PHILIPPA GREGORY
Zelda’s Cut

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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Philippa Gregory asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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

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Source ISBN: 9780002257602

Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007396320

Version: 2017-09-25

Dedication

for Anthony

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Keep Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

One

The question between them, being unresolvable, remained unresolved. Their irresolution: his and hers, and the intrinsic insolubility of their relationship stood between them like a wall … like a rock … like a …

Isobel broke off from typing and consulted the thesaurus beside her on the desk.

Like a barrier, bastion, bulwark, dyke, rampart … Like an impenetrable bulwark, like an impenetrable bastion, like a bastion, like a rampart …

She hesitated. Her husband put his fair head around the door of her study.

‘Can’t you take a break for lunch now?’ he asked plaintively. She glanced at her watch. It was not yet one o’clock but Philip’s condition meant that he needed regular small meals, and if Isobel failed to provide these, he became hungry and irritable.

‘What has Mrs M. left for us?’ she asked, getting up from her desk and glancing back at the screen, thinking distractedly about soup and barrier, bastion, rampart and bulwark.

‘Soup and bread rolls again,’ he said. ‘But I got her to buy a piece of steak for supper.’

‘Oh good,’ she said, not hearing him.

The kitchen was a pretty room with sprigged curtains and wooden units. The view from the window over the sink looked up the hill at the back of the house, the green shoulder of the Weald of Kent, bright now with springtime growth. Beside the Aga stood a saucepan filled with home-made soup. Philip watched as she put it on the hot plate and took the rolls from the bread bin.

‘I’ll lay the table,’ he volunteered.

When Isobel brought the bowls to the table she found that he had forgotten a knife to cut the cheese, and there was no salt. She fetched them without irritation, her mind still on bastion, rampart or bulwark.

‘You had two phone calls while you were working,’ Philip said. ‘Someone from your publishers, I wrote down the name. And Troy.’

‘What did Troy want?’

‘It’s such a ridiculous name,’ he remarked. ‘D’you think his parents really christened him Troy? Or was he called Trevor and has been trying to live it down ever since?’

‘I like it,’ she said. ‘It suits him.’

‘Never having had the honour, I couldn’t say. But it is a ridiculous name.’

‘Anyway,’ Isobel said patiently. ‘What did he want?’

‘You don’t imagine he’d tell me, do you?’ he demanded. ‘I’m just the messenger boy, the telephone operator. The receptionist at Hotel Literature.’

‘Hotel des Lettres,’ she suggested and was rewarded by the gleam of his smile.

‘Très belle.’

There was a brief silence, he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said briefly.

‘Aches and pains?’ she asked.

‘A bit.’

‘Why not have a lie down?’

‘I have all the rest of my life to lie down,’ he snapped. ‘That’s one of the things I have to look forward to. Progressive disability, or as you would say: a nice lie down. I don’t especially want to rush towards it.’

She bowed her head over the bowl of soup. ‘Of course not,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m sorry.’

Philip put his spoon in his empty bowl and finished his bread. ‘I think I’ll go for my walk,’ he said. ‘Stretch out a bit.’

She glanced outside at the clear skies. Their house was in a fold of the Weald, he had the choice of walking upwards to the crest or downwards to the village.

‘You could walk to the pub and I could drive down to meet you there later,’ she suggested.

‘You mean so I don’t face the challenge of an uphill?’

Isobel was silent.

‘That would be good,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Thank you. In about an hour?’

She nodded.

He got up from his place at the table and sighed with weariness at the effort of having to move. He went to the housekeeping jar which she kept filled with money, and helped himself to a ten-pound note. She watched the money that she had earned slide into the pocket of his slacks.

‘See you later, about two thirty,’ he said, and went out.

Isobel got to her feet and cleared the plates into the dishwasher. For a moment she looked at her face reflected in the window above the sink. She hardly recognised herself. The features were as they had always been, strong bones, large grey eyes, but the skin around her eyes and mouth was crumpled with sadness and disappointment. She paused in her work for a moment, looking at the lines around her eyes and the groove which marked either side of her mouth. She might call them laughter lines; but there had been little laughter in the last three years. In her head she heard Philip say, so sharply: ‘Progressive disability, or as you would say, a nice lie down.’

‘God, what a stupid thing to say.’ She shook her head. ‘What a fool I am.’

She bent and closed the dishwasher door. When she straightened up and saw her mirrored face again she gave the pale reflection a tight, determined smile. ‘I’ll have to try harder,’ she said to her image. ‘I’ll just go on trying.’

Troy on the telephone was always at his best. Isobel was glad to be talking to him without the silent presence of Philip, brooding in the kitchen or walking slowly in the garden.

He answered on the third ring. ‘Troy Cartwright,’ he said warmly.

‘It’s Isobel,’ she said and heard her voice lighten.

‘My star writer!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thanks for calling back. How are you?’

‘I’m well.’

‘And Philip?’

‘He’s fine,’ she said cheerfully.

‘You sound wonderful. How’s the book going?’

‘It’s finished,’ she said. ‘Actually, all except one word.’

‘One?’

‘Yes.’

Troy briefly considered asking her which word, but thought that lay within the area of the writer’s particular talents and outside the remit of her agent.

‘Come out to lunch to celebrate!’ he commanded. ‘I need to be seen out with a beautiful woman.’

Isobel smiled at the thought of Troy Cartwright, slim, mid-thirties, urbane, and living at the heart of fashionable London, needing to be seen lunching with her. ‘Oh, ridiculous.’

‘Not at all. I was looking through my client list for someone who combined brains and beauty and there was no contest.’

Absurdly, she heard herself giggle, an unusual sound in the quiet house. ‘I could deliver the manuscript, I suppose.’

‘Oh please! I so want to see it.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Great. I’ll book a table somewhere expensive.’

She hesitated. ‘It’s not necessary – ’

‘If I am taking Isobel Latimer out to lunch I want the world to know it.’ His voice dropped to a warm caress. ‘So you make sure that you wear something beautiful.’

‘All right,’ she said, surrendering to the pleasure of flattery. ‘I’ll come to your office at one.’

‘I’ll vacuum the red carpet myself,’ he promised.

Philip had walked himself into good humour. He sat in the garden of the pub with a whisky and ice in a glass before him. He waved as Isobel drew up in the Volvo and watched her park and get out of the car. He thought that she looked older than her fifty-two years as she walked across the car park towards him. She was as slim as she had always been, and her glossy chestnut hair had only faded slightly to pale brown. At first glance she could still be the young academic who had sat opposite him at a conference on ethics in the pharmaceutical industry, and argued her case with such precocious confidence and serenity that she had made him laugh and want to flirt with her. He had thought then that a highly intelligent academic wife might be a great asset to a man in his position. He had thought then that he could afford such a wife. He could earn the money, doing work which she considered morally suspect, he could bring home the tainted profits of capitalism, and she could study philosophy. She could be his luxury, a wife infinitely more prestigious and interesting than the flashy blondes of his colleagues. His earning power could buy her a good lifestyle where she could read and think and write. And in return: he could enjoy her.

It all changed the moment he became ill. He knew now that he could have died without her steady strength of mind, her determination that he should survive. But as he watched her walk towards him and saw the droop of her shoulders and the weariness in her very footsteps, he did not feel gratitude, nor even tenderness. He felt irritated. She was always tired these days. She always looked so miserable. Anyone would think that it was her who was ill.

‘Come and have a drink,’ he called. ‘We don’t have to rush off, do we?’

She hesitated. ‘I was going to work this afternoon.’

Philip tutted. Isobel’s problem was that she worked too hard, he thought. Her agent Troy, her publishers, her publicity people – they all thought they had equal right to her time, and she was too polite to say no. People pushed her around, and she was foolish enough to try to please everyone.

‘Take a break,’ he ordered. ‘You need a break.’

‘All right,’ she said, thinking that the bastion, rampart, bulwark or dyke question could be resolved tomorrow morning before she took the train to London.

He limped into the pub and brought her back a glass of white wine, and they sat in the sun together. Isobel tipped her head back to the warmth.

‘This is idyllic,’ she said. ‘I love the month of May.’

‘Best time of year,’ he agreed. ‘The field that Rigby left fallow last year is just filled with cowslips.’

‘We are so lucky to live here,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t bear to live in London.’

‘It was a good choice,’ he said. ‘I just wish I knew how long we’ll be able to stay in that house.’

Covertly, she glanced over at him, nursing his drink. ‘Surely we’ve got a good few years yet.’

‘It’s the stairs that’ll be the first difficulty,’ he said.

‘We can get one of those stairlifts.’

Philip made a face. ‘I’d rather move our bedroom downstairs. We could use your office and you could write upstairs. It wouldn’t make any difference to you.’

She thought for a brief moment of regret that she would lose the view from her study window which she loved, and the bookshelves that she had designed. ‘Of course. That’d be fine.’

‘Provided Mrs M. is prepared to keep coming, and maybe do a little more. We’d need to get someone to do the garden.’

‘It’s so terribly expensive,’ Isobel remarked. ‘Other people’s wages cost so much. It’s paying their tax which is so awful.’

‘It’s our lifestyle,’ he reminded her. ‘It makes sense to spend money on our comforts.’

‘As long as we have the money coming in.’

He smiled. ‘Why shouldn’t it come in? You’ve never written a book yet which didn’t win one prize or another. All we need is for someone to buy the option for a film and we can rebuild the barn and put in a swimming pool and a gym.’

She hesitated, wondering if she should state the obvious: that a film was not likely, and that literary prizes and literary acclaim were not guarantees of good royalties from publishers. She stopped herself. She had promised herself that she would never worry him with money troubles. She had taken it on herself to earn the money and to free him from fear of debt when he was facing so many other, greater fears.

‘That barn would be perfect for a swimming pool,’ Philip repeated. ‘I read a paper the other day. Swimming is the best exercise someone with my condition can take. Much better than walking. And if we put it in the barn it would be useful all the year round. It’s hard to get the exercise in winter.’

‘I don’t know that we could afford it,’ Isobel said cautiously.

He shook his head at her reluctance. ‘What are we saving our money for?’ he demanded. ‘You talk like we’re going to live forever. Well I’m certainly not. We know that well enough. I don’t see why we have to be so cautious.’

Isobel made herself smile and raise her glass to him. ‘You’re right, I know. Here’s to the Hollywood option and us as millionaires with a swimming pool in the barn and a yacht in the Med!’

‘I might look into the price of pools,’ he said.

‘Yes, do,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

Troy’s office was in Islington, in a converted Victorian terrace house. He lived in a flat upstairs and the ground floor was occupied by two other literary agents, a beautiful girl behind the reception desk, and one overworked assistant who was required to do the administration for all of them.

Isobel perched on a chair surrounded by manuscripts while Troy slipped on his Armani jacket, set it straight across his shoulders, and smoothed his silk tie. It was a dark navy suit and a dark navy tie. Against the severe colour Troy’s light brown hair and clear skin looked boyishly handsome.

‘You look gorgeous,’ he remarked, patting his pockets to check that he was carrying his credit cards. He picked up his mobile phone to carry in his hand, he would never have destroyed the line of the jacket by putting it in his pocket.

Isobel glowed at his praise. She was wearing a summer shift dress in pale blue with blue court shoes, her soft brown hair was enfolded into a bun on the nape of her neck. She gave the overall impression of being a rather elegant headmistress at a select girls’ school. She was not a woman that any man had ever called gorgeous.

‘Absolutely edible,’ Troy asserted, and Isobel giggled.

‘Hardly. Where are we going for lunch?’

‘Number Fifty-two – it’s a new restaurant. Very hot. I had to almost beg for a table.’

‘There was no need – ’

‘There was every need. Aren’t we celebrating the birth of a new manuscript? And besides, I want to talk to you about things.’

Isobel followed Troy down the steps to the street and waited while he hailed a cab with a commanding wave of his hand. But it was not until they were seated in the restaurant – dark-tinted mirrors, real wood floors, marble-top tables, astoundingly uncomfortable chairs but beautiful flowers on every available surface – that he leaned forward and said: ‘I think we may have a bit of a problem.’

She waited.

‘It’s Penshurst Press,’ he said. ‘They’re not offering so much for this book as they did for the last.’

‘How much?’ she asked bluntly.

The waiter came to take their order and Troy shook his head. ‘In a minute.’ He turned back to Isobel. ‘A lot less. They’re offering £20,000.’

For a moment she thought she had misheard him. In the rattle of utensils and the hum of conversation she thought that he must have said something quite different.

‘I beg your pardon. What did you say?’

‘I said £20,000,’ he repeated. He saw that she had paled with shock. He poured a glass of water and held it out to her. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s less than half what we were expecting, but they won’t shift. I’m sorry.’

Isobel said nothing, she looked stunned. Troy glanced uneasily around the restaurant, hating the discomfort. The waiter returned and Troy ordered for them both, and waited in silence until Isobel had taken a sip from her glass of wine, raised her neat head and spoke:

‘This is nearly two years’ work,’ she said. ‘Two years’ work for £20,000?’

‘I know. There would be foreign sales on top of that, of course, and a book club deal perhaps, and the usual extras …’

She shook her head. ‘They don’t add up to much these days.’

‘No,’ he said quietly.

The waiter brought them two little plates of appetisers. Isobel looked down at the exquisite parcels of filo pastry, her expression completely blank.

‘Why have they offered so little?’

Troy swallowed one of the parcels in a single gulp. ‘The signs were there. They’ve paid slightly less for every book that you’ve written over the last ten years. They look at the balance sheet, and they can see that your sales are going down. The fact is, Isobel, that although you win the literary prizes and there is no doubt of the merit of your writing, no question of that – the fact remains that you don’t sell many books. You’re too good for the market, really. And they don’t want to pay out in royalties when they’re not earning good money in sales.’

She took another sip of wine. ‘Should I go to another publisher?’

He decided to risk complete honesty. ‘I’ve asked around already, very discreetly. I’m afraid they all say the same sort of thing. No-one can see how to sell more than Penshurst are doing already. Nobody would pay you any more.’

‘Two years’ work for £20,000,’ she repeated. She took another sip of wine, and then another. The waiter refilled her glass and she took a gulp.

‘What you must remember is that no-one is denying that you are one of the foremost literary writers in England today.’

The look she turned on him was not one he had expected; he thought she would be offended but instead she looked terrified.

‘But what am I going to do?’ she cried. ‘I have to earn enough to keep us, I have to earn enough for me and Philip. I can’t go back to teaching at a university, I can’t be out of the house all day, he needs me at home now. If I can’t earn money from my writing, how are we going to live?’

He did not understand what she meant. ‘Live?’

‘All the money that comes into our house is earned by me,’ Isobel said fiercely. ‘Philip doesn’t have a penny.’

Troy looked stunned. ‘I thought he’d have a disability pension, or something.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s gone. All gone. I cashed it in to buy the house outright. I told him not to worry. I told him that it had paid off the mortgage and we had bought savings policies. But we hadn’t. It just paid off the mortgage. I thought I could keep him for the rest of his life.’

She looked away. ‘I thought he was going to die. I thought I’d have to keep him for a couple of years, keep him in real comfort and security. But now he’s in remission. I don’t know what will happen next. And you tell me that I can’t earn the money I need for him.’

Troy took a gulp of his own wine. ‘Could you do some more reviewing?’

‘It doesn’t pay, does it?’ she said bitterly. ‘Not like the novels ought to pay. And now you’re telling me that my novels don’t sell. To sell you have to be someone like Suzie Wade or Chet Drake. No-one admires their work; but everyone reads them.’

He nodded.

‘And how much do they get for that … that drivel?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps about £200,000 for a book? Maybe more. And then there are film rights or television mini series. They’re both millionaires from their writing.’

‘But I could do that!’ she exclaimed bitterly. ‘I could write a book like that in a year! In half a year!’

The waiter appeared and put their first course before them. Troy picked up his fork but Isobel did not eat.

‘It’s harder than it looks,’ he reminded her gently. ‘You of all people know that. Even these commercial novels require skill. They’re not complicated stories or beautifully written; but they have a real talent for catching the public imagination, they command a readership.’

She shook her head and took another gulp of wine. The waiter refilled her glass. Troy saw with some concern that the level in the bottle had dropped quite dramatically.

‘I could write like that!’ she exclaimed. ‘Any fool could.’

He shook his head. ‘You have to really be in touch with the readers’ dreams,’ he said. ‘That’s what they’re so good at. It’s all emotions, it’s all gut consciousness. It’s not the sort of thing you do. You write from the intellect, Isobel.’

‘I could do it,’ she persisted. ‘I could tell you the sort of story right now.’

He smiled at her, welcoming any change in tone which would move her away from the horror of the initial shock. ‘What would you call it?’

‘Devil’s Disciple,’ she said promptly. ‘Son of Satan. Something with the devil in it, that’s what they all want, don’t they? To believe that there are Satanists and that sort of nonsense?’

‘That’s true,’ he conceded.

‘It would be the story of a young woman who has to earn money, a huge sum of money, to pay for her sister’s operation. Something, oh, complicated. But something that we’ve all heard about.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Bone marrow transplant. The sister is near to death and only this experimental operation would save her.’

He nodded, smiling.

‘They’re twin sisters,’ Isobel said, improvising rapidly. A lock of hair had become detached from the neat bun, her cheeks had flushed. The waiter poured more wine. ‘They’re twin sisters and the younger sister discovers that a Satanic cult will pay exactly the sum of money they need for a girl who can prove she is a virgin, who will allow anything to be done to her – for one night.’

The waiter hovered, bottle in hand, openly listening.

‘Go on.’ Troy was intrigued.

‘She is examined by a doctor, she is indeed a virgin, and then she walks towards the large house in the country for the cult to use her as they wish for twenty-four hours.’

Troy leaned forward to listen. The woman on the next table leaned too.

‘They use her sexually, they tie her up, they cut her with their silver knives so that her body is tattooed with occult signs, then they lie her on the altar and she thinks they are going to slit her throat at dawn. Scented smoke wreathes around her, they give her a strange-tasting drink, a man, a dark and handsome man, comes slowly towards her with his silver knife held before him …’

Troy hardly dared to speak. The waiter poured more wine for Isobel, like a fee for the storyteller.

‘She wakes. It is broad daylight. She can remember only the faces of the thirteen people of the coven. But in her hand is a cheque for her sister’s treatment.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Troy whispered. The woman on the next table and the waiter were rapt.

‘She walks from the house, she goes to bank the cheque.’ Isobel paused for dramatic emphasis. ‘The cheque is no good. There is no such name, no such account. She has no money. Her sister dies in her arms.’

‘Oh, my God!’ exclaimed the waiter involuntarily.

‘She swears complete revenge against the thirteen members of the coven.’

‘Too many, too many,’ Troy whispered.

‘Against the five members of the coven,’ Isobel corrected herself, hardly breaking her pace. ‘She goes to the police but no-one believes her. She decides to hunt each one down individually.’

‘Very Jeffrey Archer,’ Troy muttered to himself.

‘There are two women and three men. Each one she tracks down and then ruins. Social shame, bankruptcy, death in a car crash, their house burned down, and then she comes to the last man, the leader of the cult whose cheque was no good.’

The waiter removed their plates as an excuse to linger at their table.

‘He has reformed,’ Isobel said. ‘He is a changed man, the leader of a charismatic Christian church.’

‘Television,’ Troy whispered.

‘He’s a television evangelist.’ She improved at once on his hint. ‘He does not recognise her, he welcomes her to join his flock. She has the decision: should she believe in his genuine reform and help him with the wonderful work he is doing with the – ’

‘Homeless children,’ Troy suggested.

‘Homeless abused children,’ Isobel supplemented. ‘Or should she pursue her revenge against him? Is he, in fact, still an evil man, who has just seized power over these helpless children in order to abuse them further? She joins the cult to discover the best way to destroy him, but then she finds that she has fallen completely in love with him. What will she do?’

‘What does she do?’ the waiter demanded. ‘Oh, excuse me!’

Isobel came to herself, tucked back the stray hair, drank a sip of water. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I always have difficulties with the endings,’ she said.

‘My God.’ Troy leaned back in his chair. ‘Isobel, that was fantastic. That is a fantastic story.’

She looked primly pleased. ‘I told you I could do it,’ she said. ‘It is a matter of choice for me – I choose to write well rather than to churn out dross. I have pride in my work. I like to do the very best that there is, not thick books of nonsense.’

The waiter stepped back from the table, the woman at the next table gave Troy a little smile, mouthed the word ‘Fantastic’, and returned her attention to her lunch. Isobel took a sip of wine.

‘But if fine writing doesn’t pay the bills?’ Troy suggested.

There was a long pause. He watched her brightness drain away. She twisted the stem of the wineglass, her face suddenly tired and heavy.

‘I have to consider Philip,’ she said. ‘It’s not just me. If it were just me I could sell the house and reduce my expenses. I would never compromise with my art.’

Troy nodded, concealing a rising sense of excitement. ‘I know that…’

‘But Philip may never get any better, and he may live for many years. I have to provide for him. He was talking only yesterday about converting the house in case he can’t get upstairs.’

The waiter brought their main course and set the plate before Isobel with ostentatious respect. Troy waited until he had reluctantly stepped out of earshot.

‘I thought you said he was fine.’

She smiled, a sad little smile. ‘I always say he’s fine, hadn’t you noticed that? There’s no point in complaining all the time, is there? But it’s not true. He’s ill and he’ll never get any better, and he may get very much worse. I have to provide for him, I have to think about the future. If I were to die before him – who would look after him? How would he manage if I left him with nothing but debts?

Troy nodded. ‘A big commercial book could earn you – I don’t know – a quarter of a million pounds? Perhaps half a million with foreign sales too.’

‘That much?’

‘Certainly £200,000.’

‘Would it be possible for me to write such a book, a commercial book, and no-one know that it was me?’

Of course,’ Troy assured her. ‘A nom de plume. Lots of writers use them.’

Isobel shook her head. ‘I don’t mean a nom de plume. I mean a complete concealment. No-one is ever to know that Isobel Latimer has ever written anything but the finest of writing. I couldn’t bear people to think I would write something so …’ She hesitated and then chose a word which was almost a challenge: ‘So vulgar.’

Troy thought for a moment. ‘We’d have to create a false client account at the agency. A bank account in another name, in the name of the nom de plume. I could be the main signatory, and draw the funds for you.’

She nodded. ‘I’d have to sign the contracts in the false name?’

‘I think you could,’ he said. ‘I’d have to check with the lawyers, but I think you could. It’s the ownership of the manuscript that matters, it’s not as if it’s not your work.’

She gave him a wonderful secretive smile. ‘And I could write an absolutely torrid shocker.’

‘Would you want to do that?’

‘For two hundred thousand pounds I’d do almost anything.’

‘But could you do it? Could you work on it for day after day? The story’s fantastic. But you’d have to write and write. These books are huge, you know, Isobel. They’re not a hundred pages or so like your usual work, they go to seven hundred, a thousand pages. Two hundred thousand words at the very least. You’d have to write in a way you’ve never written before and it would take you at least six months. It’s a long project.’

The look she shot across the table was one of bright determination. He thought he had never seen her so sharp and so focused before. ‘I’m in real trouble,’ she said bluntly. ‘All we own is the house, all that’s coming in is my advances. I was counting on a good sum from Penshurst Press and now you tell me all they want to pay is £20,000. It’s a hard world we live in, isn’t it? If they won’t pay me to write good books, then I’ll just have to write bad.’

‘Can you bear to do it?’ he asked quietly.

Isobel gave him a glance and he realised, for the first time in their long association, that this was a passionate woman. Her frumpy clothes and her faded prettiness had hidden from him that this was a woman capable of deep feelings. She was a woman who had dedicated her life to being in love with her husband. ‘I’d do anything for him,’ she said simply. ‘Writing a bad book is the least of it.’

Isobel was silent on her return from London. When Philip asked if she was well she said that she was a little tired, that she had a headache.

‘Were you drinking at lunchtime?’ he asked disapprovingly.

‘Only a glass of wine.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘That Troy always tires you out,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you just post the manuscript to him? What d’you have to see him for?’

‘He’s amusing,’ she said. ‘I like him.’

‘I suppose he’s a change from me.’

‘It’s not that, darling. I just like to deliver the finished manuscript. It’s a bit of a lift, that’s all.’

‘I’d have thought you had enough to do without becoming a courier service as well,’ he said grudgingly.

‘I do have,’ she said. ‘I’m going to start a new novel at once. I got the idea over lunch.’

‘What will it be about?’

‘Something about the notion of personal responsibility and whether people can genuinely reform,’ she said vaguely.

He gave her an encouraging smile. ‘That sounds a bit like The Dream and the Doing,’ he said, citing one of her earlier books. ‘I always liked that one. I liked the way the heroine had to make a choice not between which man she married, but actually between two contrasting moral systems. It was a very thoughtful book.’

‘Yes, I think it’ll be very like that,’ she said. ‘Are you coming up to bed?’

‘I’ll have a nightcap before I come up.’

Isobel paused. ‘Oh, come up before I fall asleep.’

He smiled. ‘Of course,’ he said evasively.

Since his illness, his desire for Isobel had almost completely disappeared. He refused absolutely to discuss this either with Isobel or with his doctor, and if Isobel insisted that they go to bed at the same time, or if she tried to kiss and caress him in the morning, he would gently but firmly push her away. It seemed to be another of the many things that had melted away from Isobel’s life, like her looks, her youth, her sense of joy, and now – her ability to make money from her fine writing. She did not complain. When Philip had first become ill she had gone down on her knees to pray. She had made an agonised bargain with the god of her imagination, that if He would spare Philip’s life she would never ask for anything ever again.

When they were finally told, after years of tests, that Philip would become progressively weaker for the rest of his life, but would not die in the near future, she thought that God had taken advantage of her trust. God had cheated on the deal. Philip would not die, but the man she had loved and married was gone forever.

Isobel felt that it was not in her power to withdraw her offer to God. She had promised that if Philip lived then she would never ask for anything again and she intended to keep that promise. She would never make any demands of Philip, she would never ask God for extravagant luck or wonderful opportunities. She thought that what lay before her was a life of duty which would be illuminated with the joy of self-sacrifice. Isobel thought that she might create a life which was itself a thing of beauty – a life in which a talented and devoted couple turned their energies and abilities into making some happiness together despite illness, despite fear of death. She thought that she and Philip might be somehow ennobled by the terrible bad luck that they had suffered. She had thought that she might show him how much she loved him in constant, loving, willing self-sacrifice.

Instead, what she actually experienced was a slog. But she knew that lots of women were forced to slog. Some had disagreeable husbands, or arduous jobs, or difficult children. Isobel’s witty, charming husband had become a self-pitying invalid. Isobel’s love for him had been transformed from the erotic to the maternal. Isobel’s sense of herself as an attractive woman had been destroyed by night after night of the most tactful but unrelenting sexual rejection.

She thought that it should make no difference. She was still determined to keep her side of the bargain with God. She had promised never to ask for anything ever again, and she was holding to her side of the deal.

‘All right,’ she said, smiling, making it clear that she would embarrass neither of them by making a sexual advance to him. ‘You come to bed when you like, darling. Anyway, I expect I’ll be asleep.’

She did indeed fall asleep almost at once but she woke in the light of the summer morning at five. Outside the window she could hear the birds starting to sing and the insistent coo of the wood pigeon, nesting in the oak tree beside the house. For a moment she lay beside Philip, enjoying the warmth of the bed and the gleam of the early-morning sunlight on the ceiling. She turned and looked at him. Peacefully asleep, he looked younger and happier. His blond forelock fell attractively across his regular features, his dark eyelashes were as innocent as a sleeping child’s on the smooth skin of his cheeks. Isobel was filled with a sense of tenderness for him. More than anything else in the world she wanted to provide for him, to care for him as if he were her child. She wanted to earn enough money so that he could always go to the housekeeping jar to take whatever cash he wanted, without asking, without having to give thanks. She wanted to provide for him abundantly, generously, as if her love and wealth could compensate for the awful unjust bad luck of his illness.

Isobel crept out from the warmth of the bed and put her dressing gown around her shoulders, and slid her feet into her sensible fleecy slippers. She left the bedroom quietly, went downstairs to the kitchen and made herself a pot of strong Darjeeling tea and then carried her china cup through to her study.

The word processor came alive with a deep, reassuring chime. She watched the screen gleam into life, and then created a new document. The blank page was before her, the little line of the cursor waiting to move, to tick its way into life. She laid her fingers on the keyboard, like a pianist waiting for the signal to play, for the indrawn breath, for that powerful moment of initiation.

‘Devil’s Disciple,’ she typed. ‘Chapter One.’

Two

Isobel wrote for three hours until she heard Philip stirring in the bedroom above her study. She shut down the file on the word processor and paused for a moment. Philip very rarely came into her study and read her work in progress, but he might do so, there had never been any suggestion that Isobel’s work was private. Now, for the first time in her life, she did not want him to read what she had written. She had a very strong sense that she did not want him to know that she was writing a form of literature that they both despised. Also, she did not want him to know that she was spending hours every day letting her imagination roam over erotic and perverse possibilities. Philip would find the scenes of the heroine tied on the altar immensely offensive. Their love-making had always been gentle, respectful of each other, sometimes even spiritual. The notion of his wife writing soft pornography would have disgusted Philip. Isobel did not want him to know that she could even think of such things.

She closed the file and considered what name she should give it to ensure that Philip would not read it. She leaned forward and typed in the name: ‘letters to the bank’. Philip never concerned himself with money now. Since he had taken early retirement from Paxon Pharmaceuticals he had handed over to her all the control of their finances. They held a joint bank account into which Isobel’s royalty cheques and advances were paid, and it was her task to draw out what was needed and to make sure that the housekeeping money jar on the kitchen worktop was filled once a week with whatever cash he might want. When they went out together, Philip paid with his credit card; he liked to be seen paying in a restaurant. If he wanted new clothes or magazines, books, or CDs, he used his credit card and then Isobel paid the bills when the monthly statement arrived. If he wanted a tenner in his pocket when he walked down to the pub, he simply took it.

It seemed to Isobel absolutely fair that she should support him so completely. When he had been well he had bought the house she had liked, he had paid for the food and wine that they ate and drank. Now that she was earning and he was not, she saw no reason why they still should not equally share. Her only difficulty arose when she realised that she was failing to earn the money they needed.

Philip was not an extravagant man. He seldom went out without her, he preferred to wear old clothes. The greatest expense in his life was his occasional visits to exotic and overpriced alternative therapists in case one of them might, one day, have some kind of cure. Isobel learned to dread those visits because they were so costly both in money and in emotion when Philip soared into hope and then dropped into despair.

‘I wouldn’t mind them being so pricey if they worked,’ she had said to him once as she wrote a cheque for £800 for an Amazonian rainforest herb.

‘They have to be expensive,’ he had replied, with a flash of his old worldliness, taking the cheque she held out to him. ‘That’s what makes you trust them, of course.’

She heard him coming slowly down the stairs. She could tell by the heaviness of his pace that today was a bad day. She went swiftly into the kitchen to put the kettle on to boil and the bread in the toaster so that he should be greeted with breakfast.

‘Good morning,’ she said brightly as he came into the room.

‘Good morning,’ he said quietly, and sat at the table and waited for her to serve him.

She put toast in the rack, and the butter and marmalade before him, and then the small box which contained the dietary supplements for breakfast – an array of vitamins, minerals and oils. He started taking the pills with dour determination and Isobel felt the usual pang of tenderness.

‘Bad night?’ she asked.

He made a grimace. ‘Nothing special.’

She poured the tea and sat beside him with her cup.

‘And what are you going to do today?’ she asked encouragingly.

Philip gave her a look which warned her that he was not in the mood to be jollied out of his unhappiness. ‘I’ll do my exercises, and then I’ll read the newspaper, and then I’ll start the crossword, and then I’ll have lunch, and then I’ll go for my walk, and then I’ll have tea, and then I’ll have a rest, and then I’ll watch the news, and then I’ll have dinner, and then I’ll watch television, and then I’ll go to bed,’ he said in a rapid drone. ‘Amazing programme, isn’t it?’

‘We could go to the cinema,’ she suggested. ‘Or the theatre. Why don’t you ring up and see what’s on? Wasn’t there something you liked the sound of the other day?’

He brightened. ‘I suppose we could. If we went to a matinée we could go on for dinner after.’

Isobel mentally lost another afternoon’s writing. ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Could we go to that Italian restaurant that was so nice?’

‘Italian!’ he exclaimed. ‘We’re going to the White Lodge if we can get in.’

Isobel dismissed the little pang of dread as she mentally doubled the likely bill for the cost of the whole evening. ‘Lovely,’ she said enthusiastically.

The house at the end of the drive loomed up as Charity walked nervously towards it. Her little heels tapped on the paving slabs as she walked up to the imposing door. There was a thick, rusting bell pull to the right of the massive wooden doors. Charity leaned forward and gave it a gentle tug.

Isobel hesitated. It seemed to her that there was a good deal too much landscape and furniture in this paragraph. Her usual novels concerned themselves with the inner psychology of her characters and she generally had only the mistiest idea of the rooms they inhabited or the clothes they wore. Her usual style was too sparse to allow much room for description of material things. Besides, Isobel was not interested in material things. She was far more interested in what people thought than the chairs they were sitting on as they thought.

There was a ring at the front door bell. Isobel pressed ‘save’ on the computer and waited, listening, to see if someone answered the door. From the kitchen she could hear Mrs M. chatting with Philip as she cleared the table. There was another ring at the door bell. It was clear that although there were three people in the house, and two of them were doing virtually nothing, no-one was going to answer the door. Isobel sighed and went to see who it was.

There was courier with a large box. ‘Sign here,’ he said.

Isobel signed where he indicated and took the box into her study. The sender was Troy Cartwright. Isobel took a pair of scissors and cut the plastic tape. Inside the box were half a dozen violent-coloured novels. They had titles like Crazed, The Man Eater, Stormy Weather and Diamonds. Isobel unpacked them and laid them in a circle around her as she kneeled on the floor. The note from Troy read:

just a little light reading to give you a sense of the genre. Can’t wait to see what you’ll do. Hope it’s going well. Do call me if you want some moral support. You’re such a star – Troy.

A footstep in the hall made Isobel jump and gather the books into a pile. She threw the note over the topmost one, which showed a garish photograph of a woman embracing a python, as Philip put his head around the door.

‘I thought I heard the bell.’

‘It was a delivery. Some books for me. For review.’

He hardly glanced at the pile. ‘Can we have an early lunch?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And have you rung the cinema?’

‘Give me a chance,’ he said. ‘I’m going to do it now.’

‘All right,’ she said and smiled at him until the door closed.

As soon as he was gone Isobel took the glossy dust jackets off the books and crammed them in the wastepaper bin. Underneath the garish pictures the books looked perfectly respectable, though overweight compared with Isobel’s library of slim volumes. She scattered them round the bookshelves and wrapped one – The Man Eater – in the dust jacket of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, and left it beside her desk to read later.

She turned back to the screen.

The door swung open, on the threshold was a man. He had a dark mop of long black hair, dark eyes set deep under heavy eyebrows, a strong characterful face, a firm chin marked with a dimple. Charity stepped back for only a moment, fearful and yet attracted at the same time.

Isobel paused, she found she was grinning in simple delight at the unfolding of the story.

He took her cheap raincoat from her thin shoulders

Isobel hesitated. ‘Cheap’ as well as ‘thin’? She shrugged. She had a reckless sense of pleasure that she had never felt when writing before. ‘What does it matter? If it’s got to be two hundred thousand words it could be a cheap, light raincoat. No-one is going to care one way or another …

‘No-one is going to care about the writing one way or another,’ she repeated.

She flung back her head and laughed. It was as if the great taboo of her life had suddenly been rendered harmless.

‘How’s it going?’ Troy telephoned Isobel after six weeks of silence. He had been careful not to ask before, frankly doubting that she could manage such a revolution in style.

‘It’s fantastic,’ she said.

Troy blinked. In all their long relationship she had never before described a book as ‘fantastic’. ‘Really?’

‘It’s such a complete holiday from how I usually work,’ she said. He could hear something in her voice which was different, something playful, lighter, younger. ‘It’s as if nothing matters. Not the grammar, not the choice of words, not the style. Nothing matters but the narrative, the flow of the narrative. And that’s the easiest thing to do.’

‘That’s your talent,’ he said loyally.

‘Well, I do think I might be rather good at it,’ she said. ‘And I’ve been thinking about who I am.’

‘Who you are?’

‘My persona.’

‘Oh yes. So who are you?’

‘I think I’m Genevieve de Vere.’

‘My God.’

‘D’you like it?’

He giggled. ‘I adore it. The only thing is, that it sounds like a pen name. If we want no-one to know that it is a pen name we need something a little more ordinary.’

‘Griselda de Vere?’

‘Griselda Vere?’

Oh, all right. But it seems a bit prosaic. Tell you what, let’s call her Zelda, like Scott Fitzgerald’s wife.’

‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘Not too romantic. Leave the romance for the novel.’

‘I do. It is romantic,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘The hero has a dimple in his chin.’

Troy let out a squawk of laughter. ‘I bet he hasn’t even got an M A!’

‘I don’t mention his academic qualifications,’ Isobel said with dignity. ‘But he does have something extraordinary in the sex department.’

‘What?’ Troy asked, utterly fascinated.

‘That’s the difficulty,’ she said, lowering her voice to a whisper and glancing at the closed study door. ‘I’m not entirely sure. I want him to have something remarkable about his genitalia.’

Troy had a sense of an Isobel Latimer that no-one had ever seen before. He kept his voice very level, he did not want to frighten away this new side of her. He thought she might prove to be delightful. ‘Oh, any reason why?’

‘It’s clearly a feature of the genre. In those books you sent me, a number of the heroes have – remarkable attributes. They’re generally very well endowed, but they also have some kind of gimmick.’

‘What about a couple of rings?’ Troy asked. ‘Like an earring, a hooped earring. Only inserted …’ He broke off. ‘Inserted not in the ear.’

‘In the genitalia?’ she demanded.

‘In the foreskin, I believe.’

There was a stunned silence.

‘So I’m told,’ Troy added hastily.

‘And who does this? Do you do it to yourself?’

‘Oh no! You go to a body-piercing studio.’

‘A studio?’

‘Not like an artist’s studio. Like a beauty salon.’

‘And why would a man do this?’

Troy hesitated. He had known Isobel for six years but he had never had a conversation like this with her before. He had a sense of exquisite discomfort. ‘Partly it’s fashion,’ he said cautiously. ‘And some people take pleasure from the experience of inserting the ring. I’m told that it enhances sexual pleasure once it is, er, fully operational.’

He was afraid that he had shocked her, perhaps even offended her.

‘D’you know anyone who has done this? Would he show me?’

Troy could not repress the giggle. ‘I know one guy who’s very proud of it. He would probably show you. But – ’

‘I’ll come up tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Let’s have lunch. I’ll buy him lunch. Tell him that Zelda Vere would like to meet him.’

Zelda Vere turned out to look and dress exactly like Isobel Latimer, except that she wore her hair down around her shoulders and had dark glasses hiding her eyes.

‘Would you have recognised me?’ she asked Troy hopefully.

‘Instantly,’ he said. ‘As would all of literary London. You’re going to have to transform if we’re really going to do this.’

‘I thought wearing my hair down – ’

‘Zelda Vere would have big hair,’ he said certainly. ‘I mean huge bouffant blonde hair. And loads of makeup, and ostentatious jewellery, and a suit in acid green with enormous gold buttons.’

Isobel blinked. ‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ she said. ‘And I don’t have anything at all like that in my wardrobe.’

‘We’ll start with the suit,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’ He strode out of the office, calling to the assistant: ‘Cancel Freddie for lunch, would you, darling? Say I’ll catch him later.’ And then ran down the steps and summoned a cab.

‘Are we serious about this?’ he asked her as they slammed the cab door. ‘The book’s going to be finished? You really intend to be Zelda Vere?’

‘Are you sure Zelda Vere can earn a quarter of a million?’ she countered.

He thought for a moment. ‘Yes. If the book’s as good as you say.’

She nodded. ‘I’m sure it’s that good.’

‘And you’re sure you want to do it? It’s going to cost us some serious money to get you dressed. Worse than that, it will have to be my serious money. And it’s my reputation on the line when we start approaching publishers. You really want to go through with this?’

‘I have to,’ she said flatly. ‘I can’t provide for Philip any other way.’

He leaned forward. ‘Harrods,’ he said shortly to the driver.

Isobel touched his arm. ‘Did you say your money?’

He gleamed at her. ‘I’m trying to think of it as venture capital.’

‘You are lending me money?’

Troy nodded briskly. ‘Have to,’ he said. ‘You have to be styled and buffed and polished and that’s going to cost serious money. You haven’t got it – not till we sell the book. So I’ll lend it to you.’

She hesitated. ‘What if nobody wants the novel? Or what if they don’t pay that much for it?’

He laughed shortly. ‘Then I shall share your disappointment.’

Isobel didn’t speak for a moment and he saw she was trying to control a rush of tears.

‘You are putting your own money in to help me?’ she confirmed.

He nodded.

To his surprise she gently touched the back of his hand with her fingertip, a gesture as soft as a kiss. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘That means a lot to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because no-one has helped me with anything since Philip became ill. I’ve been completely alone. You make me feel as if this is a shared project.’

Troy nodded. ‘We’re in it together,’ he promised her.

They did not trouble themselves to look for the clothes they needed. Troy said a few words to the chief sales assistant on the designer floor and they were ushered into a room which looked like an ornate sitting room in a private house.

‘A glass of champagne, madam, sir?’ a sales assistant offered.

‘Yes please,’ Troy said calmly, and nodded to Isobel to conceal her awe.

The mirrored doors opened and another assistant came in, pushing a rack of hanging outfits.

‘We’ll also need an appointment for makeup, and hairdressing,’ Troy murmured.

‘Of course, sir,’ she whispered back. ‘And first, the outfits.’

One suit after another was whipped off the rack, stripped from its protective plastic coating and swung like a matador’s cloak before Isobel’s gaze.

‘Try the pink,’ Troy advised. ‘And also the yellow.’

Isobel flinched back from the garish colours. ‘What about the grey?’ she asked.

‘Will madam be colouring her hair?’ the sales assistant asked.

Isobel glanced at Troy.

‘Bright blonde,’ he confirmed.

‘Then the pink will be wonderful,’ she said. ‘A pity not to maintain a high presence. The pink and the yellow both have a very high presence.’

They hung the suit inside the curtained changing room. Isobel went reluctantly inside and the curtain was dropped behind her. A pair of high-heeled gold sandals and a pair of high-heeled pink mules were inserted discretely underneath the curtain. Isobel regarded them with suspicion.

She took off her cream linen dress and flinched slightly at the sight of herself in the mirror. She was wearing a bra and a pair of pants which had been machine-washed so often that they were a creased grey, and a thread of elastic was fraying from the seam. Her hips were rounded, her thighs a little slack, her belly was podgy. Under the uncompromising lights of the fitting room there was no concealing the fact that she was a middle-aged woman who had not taken care of herself.

She shrugged and slipped on the pink jacket. It fitted perfectly. At once the upper half of her body looked tailored, constructed, somehow ordered. The skirt glided up over her hips and she fastened the zip at the waist without difficulty. It looked startlingly slim but it was generously cut. The hem of the skirt skimmed her knee. Isobel had not worn anything shorter than mid-calf length for the last ten years. She stepped into the pink mules. At once her legs looked longer. The pink of the jacket gave a brightness and a colour to her face. She tossed back her hair and tried to imagine herself blonde.

‘Come out,’ Troy begged. ‘Let’s see.’

Cautiously she drew the curtain to one side, almost apologetically she stepped out. Troy, glass of champagne in hand, regarded her with sudden, flattering attention.

‘Good God, Isobel,’ he said. ‘You are a knockout.’

She flushed, and teetered slightly on the high heels. ‘It’s so unlike what I usually …’

‘It’s very easy to get set in our ways …’ the sales assistant remarked gently. ‘Very hard to keep up. And it is difficult if madam lives in the country …’

The junior assistant stepped forward with a large tray of earrings and matching necklaces. Isobel was gently guided towards the mirror and the sales assistant scooped up the mass of light brown hair and piled it on Isobel’s head with two deft pins.

‘Just to give you an idea,’ she whispered.

Isobel’s ears were not pierced, but the sales staff put a Perspex band over her head and hung the earrings at ear level. They chose massive chunks of glass which looked like diamonds, and big, bright enameled flowers. They draped the matching necklaces around her neck.

‘Madam has such a long neck, she could wear almost anything,’ the sales lady said, as if genuinely delighted with the discovery. ‘I’m surprised you have not had your ears pierced.’

‘It’s just not my sort of style,’ Isobel said weakly.

A shame not to make the most of that lovely neck,’ the sales lady remarked.

Isobel found she was dropping her shoulders and raising her chin to her own reflection. She had never before considered the length of her neck, but with her hair swept up and the pink shedding a rosy radiance on her skin she did indeed think that she was blessed with a rather special feature which she should exhibit more often.

‘I want to see you in the yellow too,’ Troy said. ‘And perhaps a cocktail dress? Something for parties?’

Isobel disappeared back behind the curtain and tried on the yellow suit. She wore it with a sparkling golden scarf at her neck and looked years younger. The golden sandals were surprisingly comfortable. While she was changing they brought in a rack of cocktail dresses and Isobel swept through a range of blue lamé, pink tulle, black velvet and midnight blue, finally settling on a radiant Lacroix and a modest navy blue Dior which was to be worn with a silver jacket.

‘For added presence,’ the sales assistant advised.

‘And stockings and underwear and shoes,’ Troy commanded. He was on his third glass of champagne and they had brought him some sandwiches to eat while he waited. ‘Just some nice stuff. Two of everything.’

‘A fitting for the underwear?’ the sales assistant whispered.

‘Oh yes,’ Troy said.

They waited only a few moments and then a woman came into the room pushing a trolley of the most exquisite underwear Isobel had ever seen. Everything was embroidered or lace or silky with the sheen of high-tensile satin. There were bodies and teddies and bras and basques and French knickers and thongs and pants.

‘I’ve never seen …’ Isobel gasped.

Troy regarded the trolley with a certain amount of awe. ‘Whatever would suit madam best,’ he said, recovering rapidly.

Isobel vanished behind the curtain with the assistant. Shyly, she took off her bra, miserably conscious of the overstretched elastic and the garment’s air of dingy age. The assistant made no remark but merely whispered: ‘Lean forward please, madam.’

Blushing miserably, Isobel leaned forward and the assistant flung around her a smooth, cool band of silk, fastened it in a moment, and then with deft fingers tightened the straps and tucked Isobel’s breasts this way and that until the bra fitted her like a pair of perfect palms lovingly cupped and holding her firmly.

‘Oh,’ Isobel breathed. ‘So comfortable!’

‘And so flattering,’ the assistant pointed out. Isobel looked in the mirror. Her breasts were inches higher than their usual position, it made her waist, her whole body, look longer, slimmer. The profile flattened her waist, made her hips smoother. The assistant smiled. ‘It makes such a difference,’ she said with simple pride. ‘Now put the jacket back on.’

It fitted a little snugger than before, it looked even better. Isobel drew back the curtain and went out to Troy.

‘Oh yes,’ he said as he saw her. ‘Surprising. It makes a real difference. We’ll take half a dozen of everything,’ he told the assistant.

She smiled. ‘I’ll have them wrapped.’

The sales assistant opened the door for the underwear assistant and remarked, ‘The makeup artiste is ready.’

‘Oh, let her come in,’ Troy said cheerfully.

They ushered Isobel to the mirror and swathed her in a pale pink towel. The makeup girl cleaned her face with a sweet-smelling gritty cream and then wiped it all off with a scented water. ‘Your toner,’ she whispered reverently. ‘And now your moisturiser. You do cleanse, tone and moisturise every day, don’t you, madam?’

‘Some days,’ Isobel said through closed lips. ‘It depends.’ She did not want to admit that her beauty regime consisted of washing her face with soap and water, slapping on a bit of face cream and then lipstick.

The makeup artiste prepared Isobel’s face as if she were sizing a canvas, and then made the equipment ready: first laying out the range of brushes which would be needed and then spreading the palette of colours.

‘Are we wanting a natural look?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Isobel replied.

‘No,’ Troy said.

‘High presence,’ the sales assistant explained. ‘Madam requires a high-presence appearance.’

‘Of course,’ the girl said. ‘For a special event?’

Troy scowled at her. ‘Highly confidential,’ he said firmly.

‘Ah, of course,’ she said, and smeared peach foundation all over Isobel’s cheekbones.

Isobel closed her eyes at the caress of the two organic sponges and gave herself up to the sensation of being stroked all over her face with tiny feather-like touches. It felt like being kissed, very gently and tenderly, and she found she was slipping off into a daydream of Darkling Manor where the hero with the dimple in his chin laid poor Charity on the altar and unzipped his trousers to reveal … She was quite sorry when the process stopped and the makeup girl said: ‘There, madam. How do you like it?’

Isobel opened her eyes and stared at the stranger in the mirror.

Her eyes were wider and larger, a deep mysterious grey where before they had seemed pale. Her face was slimmer, her cheekbones enhanced making her look mid-European and glamorous as opposed to fading English rose and ordinary. Her eyelashes were dark and thick, her eyebrows stylish and arched. Her lips were an uncompromising cherry, a bright smile in a beautiful face. She looked like a stylised, enhanced painting of herself.

‘I’m … I’m …’

Troy rose from the sofa and came to stand behind her, his hands reverently on her towelled shoulders, looking at her in the mirror, meeting her reflected eyes and not her real ones.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re not just making money here, we’re making a person. Zelda Vere is going to be beautiful.’

‘Hairdresser?’ the sales assistant inquired. ‘A colourist and a stylist?’

‘No!’ Isobel exclaimed with sudden determination. She turned to Troy. ‘I can wash this off in the train on the way home,’ she whispered. ‘And I can hide the clothes. But I can’t go home blonde. It’d be too awful.’

He recoiled as he realised what she was saying. ‘You’re never thinking of keeping this a secret from Philip?’

Isobel glanced around. The sales assistant withdrew to a discreet distance and the makeup artiste was absorbed in packing her brushes.

‘I have to,’ she said. ‘If he knew I was writing a book like this at all he’d be heartbroken. If he knew I was doing it for him then he’d feel completely ashamed, it would be unbearable to him. He hates books like that, and he hates authors like this. It’s got to be a complete secret. To the whole world and to him too. He would be completely mortified if he knew. He …’

‘He what?’ Troy demanded.

‘He thinks my books are still doing well. I haven’t told him that we’ve been in trouble for years. I can’t tell him now. And I won’t tell him about the new book.’

Troy whistled a silent arpeggio. ‘He thought you were doing well? He didn’t know?’

Isobel’s desperate eyes looked out of the serene, beautiful mask. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Worry is really bad for him, I couldn’t risk him worrying. When he first became ill he handed over everything to me to look after. I just cashed in all our savings, and told him that it was all right. I didn’t know what else to do.’

‘So everything hangs on this?’ Troy queried.

Isobel nodded. ‘But I can’t change how I look permanently,’ she warned him. ‘So I can’t go blonde.’

‘Well, OK by me,’ Troy said with a sense of the stakes in this gamble growing greater by the minute. ‘OK by me, if you think you can get away with it. The bank account was going to be secret anyway so it makes no difference to me. As long as you think you can keep it up at home.’

‘But I can’t have my hair dyed.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘What about a wig?’ He turned to the sales assistant. ‘Wigs,’ he said firmly. ‘Blonde wigs.’

‘Of course if madam does not wish to alter her own style, that is an ideal solution,’ the sales assistant said smoothly. She nodded at her deputy and the woman slipped from the room. ‘Perhaps just a little trim, just to enhance the profile, would be a good idea?’

‘I’ll have a trim,’ Isobel said. ‘But I won’t colour it.’

The sales assistant nodded and stood aside as the rack of wigs came in with the fitter behind them.

‘Another glass of champagne Sir?’ she asked Troy, who settled down on the sofa once more as the hairdresser came in and started to trim Isobel’s hair into a neater shape.

‘Yes please,’ he said.

Isobel faced the mirror, ready to be fitted with her wig. First they crammed her own hair into a flesh-coloured skullcap as tight and uncomfortable as the bathing hats she used to wear for swimming at school, and then they forced the huge mane of hair on top. Isobel felt so mauled by the struggle to get them on that she was scowling when she looked at the mirror to see the effect.

She saw a petulant beauty, a spoiled, glossy, golden woman who could be almost any age from mid-twenties to forty. The brightness of the hair enhanced the perfect colour of her skin, made her eyes darker, made her eyelashes dramatically thick and black. The wide bouffant style made her face look slim and elegant. She had the look of all the women who gaze from the pages of the society magazines, the women who feign unawareness of the photographers, who share a joke laughing but never screw up their eyes when the flashbulbs pop, who are always there at the parties, at the awards nights, who ski in winter and sail in summer, who know New York and go to the Paris fashion shows, who call each other ‘darling’ and kiss without lips touching cheek. They are the women who once married rich men and are still managing to hold on to them. They are the women who organise the charity balls, who launch fragrances, who own racehorses, who put their names to bestselling autobiographies created by ghost writers about imaginary events.

‘Bingo,’ Troy said from the sofa. ‘Cinderella.’

‘A very high presence,’ the saleswoman said approvingly. ‘Delightful.’

Troy rose up. ‘We’ll take it all,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it all now.’

‘Madam should really take two of the wigs,’ the hairdresser advised. ‘When one is being washed and set she can use the other.’

‘Oh I suppose so,’ Troy said.

‘And of course we can deliver,’ the saleswoman offered.

He shook his head. ‘We have a car outside.’ He turned to Isobel. ‘D’you want to keep it all on? We could invite Freddie over here for tea. Try it out on him?’

The wealthy woman in the mirror smiled with perfect confidence. ‘Why not?’ she asked her reflection.

Freddie, pouring tea for the three of them on the terrace, was delighted to meet Zelda Vere.

‘An author of mine.’ Troy introduced her. ‘A new author, and a very exciting new book to be finished …’

‘Within the year,’ Isobel promised.

‘Whenever,’ Troy said. ‘Freddie is an interior designer, and man about town.’

Freddie grinned. ‘D’you take milk? Really? How can you, Troy?’ When Isobel accepted milk and sugar he looked stunned. ‘I’m so lactose intolerant you wouldn’t believe.’

‘Zelda has a professional interest in body piercing,’ Troy said quietly, with a discreet glance at the nearby tables. ‘I was attempting to describe to her a Prince Albert.’

Freddie’s bright gaze met Isobel’s. ‘You really need to see one,’ he said.

‘I was hoping that I might,’ she replied, and then realised that her voice, her hesitant politeness, was all wrong with the acid pink suit and the brassy blonde hair. She tossed her head and tried again: ‘I promised myself a look at yours.’

Freddie let out a small scream of laughter. ‘Here?’ he asked.

The new brassy-headed Isobel did not flinch. ‘If you like.’

‘Now, now, children,’ Troy interrupted. ‘We’ll go back to my flat for the Doctors and Nurses experience.’

‘But why d’you want to know?’ Freddie asked, pouring hot water into the tea pot.

‘For my novel,’ Isobel said. ‘My hero is a dark, brooding Satanist and I wanted to give him something of a … a gimmick.’

Freddie looked slightly offended. ‘A Prince Albert isn’t a gimmick,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s a statement.’

‘About what?’

He hesitated for a moment, and then decided to tell her. ‘You can either be the person that you were born to be: nicely brought up, good parents, nice job, reasonable income, polite children, agreeable home – right?’

Isobel nodded, feeling the weight of her hair give her nod an extra emphasis.

‘Or you can redefine yourself. You get to an age when you’ve done all that was expected of you. You’ve got the education that gets you the job that gets you the pension and then you look around and say – so have I lived all my life and worked all my life just so that I can have a pension when I’m old? That’s what happened to me. I was an accountant, I spent years and years getting my exams, getting my partnership, working for my clients, and suddenly I woke up one morning and thought I am so damn bored of this I can hardly get out of bed. It’s my life, and it bores me to tears.’

Isobel waited. She had an odd sense that she was hearing something of immense importance, that this man whom she had taken at first to be something of a fool was telling her something that she should hear.

‘Well, I cut loose,’ Freddie said quietly. ‘I came out. I told my mother and father that I was gay. I chucked in my job, I trained as an interior designer, and I studded my penis with jewellery.’

Isobel blinked and felt her mascara cling to her eyelashes like tears.

‘It’s my way of saying that I don’t have to sit in a pigeonhole. I don’t have to be what people think of me. I can find my own way, I can be someone else. I don’t have to have the identity my parents chose for me. I don’t even have to stay with my first choice of identity. I can set myself free.’

Isobel nodded. ‘I do know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Though it’s not true for everybody. Some people have to stay inside their boundaries. Some people take a choice, which isn’t perhaps the easiest choice, but it’s the right thing to do. Some people want to do the right thing more than they want to do anything else. Some people see the rules and stay inside them. Some people have to.’

Freddie shook his head. ‘No-one has to.’

Three

Back at his flat Troy poured pink champagne. Freddie raised an eyebrow at him and said: ‘I have some stuff on me, if you’d like it?’

Troy glanced at Isobel, who was pretending to examine an antique mirror over the mantelpiece but really admiring in wonder the sheen on her hair and the glow of her skin.

‘Excuse us for just a moment,’ he said to her.

Freddie looked surprised. ‘Wouldn’t Zelda like …?’

‘No,’ Troy said briefly. ‘Allergic.’

Freddie was astounded. ‘Allergic to cocaine? But how dreadful! You poor dear! How d’you ever manage? I would just die …’

‘What?’ Isobel asked, suddenly realising what he was saying.

Troy shook his head warningly at Freddie, but it was too late.

‘D’you take cocaine?’ Isobel demanded, deeply shocked.

‘He doesn’t, I do,’ Freddie said, desperately lying. ‘I’m always trying to persuade Troy to try it, but he won’t.’

‘I should think not,’ Isobel said staunchly. ‘It’s terribly addictive, isn’t it? And bad for you?’

Troy looked meaningfully at Isobel. ‘You surprise me,’ he said carefully. ‘I’d always thought of you as a woman of great sophistication. Everyone says to me that Zelda Vere is very much a woman of the world.’

Isobel checked herself for a moment and then wiped her look of indignation from her face. ‘Oh, of course,’ she said, recovering. ‘I’ve just seen so many people have so much trouble with it.’

Troy nodded. ‘Let’s just stick with champagne, shall we?’

‘Sure,’ Freddie said, agreeably.

Troy poured them all another glass and the two men started to exchange anecdotes, for Isobel’s amusement. Isobel kicked off the pink mules and curled her long legs underneath her, and felt young and bohemian and daring. They laughed together as the level in the bottle fell lower and lower.

‘Now then,’ Troy said as the conversation paused. ‘Let’s see the family jewels, Freddie.’

Isobel followed the two men to the spare bedroom. Troy closed the door behind him and there was a sudden moment of delicious, clandestine intimacy. Isobel, dizzy from the champagne and aroused: by her own new beauty, by the company of two handsome men, by the whole extraordinary circumstances, leaned back against the door and absorbed the fact that she was in a bedroom, rather drunk and quite alone with two attractive young men.

‘I feel quite shy,’ Freddie said.

‘Do show,’ Isobel encouraged him. ‘I really do need to know.’

Freddie unzipped his trousers, let them fall to his knees and then slid his black silk boxer shorts downwards to show her his gently rising penis. ‘Excuse us,’ he said charmingly. ‘It’s just all the attention.’

She regarded it with fascination. This was only the second penis she had ever seen in her life. Philip had been her first and only lover and she had not seen him naked and aroused for more than three years. ‘Why, it’s lovely,’ she breathed.

He had ringed the foreskin with delicate studs of silver and the very peak boasted a delicate silver sleeper. The three of them gazed at it, quietly impressed.

‘Will it be of any help?’ Freddie asked.

The question was too much for Troy. He exploded into raucous mirth. ‘I should think it would be of tremendous help!’

Isobel hesitated, trying to keep a straight face, and then was caught by the wave of laughter, howling with merriment until the tears came into her eyes and smudged her mascara.

Troy bundled Freddie out of the house at ten and then turned to Isobel. ‘C’mon, Cinderella,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to get you back into rags to catch the train.’

They were like actors in a play, intent on the work they had to do. He helped her take off the pink jacket and hang it on the hanger, he put shoe trees in the mules. The wardrobe in his spare bedroom was now dedicated to Zelda Vere’s shrouded clothes. There were two stands for the wigs. Zelda Vere’s expensive cosmetics were in the dressing-table drawer. Isobel let Troy draw the plastic covers over the jacket and skirt while she pulled on her linen dress. She realised for the first time that it did not exactly fit. It gaped slightly at the armholes, you could glimpse her old ill-fitting bra from the side, the waist was too long; the fall of the skirt to mid-calf with the flat shoes made her legs look short and fat.

‘I could take one of the suits home,’ she said wistfully.

‘Not one of them,’ Troy ruled. ‘If you overlap your identities at all, someone will see you and make the connection. You’ve got to be like a spy. You’ve got to have waterproof compartments. Zelda waits for you here – in the drawers and in the wardrobe. Isobel is catching the train home tonight and you’d better have some idea where she’s been all evening, if you’re hoping to keep this deception up.’

‘He already knows I’ll be late,’ Isobel said reluctantly. ‘I rang him from Harrods to tell him I was having dinner with my publishers. He isn’t expecting me home.’

‘Just get your story perfect,’ Troy urged her, putting her jacket round her shoulders and opening the front door. ‘Where did you have dinner? What did you eat? That sort of thing. If this deception is to work it has to be totally, totally convincing.’

She hesitated on the doorstep, reluctant to leave him. ‘Thank you for today,’ she said. ‘We’ve never spent so much time together before and you’ve been my agent for – what? – six years.’

In an odd courtly gesture he took her hand and kissed it. ‘It was my pleasure,’ he said. ‘We did great shopping. And I loved sitting on the sofa like a sultan and seeing you modelling things.’

The thought of him enjoying her gave her pause. ‘You liked seeing me?’

He made a little deprecatory gesture. ‘Of course. You were transforming from one sort of woman to another. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be fascinated.’

Her face warmed at the thought of being fascinating. Oh Troy! I always thought that you …’ She hesitated to choose her words carefully. ‘I always thought that you were not very interested in women.’

He laughed. ‘I’m interested in people,’ he said. ‘I love Freddie because he’s bold and risk-taking and exciting. And I like you because you’re determined and courageous and suddenly you have embarked on some kind of new path here that could take you anywhere – and that’s fascinating for me.’

‘But your preference?’ she asked delicately.

He stepped forward and hailed a cab. The car swung in and Troy opened the door for her. ‘Neither here nor there. Don’t forget to construct your alibi on the way home.’

‘You were late last night,’ Philip said at breakfast. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘I know,’ Isobel said. ‘It went on and on.’

‘You should have told them you had a train to catch,’ he said with disapproval. ‘You must have got the last one home.’

‘I didn’t want to make a fuss.’

‘You should make a fuss,’ he corrected her. ‘They may be the publishers but you’re the author. Where do they get their living from, that’s what I’d like to know?’

‘They look after me very well,’ she said. She put his toast down before him and poured his tea. She wondered at the readiness of the lies that were sliding from her mouth.

‘I sat next to James Ware,’ she told Philip. ‘Of the Sunday Times.’

‘Did you tell him what I said about that last review of your book?’ Philip asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We talked about Spender.’

‘Fat lot he’d know,’ Philip said crossly, and opened the newspaper. ‘You should have told him what I said. If I’d been there I’d have made sure that he knew he had completely the wrong end of the stick.’

She hesitated. ‘What are you going to do today?’

He looked around the paper. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘My exercises, the crossword, lunch, walk, tea. What are you doing today? Writing?’

Isobel looked at her navy calf-length skirt with mild dissatisfaction. ‘I thought I might go to Tonbridge and look at some clothes. I’m so bored of all my clothes.’

‘Why bother?’ he asked. ‘You hardly go anywhere. What d’you want a smart dress for?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘I just thought in London yesterday that the cream shift is awfully – ordinary.’

He smiled his charming smile at her. ‘We’re ordinary people,’ he said. ‘That’s our strength. We don’t need the gloss. We have genuine substance.’

‘I suppose one could have both,’ she said. ‘Gloss on the outside and substance underneath. We don’t have to be wholly solid and worthy and always wearing flat shoes.’

Philip looked puzzled at her disagreement. ‘Of course you can’t have both,’ he said. ‘You’re either a trivial person or a deep one. You either care about the things that matter or you run continually after fashion. We know who we are. How we appear doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘So no point wasting your time and our money on shopping.’

‘No,’ Isobel conceded. ‘I’d better get to work.’

She closed the study door behind her and pulled out her chair. She switched on the computer and watched the screen come to life. She thought that she had been doing these actions, like a line worker in a factory, every morning at this time for the last six years. It seemed very odd to her that this was perhaps the first morning ever that she had resented it.

It had been the conversation at breakfast. Philip’s certainty in her seriousness, in her moral values, should have been a matter of joy to her. That her husband thought well of her should please any woman. But because she was held so high in his esteem she was never given new clothes. Because he admired her intellect and her seriousness, she was never given treats. He discouraged her from taking an interest in fashion, or from changing her appearance in any way. Isobel had worn flat shoes, calf-length skirts and her hair tied back at their first meeting when she had been a scholarly postgraduate; and nothing had ever changed. Isobel thought that she was fifty-two and she had not known till yesterday that she had a beautiful neck. Perhaps fifty-two was rather late to discover such an asset. Who would admire it, other than well-trained shop assistants selling earrings? Who would notice if she had her ears pierced? Who would run a finger from ear lobe to collarbone? Would anyone ever sweep up her hair and kiss the nape of her neck and graze the skin with his teeth?

Isobel clicked on the file marked ‘Letters to the Bank’ and put the vision of a man caressing her neck out of her mind. She had made a commitment to Philip and a promise to herself, never to look back, never to wonder how their marriage might have been if he had not been ill. She believed that she should be grateful only that he had lived. That was the most important thing. Shopping, and a man with a liking for long necks, and vanity were supremely irrelevant. She opened chapter one and started to format and print it.

Isobel carried the first ten chapters of her novel into the village post office and put it on the scales. It weighed as much as a complete manuscript of one of her usual books. She paid for it to be sent recorded delivery to Troy’s office, and then stepped back from the counter. Isobel normally never ate sweets of any kind. She had been forbidden them as a child, except for one chocolate egg at Easter, and had never acquired the taste. But she felt that the posting of the first instalment of the Zelda Vere novel deserved some reward. And she was certain that Zelda Vere ate chocolate.

She looked at the confectionery counter. There were few things she remembered from her childhood. Then she saw a large box of chocolate brazils. She smiled. Of course Zelda Vere would eat chocolate brazils, probably while drinking crème de menthe. ‘I’ll have them,’ she said, pointing.

‘For a present?’ the woman asked, reaching for the large box.

‘Yes,’ Isobel said.

‘Lucky lady,’ the woman said.

‘Yes,’ Isobel agreed. ‘She is terribly lucky.’

She parked on the side of the road on the way back to her house and ate a dozen of them, one after another, with intense relish, filling her mouth with the sharp taste and then savouring the warm nuttiness of the centre. When she had eaten so many that she felt slightly, guiltily queasy, she hid the rest of the box under a scarf on the back seat. She was just about to start the car when she remembered Troy’s warning that the compartments between Isobel Latimer and Zelda Vere must be watertight. She must be like a spy. Reluctantly she got from the car and looked at the land falling away from the road – a patchwork of fields intersected by half-hidden lanes, a farmhouse down to her left, her own house hidden by the fold of the hill. With a powerful overarm throw she flung the box high into the air. It went up in a grand arc into the blue sky and then turned over in the air and scattered chocolate brazils like a rain storm of incredible richness. Isobel clapped her hands together in delight and watched the expensive chocolates tumble recklessly down on Kent.

‘That was pure Zelda Vere,’ she whispered to herself and wiped the chocolate from her lips, pulled up the sagging waistband of her navy skirt, got back into the car and drove home.

‘Did you get some whisky?’ Philip asked her. ‘We’re nearly out.’

‘Didn’t you put it on the list for Mrs M? It’s her day to shop tomorrow.’

‘I don’t like her buying my whisky,’ Philip complained.

‘I don’t see why not.’

They were at lunch together. Isobel, a little sick from too many chocolate brazils, was eating very little. Philip had a green salad before him and a slice of cheese on toast.

‘Doesn’t seem right,’ he said.

Isobel raised her eyebrows. She knew that she was being unusually impatient with Philip. Something of the spirit of Zelda Vere had entered her with the chocolate brazils.

‘Well, I wasn’t planning to go down to the village again,’ she said shortly. ‘I want to work this afternoon.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to go then,’ he said. There was a pause while he waited for her to say that she would drive down rather than make him go. Isobel said nothing.

‘I could walk down and you could pick me up,’ he said. ‘It could be my afternoon walk.’

Isobel hesitated for only one moment and then she experienced the familiar rush of guilt at the thought that she was being selfish and ungracious to Philip. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Shall I pick you up from the pub at two thirty?’

He smiled, pleased that he had got his own way. ‘Call it three and that’ll give you time to pop into the off licence and buy the whisky on your way,’ he said. ‘I’d rather not trek down the High Street. I’ll wait for you in the pub.’

‘All right,’ Isobel said again. ‘At three.’

‘There’s a problem with the manuscript,’ Troy said on the telephone.

Isobel felt the falling sensation of fear. ‘What?’ she asked quickly.

‘I don’t think you completely understand the genre,’ he said.

‘What d’you mean?’ Isobel demanded. She looked at the screen before her where Charity was about to confront the businesswoman who had left the coven and founded an international cosmetics business. Charity was posing as a model, the face of the spring collection. At any moment she would tie the woman up and scar her face forever. The woman would never be seen in public again. Isobel was as certain as she could be that the scene was a perfect example of the genre.

‘It’s these semi-colons,’ Troy said, the glee at last revealed in his voice.

‘What?’

‘Nobody in popular fiction uses semi-colons. They wouldn’t know what to do with them.’

‘What do they use?’

‘Commas. They use nothing but commas.’

‘But what about subjunctive clauses?’

‘Commas again.’

‘Lists?’

‘Still commas.’

‘Do they use full colons?’

‘Never!’ Troy exclaimed gleefully. ‘You’re still too erudite, Isobel. It’s a dead giveaway. You’ll have to re-format these chapters before I can send them out. They have to have nothing but commas and full stops. Nothing else.’

Isobel could hear the laughter in her own voice. ‘But the story?’

‘Perfect,’ Troy said. ‘Perfect in every way. It’s a hit, Isobel. Or rather, I should say, Zelda. We’ve hit the jackpot. You’re going to make a lot of money with this one. I promise.’

She closed her eyes for a moment and felt the sense of relief wash through her, unknot the tightness in her shoulders and the strain around her eyes. ‘A lot of money,’ she repeated softly. She visualised the swimming pool they would build in the barn so that Philip could exercise his muscles daily. The gymnasium they would put next to it. And she would buy some clothes – not in the Zelda Vere league of course, but some well-cut, elegant clothes. And she might get her hair tinted, just to give herself a little more – ‘Presence,’ she whispered. She would get her ears pierced and wear earrings which would show off the length of her neck. And Philip, fitter from swimming, might yet admire her looks.

‘Replace all the semi-colons with commas or full stops. And rough up the text a bit,’ Troy commanded. ‘Your imagery is still too precise, think cliché, darling, not original imagery. More cliché and not so many long words. And then send it to me again and I’ll send it out to all the publishers.’

‘All the publishers?’ she queried. ‘Not just Penshurst?’

‘Absolutely not!’ he declared. ‘We’re going to be fighting them off for this manuscript. They’ll all want to buy it. We’ll have to hold an auction.’

Philip put his head around the study door. ‘Isn’t it time for lunch?’ he asked.

Isobel flinched and moved her head so that she blocked his view of the screen.

Philip saw that she was on the telephone. ‘Who is it?’

She put her hand over the mouthpiece and whispered: ‘Troy, I’ll only be a moment.’

‘Can’t he phone back?’

Isobel nodded. ‘Just one minute more.’

Philip waited for a moment, and when she did not put down the telephone he made a little irritable tutting noise, pointed to his wrist watch, and went out of the room, closing the door briskly behind him.

‘An auction?’ Isobel whispered into the phone.

‘Is it safe to talk?’

‘Yes, if I’m quick.’

Troy, miles away in London, lowered his voice as if to keep the secret safe. ‘I’ll send the three chapters and a synopsis out to all the big London publishers. They’ll read it, and then they’ll bid. We’ll give them a starting price and we’ll take bids over the telephone. We’ll let it go on for a day – not longer. At the end of the day the highest bid gets the book.’

‘But how will they know what price to pay? How will they know what it’s worth?’

‘That’s the joy of it! They won’t know. Because nobody knows Zelda Vere so they can’t set a price based on her previous sales. She’s a dark horse. They have to gamble. But when they know that all the others are in and making bids they’ll all make bids too. It’s my job to get the buzz going, to get the excitement up.’

Isobel closed her eyes again and saw once more the warm waters of the heated pool and the clean white tiles. ‘And my job to write the novel.’

‘And lose those semi-colons,’ Troy advised. ‘How long before you are finished?’

Isobel looked at the screen. This was only Charity’s second victim, she had to seek revenge on two others and then meet and fall in love with the leader. ‘It’s got to be two months,’ she said. ‘I can’t see how to do it quicker.’

‘Perfect,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll get the buzz going at once.’

Four

Rhett crushed her in his strong grip, his powerful member pressing against her thighs in a forceful reminder of their pleasure of the night before when she had lain whimpering with ecstasy beneath the pounding rush of his thrusts.

‘Do you swear that you love me more than you have ever loved anyone?’ Charity demanded.

‘I swear it,’ he said hoarsely. She could feel him pressing against her more urgently. In a moment, she knew she would succumb –

‘No, melt.’

– melt into his arms

‘No, beneath …’

beneath his desire and her resolve would be lost.

‘I love you more than anyone,’ he promised. ‘If I lost you my life would not be worth living.’

They were the words she had been waiting for.

‘I will be your wife,’ she said. ‘Love me.’

‘Mmm,’ Isobel muttered critically. She sat back for a moment and then typed a new version.

They were the words she had been waiting for. She drew back from him, quickly before the seduction of his body should entrap her.

‘You will never see me again,’ she said icily. ‘You will spend the rest of your life longing for me, longing for another night like last night, aching for my body, crying for my smile. This is the great revenge I have played out upon you. You will never be happy again.’

He would have snatched her to his mouth for a rain of hungry kisses but he was too late. Charity had slipped out of his embrace and was gone.

The last thing she heard was the cry of a man completely destroyed.

‘The end,’ Isobel wrote in quiet triumph. ‘The end.’ She hesitated, looking at the screen. ‘But which end?’

She turned to the bookshelves and pulled out the hidden commercial novels and flicked through to the last pages. They all ended happily. Isobel paused. ‘I can’t do it,’ she said with sudden resolution. ‘Even to work inside the genre, I can’t do it. This is a story about a woman who takes revenge, about a woman taking a decision about the sort of life she wants to live. I won’t have her melting at the last moment. I want her to be free, I want her to leave the man and go.’

She pushed her chair back from the desk and unconsciously unravelled the knot of her hair, ran her fingers through the thick softness of it and then tied it back up. ‘I can’t bear to have her just collapse under a man, after all she’s been through,’ Isobel whispered. ‘This isn’t a story about wanting a man. This is a story about a woman making her own choices. About a woman who has the guts to say that love is not the important thing: the important thing is autonomy.’

She stabbed a grip firmly into the re-made bun, pulled her chair closer to the desk, and with one sweep of the computer mouse, highlighted the tender reconciliation scene and cut it. It disappeared from the screen leaving Charity’s curse on the man she had loved and her disappearance from his life.

‘Quite right too,’ Isobel said with satisfaction. ‘Why should a woman be stuck with a man?’ She paused for a moment, savouring the sense of completion. Then she picked up the telephone.

‘It’s finished,’ she announced to Troy. ‘I’ve done it.’

‘Zelda Vere – well done!’ he said in a whisper. ‘And something’s come up here.’

‘What?’

‘You know the auction date is next Tuesday?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I wanted it finished by then so you could tell them you had the whole book, as soon as it is bought.’

‘One of them wants to meet you.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not unreasonable. They’re talking about investing a lot of money. But it does leave us with a bit of a problem. D’you think you could come up and be Zelda Vere for a day? Say on the Monday?’

‘For how many people?’ Isobel spoke cautiously but she had a great sense of excitement and anticipation at the thought of putting on Zelda Vere’s beautiful clothes and her golden head of hair and that wonderful makeup.

‘I don’t know how many would want to come. You’d have to be prepared for half a dozen. And you’ll have to have a back-story. You’ll have to think who Zelda is, where she comes from. Where she got the ideas for this novel. Why don’t you come and stay the night before, Sunday night, and we’ll spend some time and get our act together?’

Isobel thought quickly. Mrs M. usually came in to sleep if Isobel was away at literary conferences or at book festivals. She generally brought a videotape and she and Philip would settle down for the evening and watch something trivial. He would complain for days after that her company rotted his brain; but his relish for the light thrillers which she chose was undeniable.

‘If I can, I will,’ Isobel said. ‘I’ll have to sort out things here.’

‘I think we need to spend some time on this,’ Troy said. Unusually for him, he sounded anxious. ‘I didn’t look ahead to this. I thought they’d just snap at the book. I didn’t think they’d want to meet you before the auction.’

‘It’s all right.’ Isobel heard herself sounding calm and reassuring. She realised that she was looking forward to being Zelda Vere. She wanted to wear that lovely suit, to be a blonde beautiful woman. She wanted to see her long legs in the gold strappy sandals and to wear the expensive underwear against her skin. She even wanted the firm sensation of the underwired bra pressing against the bones of her chest. She wanted to be that other woman, far away from the tedium and the responsibility of her normal life.

‘I’ll be there,’ she promised. ‘We can do it.’

‘It’s a reading,’ she told Philip. ‘First thing at Goldsmiths College and a discussion about the novel. Apparently someone dropped out at the last minute and they asked me to step in.’

‘Should have thought of you in the first place,’ Philip said. ‘You shouldn’t let people treat you like second best. You shouldn’t be the one they fall back on, Isobel, you should be their first choice.’

‘Well, they’ve chosen me now. The only thing is, I’d like to stay Sunday night, so that I don’t have to rush on Monday morning. I hate that commuter train going into London in the morning.’

‘Away all night?’ he asked.

‘Mrs M. could come in. I’ll ask her.’

‘I suppose she’ll bring one of those ridiculous films and insist on watching it.’

Isobel smiled. ‘I expect she will. She always does.’

‘When would you be back?’

‘After lunch sometime, Monday afternoon,’ Isobel said. ‘It’s an all-day conference. I might stay and listen to the other papers if that’s all right with you.’

‘Makes no difference to me,’ he said ungraciously. ‘I’m not going out dancing after all. I can do the crossword and my exercises whether you’re here or not. What did you think you might be missing? Riding on the motorbike? Cross-country skiing?’

‘No,’ Isobel said quietly.

There was a brief silence. Isobel kept her eyes on the table-top and thought that Philip’s bad temper was as much a symptom of his illness as his wasted legs. She should embrace them both with equal tenderness. She kept looking down until she could meet his eyes and smile at him with real affection.

He was not looking at her, he was reading a brightly coloured leaflet. He nodded at the information and then pushed it across the lunch table towards her. ‘Here, I sent off for this. I thought it would give us a general idea.’

It was a glossy brochure from a swimming-pool company. It showed a seductive picture of a beautiful indoor swimming pool, the lights glistening on the blue water, a bikini-clad girl poised on the diving board.

‘Does it say how much?’ Isobel asked.

Philip laughed shortly. ‘I think if you have to ask the price you can’t afford it. And anyway, it varies in terms of the volume of the pool and whether you have an electric pump and heater or a gas one.’

Isobel felt a familiar sense of dread. ‘I can see you’ve gone into it,’ she said lightly.

‘I just like to know things,’ he said with dignity. ‘I measured up the barn the other day. We could easily fit it in there and even a small sauna.’

‘A sauna!’ she exclaimed. ‘Very grand.’

‘I think it would help my condition,’ he said. ‘The heat. And of course the exercise. I could do my exercises in the water, it would take the strain off the joints, and I would swim. It’d do you good too. You never take any exercise. You drive everywhere. At least I walk once a day, but you only drive to the village. You’ll get overweight, Isobel, flabby. Women always run to flab. We’re neither of us spring chickens any more.’

‘I know.’ Isobel nodded, swallowing the retort that she drove to the village to collect him, to spare him the return walk home; that before his illness she had walked every day. Now she never had the time.

‘There you are then.’

‘So how much do they cost? Swimming pools? About?’

‘We’d get a nice one in the barn and the barn converted with sliding picture windows for under £50,000,’ he said judicially. ‘We could do it a lot cheaper, of course, but I think it’d be a false economy.’

Isobel blinked. ‘We simply haven’t got that sort of money darling.’

‘Not now we haven’t, I know. But when they bid for your new book we’ll have a lump sum come in.’

Isobel recoiled, thinking for one extraordinary moment that he knew all about Devil’s Disciple. Then she realised that he was talking about the literary novel that Penshurst Press had bought for only £20,000.

‘Yes,’ she said, rapidly improvising. ‘I have great hopes for it.’

‘Troy not told you yet?’

‘Not yet.’

‘He’s so slow, that man, anyone would think he was doing you a favour.’

‘He’s discussing with the editors.’

‘Lunching out at your expense, more like,’ Philip grumbled. ‘You ought to tell him, remind him who it is that earns the money.’

‘I know I should,’ she said mildly. ‘I’ll talk to him next week.’

‘I’ll see what sort of planning permission we need,’ Philip said. ‘I’ll phone the town hall. Do us no harm to get planning permission and some drawings done.’

‘Perhaps we should wait till we know how much I’m going to earn …’

‘It’d be an interest for me,’ he pointed out.

‘Oh of course then, yes. Let’s get some drawings done.’ She hesitated. ‘They won’t be very expensive, will they?’

‘For God’s sake!’ he exploded. ‘You’re so mean these days, Isobel! We have to spend some money if we want to go ahead with this. If you’re so anxious about it then I’ll pay for the drawings myself. All right? I’ll cash in some shares, I’ll use my own money. Will that satisfy you?’ He stamped to the back door and threw it open. ‘I’m going for my walk,’ he said irritably.

‘I’ll pick you up from the pub,’ she said quickly to the closing door.

‘You don’t need to,’ he said crossly. ‘I’m going up the hill. I don’t know how long I’ll be.’

Isobel let him go. There was no point in running after him. She went to the kitchen window and watched his endearing limping stride carry him slowly to the end of the garden and then out through the wrought-iron gate to the track that wound steeply up the side of the Weald. He would never manage to walk to the crest of the hill, she knew. He would be too breathless and his weakened legs could not carry him up that hard gradient. She watched him with a pity which was so intense that it felt like passion. She wanted to go after him, she wanted him to lean on her, she wanted to support him.

Philip would be back by teatime, she reassured herself. He would be tired out within half an hour and sit down to rest, too proud to come home straight away. As long as he did not take a chill he would come to no harm, stubbornly sitting out the afternoon, wanting to worry her, insisting on his independence. By four he would limp homeward, wanting his tea. He would hate it if she ran after him, he would hate it if she showed how easily she could catch him up, even if she were following him for love. He would even hate knowing that she had watched him go. He did not want pity, he wanted them both to behave as if nothing was wrong. The best thing that she could do for him was to earn the money to buy the things he wanted, and to maintain the life that they had chosen.

Isobel turned back to the study. She could get the full text of Devil’s Disciple formatted and printed out and ready to take to London when she went on Sunday night. She felt that the most loving thing she could do for him was to sell the Zelda Vere novel and earn him the money he needed now.

Troy opened the front door of his London flat almost as soon as she rang the bell. ‘This is getting a bit tense,’ he said, leading the way from the little hall up the carpeted stairs. Isobel followed, carrying her overnight bag. ‘I told one of the publishers they could meet you and now they all want to come. I said they could come here, each of them, at hourly intervals. Half an hour quick chat and then go. So I’ve kept it as short as I can.’

Isobel heard herself give a nervous little laugh. ‘Well, the worst that can happen is they don’t bid for the book, isn’t it? It’s not as if we’re impersonating a policeman or anything. We’re not doing anything criminal.’

‘No,’ he said, slightly cheered. ‘I thought we’d have a practice tonight, a dress rehearsal.’

‘Of course.’

Troy threw open the door to the spare bedroom and Isobel went inside. The wardrobe doors were open, the plastic covers were off the suits. The makeup was laid out on the dressing table, eyeshadows and liner and mascara to the left, lipsticks to the right, foundation powders and blushers in the centre. The shoes, free of their shoe trees, were standing side by side at the foot of the bed.

‘You got it all ready!’

‘It just seemed the right thing to do – preparing the star’s dressing room.’

Impulsively, Isobel turned around and kissed him. He held her lightly for a moment and she had a sudden surprising sense of his nearness, of the intimacy of his touch.

‘Now get out of that dreadful skirt and into Zelda’s lovely clothes and we’ll get started,’ he said briskly.

She hesitated for a moment, waiting for him to leave, but he had turned aside to the wardrobe to slip the suit off the hanger. He was so matter-of-fact, so uninterested that she felt that it was all right to undress before him. It was as he said, like being an actress, like being a star. He was her dresser; he was not a lover watching her strip.

‘It’s your fault it’s an awful skirt,’ she said stoutly, pushing the elasticated waistband down over her hips. ‘I wanted to take the suits home.’

‘Zelda stays here. I take care of her clothes. You can go and buy yourself some new things if you need them. But not too glamorous. You two have to stay separate.’

Isobel stepped into the pink skirt and carefully pulled it up, zipped it up, and settled it on her hips with her hands in the odd coquettish gesture that all women in snug skirts naturally adopt.

‘Nice,’ Troy said. ‘And the jacket?’

‘I need the new bra,’ Isobel said. ‘It won’t fit right without it.’

‘Oh, of course,’ he said. ‘Top drawer on the right.’

Isobel opened the drawer. He had unpacked all the underwear and folded it meticulously on scented liners. There was also a new silk nightdress.

‘What’s this?’ Isobel asked.

‘I couldn’t see Zelda sleeping in a pair of cotton pyjamas, so I bought her something a bit silky.’

‘Thank you,’ Isobel said. ‘You’ve been to a lot of trouble.’

‘I enjoyed it,’ he said simply. ‘I liked getting the things just right, and I loved the makeup. All those little bottles, it’s just like the little pots of model paints I had when I was a kid.’

Isobel hesitated, wanting to take off her bra but feeling shy.

‘I’ll get us a couple of glasses of champagne,’ Troy said. ‘Help the alibi along. Zelda always drinks Roederer, I think. I got some in.’

Isobel dressed swiftly while he was gone and when he came back she was seated before the mirror pulling the skullcap over her hair.

‘It would be miles easier if I did go blonde,’ she said.

Troy put the cold glass of champagne on the dressing table beside her. ‘Absolutely not. You’d be too alike, and anyway, I like having her hair waiting here, along with her clothes. I looked in last night and she was like a ghost waiting to be raised.’

Isobel sipped her glass, and then ducked her head and pulled the wig on.

‘Careful!’ Troy snapped. ‘You’ll tear it! Here! Let me.’

‘It’s so tight!’ she complained.

‘Hold it at the front while I pull it down at the back.’

Isobel held the fringe as firmly as she dared while Troy heaved from behind. Slowly the skin stretched and then encased her head. She pushed the hair back from her face and looked into the mirror. A face halfway between Isobel and Zelda looked back at her, with Isobel’s tired skin and dark-shadowed eyes and pale lips, but Zelda’s glorious mane of barmaid blonde.

‘Put some makeup on quick,’ Troy urged her. ‘Shall I do it? I was watching what she did.’

‘Oh yes please.’ Isobel tipped her head back, closed her eyes and gave herself up to the pleasure of his touch. He cleansed her skin with the same gritty, sweet-smelling cream, and then wiped it clean, patted it with toner and then moisturiser and then stroked on the foundation cream with tiny sensual sponging gestures, intruding like a lapping kitten into the corners of her eyes, sweeping like the wing of a bird across her cheeks.

‘Don’t open your eyes,’ he whispered, his lips very close to her ear. ‘I want to do the lot.’

She stayed completely still, as he commanded, her eyes closed, the sensitive skin of her cheeks, her temples, recognising the warm breath of the powder, the soft brush of the blusher. Her eyelids were soothed by the soft stipple of the eyeshadow, pressed by the application of false eyelashes, and then slicked by the wet line of the eyeliner.

The touch of the lipstick brush on her lips was like a hundred small, slow kisses. She felt her soft lips dragged gently one way and then another in a slow, tantalising, dabbing gesture.

Then the soft tissue was laid over all her face and patted gently down.

‘Et voilà!’ Troy said, his voice husky. ‘And Zelda is with us.’

Almost unwillingly Isobel came out of the darkness which had been filled with such passive sensuality, and found herself looking into the radiant face of Zelda Vere.

‘You are beautiful,’ Troy said. His face was beside hers, looking over her shoulder into the mirror.

‘She is,’ Isobel reminded him.

‘Well, you are her now. So you are,’ he said. ‘I feel like a magician. I made you. I painted you like a doll and here you are. Coppella.’

The two of them gazed and gazed at the image they had made for long moments.

‘Now,’ said Troy. ‘To work. We’ll go into the sitting room.’

Isobel reached for her glass and got to her feet.

‘No! No!’ Troy exclaimed. ‘Don’t rush. And Zelda never picks up her own glass. Someone will carry that for you. You move slowly, and elegantly, as if you were paid by the minute.’

Isobel walked slowly to the door.

‘More hips,’ Troy said.

‘I’d look ridiculous,’ Isobel argued, pausing at the door.

‘Of course. All rich women look ridiculous. But who would ever dare to tell them? Sway your hips. Think Marilyn Monroe.’

Isobel set off down the corridor towards the sitting room, conscientiously swaying her hips. Her high heels snagged slightly in the thick pile carpet. She did not feel glamorous any more, she felt incompetent. She turned at the doorway and met Troy’s encouraging smile.

‘Nearly,’ he said. ‘Look. Watch me.’ With both glasses held steadily in each hand he walked towards her, his weight well forward, his hips tilted, each step a little dance movement as he flicked his hips to one side and then the other. ‘The hips go sideways, the legs go straight on,’ he said, announcing a discovery. ‘And it’s a narrow path, the feet go along a line. Try again.’

Isobel walked back to the bedroom.

‘Brilliant. Once more for luck?’

She walked the length of the corridor and then returned, moving like a model on a catwalk before his judging eyes.

‘Perfect,’ he concluded. ‘Now. Go in and sit down.’

Isobel was gaining confidence, she swayed across the sitting-room floor, chose to sit on the sofa and spread herself along it, long legs outstretched, leaning diagonally back against the cushions. She crossed her legs at the knee, stroking the pink skirt downwards. She allowed one mule to drop slightly, showing the arch of her foot.

‘That is very sexy,’ Troy said with deep approval. ‘I knew you had it buried in you, Isobel. God help us all when it comes seething out.’

She giggled. ‘I don’t seethe.’

He clapped his hand over his mouth. ‘My fault. I shouldn’t have said Isobel. Zelda, I should have said – Zelda, you look wonderful. You are a woman full of seething sensuality. Here’s your champagne.’

‘Thank you,’ Isobel drawled. She put her hand out but did not stretch towards him. She made him walk to her and give her the glass.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now tell me about your early life.’

‘I was brought up in France,’ Isobel started, telling the story she had devised on the train. ‘My mother was a cook to a family of ex-pats in the South of France. I don’t want to release their name. I was educated at home, so there’s no record of me at any French school. At eighteen I became a secretary in the family’s wine business. At twenty-four I made a brief, unhappy marriage to a Frenchman and when I left my husband I did a number of jobs, all of them clerical, temporary. I’ve always written, I’ve always kept a diary and written short stories but this is the first novel I have ever completed. It took me ten months to write. I got the idea from a newspaper cutting, I can’t remember quite where, and from the stories that the French maids used to tell me about strange goings-on in the neighbouring chateaux.’

‘Excellent,’ Troy said, pouring them both some more champagne. ‘And your parents?’

‘Both died in a car crash twelve years ago, leaving me very well off. With my inheritance I have travelled all round the world.’

‘Any other family?’

‘I was an only child. Books were my only friends,’ Isobel added. A wink from Troy commended the addition.

‘And where d’you live now?’

‘I was travelling. But now I am going to buy myself a flat beside the Thames in London. I have a great affinity for ports, being such a traveller.’

‘Romantic interest?’

‘I feel I must preserve my privacy.’

‘But your passionate love scenes, are they all imaginary?’

‘I have known deep desire. I am a woman of passion.’

‘Age?’

‘Forty-six?’ Isobel hazarded.

‘Go for forty-two,’ Troy commended. ‘D’you drink or do drugs at all?’

She shook her head. ‘I have a horror of drugs, but I drink champagne and mineral water. Never coffee, only herbal tea.’

‘Beauty routine? Writing routine? Lifestyle?’

‘Cleanse, tone, moisturise,’ Isobel recited. ‘I write every day in a fountain pen in special French exercise books. I read in the afternoon in either French or English. I am very disciplined. I prefer to travel by train so that I can comfortably work and watch the scenery.’

‘Lonely?’ Troy asked.

For a moment, surprised by the question, her face came up and she met his eyes. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, in her real voice. ‘Oh yes.’

Troy flicked his gaze away, determined not to hear the note of true desolation. Isobel looked away as well. She had not meant him to know. She had not meant ever to know it herself.

‘I mean, despite all this foreign travelling, d’you have no friends?’

Isobel slid back behind the mask of Zelda Vere. ‘I meet people and talk to them, perhaps intimately. But then they go on their journey and I go on mine. From now on I shall live for my writing.’

‘Do you think you are a good writer?’

Zelda Vere leaned forward. ‘What the world needs is storytellers,’ she breathed. ‘People make so much fuss about these so-called literary novels which are read by maybe one or two thousand people. My stories will reach millions of people. People need stories and magic and hope in their dreary day-to-day lives. I happen to have the wonderful talent of being a great storyteller. I may not know about semi-colons, but I do know about life.’

‘Brava!’ Troy cried, applauding. ‘Brava.’

They practised a few more questions and answers before Troy ruled that they should eat before they were drunk on champagne. He would not allow Isobel to keep on the wig or the clothes while they ate. ‘What if you dropped food on her skirt?’ he asked. ‘I want her to wear the pink tomorrow.’

Isobel went and stripped off Zelda Vere’s clothes, and wiped Zelda Vere’s makeup from her face. She came into the kitchen-diner wearing the despised skirt and a baggy jumper, her face plain and slightly shiny from the makeup remover.

‘Hello, Isobel,’ Troy said encouragingly. ‘Here, have a nibble.’ He pushed a dish of olives and nuts towards her and peered under the grill where two dishes in silver foil were starting to bubble.

‘Are you cooking?’ Isobel asked in surprise.

‘I sent out. I’m just warming it up,’ he said. ‘Chicken breasts in pesto and beetroot, with wild rice. Hope you like it.’

‘Sounds lovely,’ Isobel replied, thinking of her usual supper at home: plain dishes like cottage pie or grilled trout, lamb cutlets or steak. Philip preferred simple food and only had a little appetite. At the end of a day of writing, she had no energy for shopping, preparing, and cooking.

They ate companionably either side of the worktop, perched on kitchen stools. ‘I turned the dining room into my study,’ Troy said. ‘I so seldom eat at home, it seemed stupid having a room standing empty.’

‘Where do you eat?’ Isobel asked.

‘Oh, restaurants with people, or quite often at parties,’ he said vaguely. ‘Or dinner parties, you know.’

Isobel nodded but she did not know. She was invited regularly to literary parties, but she did not like to go alone, and standing around and talking was obviously unsuitable for Philip’s condition. In any case he hated those sorts of social occasions. The few parties they had attended when Isobel’s career was starting to take off, before Philip was ill, had been uncomfortable for them both. Philip regarded any other author as a rival to his wife, and any attention paid to any other writer as a snub to his wife. He tried to defend her by loudly decrying everyone else’s work. He was shy in a room full of strangers and his shyness took the form of abruptness, almost rudeness. Equally, he felt insulted that people would ask him briefly what he did and yet have no genuine interest in his experiences, in his lifetime’s work in the pharmaceutical industry. Their eyes slid past him to Isobel, they expected him to introduce her and then stand back.

What made this even more galling was that Isobel would never have written in the first place without Philip’s encouragement. In the early days she used to read to him in the evening and he would often suggest a change or a correction. He thought deeply about the things that she cared about. He had skills of critical reading and self-discipline which he taught her. He bought her a word processor and introduced her to it, helping her to make the transition from her old typewriter. He encouraged her to write every day, whether or not she was in the mood. To find that she was now something of a celebrity and he relegated to the position of driver and handbag carrier was quite unbearable. His sudden illness put an end to Isobel’s social success and his descent into second place, and spared them both the challenge of maintaining a husband’s pride when his wife was suddenly regarded as more interesting, more successful and, even worse, a better earner.

Philip’s illness kept him at home, protected him from Isobel’s fame. It kept her at home, too.

‘You could come up to town more than you do,’ Troy remarked.

‘It’s the trains,’ Isobel said easily. ‘And I don’t like to leave Philip too often.’

‘Oh yes, how is he?’ Troy uncorked a bottle of white wine and poured them both a glass.

‘Just the same,’ Isobel said. ‘If things go well tomorrow then perhaps I’ll make enough money to put in a swimming pool. He thinks that would really make a difference. There have been some studies. Heat and exercise in buoyancy can really make a difference, apparently.’

‘And what is it that he’s got, exactly?’ Troy said. ‘Sorry, I feel I should know, but I really don’t. He’s been ill ever since I first knew you. I never really liked to ask.’

He saw how the very question drained her of energy. Her face grew grey with weariness. ‘Nobody knows. That’s the hardest thing about it. He has some kind of neurological malfunction which is rather rare. Nobody knows quite what causes it, it could be genetic, or it could be a virus, or it could be an allergy. What it means is that the part of the brain which activates the big muscle groups, arms, legs, sort of misfires. The messages don’t get through. So the muscles weaken and waste. The real struggle is to keep mobile. Swimming would be ideal, and he does exercises and walks every day. He’s very brave.’

‘What’s the prognosis?’

‘That’s part of the difficulty. Nobody knows for sure. Some people just get spontaneously better – about a third of people get better. About a third get very bad and then stay there. And the final third get weaker and weaker and then die. We know now that he’s not got the worst case, he won’t die. But we didn’t know that for the first two years.’ She made a little grimace of pain. ‘That was the worst time, but in a way it was a good time. We were very passionate together, because every day was precious. We really felt that we were on borrowed time. But now …’ She broke off. ‘Now we don’t know how he’ll be over the next few years.’ She made her voice cheerful. ‘He could stay the same. Or he could get better, you see. He could get better tomorrow. He won’t die. It’ll probably be like this forever.’

Troy looked across the worktop at her with compassion. ‘But it means that you’re only fifty, and married to a man who won’t ever take you dancing.’

‘Dancing’s the least of it,’ she said quietly.

There was a brief silence and then Isobel found a smile from somewhere. ‘There’s no point grieving over it,’ she said briskly. ‘I made my mind up to it years ago. I was sure he was going to die when he first had it. I promised myself then that if he was spared, if we were spared, that I would be happy. I would make him happy. This is so much better than it might have been.’

‘Oh yes,’ Troy assented emphatically, privately thinking that it was not.

At eight thirty in the morning Troy called Isobel; but she had been awake for an hour, listening to the unaccustomed noise of the London street, nursing a hangover, and wishing she felt free to go to the kitchen and make herself a cup of tea.

He opened the bedroom door and presented her with a cup of pale green liquid smelling of straw. ‘Herbal tea,’ he said. ‘To get you in the mood.’

‘I’m terrified,’ Isobel said.

‘You’ll be wonderful. You were wonderful yesterday and that was only a practice.’

‘And there’ll be no-one who has ever met me? No-one from Penshurst Press?’

‘Penshurst!’ He waved them away. ‘They don’t have the kind of money we’re looking for here. They’re a small-time literary house. We’re playing with the major league here.’

Isobel nodded and leaned back against the pillows.

‘You’re pale,’ he said with sudden concern. ‘Feeling all right?’

‘I have a hangover,’ she confessed. Philip would have been shocked and disapproving.

‘Oh yes,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll get you something. We did go it a bit.’

He disappeared from the bedroom and came back with a small effervescing drink. ‘Here you are. And I’ve run you a hot bath. As soon as you’ve had it we’ll have breakfast and then start to get Zelda ready. She needs to be beautiful by ten o’clock. The first editors are here at ten thirty.’

‘Isn’t that awfully early?’ asked Isobel, who had learned over the years that it was impossible to reach the editors at her publishing house much before eleven in the morning.

Troy grinned. ‘They’re hungry. They’ll be here.’

‘You make me sound like a picnic,’ Isobel remarked.

‘Zelda is,’ he said, lingering on her name. ‘Zelda is a picnic and a dinner and a drink all rolled into one. Zelda is cordon bleu, and everybody wants her.’

Isobel, perfumed, blonde-headed, perfectly made up and dressed in the pink suit with the pink mules, was draped over the sofa at ten fifteen, and at ten thirty the first editors came in. She did not get up from her seat but merely lifted a languid hand to them. The woman shook hands, but the man was so overcome that he kissed the well-manicured fingertips and then sat down opposite her and gazed.

‘How much of this is based on real life?’ Susan Jarvis, the senior editor, asked.

Zelda Vere smiled. ‘It’s fiction, of course.’

‘But I would guess that you have had some kind of experience with a Satanic cult?’ Susan pressed.

Zelda’s gesture indicated an invisible wall before her. ‘I based the novel on my research and my own intuitive sense,’ she said. ‘And on my experiences, of course.’

In this country?’ Susan hinted.

‘In this country, and abroad.’

‘Of course Zelda’s great talent is telling a great story,’ Troy intervened, speaking to Charles, the junior editor.

‘It is a great story,’ he concurred. ‘May I say, Miss Vere, what a great story it is? And what a great all-round package – if I can use the word – you are? I think we can do great things with you.’

‘What sort of things?’ Troy asked encouragingly.

‘Oh, we’d be looking at a major advertising campaign in all the media including television. We’d be looking at a major author tour in five, maybe six or seven, cities. We’d be submitting this book for the appropriate prizes, extracts in suitable magazines, a big publicity campaign and a big push in the non-book outlets in particular.’

‘Non-book outlets?’ Isobel asked, confused.

‘Supermakets,’ Troy said briefly. ‘More than bookshops.’

‘You would sell my book in supermarkets? Like cans of beans?’

Troy’s eyes snapped a warning at her. ‘Miss Vere, Justin and Freeman Press would undertake to place this book where it would sell the most copies. That’s what we all want.’

‘Of course we’d try for the bookshops,’ Charles said feebly. ‘But the great strength of this book, as we see it, is the common touch.’ He turned back to Zelda Vere. ‘You really know how the ordinary woman thinks. It struck a chord with all of us at Justin and Freeman. I gave the manuscript to my secretary and to my wife, and I can tell you, I knew, when those two ordinary women came back to me and said that they saw themselves in this wonderful story, that we had a winner on our hands.’

‘Both very normal and at the same time very bizarre,’ Susan confirmed. ‘That was what attracted me: the bizarre quality of the story. And, more than anything else, fresh; but absolutely central to the genre.’

‘And which genre is that?’ Troy asked.

Susan looked at him as if there could be no doubt. ‘Survivor fiction,’ she said bluntly. ‘This is a survivor fiction novel. We couldn’t make it work any other way. This is Zelda’s own story, fictionalised and told in third person – though we may need to see an editorial amendment there – but this is the real-life story of a woman horrifically abused who survives and revenges herself.’

Isobel felt her hand tighten on the stem of the champagne glass. ‘But if it were real life, if it were true, then Charity would face dozens of criminal charges.’ She stopped herself, realising her snap of irritation was quite unlike Zelda Vere’s slow drawl. ‘I’m sorry. What I meant to say was – it can’t be offered as a true story. Not possibly. Can it? Because Charity kidnaps two children and burns down a house, and bankrupts a business and blackmails a politician, and scars a woman.’

‘I assumed there was a fictional element,’ Susan said briskly. ‘And we’d make that clear. But this is a survivor fiction, isn’t it? There is a core of truth, and that a terrible truth.’

‘Yes,’ said Troy.

‘No,’ said Isobel.

Troy crossed the room and took her hand and kissed it. Under the warm touch of his lips she felt the warning pinch of his fingers. ‘She’s such an artist she does not know the truth she has told,’ he said firmly. ‘She’s still in denial.’

Five

There was no time for Troy and Isobel to speak before the next pair of editors arrived, and then the next. All morning they trooped in, drank a glass of champagne, praised the novel to the skies, promised astounding sales, and all of them, every single one, tried to persuade Isobel to confess that the novel was autobiographical. When Troy closed the front door on the last editor he found Isobel in her bedroom, wig on the stand, precious pink suit discarded on the unmade bed, frantically scrubbing at her red face with tissues.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked tightly.

She turned to him, her eyes blackly encircled with wet mascara. ‘This is impossible,’ she said. ‘We invented her, Zelda Vere, and now they’re all at it. They want her to be a Satanic cult survivor and it’s nonsense. I can’t stand it. I can’t begin to pretend these things are true. And I can’t begin to pretend to be in denial about it either, so don’t try that way out. We’ll have to call it off.’

He was about to snap at her but he held himself back. ‘How much is the swimming pool?’

She paused and turned towards him. ‘Fifty thousand pounds … I don’t know.’

‘And it would help Philip’s condition?’

‘He thinks so.’

Troy nodded. ‘That last editor, from Rootsman, said they would be starting the bidding for the world rights at £200,000. That’s starting the bidding. You could go to half a million.’

Isobel dropped a grubby ball of cotton wool on the dressing-table top and looked at him in silence.

‘I’ll go and buy some sandwiches,’ Troy said. ‘I think we could both of us do with some lunch.’

Isobel appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing her country skirt with the baggy waistband, a cotton shirt, and a sweater draped over her shoulders. Her brown hair was tied back in her usual bun, her face was clean and shiny without even a dab of lipstick. She could have wilfully designed her appearance to remind Troy that she was a middle-aged academic, up from the country for a visit and already longing to be home again.

He put the plate of sandwiches before her and poured her a strong black coffee.

‘The money is fantastic,’ he said after she had eaten.

She nodded.

‘And all the work has been done. All they want is a few editorial changes. I’ll do them if you don’t want to. I can set up the bank account tomorrow, they all understand that the money’s to be paid into a numbered account overseas. They think it’s a tax issue, so that’s all right. Then you collect the money and you’re free to write whatever you want to write.’

Still Isobel said nothing.

‘The rest of your life, you can write exactly what you like. Or take a break,’ he said persuasively. ‘Go for a cruise. Go somewhere warm with Philip. Take a holiday. It’d do you both good. You can invest this and have an income, or you can buy the things you need. And if it goes to a TV mini series, which is very likely, then you’ll be provided for all the rest of your life. You can replace his shares and his savings so he’ll never know you raided them. You can take out insurance so that you know that he’s safe whatever happens to you. You need never work again, unless you want to.’

‘They’ll want a sequel,’ she said flatly.

He shrugged. ‘It’s a one-book contract. They can want all they like. You can decide to write another, or we could hire a ghost writer and I could brief her. Or they can do without. It’s up to you. You’re the star.’

Troy saw the brief gleam of ambition in her eyes before she looked down.

‘You’re an author who has been immensely influential in the literary world,’ he continued. ‘But you will never earn the money you need to keep yourself, let alone to support Philip. This one book can redress that injustice and nobody will ever know. This gives you the money you deserve. And if they do alter the book – why should you care? This was a book to make money, why should you mind what they call it: fantasy, gothic, survivor fiction, who cares? As long as it sells?’

She turned on him then. ‘Because if it’s commercial fiction then it doesn’t matter that it is nonsense,’ she said fiercely. ‘They put a jacket on it which says it is nonsense. It’s read as entertaining nonsense. Once we start saying it is based on fact we are telling lies about the nature of the world itself. We are misleading people. We’re not producing fiction, we’re telling lies. We are doing something morally wrong.’

He nodded, thinking fast. ‘People pretend all the time,’ he argued. ‘In their own lives. They say they are a certain sort of person because it keeps them where they are. You say that you love your husband and that you are a highly moral woman because that keeps you at home when someone with less motivation would have cut and run.’ He heard her gasp but he would not be interrupted. ‘People’s lives are fiction. All autobiographies are fiction. When some supermodel says that what she really wanted to do was to work for charity, when some rich man’s wife writes that she married him for love: it’s fiction. Sportsmen’s autobiographies, ballerinas’ own stories: they tell the truth of their lives as they want it to appear, not what it was really like. We all know it. That’s what we’re selling. Whether the manuscript says “Charity thinks, Charity does” or “I thought, I did” makes no difference.’

Isobel was on to it like a flash. ‘It makes a difference to me! I have to stand by this nonsense and pretend that it is real. I have to say that it was me!’

‘Zelda says: “it was me”, not you. And you were happy to pretend to be her, brought up in France, worked as a secretary, married once, unhappily, parents dead in car crash. Now we pretend as well that she had a sister, that she was entrapped by a cult of Satanists. What difference does it make?’

She hesitated. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ she said slowly. ‘It does make a difference. There is a difference between fiction and telling lies.’

‘It’s fantasy whichever way you look at it,’ he said. He took a breath, forcing himself to stay calm. From this one morning’s work he stood to earn £20,000. The prestige from being known as Zelda Vere’s agent had already had an impact in the way he was treated by publishers. No-one had ever before returned Troy’s calls within the same day. Overnight he had become a major figure in the publishing scene.

‘Please, Isobel, think,’ he said quietly. ‘The auction is tomorrow. I can’t be seen to let people down. I can’t conduct an auction and then withdraw the book. The auction is a binding agreement. If we’re going to cancel then it has to be by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. And then you’ll have lost everything. You’ll be back where you were when we started. You’ll never again earn enough to live on from your writing, Penshurst simply won’t pay more. And worse than that: you’ve just wasted four months on a novel that you won’t publish. I’ll have wasted a small fortune on Zelda’s clothes. You’ve destroyed my confidence in your work.’

She looked quickly at him and he saw her lower lip quiver. ‘You?’ she asked. ‘I’ve lost you?’

Troy was relentless. ‘I asked you in the cab before we went to Harrods if you were sure. I told you then that it was my reputation as Zelda’s agent that was on the line. I bank rolled you. I said we were in it together. If you pull out now it doesn’t just hurt you and Philip, it’s bad for me too.’

She shook her head as if it were too much for her. He thought for a guilty moment that he was bullying her as persistently as her husband must bully her. Philip must do something like this: intellectual argument and then emotional blackmail. This must be his technique to make her responsible for everything. She was so endearingly vulnerable. She could struggle forever with that sharp, trained intelligence, but she could not tolerate the thought of being abandoned, of losing someone’s love.

He saw her shoulders hunch under the burden he had laid on her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry to appear indecisive. I’ll ring you tonight. I’ll think about it as I go home on the train. I’ll decide by six o’clock.’

He nodded. ‘I hope you decide to take the plunge,’ he said. ‘For the swimming pool, for Zelda, for Philip. I hope you decide to take good money for good work. I’d be really disappointed if you failed at this stage.’

Isobel nodded. He noticed that she did not meet his eyes. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

There was an odd atmosphere between them as she came from the spare bedroom with her little overnight bag. They were like lovers parting after some mutually unsatisfactory experience. The cramped hall was filled with the atmosphere of mild blame, of dissatisfaction. At the door, on a sudden impulse, Troy put his hand on her waist and at once she turned her face up to his. He leaned forward and kissed her. Extraordinarily, her mouth was warm and inviting under his. She dropped her bag, her hands slid up his arms to his shoulders and then one cool palm pulled his head down to her lips. He kissed her hard, passionately, his irritation dissolving into a surprised desire. She kissed him back and for a moment he did not see her as the tired middle-aged woman, but with his eyes closed in her kiss he imagined that he was touching the golden, languid, arrogant beauty who had sprawled all the morning on his sofa with a high-heeled pink mule swinging, showing the curve of her instep.

Isobel stepped back and they looked at each other, a little breathless. She would have said something but awkwardly, shyly, he opened the front door, and in that moment’s dislocation she slipped away. The door closed behind her and Troy froze, listening to her sensible shoes clumping down the stone steps to the street but hearing in his mind the light feminine skitter of high heels.

On the other side of the door, Isobel stepped into the road and raised a hand for a taxi. ‘Waterloo,’ she said to the driver, her face blank.

She had her hand clamped over her mouth as if to hold the kiss and the power of the kiss inside her. Unprecedentedly, for a woman who was mostly intellect, and often worry, she thought of nothing, nothing at all. She sat back in the seat and stared unseeingly, as the taxi turned in the street and headed south through the early-afternoon traffic. Still she kept her hand over her mouth, still she felt, under the unconscious grip of her fingers, the heat and the power of his kiss.

‘Good talk?’ Philip asked her when she arrived home.

‘Fine,’ she said distractedly. The breakfast things had not been washed up, his soup bowl and bread plate from lunchtime were still on the table along with the litter of Philip’s morning: orange peel, a couple of pens, a rubber band from the post, some empty envelopes, some flyers which had been shed from the newspaper. Isobel looked at the room and the work that needed to be done without weariness, without irritation. She looked at it all with calm detachment, as if it were the kitchen of another woman. It was clearly not the kitchen of a woman who had, this very morning, been offered more than a quarter of a million pounds for a novel, lounged on a sofa like a beauty queen and been passionately kissed.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ Philip said, following her gaze. ‘Mrs M. thought she might go off early after staying overnight and I said: “Yes”. I didn’t quite realise …’

‘That’s all right,’ Isobel said. ‘Won’t take a minute.’

She started to clear the table, watching her hands collecting debris, throwing it in the bin, watching herself stacking plates in the dishwasher, adding dishwasher liquid, still feeling on her lips the scorch of Troy’s touch.

‘Did it go well?’ Philip asked again.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. She heard her voice assemble lies. ‘They were very bright, they asked some interesting questions. Then there was a buffet lunch. I saw Norman Villiers. He was doing the afternoon session. He was well, said some interesting things about Larkin. Then I came home.’

‘You should do that sort of thing more often,’ Philip said generously. ‘It’s certainly done you good. You look quite radiant.’

‘Do I?’ she asked, her interest suddenly sharpened.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Glowing.’

Isobel’s hand stole to her mouth, her fingers covered her lips as if their bruised pinkness would betray her. ‘Well, I did enjoy it,’ she said, her voice very level. ‘There was some talk of a series of lectures. Replacing someone on maternity leave. I didn’t say yes or no, but I would like to think about it.’

‘Surely you don’t want a regular commitment,’ he protested.

‘Just a short series. In a few months’ time,’ she said. ‘I might go up and stay overnight and then come back in the afternoon, like today, once a week.’

He rose from the table and stretched. ‘As you like,’ he said. ‘Makes no difference to me. There were a couple of phone calls. The ansaphone took them. I was outside in the barn. I’ve been measuring up. I marked it out with spray paint so you can see the size the pool would be on the ground. And I’ve got on with the drawings.’

‘You have been busy,’ she praised him as she moved towards the door, wondering if it was Troy who had called.

‘I told you it would be an interest for me,’ he said. ‘And I found a swimming pool company who will do it at a discount if we order within four months.’

‘Even so,’ she said, ‘£50,000 …’

‘I’ll show you the figures when you’ve finished work,’ he said, wanting to detain her. ‘But I think you’ll see that if we do it now we can get real value for money. We could always borrow the money, the house could be security for the loan.’

Isobel nodded and went into her study, closing the door behind her. The ansaphone showed two calls. One had left no message, the other was an invitation to judge a minor literary prize. She noted for a moment the disproportionate sense of disappointment that swept her at the realisation that neither call was from Troy.

She rested her head in her hands and looked at the telephone, willing it to ring. One part of her was fully conscious of the absurdity that she was a woman in her fifties, sitting by a telephone like a girl of thirteen waiting for a call from a boy. Another part of her mind revelled in the fact that she was treasuring a kiss, like a girl of thirteen, that the thought of him ringing her made her heart pound, that even Philip, who rarely noticed anything about her, had called her radiant.

She realised that she could ring him. There was no convention that said that she could not initiate a call. She picked up the telephone and dialled the number of Troy’s office. They put her through to him straight away.

‘Isobel,’ he said. She listened intently for an undercurrent of extra warmth in his voice, and found she could not be sure. The uncertainty was as thrilling as if he had told her he loved her. ‘I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call.’

‘I only just got in,’ she said breathlessly. ‘And then I had to talk to Philip.’

‘Sure. So. What do you think?’

‘Think?’

For a moment she believed he was asking her about the kiss.

‘About the auction, about the book, about letting them sell it as survivor fiction?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t seem to decide. What do you think?’

Troy felt the tense muscles of his shoulder blades suddenly blissfully uncurl. All afternoon he had been afraid that Isobel would stand on her principles, or stand on her pride and refuse to go ahead. Now, at the role of doubt in her voice, he warmed to her.

‘Oh, I think you would regret it all your life if you didn’t take this opportunity,’ he said. ‘It’s just a question of some minor editorial changes and a bit of extra acting. And we saw today how wonderful you are when you are Zelda Vere. It’s just all of that, only a little more.’

‘I don’t know that I can do it,’ she said.

‘I so want you to find the courage to do it,’ he said. ‘I feel like the whole idea is our creation, I feel so proud of you. Writing the book like that, and then creating Zelda Vere. And I do love the deception, it’s probably some terrible psychological flaw in me, but I just love it. I love that we have created her. I loved having her in my house. When you left today I felt quite …’

She waited. ‘What?’ she whispered.

‘Bereft.’

She drew in a sharp breath.

He could sense her concentration on his words, the bright spotlight of her undivided intelligent attention. ‘I would be so disappointed if we didn’t go ahead,’ he said, dropping his voice to a low, seductive whisper. ‘I’ve enjoyed it so much this far. The shopping, and the dressing, and the …’

‘The?’

‘Warmth.’

Her hand was at her mouth again, touching her lips. ‘All right,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll do it. But you must promise to be with me. I can’t do it on my own.’

‘I’ll be with you,’ he swore. ‘Every single step. I’ll be there. Every step of the way.’

Troy heard her whispered ‘goodbye’ and put the telephone down. He was conscious that in that one telephone call he had earned £20,000 and who knew how much more? But he knew himself well enough to recognise that he was feeling more than an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm for a good deal. There was something about Zelda Vere and about Isobel’s transformation into Zelda which was pulling at him: some deep, genuine attraction.

‘She is sexy,’ he said softly to himself, thinking of Isobel in the blonde wig and the pink mules. ‘Who would have believed it? Who would have dreamed she could have walked like that and sat like that?’ He looked over at the silent phone. ‘Who would have believed she could kiss like that?’

Troy took the opening call from the first publishing house at 9 a.m. prompt. They bid £200,000 as they had promised they would. Troy made a note of their bid and kept his voice calm and impersonal. When the second publishing house telephoned he told them the bid already made, and they went to £205,000. The third publishing house dropped out straight away but the fourth bidder went up another five thousand. The calls came in throughout the day but by two o’clock there were only two major publishers left in the bidding and the price was £335,000.

‘I tell you what I’ll do,’ said Susan Jarvis of Justin and Freeman. ‘I’ll offer £350,000 and you tell me yes or no. I can’t go higher than that.’

‘I’ll tell you “Yes” now,’ Troy said quickly, knowing that the rival publishers would not go over that. ‘Miss Vere liked you so much, I know that you would be her preferred publishers.’

‘It’s a deal then,’ Susan said with quiet pleasure. ‘Would you tell Miss Vere that we’re very happy. Can I telephone her?’

‘I’ll ask her to phone you,’ Troy said. ‘She’s very protective of her privacy, as you can understand.’

‘Oh yes,’ Susan said. ‘After all that she’s been through. I understand perfectly.’

‘Yes.’ Troy grasped at the straw. ‘She won’t take phone calls unless they’re cleared, and she won’t release her address, of course.’

‘So how are we going to do publicity?’ Susan queried. ‘We’ll need a big publicity tour.’

‘Get her a hotel room as her base,’ Troy said. ‘She can do everything from a hotel, and when you take her on tour she’ll need me to go with her. She needs support. She’s still quite fragile.’

‘She’s wonderful,’ Susan Jarvis said. ‘And how much of her story is actually true, d’you know?’

‘Certainly the Satanism, and the sex,’ Troy said happily. ‘And at least one of the revenge episodes. I know, because I saw the newspaper cutting. Someone else was prosecuted for it so there’s no danger of a police investigation. She got clean away with it.’

‘It’s remarkable. To endure all that and write so well. Is she working on a sequel?’

‘We’ll discuss it,’ Troy said. ‘What d’you think is going to be the next big genre?’

‘High living,’ the editor said without a second’s doubt. ‘We’ve had a whole load of novels about the dangers of sex and the misery of promiscuity. We’ve had a lot about simple joys. Now people want a bit of lightness in their lives again. Sex and shopping, but up the social scale. High living, fast cars. Think Hello magazine crossed with Playboy from the old days. And health too. Health stays big.’

‘Zelda could do that,’ Troy said delightedly. ‘That’s perfect for her.’

‘Just what I thought,’ Susan declared. ‘This is more than a one-book deal, this is the creation of a new star.’

‘We’ve done it,’ Troy whispered on the telephone to Isobel. ‘It’s £350,000,’

There was a stunned silence.

‘How much do I get straight away?’ she asked.

‘Best part of £150,000,’ he said. ‘You can order that swimming pool today.’

He heard her sigh, but she said nothing more.

‘You must be pleased?’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘I’m just – incredulous, I suppose.’

‘You earned it,’ he said loyally. ‘It’s what the market pays. There’s nothing to be incredulous about.’

‘I feel like I want to rush out and tell Philip that he can have the swimming pool and that we’ve made our fortune,’ she said. ‘It’s so odd that I can’t tell him. I feel like I’ve got no-one to celebrate with. I shall have to act as if nothing has happened.’

‘You can tell him you did well on your literary novel,’ Troy offered. ‘Tell him that it’s the royalties for that which are paying for the pool. Crack open a bottle of champagne for that. It’s a good book.’

‘Yes, but only you and I know what’s really happening,’ she said. ‘No-one knows, but you and me.’

‘Come up for lunch,’ he said, hearing the appeal in her voice. ‘Come up to the flat and change and you can go out as Zelda Vere. I’ll take you somewhere wonderful and everyone can come and congratulate you.’

Isobel gave a little gasp. ‘I don’t know if I dare!’

‘Got to start somewhere,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll go and buy some more clothes. You’re going to need them.’

‘Tomorrow?’ she whispered.

‘Tomorrow,’ he replied.

Six

When Susan Jarvis heard that her new author was coming into town for a celebration lunch she insisted that it should be at her expense and that Zelda should also meet the other people in the team who would work on her book. Troy, conscious of the mounting expense of entertaining Zelda, was relieved to hand over the cost to Justin and Freeman Press. Six people would sit down to lunch with Zelda Vere: the publisher David Quarles, the two editors Susan Jarvis and Charles Franks, the publicist, the marketing man, and the head of the sales team. They booked the large window table at the Savoy River Room, and the publicist notified the gossip columnists that the newest, hottest, and most expensive novelist of the year would be at lunch.

Troy laid out Zelda Vere’s clothes with loving attention. This time she should wear the yellow suit, he thought. He unwrapped it from its cover and put the skirt on one hanger and the jacket on another to air. There was a neat satin bustier to wear beneath it, the lace could just be glimpsed at the neck of the jacket. He spread it out on the bed and felt his own response to the silk under his fingers. He put out the sandals, the thin-heeled gold sandals, and a pair of absurdly silky fine tights. ‘She’ll have to wear gloves to put them on,’ he said thoughtfully.

He laid out the makeup on the dressing table: the foundation cream in its gold-topped bottle, the dusting powder, the blusher, the concealer pen, and then the jewel colours of eyeliner, eyeshadow, mascara, and lipsticks. He looked at them with a pang of conscious envy. It was so unfair that women should be able to change themselves so completely. Even on a bad day they could, with the skill and the equipment, make themselves look years younger, ten times happier. Artifice was part of their nature, their accepted social nature; whereas for a man to attempt to deceive was regarded as morally wrong.

Troy seated himself at the table and looked at his own neat face over the gold tops of the bottles. His hair was golden brown, his skin very smooth and fair, no shadow of stubble, no darkness at the sideboards. Acting on impulse he reached forward and swept the wig on to his head, like a little boy playing at dressing up in his mother’s room. He held the front of the wig and pulled it down at the back as he had helped Isobel to do, and then he looked at himself in the mirror.

He had expected to laugh at the reflection, he had expected to see a man absurdly dressed in drag, he had expected a pantomime dame. Instead he saw his twin, his sister, his anima. It was a pretty woman who looked back at him. A blonde woman with bouffant, wide hair but a narrow, interesting face. A strong chin set off a sensual mouth, narrow nose, wide blue eyes, high cheekbones. A beautiful woman, a woman like him, recognisably like him, but undeniably a woman.

‘Good God,’ he whispered. ‘I could be Zelda Vere.’

The illusion of Zelda that he had created with Isobel was so much of a type that almost anyone could be her. She was characterised by the big blonde hair, by the good bones. The details of eye colour and expression were almost lost under the impact of the overall appearance.

Thoughtfully he took up the lipstick brush and painted on the cherry-red lips, dusted his whole face with powder. He looked at his reflection again. He expected to see a grotesquerie. But it was not so. A woman looked back at him with a bright, confident smile, a shock of blonde hair, eyes which were more sparkling and bluer than before, enhanced by the even skin tone and the vivid lips.

The door bell rang, Troy jumped; as guilty as if he had been caught stealing. He pulled the wig from his head and smeared the lipstick from his mouth. He was still rubbing at his face with a big tissue as he ran down the stairs to his front door. He whisked it out of sight and opened the door to Isobel.

She was looking excited and fresh. Her mouse-brown hair was swept back off her face and held with two slides, not confined in a bun. She was wearing navy-blue slacks, a white shirt and a navy-blue blazer. She had been thinking ahead to this moment all the way up on the train. She had put her writer’s imagination to how she would look, how she would feel; how he would look and feel. She had even heard in her head the things that they might say to each other.

But Troy just took her in, in one long, comprehensive gaze, and she looked back at him, her chin raised, her eyes unwavering. It was the one thing she had not predicted, that long, devouring look. As soon as she met his eyes she had the shock of encountering something she had not predicted, a man she had not imagined.

‘Come in,’ he said, stepping back into the hall.

Isobel followed him in. He noticed a hint of perfume, the sweet smell of Chanel No. 5. She saw the tissue in his hand.

‘You’ll laugh,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I tried on the wig, Zelda’s wig. And then I put on some lipstick.’

She did not laugh. ‘How did you look?’

‘I looked like her, I looked like … you, when you were her,’ he said. ‘It was extraordinary.’

‘Will you show me?’

Troy opened the door to the spare bedroom, Zelda’s bedroom.

‘I don’t know if we have time …’

‘I should so like to see …’

Troy tried to laugh away his embarrassment; but Isobel’s gaze was steady and unsmiling. He realised that her naivety protected them both from the farcical nature of this scene. Isobel would not laugh because she was genuinely engaged by the question of what he would look like, dressed as Zelda. She had no knowledge of the shady absurdities of transvestism, of cross-dressing, of transsexualism, of drag queens and pantomime dames. She was completely innocent of any speculation about that world and so she brought no preconceived ideas or prejudices to this experience. It was as pure for her as a first love, untainted by knowledge.

And she was right. It was a different thing from anything anyone had ever done before. Their creation, Zelda, was not born out of a forbidden lust, or some private, secret perversion. She had come upon them quite innocently, quite unexpectedly. She transcended the boundaries of gender. She had been made by them both, both of them had an equal claim to her. Troy had coached Isobel in Zelda’s walk, he had painted Zelda’s makeup on Isobel’s face. Now it seemed perfectly natural and right that Isobel wanted to see Zelda as manifested by Troy.

He paused for only a moment. ‘I must make it clear that I’m not into dressing in women’s clothes,’ he said, laying down a boundary as if he thought it would somehow keep them safe.

‘Of course not,’ she said simply. ‘This is not anything to do with that. This is about being Zelda.’

He turned and pulled on the blonde wig, clumsy in his embarrassment. Without meeting his own eyes he looked into the mirror and painted a little dab of scarlet on his lips, which were still slightly stained from before. He turned to her judging look. He shrugged his shoulders, trying to hide his sense of shy embarrassment. ‘Ridiculous,’ he remarked.

Slowly Isobel shook her head. ‘You look beautiful,’ she said. ‘A beautiful woman in a man’s beautiful suit. You look wonderfully – ’ she searched for the word ‘ – ambiguous.’

‘You put on the other wig,’ he suggested.

They stood side by side before the dressing table, like a pair of girls sharing the mirror in the Ladies cloakroom. Isobel pulled on the blonde wig and fluffed out the bouffant hair. With her eyes on Troy’s reflection she reached forward and painted her own lips to match his scarlet. They stood in silence: twin girls, twin women.

Watching himself, watching the movement in the mirror, Troy slid his arm around her waist. Isobel, watching them both, turned inside his arm and the mirror saw his beautiful face full-on under a cascade of blonde hair, and her absorbed profile. Troy watched from the corner of his eye as his blonde hair fell forward when he turned a little and bent to kiss her. He felt the warm taste of the lipstick as they kissed gently, and then deeply, taking in the heat of each other’s mouths, the touch of the tongue, the smooth glide of the waxy coloured lips.

Troy released Isobel and she stepped back a little, her grey eyes very dark with desire.

‘This is extraordinary,’ he said, a slight quaver in his voice.

She nodded, she did not trust herself to speak.

They stood in silence for a moment.

‘You’d better start to get ready,’ Troy said, clearing his throat. ‘We have to be at the Savoy at one.’

He turned back to the mirror and pulled the wig from his head, placed it gently on the stand, wiped the scarlet from his mouth. He saw her looking at him in the mirror, he saw the naked desire in her eyes.

‘I’ll make us a nice cup of tea,’ he said.

When Troy came back into the bedroom, carrying the tray, he recoiled at the sight of her. Isobel was gone, completely gone. In her place was Zelda Vere. Zelda was seated before the dressing table naked but for the silky bustier and a tiny pair of high-cut satin pants. Her breasts were tightly encased in the lace, her hips moulded by the stretchy satin. Her arms were raised above her head, teasing further height out of her mane of blonde hair. Her eyes, dark-lidded, freighted with the weight of the false eyelashes, shadow, eyeliner, mascara, looked back at themselves in silent adoration from the mirror. Her skin, Isobel’s smooth, always-concealed skin, gleamed like white marble in the shadowy room. Her long, pale, bare legs were flexed to hold her feet on demi-point on the floor. The slack of her thighs, Isobel’s office-chair thighs, was concealed by the tense pose, perched on the dressing-room chair like a piece of fifties pornography, modest by today’s standards, but gleaming with the gloss of glamour.

For Troy, who had first seen a half-naked woman on the paperback books in the carousel at the corner shop, and glimpsed calendar girls at the back of the petrol station, she was an echo of adolescent desire, resonant with meaning. She was an icon, gilded with the longing of a boy’s half-recognised guilty desire.

Isobel heard the chink of the tea pot against the cups as Troy trembled at the sight of her, and she turned and put down the comb with unshakable serenity. ‘Come in,’ she said silkily to Troy in her Zelda voice. ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’

‘Perhaps you’d like champagne?’ Troy stammered, trying to keep pace with this transition.

‘D’you have some chilled Roederer?’

Troy nodded.

‘Perhaps later,’ she said.

He poured the tea and put a cup at her right hand on the dressing table. She leaned forward and added another flicker of blusher with the thick sable brush, then she leaned back.

‘How do I look?’

‘Beautiful,’ Troy said.

She turned from the reflection and looked at him. ‘You want me,’ she stated.

Troy cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know what I want,’ he said honestly. ‘I can’t answer you. I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know who I am, nor what I want. I thought we were doing a brilliant scam here, to get Isobel Latimer a proper deal for once in her career; but we seem to have unleashed something else. Something much more powerful.’ He paused. He drew a shaky breath. ‘Please, it’s my job to make sure that we get the contract signed. Let’s concentrate on that first, and talk about the rest later?’

She thought for a moment, and then to his relief and to his disappointment, he saw the sultry, sexual look pass from her face. She nodded, as Isobel would have nodded at an appeal to her common sense.

‘Of course,’ she said briskly. ‘You’re right. I apologise.’

‘Isobel?’ he asked tentatively, as if there could be some doubt.

She nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s very – er – taking – being her.’

‘I know,’ he said. He drank his own tea. ‘You can be her all lunchtime, and then we’ll go and buy her some more clothes.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘And then we’ll come back here and talk?’

Troy felt himself shrink from the suggestion that any of this heated ambiguity could be pinned down in Isobel’s matter-of-fact words.

‘All right,’ he agreed.

Zelda Vere was seated between the publisher David Quarles and her editor Susan Jarvis at lunch and they plied her equally with champagne and promises. She smiled and accepted both. Troy watched with what he recognised as absurd concern as Zelda drank three glasses of champagne and let them pour a fourth. When they had finished eating and coffee was served, a photographer appeared and Zelda was photographed, listening attentively to Susan Jarvis and laughing merrily at a joke from someone else. The whole restaurant, alerted to the fact that a celebrity was lunching, took care not to look in their direction, while managing to scan them and speculate about the event.

When the coffee had been poured the publicist, quietly delighted that she had managed to get a photographer to come to the hotel, and that he had established so effectively the importance of the new author, laid before Zelda the plans for the publicity tour they would want her to embark on in January.

Zelda glanced at the first page and looked in horror towards Troy.

‘We have to preserve Zelda’s privacy at all costs,’ he said quickly, reading over her shoulder.

‘Of course.’ They all nodded.

‘Daytime television,’ Zelda quietly pointed out.

‘Yes,’ the publicist said. ‘We were especially lucky to get that. They’re doing a special feature on lucky breaks the week after next. I hoped you would talk about a rags to riches story. How your talent has brought you an amazing advance.’

‘It’s just so …’ Zelda broke off.

Troy, separated from her by the table, could only look at her inquiringly.

‘So … public,’ she said. She scowled at Troy but could find no way to warn him that Philip watched daytime television while Mrs M. was clearing up the breakfast things, and then generally left it on while he was doing his crossword and drinking his coffee. He affected to despise it, but the truth was that he seldom missed a programme, and often talked at lunch about the immense folly and waste of time of the whole premise and how amazing it was that anyone watched such drivel.

Troy grasped at once what she was saying. ‘No-one from your childhood would recognise you now,’ he said quickly. ‘It’s OK, Zelda, I promise you.’

‘And it is a wonderful opportunity,’ the publicist added. She was a young woman, a little flustered that Zelda was not thrilled at the opportunity of appearing on television. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘I am pleased,’ Zelda said. ‘It’s just I didn’t expect it all to happen so soon.’

‘We have the contract ready to go,’ David Quarles said. ‘We’re working on the artwork for the jacket already, we’ll have something to show you within a month. We’re hoping to publish in the winter season. No point wasting time or good publicity opportunities.’

Zelda looked towards Troy. He nodded firmly. She pinned her cherry smile on her painted face‘ course.’

They had ordered a limousine to take her home from the Savoy. Zelda stepped into it and arranged her long legs. Troy got in the other side. ‘Harrods,’ he said to the driver. ‘And then wait.’

He pressed the button and the glass screen slid up between the passenger seats and the front seat.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

Isobel’s apprehensive expression gleamed through the confident mask of Zelda. ‘It’s Philip,’ she said. ‘He never misses a programme.’

‘He’d never, never recognise you in a million years,’ Troy assured her. ‘Honestly. No-one would. And you’ve not said a word, have you? Not one word?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘And we’ve kept all of Zelda’s stuff at my house so he won’t even recognise the clothes. You underestimate how little attention men pay. Really. He’ll have the television on in the background and he’ll look up and glance at the screen and see a woman who looks like all the others. Zelda is part of a look. She’s a genre. He wouldn’t even be able to tell her apart from the others. They all look the same.’

‘But I’ll have to be away that night.’

‘Can’t you lie to him? Make up a literary conference or something?’

‘I said I might do a series of lectures at Goldsmiths,’ she confessed. ‘I was sort of preparing.’

‘Very sensible,’ Troy commended. ‘Tell him that you’re doing them and that they’re on different days. We’ll always have plenty of notice of these things. Look, this is a fortnight ahead. Come and stay with me the night before, I’ll help you with your makeup. I’ll come to the television studios with you. I’ll be there every step of the way. We’ll do it together.’

She nodded, but she still looked doubtful.

‘Let me show you something,’ Troy said. He drew an envelope out of his pocket and spread the thick document out on his dark-suited knee. ‘This is your contract. D’you see what it says here? It says £350,000. D’you know how many Isobel Latimer novels you would have to write to earn that?’

Isobel shook her head. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’

‘Seventeen. D’you know how many years you would have to work?’

‘Thirty-four years,’ she said precisely. ‘Longer, if I got stuck.’

‘It’s a lifetime’s pay,’ Troy said. ‘For one book. And all you have to do now to earn it is to wear some beautiful clothes and go on television and be polite to some idiot of half your intelligence before a daytime audience that is barely watching.’

‘If Philip recognises me …’ she began quietly.

‘If he recognises you he can lump it,’ Troy said brutally. ‘He wanted a swimming pool, didn’t he? He wanted the lovely house, didn’t he? He left you to earn it, didn’t he?’

‘He can’t earn,’ she said indignantly. ‘You know how ill he is. That’s terribly unfair.’

‘But he does spend,’ Troy said, going to the very heart of the burden on Isobel. ‘He wanted something that you would never ever be able to provide unless you wrote this sort of novel. So you did it. And you did it for him. And you even lied to protect him from the hurt of knowing about it. If he ever finds out he should go down on his knees and kiss your feet.’

He was afraid that he had gone too far. She turned her blonde head away from him and looked out of the window at the slowly moving traffic.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said in a small voice.

Troy could have let it go. He could have agreed that he did not understand. But some strand of mischief in him led him on to nurture her doubts. ‘I think I understand very well,’ he said flatly. ‘And I know that if the worst comes to the worst and he recognises you as Zelda, then he will take Zelda’s money just as he has taken Isobel’s money and he’ll find one way or another to make himself feel all right about it. Because he doesn’t mind leaving you to carry the can. He doesn’t care what you’ve got to do as long as he has he gets what he wants.’

The car drew up outside Harrods and she forgot to wait for the driver to open the door. She got out of the car with Isobel’s hurried graceless speed. Troy jumped out too, strode after her and caught her as she pushed her way through the doors into the store. He touched her arm and she turned to him.

‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘We both had a bit to drink. This is a big deal for both of us. Let’s go and get a cup of tea and then look at some clothes for Zelda.’

‘You didn’t mean what you said about him?’ she demanded.

Troy shrugged. Words cannot be unsaid, their effect lasts even when they have been denied. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Who knows him better than you do? I was just worried about you.’

She nodded. He opened the door for her and stepped back as she went through with Zelda’s swaying stride.

Seven

This time they were more confident of Zelda’s taste. They chose her clothes themselves, wandering in great sweeps of the designer-clothes floors, selecting and rejecting. They agreed that Zelda did not need another suit but that she should have a couple of dresses, one with a matching coat for the cold days of spring when she would be on tour, and another evening dress. Isobel especially wanted to buy some silk pyjamas and a matching silk gown. ‘For lounging around in,’ she said.

Troy made no comment, it was obvious to them both that any lounging around that Zelda might do would take place at his flat with him.

They found one beautifully cut simple shift dress which Isobel would have bought. Troy shook his head. ‘Too tasteful,’ he said. ‘Isobel Latimer would wear it. Zelda is much more barmaidy.’

‘She needs a winter coat,’ Isobel said.

‘A fur,’ Troy ruled.

‘Surely not!’ Isobel was shocked. ‘Nobody wears fur.’

‘Nobody used to wear fur,’ Troy corrected her. ‘That was the immensely tedious political correctness of the eighties. People wear fur now. Rich women wear fur.’

Isobel was about to argue. ‘Let’s go and look,’ Troy said persuasively. ‘See if there’s anything we think she would like.’

They went outside to the street and strolled down the road into the first fur shop they encountered. When they stepped over the threshold they were both, at once, persuaded. The place was filled with the scent of cool pelts. It was an irresistible perfume of wealth. The coats were chained to the rail with small, light chains as if they were too priceless even to be looked at without permission. The assistants came forward to serve customers with keys at their waists like eighteenth-century chatelaines. A man sat at a desk by the door and served no-one at all but bowed his head and smiled as they came in as if it were his own exclusive private club.

One of the saleswomen accompanied by an assistant came forward and as Troy pointed to one fur coat and then another, they unlocked them in a reverent ritual and then slipped them off the hanger and slid them over Isobel’s shoulders. They draped her in dark mink, in pale ocelot, they contrasted her blonde hair with the dark velvet gleam of sealskin. Then they found a coat with two colours, a coat beautifully made from soft short pelts, a coat of unmistakable expense.

‘That’s the one,’ Troy sighed.

It was a pale honey-coloured mink, with a wide collar in contrasting dark mink which could be folded up to make a warm ruff around the neck. Isobel looked at the vision of her blonde hair cascading over the dark collar and the matching honey fur in the mirror.

‘How much is it?’ she asked.

The assistant glanced at Troy before answering. Troy inclined his head towards her ear. Isobel caught a whisper. It sounded very much like £40,000.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Troy said grandly. ‘Working capital. We’ll have it.’ He gave his gold credit card to the assistant and they left her wrapping it while they went back to Harrods.

‘How are you paying for this?’ Isobel asked anxiously.

‘Credit,’ Troy said grandly. ‘I’m making you an advance on your earnings.’

‘Advance from where?’ Isobel asked. ‘Who’s paying? The publishers?’

‘My bank manager,’ Troy said with a grimace. ‘What can we do? You have to have the clothes.’

‘I don’t have to have a forty-thousand-pound coat,’ Isobel said, as they strolled back to Harrods and went up in the lift to the designer dress department.

‘Yes, you do,’ Troy said. ‘Come on.’

They walked into the room as if it were their own. One of the assistants recognised them and came forward with a smile.

A few more dresses,’ Troy said grandly. ‘Winter cocktail dresses, and some kind of matching jacket or stole thing.’

They agreed on a shift dress in electric blue with a matching boxy jacket, a white and gold cocktail dress with matching coat, and a beaded blue evening dress. Then they went to the shoe department and chose shoes to match, then to the lingerie department and bought several sets of new underwear.

‘This is gorgeous, gorgeous stuff,’ Troy said, looking at the detailed embroidery on the lingerie. ‘It feels like silk, it feels better than silk, it feels like water. God, if I was a woman I’d never spend money on anything but underwear. This is so lovely.’

Isobel leaned over to look at it with him and her blonde hair brushed against his cheek.

‘What would be better?’ she asked very low. ‘To see it worn, or to wear it oneself?’

He was silent, the challenge went so close to his desire that he could not answer her. She turned without saying more, and headed back to the dress floor. Troy followed.

‘You want more?’ he asked.

The look she turned on him gave him a jolt of sexuality, as powerfully as if he had touched a live wire.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘They had that blue dress with the jacket in a 16,’ she said.

‘So?’

She met his eyes shamelessly. He recognised at once Zelda’s greed for sensual experience and Isobel’s practical determination. It was a powerful combination of the two women.

‘I want us to buy it for you,’ she said.

He stood stock-still, the bags in his hands creating an obstacle for other shoppers to push around. He did not even know they were there.

‘You want to buy a dress for me?’

She turned and confronted him. ‘I want us to match,’ she said. ‘Like we did this morning. You liked that, didn’t you?’

The swimming in his head was the lunchtime champagne, but also the dizzy sense that Isobel Latimer, the dull, worthy, academic, middle-aged woman from the country had somehow penetrated to secrets that he did not know he had. She had cut with a stiletto to the very core of him.

‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘I did like it.’

‘Well, why not?’ she demanded fiercely. ‘Why not, Troy? In for a penny? We’re doing everything else, aren’t we? We’re lying to the publishers and lying to my husband and pretty soon I’m going to go on television and on the radio and in the newspapers and lie and lie to the whole nation. Why shouldn’t we be truthful amongst ourselves? Why should we pretend to each other? Why shouldn’t we see how we feel? Dress how we want? See who we are when we are not stuck with being Troy Cartwright and Isobel Latimer? We’ve done something here, haven’t we? We didn’t mean to do it, it wasn’t our intention, but something has happened. We’re set free. We’ve got some choices. I want to take them.’

Troy closed his eyes briefly as if he would hide from her the sudden snap in his mind as she named his desire and gave him permission. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s buy it.’

‘And everything else,’ she said with fierce greed. ‘The underwear, the tights, the shoes, everything. We’re going to be rich, aren’t we? We can have everything?’

They said nothing in the limousine on the drive back to Troy’s flat. The driver helped them carry the shopping bags up the steps and left them inside the hall. Troy gave him a tip and closed the door. They were alone in the silent building.

‘I should pop down to the office and check for messages,’ Troy said.

‘Don’t,’ she said simply.

He glanced at her, but said nothing. He picked up the shopping and followed her up the stairs, along the corridor into the spare bedroom. She tossed her bags on to the bed and pulled his blue dress out of the tissue paper. ‘Do,’ she said, her voice gentle. ‘Do try it, Troy.’

He held it at arm’s length as if he had never seen a dress before. He felt the lightness of the fabric, saw the fine working of the seams.

‘It won’t fit,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no bust. Even if it goes up over the shoulders.’

‘Take your suit off,’ she whispered. ‘We can make it fit. We can pad it out a bit or something. Come on, try it.’

He slipped his jacket from his shoulders and pulled his shirt from the waistband of his trousers. He was conscious of her gaze, taking in his nakedness. He heeled off his shoes and peeled off his socks and dropped his trousers.

‘Go on,’ she said gently. ‘You’ve seen me all but naked.’

He pulled down his silk boxer shorts and stood before her. Isobel gave a little sigh, a little breath of a sigh.

‘These,’ she said monosyllabically, and pulled the tissue-wrapped underwear and a pair of hold-up stockings in palest coffee from the distinctive bag.

Troy smoothed on the stockings, feeling the strange adhesion of the hold-ups on his naked thighs. Then he pulled on the French knickers, felt the whisper of silk around his penis, the stroke of the slight seam against his deepest crotch, the weight of the embroidery, pale blue silk on pale blue silk.

‘I want the wig on before the dress,’ he said. ‘I’ll feel a fool wearing a dress without her hair and face.’

Isobel brought the wig from the stand and held it for him as he pulled it on. ‘Let me do your makeup,’ she begged. ‘You did mine.’

Troy sat, half-naked as he was, on the dressing-table stool and felt the cool silk of the French knickers against his buttocks, the erotic silkiness of the stockings on his legs. Isobel stood behind him and pattered his face with her fingers, cleansing with the perfumed cleanser, dabbing him clean with the toner, and then sweeping over his skin with the moisturiser. Then he felt the sensual strokes of the foundation, the slick line of the eyeliner, the feathery dabs of eyeshadow, and the butterfly kiss of the mascara wand.

‘Keep your eyes shut,’ Isobel breathed. When she leaned over him he could feel her blonde hair tickle his bare shoulders and mingle with his own, he could feel her thighs and her belly pressed against his bare back. He felt himself becoming aroused by her touch, but he kept his eyes shut and his face serene.

The lipstick brush against his lips was like a thousand small kisses, tiny provocative nibblings, like a sexual teasing. When it ceased, the sweep of the big powder brush across his face was like a release.

‘Keep your eyes shut and stand up,’ Isobel commanded.

Troy stood and moved as she told him, stepping into the dress, feeling her pull it up over his shoulders, zip the back, feeling the sensuality of the silk against his bare body, the way it warmed to his skin, the way the dress fell so easily against him, unlike a suit, unlike trousers, the way it fitted and yet did not constrain.

He stretched out his arms behind him and she slid the little jacket on.

‘Now wait a minute, wait for me,’ she said urgently.

He stood, his eyes still closed, hearing the fall of her clothes as she undressed, and the rustle of the tissue paper as she took the new dress from the bag. In a few moments she said: ‘Turn around,’ and he knew that she had placed them side by side before the mirror. Then she said: ‘Open your eyes.’

Before him were two beautiful women, in identical blue dresses. It looked like an illusion, a magic illusion, created by mirrors in which one woman was reflected back to look as if there were two. But then his gaze picked up the differences. Isobel’s face beneath the blonde wig was rounder than his, her eyes grey while his were blue. His shift dress hung from his shoulders, while hers fitted snugly over her breasts. But the illusion was what drew him, the two women, side by side, as alike as twins.

Isobel turned to him. ‘We’re both Zelda,’ she whispered. ‘We’ve made two of her.’

This time he did not kiss her. He looked from her beautiful painted face to the reflection of his own, and then back again.

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