d take care of you.’

Homer came home with six frazzled children. They loved the sandwiches and ignored the cake. Jason threw jelly at the wall. He was over-excited. The parents came early and stood around drinking sherry. The children quarrelled over going-home presents. Bobby set up a roar, in the cloakroom. ‘I’m afraid Jason must have bitten him,’ Homer came back to apologise. Bobby’s mother took him huffily home, saying she always slapped for biting. Bobby had been a biter, but not for long. She’d seen to that. Scratching was one thing, biting another.

‘It’s not good,’ said Homer, when all had departed, supper had been eaten and night fallen. ‘Jason is aggressive.’

‘Perhaps it’s the lead in the London water,’ said Isabel.

‘No,’ said Homer. ‘No excuses. I think he’s disturbed.’

‘Disturbed!’ cried Isabel. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Isabel,’ said Homer, ‘face it. He watched Superman II from the aisle, and when the usherette tried to make him sit in a seat he bit her ankle. There was a terrible scene.’

Isabel laughed.

‘It isn’t a laughing matter,’ said Homer. ‘I think he should see a child psychologist.’

‘What – Jason?’

‘It can’t do any harm, Isabel.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Isabel, but already she was terrified.

She had seen Jason as an extension of herself: flesh of her flesh, mind of her mind. But of course he was not. Jason, her child, was separated from her; the umbilical cord had been cut long ago but she had scarcely noticed. He no longer slept, ate, smiled, felt at her command. He did these things at his own prompting, not hers. She could no longer tuck him under her arm and run, should the going get bad. He could blame her for her decisions, dislike her for what she did, withdraw his love from her. Week by week he became less her perfect child and more his own imperfect master; yet still must suffer, as all children must suffer, because his mother’s love for him was not perfect either: had fallen away, in the light of his own growing independent will, from its moment of perfection, somewhere at the beginning.

Now here was Homer, who should love Jason, saying their son was imperfect and disturbed, implying the fault was hers. She could not protect Jason, because he was not hers to protect, being six and his own self. And she could not protect herself, because she was guilty.

‘Isabel,’ said Homer, alarmed by the expression on her face, ‘it’s no big deal. I just thought it might help. It does seem to me that Jason isn’t all that happy. We might be doing something wrong, between us. God knows what it is.

Perhaps it’s seeing you on the television screen when you ought to be here in the house.’

‘Ought to be?’

‘From Jason’s point of view, no one else’s. Christ, Isabel, he’s a kid of five.’

‘Six.’

‘Six. And Isabel, you’re under a strain yourself.’

‘Me?’

‘You slapped the poor child. Slapped him! And why? What was he doing wrong?’

‘Homer, I told him not to do something and he just went on doing it. There was a room full of screaming kids and bleating adults. I didn’t slap him hard, just enough so he’d listen.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘I can’t even remember. It wasn’t important. Homer, Jason and I are well within the limits of ordinary normal mother and child behaviour. Most mothers slap their children from time to time.’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘Most children are rude, aggressive, disobedient and defiant some of the time.’

‘I don’t think that’s true either. And most children don’t refuse to sit in their cinema seat and then bite the usherette’s ankle when she tries to move them. There, you’re smiling! I think you’re acting something out through Jason, Isabel, really I do, and Jason is reacting badly to it.’

‘You mean I should see an analyst?’

‘Heaven forbid,’ said Homer, wearily, and Isabel felt she had been unreasonable.

‘Anyway,’ said Isabel, ‘we don’t know any child shrinks. They’re out of fashion.’

‘I can always find out through my office,’ said Homer. ‘What’s ten years out of date for you TV people, we publishers are just about cottoning on to.’

‘Homer,’ said Isabel, ‘I get the feeling you resent my job. Shouldn’t we be talking about that, and not shifting the whole problem on to poor little Jason?’

‘I think,’ said Homer, ‘we are nearer to having a row than we ever have been. Let’s go to bed.’

Homer and Isabel went to their white lacy bed with its delicate brass tracery at head and foot, in a bedroom with dark green walls and purple blinds. It was tidy because Homer kept it so. Isabel tended to leave her clothes where they fell. But she made the bed every day, lovingly and neatly, and even sometimes ironed the cotton sheets, when they came from the washing machine, because they were so pretty.

Homer forgave Isabel more quickly than Isabel forgave Homer. Or so it seemed. In fact, it was fear that kept Isabel lying stiffly on her back, her flesh shrinking from her husband’s, and not anger at all. But he was not to know that. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Homer. ‘Look, if it so upsets you I’ll never mention the matter of Jason and a shrink again.’

‘Good,’ said Isabel.

‘Then turn round and kiss me.’

‘No. I can’t. I don’t know why.’

‘You see,’ said Homer, ‘it wasn’t only that he bit the usherette and there was this fuss, but afterwards he denied it. He really honestly didn’t seem to remember it. That was what really got me. I don’t think the other kids noticed much. It was the bit when Superman throws the villain into the Coca-Cola sign. It was actually a shockingly violent film – not at all like Superman I, which was innocent.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Isabel, ‘I get the feeling we’re all being softened up for something, children and all.’

‘If we are,’ said Homer, ‘there’s nothing we can do about it, except look after our own.’

Isabel went to sleep and dreamed about the end of the world. Missiles flashed to and fro above her head, phallic every one. In the end, all was rubble.

She moaned and again Homer tried to take her in his arms and again she refused. Had that ever happened before? She could not remember but she did not think so. She did not want his flesh in hers. It was too dangerous: an opening she could not control. She was half asleep.

Upstairs Jason, as if responding to the tumult and upset of the night, woke and started to cry. Isabel, glad for once to be called fully into consciousness, got out of bed and went upstairs to see what was the matter. Jason was wide awake.

‘I had a nasty dream,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘Bombs.’

‘You shouldn’t be so naughty through the day,’ said Isabel. ‘Then you wouldn’t punish yourself at night. It’s your dream, you know. You own it.’

She didn’t think he would understand, but he seemed to. He was open and receptive; a midnight child.

‘I wasn’t very naughty.’

‘Biting is naughty.’

‘It was my birthday. Bobby took my present.’

‘No. At the cinema. You bit there. A grown-up, too.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Daddy said you did.’

‘I didn’t.’

She didn’t pursue the matter. His blue eyes were wide and clear. They followed her as she moved about the room. So Dandy’s eyes had followed her. Every day, she thought, he grows more like Dandy. I never thought of that. I thought if the child took after anyone he would take after me. I thought that somehow you snatched a child from a man and that was that. I thought, moreover, that I would have a girl. That I would have a boy, and carry the father with me for ever and ever, was something I never envisaged.

She kissed him goodnight, settled him for sleep, and went back to bed.

‘Everything all right?’ asked Homer.

‘Fine,’ said Isabel.

3

Now. Washington’s clocks are five hours behind those of London. It was seven o’clock in the evening when, on the thirty-fifth floor of the Evans building, which towers over the rushing and romantic waters of the Potomac river and houses the overflow from the Russell Senate office building, Joe (Hot Potato) Murphy and Pete (Kitten) Sikorski resolved to work late on something that had just turned up on the print-out.

Joe and Pete had semi-official access to the big CIA computer along the river. Both were ex-Company men. Now they were part of the big new up-and-coming Ivel-for-President campaign team. Their days of Dirty Tricks were past. Joe and Pete worked tirelessly and logically for the IFPC and, so far, within the law. If both kept firearms in their office drawers, and bedroom shelves, and gun holsters beneath their left arms, both were licensed and entitled so to do. They were allies; kingmakers. They were devoted and loyal. Hot Potato and Kitten! Joe and Pete made more of their nicknames than did their familiars and friends, perhaps feeling the need for sympathetic magic to make themselves ordinary and kind, and more like other men.

‘Praise be,’ said Joe Hot Potato Murphy, staring at the coded print-out. He liked to emphasise his Irish origins. He cultivated the twinkle in his eye and the roguish charm of his manner. They disarmed the unwary.

‘Here’s the Australian bitch again. She’s moved up a notch to the Pay Good Attention file. What are our options here, Pete?’

Pete proposed and Joe disposed. Pete had one degree in economics and another one in law, and burn marks on his upper arms, to mark the spots where he had practised steeling himself against pain.

‘We disclose nothing,’ said Pete, ‘in case we blow something. This is a very sensitive area.’

‘It might be more sensitive than we can legitimately handle,’ said Joe.

‘Hell no,’ said Pete. ‘She’s just a woman like any other.’ Pete’s wife was a tall, pretty blonde who sprayed herself all over with deodorants four times a day, so as not to cause offence. If she stood still, which she seldom did, so busy was she in the pursuit of hygiene and physical perfection, that she appeared like a painting against the drawing-room wall, framed by drapes. Then the sound of her husband’s voice would activate her again, and her pretty hands would start patting and folding and tidying and replacing, and her long legs would scissor to and fro, and her manicured feet in their shiny shoes go clip-clip-clop on the tiled kitchen floor.

‘A feminist and a radical,’ warned Joe. ‘And her father’s a communist, now resident in Saigon. That doesn’t make her a woman like any other. Her show goes out live and she’s got a six-million audience hanging on her every word. And that doesn’t make her like just plain folks, either.’

‘We can take care of the talk show,’ said Pete.

‘We should have taken care of her,’ said Joe, ‘a long time ago.’

‘Joe,’ said Pete, ‘quit living in the past. She’s a wife and mother. We don’t wage war on women.’

‘It is an insult to the sweet name of womanhood,’ said Joe, ‘to call her a woman at all. A feminist and a radical! A wife, you say! Is a woman who makes her husband wash the dishes worthy of the name of wife? What sort of mother is it who makes her man change the baby’s nappy? We have some problem with definitions here!’

‘I hear you, Joe, I hear you.’

They talked like this for a while longer, using words as cloaks of darkness, the better to build the trivial into the significant; the easier to justify ill temper, neurosis and spite, and thus keep their good opinion of themselves. Now they made decisions. They would take appropriate precautionary measures, intensify the security ring around her, and wait and see how the cookie crumbled.

‘There are more ways than one,’ said Joe, ‘of crumbling cookies.’

And they both went home to their wives, comforted by the thought of their many options, first double-locking and otherwise securing their offices, which bristled with anti-bugging devices of one kind or another.

4

Buzz-buzz! Listen to the bees! A fuchsia hedge runs along the bottom of Wincaster Row, all the way from No. 1 to No. 31. There can’t be another fuchsia like it in all London. Six foot high, five foot broad, and a mass of scarlet flowers for most of the summer. What trick of soil and weather and intent produced it, I do not know.

I cannot see it now but I can hear it. The bees suck the flowers all summer long, humming and buzzing, quite overwhelmed by their discovery of such an extensive treat. I am sure they come from as far afield as Enfield, and Richmond, and Epping and Dulwich: from the green outer suburbs. For surely bees live in hives, and where in the crowded inner city is there room or time for anyone to keep beehives? Neighbours would complain.

Hilary suggested to the garden committee that the hedge be removed: she thought the bees were dangerous: she thought they might sting her little girl, Lucy. The garden committee looked at her in amazement, and explained that bees were good, and necessary to man’s survival.

‘What about woman?’ asked Hilary, triumphant.

That was when she was pregnant for the second time, having lapsed briefly into heterosexuality with a man who could be guaranteed to treat her badly and abandon her; which indeed he did, in the sixth month of her pregnancy.

Hilary then worried, throughout the seventh and eighth months, in case the baby turned out to be male, and as such designated as enemy and rejected by the lesbian friends on whom she now depended for help and support, and who gave it gladly but not unconditionally. Hilary could not bear the thought of handing a male baby out for adoption – a Caucasian male infant, a prize in the world of baby-bargaining would be handed out to the straightest of straight middle-class couples. And then she, Hilary, would be responsible for bringing into the world she was trying to reform the worst form of male oppressor. Nor could she damage little Lucy by exposing her to the brutality and aggression of a male brother. In the ninth month the only solution seemed to be to put down the baby at birth, if it should be male. She wept and writhed and told Jennifer, and Jennifer refused to speak to her any more.

‘She’s wicked!’ said Jennifer. ‘Wicked!’

‘She’s mad,’ was all Hope would say. ‘She’ll be better when the baby’s born. How could anyone look like that – tight to bursting – and not be slightly mad? Let’s hope it’s temporary.’

And Hope waved her scarlet, perfect fingernails in the vague direction of Hilary, who refused to wear the kind of full and blousing garment which would hide her extraordinary shape – she seemed to be without fat, and the baby lay inside her, with its folded form straining and outlined just beneath, it seemed, the skin of her belly.

When the baby was born, plopping easily into the world, it was, indeed, discovered to be a boy, and Hilary loved him very much, and little Lucy spent her time attending to its infant male needs; and Hilary’s friends were indeed scornful of its maleness; and Hilary’s lovers complained of the attention she paid it in the night; so Hilary renounced her lesbianism altogether, and thereafter had to put up with Jennifer’s rather patronising forgiveness, and the told-you-so attitude of Wincaster Row.

The new baby’s father, even, cautiously, came back from time to time to dandle it upon his knee. He took Lucy out as well.

‘I’m not one of your sissy men,’ he’d say. ‘I’m not one of those poncy men who dance attendance upon feminists and get their kicks out of being mentally whipped, and run the crèches at women’s conferences in return for a kick and a smile. I’m just sorry for the poor little bugger.’

Hilary would dance up and down with rage. She was a beautiful girl, in a brownish, sinewy kind of way, and tried to live by her principles. Even Jennifer acknowledged it.

‘The world is so arranged,’ said Jennifer, surprisingly, ‘as to make doing right almost impossible. At least Hilary is trying.’

Jennifer gives Hilary little dresses and little white socks for Lucy, but Hilary just puts them in the jumble sale, and Lucy goes on wearing dungarees. Lucy longs for dresses and dolls, but perhaps that is only because she isn’t allowed them.

I had a baby once: it was neither male nor female. It was born without reproductive organs: it died within five minutes of birth and just as well. Extraordinary things are born to woman: mutants of another race, unviable. Cling to a sense of self through that, if you can. Of purpose. I asked the doctor not to tell Laurence what the matter with the baby was. (Can we call this thing, my child, a baby?) How could I say to Laurence, you and I together, this is what we made. Nothing. We cancelled each other out. I bore the burden of this knowledge alone. Stillborn, I said, and Laurence didn’t ask any further: barely a why or a wherefore, and he an investigative journalist, and, as usual, away at the time.

Easier to find out and condemn what goes on in another country, in a far-off place, than what happens in your own home and in your own heart.

I told Isabel. ‘Aren’t you angry?’ she asked. ‘I would be, if fate picked me out amongst millions, and dealt me a blow like that.’

I replied that I had worn anger out. But it may not be so. Perhaps after all it was red rage that burned out my eyes. Or perhaps it was only fate, being kind, dealing me a trump card. Certainly I have caught Laurence’s butterfly nature on the pin of my helplessness; he struggled a little and made his protest, drunk and unshaven down at the pub, and now lies still, and holds me in his arms, careful and caring and good at last, frightened to move suddenly unless something else gets torn.

You really cannot expect a blind woman to have a baby. Some do, of course, but it isn’t expected. Soon I will be too old, in any case, and saved.

Buzz-buzz! How busy we all are along Wincaster Row. At least the bees stop at night, when cold slows their wings and the weight of the honey they won’t let fall all but defeats them. They make it back to the hive if they can, and die if they can’t, uncomplaining and dutiful. A bee could spend its days, as a butterfly does, glorifying its maker, dancing in the sun, rejoicing in the Lord – but no, it prefers to labour. Nevertheless, the bees are clearly pleased by the fuchsia hedge.

Work in Wincaster Row does not stop when night falls. Then the fuchsia bush hangs darkly and silently at the end of the garden. I remember it from my sighted days: how the lights from the windows – which sometimes burned all night – would outline its shape: it seemed then a hovering storm cloud, picked out with flecks of blood.

Oliver the architect sometimes works until two or three in the morning. He is designing a building for the disabled: he works for nothing. Anna, his wife, would prefer that he should work for something and spend more time with her and the children: but seldom says so.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Hope says crossly, ‘if only everyone would look after themselves and forget about the rest of the world, it would be in a much better state.’

Hope’s lovers bring her chocolates and flowers, in the hope of making her feel something more than kindness towards them. They puzzle her. What is it they want? Sex she understands, and offers, but they want her essence, her very soul, not just her body. She is writing a paper on Thucydides. No one will pay her for it, she explains. It will be published in an obscure magazine and forgotten. But it’s interesting: such things must be written. Hope lectures in Greek poetry at Birkbeck College, to mature students. They study for the sake of it, not in the hope of future employment. One pupil is over eighty.

Buzz-buzz! Dawn’s breaking. I can tell, because I hear the bees.

Hope once got stuck halfway up the oak tree in the communal garden. She was trying to rescue a kitten. Hope wept: the kitten wailed: the fire engine arrived. Ivor the alcoholic fell hopelessly in love with Hope, for at least a month, and Ivor’s wife baked bread furiously, in the hope that her proper domestic worth and value would become apparent to him—which indeed it always was, but what has love to do with just deserts? Those who don’t deserve it, receive it. Those who most need it, seldom have it. To those who hath, as Jesus once observed, to the shock and dismay of all around, shall be given, and to those who hath not, even that small portion that they hath shall be taken away.

It was Hope who let the men who called themselves electricians in to No. 3. They turned up at six one morning in a London Electricity Board van, when Homer, Isabel and Jason were off visiting friends in Wales, and spent an hour inside the house, seeing, they said, to faulty wiring.

Hope was out early trying to find a kitten she thought she heard crying. Buzz-buzz! She shinned up a drainpipe for the LEB men, climbed over on to the balcony, and in through the window and down to the hall, through the coats and the bicycles and by the grandfather clock, and opened the front door for them, before you could, as it were, say Jack Robinson.

‘Thank you, miss,’ they said, admiring. She had lovely legs, which showed to advantage as she leapt gazelle-like from point to point on the face of the building. Hope always let everyone in, up and down the row, if they’d forgotten or lost their keys.

‘Think nothing of it,’ she said.

No doubt they could have let themselves in more simply, had she not happened to be out of bed early, looking for a lost kitten.

After the electricians had been and gone, listeners could hear everything that went on in No. 3, if and when they wanted. The IFPC had their listening devices installed. Buzz-buzz!

5

Homer, for a day or so, said no more about Jason needing to see a child therapist. Isabel went nervously about her work and life, watching Jason for signs of inner disturbance. Any child, when watched closely, when faith has gone, can appear both deranged and malicious. Naivety can seem calculated, charm self-conscious, the noisy and instant expression of emotion a covert attack upon the adult. Isabel knew this, and reassured herself. Jason was a six-year-old child behaving like a six-year-old child, and was neither her persecutor nor her victim.

Which was just as well, because if Jason was indeed suffering some inner turmoil, which only truth would resolve, then she would have to start digging away at the very foundation of her life with Homer, and this she did not wish to do. Self-interest, as well as maternal pride, was at stake. Jason, for everyone’s sake, had to be in good heart and good health.

Dandy Ivel made a speech about probity, integrity, endurance and fidelity. It was reported on British television. Isabel changed programmes. Homer said, ‘That man throws abstract words about like karate chops, the better to confuse and terrify.’ Isabel said, ‘Yes, doesn’t he?’

Isabel and Homer and Jason went to stay for the weekend with the Humbles, in Wales. Ian and Doreen had given up their Wardour Street life of (him) dress-designing and (her) film-making, and taken to sheep-farming up a distant Welsh hillside. Ian and Doreen drove a battered Land Rover stuck with anti-nuclear stickers, and their children were dressed in stiff woollen garments, hand spun, natural dyed, and knitted on very thick needles; their tiny limbs, thus encased, and macrobiotically lean, found movement difficult. They sat on the splintery wooden floor of their homestead and wailed. Jason took offence at this, and no amount of reproof or explanation could prevent him from setting about them with his fists.

‘Jason, they’re only little. Please stop.’

‘Jason, it’s their home, their toys. They don’t understand about sharing. They don’t go to school, as you do!’

Doreen taught the children at home, as she was qualified to do. She didn’t want them subjected to the brutality and corruptness of (presumably) the likes of Jason.

‘Jason, if you go on like that, you’ll have to go to bed.’

Jason was frightened by the dark and the silence and became hysterical when Isabel tried to put him to bed, wrapping tentacle-like limbs around hers. Presently, when he was calmer, Homer took him away and bathed him, in a tin bath in the outhouse filled by hand from a tank inadequately warmed by a solar panel. But Jason found the presence of a broody hen offensive and frightening (according to Homer, later) and then bit his father in his struggle not to be bathed, and then denied that he had, although the marks were clear enough on Homer’s ankle.

‘He doesn’t travel well, that’s all,’ said Isabel, lightly, and pointed out that Ian and Doreen’s girls twitched and scowled and whined; and that although they didn’t make nearly so much noise as Jason, they were equally troublesome, and had stolen his silver tractor and hidden it, quite deliberately.

‘But they didn’t bite,’ said Homer. His horror of biting was irrational, he agreed. A child might well feel it reasonable to use his teeth to make an impression, in every sense of the word: nevertheless, Homer was upset by it.

The night they returned to London Jason wet the bed. Homer stripped the sheets and washed and turned the mattress.

‘Isabel, you must see,’ he said. ‘Jason is upset and worried and needs help. What are you worried by? What are you so guilty about? I don’t understand it. It’s so unlike you.’

‘I don’t want him defined as disturbed,’ she said. ‘I don’t want him given pills.’

‘Neither of those things will happen,’ said Homer. ‘Perhaps you’re afraid of some criticism of you? That it might be said that Jason’s troubles stem from your work? But we both know that isn’t so: my working is as likely to upset Jason as your working. We’ve both been equally involved in his upbringing – except I notice it’s me dealing with the sheets when he wets the bed!’

Isabel capitulated. Homer brought Dr Gregory to her attention.

‘Who recommended him?’

‘Colin Matthews.’ Colin Matthews was one of Homer’s authors. He wrote bestselling political novels.

‘But you don’t trust his judgement or his politics or his style. How can you trust him to be right about a child psychologist?’

‘Dr Gregory saw his daughter through a bout of head-banging. Little Antonia. Do you remember? We went to her christening party.’

‘We shouldn’t have gone. It was hypocrisy. The whole child’s life is based upon hypocrisy. The father’s a fascist and the mother a hyena, and Antonia goes to a Steiner school. No wonder she banged her head.’

Isabel knew she was being unreasonable and ridiculous. She could feel her bottom lip, already so thinned and mutilated, tightening and narrowing yet more, to become, in the end, her mother’s.

‘Perhaps that’s what Dr Gregory pointed out,’ said Homer, patiently.

‘She’d have probably stopped anyway,’ said Isabel. ‘You don’t meet that many adults who bang their heads – or bite people’s ankles, for that matter.’

‘You do in mental homes,’ observed Homer. It was the last protest Isabel made. She rang Dr Gregory. The only appointment he had available was at three the following afternoon. Isabel accepted.

She had forgotten, of course, that she would have to fetch Jason out of school before time. In so doing, she encountered Mrs Pelotti.

‘Jason? Leaving school early to see a psychiatrist? You astound me. Why are you doing it? Did the recommendation come from the school? No? Then what are you doing to the child? Jason is a great trial to all of us, but he isn’t disturbed. There is nothing wrong with Jason that shouldn’t be wrong with all of us. Are you a cabbage? No! Is your husband a cabbage? No! Then why expect your unfortunate child to be a cabbage?’

Mrs Pelotti had a low opinion of parents, who seemed to her, from her long experience of them, to have their children’s worst interests at heart. The middle classes over protected; the working classes were themselves a source of actual danger to their progeny. She took children in from the age of three – all of them, selection being by catchment area alone. She took in the backward and the brilliant, the sickly and the healthy, the mad and the sane, the poor and the rich, bullies and victims – and wherever her eye fell there was health, sanity and energy. The red-brick building, with its high echoing walls, rang to the sound of child music and was brilliant with child art, and where she trod flowers, both artificial and natural, bloomed. If her eye could not fall upon, her foot could not seek out, every corner of the school; if bullying and misery and meanness of every kind swept in with the litter off the street, blown in by winds of urban discontent, it was not her fault, nor her predecessors', nor those who would come after her, when finally she lay down exhausted and died.

Of Mrs Pelotti’s pupils one out of every five came from homes where there was a mother at home and a working father. The rest had empty houses to return to; or were brought up by mother or father alone; or by grandparents or elder brothers or sisters; or by foster parents. All had roofs over their heads, and shoes, usually sneakers, on their feet; but seldom the roof they wanted, nor shoes that fitted.

Isabel and Homer sent Jason to Mrs Pelotti’s school because they thought they should, and because he was happy there. Friends had children who went to schools where fees were paid and blazers worn and feet clipclopped in polished lace-up shoes, and these parents blamed Isabel and Homer for sacrificing Jason on the altar of socialist, or whatever, principle. Isabel and Homer said they didn’t want Jason growing up fearful in a world in which he didn’t participate. And how could society ever be changed for the better, they asked themselves and each other, if the middle classes reserved privilege for their children? Mrs Pelotti, they reasoned, needed their help.

Mrs Pelotti this morning, seemed in no need of help.

‘You see,’ said Isabel, ‘he’s taken to biting!’

‘So?’ said Mrs Pelotti. ‘So would I if I were him. You talk to him too much. You ask his advice. You forget he’s too young to give it. You treat him as if he were grown-up. He’s only six. Of course he bites. He could never talk his way round you lot. What else is he to do?’

‘Anything else we do wrong?’ asked Isabel.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Pelotti, ‘you’re always late. Bring him in on time and collect him on time. You and your husband spend so much time discussing whose turn it is that the child gets forgotten. But take him to a shrink if it entertains you, and you’ve got the money. I don’t suppose it will do much harm. If you have things to throw away there’s a jumble sale next week. I have become more a fund raiser of late than an educationalist. I have no choice.’

‘Mrs Pelotti,’ said Isabel, surprised. ‘I’m never late.’

‘One of you is,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s your husband. You’re both so busy you never notice anything.’

That over, Isabel went to work. Mrs Pelotti had been unfair. Jason was almost always delivered and collected on time, but Mrs Pelotti’s way was to brisk up both parents and children by brutal overstatement, and send them away with some kind of achievable, practical mission. If you were five you learnt to tie your shoelaces; if you were thirty-five you aspired to get up on time.

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